America's Wildfire Problem: Startups Get Creative 🔥

Luckily, tech guys from Silicon Valley have taken it upon themselves to do something about this. Several startups have come up with swanky new tech to detect fires before they happen and help people evacuate the area.

One such startup is Zonehaven founded by Dave Winnacker, former marine and firefighter, and Robert Shear, a Silicon Valley veteran. The company created two things. 

An "evacuation autopilot" that would use sensors to detect sudden temperature spikes in the area and determine when to start evacuation.

An “evacuation software” that would use topographical, wind, and rainfall data, to predict the fire’s path up to 5 hours in the future, helping agencies send out red alerts.
 

Did the tech work? 

The answer is a happy “Yes” 

In August last year, an overnight thunderstorm sparked hundreds of fires across San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties. Zonehaven’s algorithms pinpointed the locations of the fires on the map, the chiefs selected which zones to evacuate, and notices went out through Facebook, Twitter, and emergency text alerts. The messages directed residents to a live online map on the startup's website. Nearly 80,000 residents were evacuated safely.

But this is not the only startup in the market. 
 

• SilviaTerra, cofounded by San Francisco based Zack Parisa creates maps of the forest, and average ages and types of trees in each acre. It prioritises where vegetation should be removed--an essential component of wildfire prevention.
• Turkish brothers Emrah and Hakan Gultekin living in the Bay Area converted their A.I. platform that monitored medical procedures into a tool to scourge wildfires with 95% accuracy.
• San Francisco-based Enview - an A.I. startup - builds 3-D terrains to determine which trees and vegetation might pose a wildfire risk. 

While all this sounds great, there is the blatant problem of funding. Most investors don’t think there is a market for wildfire prevention tech which is why these startups find it hard to raise even $25,000 in funds. Unfortunately, until the population starts taking the wildfire problem with urgency, the market for such startups will always remain nascent. 

When President Biden announced his $2.3 trillion herculean plan back in April, he had a thorough idea of where these colossal funds were going to come from. 

The Plan: to spend on infrastructure, internet, EVs, and pollution control. To reduce child poverty and help adults find jobs in a changing economy. 

The plan to achieve this plan: raise income tax rates for the top 1% of earners while raising the capital gains tax as well. 

Today, corporations and HNIs pay less than at almost any other time in modern history. Corporate taxes have fallen to historic lows. Here are some graphical representation comparing marginal tax rates, corporate tax revenue and PAT over the decades. 

The Biden administration is also proposing to roughly double the tax rate on capital gains to their highest level in modern times and well above the 35% peak of the 1970s.

Over the past year and a half, people have been forced to acclimate to remote work. Just as we saw a significant shift in working models at the dawn of the gig economy, we should expect an even bigger transformation to take place as it evolves to an independent service economy brought on by the pandemic.

It's called solo-commerce. 

The gig economy is still robust, but the solo-commerce model helps people grow easily from contractors to solo-practitioner businesses to startups and beyond. Read all about how the pandemic brought about the birth of solo-commerce and where's the trend headed. 

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• Original code written by Tim Berners-Lee to invent the World Wide Web will go on auction this month. Bidding starts at $1000. 
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• Global ad spends set to grow to $657 billion this year, a 14% increase YoY. 
• The U.S. and EU suspend billions of dollars worth of tariffs over the Boeing and Airbus - bringing their 17-year old trade war to a halt. 
• Now you can buy an Amazon manufactured COVID test kit on Amazon for $40 - test results will be available on a diagnostic website.