Digital product passports: a brief explanation

While a dozen definitions may exist for it, a digital product passport is simply a detailed history ‘book’ on a product and may include, among other things, its provenance, the source of origin of the raw materials used in its production, and the authenticity of the product itself.

Early use case suggests that digital passports were geared primarily towards addressing the issues around sustainability, circularity and ethics. Authenticating the product itself was definitely part of the features, and while it did not appear to be a primary concern at first, it is now one that underscores the service.

The rise of digital passports for luxury brands

Panerai is not the first luxury brand to adopt digital passports for its products. Breitling was the first in the horology industry to issue passports on its timepieces, and in 2022, teamed up with Arianee once again, as well as Sourcemap, to make its first fully traceable timepiece, the Super Chronomat Automatic 38 Origins.

Digital product passports however seem to be more commonplace in luxury fashion. The Aura consortium issues a certificate of guarantee for the products in its programme, and Chanel has its own digital passport it gives for its bags. Pangaia and Yoox Net-a-Porter use the Eon Connected Product Platform to issue digital twins for their products, complete with their provenance and other details.

But that seems to be about the scope of usage. Other horology brands like Audemars Piguet, Dubuis and Vacheron Constantin are part of the Arianee consortium but do not have their digital passports out yet. In fact, it appears that a significant reason why fashion brands might perhaps be more inclined to issue them can be linked to government intervention in this regard. The European Union, for example, is looking to set up an EU digital product passport in the Ecodesign for Sustainable Regulation that would legally force EU-based companies to integrate them into their production process. It also has a Circular Economy Action Plan that mandates businesses in the textile, industrial and electric vehicle battery and construction industries to include digital passports in their products by 2024.

Are digital product passports about to become more commonplace?

The short answer? Yes.

Even if government mandates did not happen, the persistent rise and evolution of counterfeit goods would have driven luxury brands to introduce modern technology to fight an ancient, never-ending problem.

As it stands, the push for more transparency in the industry, coupled with superfakes threatening the exclusivity that is one of its pillars, and increasing legal mandates would push luxury brands to integrate digital passports into their processes and products. How well it would solve the challenges that bedevil the industry is another matter entirely.

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Released by Hashem Al-Ghaili, a well-known video producer who specialises in science and tech communication, the video unveils a flying hotel concept thought up by Tony Holmsten, a concept artist and illustrator.

Sky Cruise Hotel

If it ever takes off, Sky Cruise will be one of the most ambitious projects of the 21^st century. The idea is to have a massive electric aircraft powered by a staggering 20 engines and nuclear energy relying on fusion reaction technology, a concept that is yet to become a workable reality.

Point in reference, the world’s largest aeroplane, the Antonov AN-225 has six turbofan engines.

Sky Cruise has been designed to be a floating mini-city in the sky, and would rarely ever come down to earth, thanks to the nuclear energy it plans to use. According to the video, maintenance and supply of goods and passengers would be done by other smaller electric or fuel-powered aircraft taking off from all over the world.

Sky cruise would have a “big hall that offers a 360-degree view of your surroundings; an entertainment deck … perfect for recreational activities [and featuring] shopping malls, sport centres, swimming pools, restaurants, bars, playgrounds for children, theatres and cinemas; a section for organising events and business meetings; wedding halls, and, viewing domes [where] guests can enjoy a wide range of activities including stargazing”

An AI-powered command deck will also ensure that guests are safe from turbulence, while a health facility with the latest medical technology will take care of all health issues that may arise in the course of your stay.

When will bookings commence?

For now, Sky Cruise Hotel is still a concept that does not seem to have even a workable prototype. The number of criticisms that have greeted it since it was revealed might be an indication of how long we might have to wait before it becomes a reality, and, given the fact that the nuclear fusion reaction technology is not yet available, it is safe to say that the ‘flying hotel that never lands’ may well be a project of the 22^nd century.

But who knows? Commercial space travel is set to become mainstream and eVTOLs as well as flying taxis are looking like they may be a part of our reality soon. Who is to say that a floating sky hotel cannot happen in our time?

If floating in the air for an extended period of time suddenly sounds appealing to you, then be on the lookout: you just might get your dream well before you’re set to take up permanent residence in the skies.

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The new functionality has been added to the Tag Heuer Connected Calibre E4 smartwatch, and will also be available as a free update for smartwatch owners via Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store. Users will get the opportunity to display their NFT artworks on their timepiece face by connecting their crypto wallets, such as Metamask or Ledger Live, to guarantee authenticity.

Frédéric, CEO of Tag Heuer, will be using the functionality himself: he recently bought an NFT from Bored Apes — an Ape with an eyepatch and a diamond grin.

How it works

Users interested in this new feature can transfer multiple NFTs to the new Lens timepiece face via a paired smartphone. Once transferred, you can resize the images, so they fit on your smartwatch’s round screen. The timepiece face has three unique ways of displaying time while showcasing your favourite NFT artworks, which are displayed in a hexagon with a cloud of particles gravitating around the image. This includes a conceptual design with a triangle and a circle representing hours and minutes.

You don’t have to worry about the clarity of the images under sunlight: Tag Heuer says the screen is clear even in strong sunlight. And high fidelity colour reproduction means your NFTs are displayed just as the creators intended.

A new revolutionary introduction to horology?

The art of watchmaking has come a long way since legend has it that Abraham Louis-Breguet created the first wristwatch for the Queen of Naples, Maria Carolina, even though Patek Philippe officially claims this record. The world of horology has since welcomed quartz, accepted stainless steel as luxury after the debut of the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak in 1972, and learned to live with – and even embrace – the sheer audacity introduced by the Ulysse Nardin Freak in 2001.

But most of these historic moments have been related to function, material and style/design. The introduction of quartz, for example, meant more accurate timepieces at incredibly cheap prices.

NFTs are no doubt revolutionary and have so far succeeded in upending the traditional structure of power in the creative industry. But how exactly does having your NFT show up on your timepiece face count as revolutionary? Perhaps, if this feature had appeared before the advent of smartphones, it might have been considered a more groundbreaking concept?

Frédéric is more confident in the ability of the new feature to take off and become widespread in horology. “We already sold nice pieces,” he tells Vogue Business. “Now, we will speak more directly to the community. We remain very confident in the mid-term. There is volatility, but overall there was very strong growth last year and we are expecting strong growth this year.”

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Nicknamed “the most beautiful building on earth”, the uniqueness of the museum easily makes it a must-see attraction when in Dubai. From the building itself – the elliptical structure shuns pillars in favour of 1024, 4-layered steel plates that help to keep it erect, while the Arabic inscriptions on it, which double as skylights, are memorable quotes from Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum – to its exhibition spaces and other attractions packed into it, there is something of interest at the Museum of the Future for just about everybody.

Beyond the uniqueness of its shape is a very profound meaning. According to the architect, the solid part of the structure represents the knowledge that we have today. The void represents all that we do not yet know – in other words, the future. Which is exactly what the museum is all about.

For example, there are entire floors dedicated to climate change, as well as outer space and the future of healthcare and wellness. The museum will also address the effect of global warming on critical ecosystems and how these might be repaired. It will look at how solar energy collection in space and asteroid mining could be used for the benefit of humanity, and will even touch upon the subject of spirituality.

As part of its design, it was determined that the Museum of the Future will be a truly sustainable project. The building is powered by 4,000 megawatts of solar energy in collaboration with the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority while the surrounding park contains 80 species of plants and is equipped with automatic irrigation and greywater recycling systems. Charging ports have been made available for visitors with electric vehicles, but parking spaces are limited to encourage the use of public transport, as a 212-metre-long bridge links the area to Emirates Towers metro station.

All these sustainable solutions have earned it the Platinum Certification for Leadership in Environmental Energy and Design (LEED), the highest rating for green buildings in the world.

Visitors can also expect to be introduced to a wide range of technologies including augmented reality and virtual reality, that will be used to project them into the future to create an immersive theatre experience. “This is not the museum where you will see objects in cases with labels next to them,” explains Lath Carlson, executive director of the Museum of the Future. “In a lot of the main galleries, there will be no labels at all. It will be a completely immersive experience that engages the visitor as a really important contributor to the experience, rather than as a viewer of someone else’s work.”

He hopes to offer an optimistic view of the future as a counterpoint to what he considers as a generally bleak outlook presented by the entertainment industry. “We want to show how people might creatively respond to the challenges, while at the same time being realistic about the challenges that are coming,” he says.

Tickets to the Museum of the Future are currently sold out, but you can check availability, as well as other relevant information on its website here.

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“The years since 2010 have not been good ones for happiness and well-being among Americans,” read the report. “Even as the United States economy improved after the end of the Great Recession in 2009, happiness among adults did not rebound to the higher levels of the 1990s, continuing a slow decline ongoing since at least 2000.”

The U.S. dropped one spot since last year and five spots since 2017, and it also fared poorly in other areas: 61st for freedom, 42nd for corruption and 37th for social support. The only good news: The U.S. ranked 10th for income.

The World Happiness Report is an annual survey by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network for the United Nations. It looks at the state of global happiness in 156 countries, ranking countries based on six variables: income, freedom, trust, healthy life expectancy, social support and generosity. The World Happiness Report was originally launched in 2012, and each year, it has a slightly different focus. This year’s report looked at happiness and the community, evaluating how technology, social norms, conflicts and government policies are driving change.

The top-ranking countries on the list tend to be consistent from year to year. In 2019, the top five included Finland at number one for the second year in a row, followed by Denmark, Norway, Iceland and the Netherlands. Among the top 10 countries, the only change of note year over year is that Austria replaced Australia in the 10th spot.

Besides the happiest countries, the World Happiness Report also looked at the places where people are the saddest. South Sudan was named the unhappiest place in the world, followed by Central African Republic, Afghanistan, Tanzania and Rwanda.

So where did other world powers rank on the list? The United Kingdom was number 15, Germany was 17, Japan was 58, Russia was 68 and China was 93.

Read on for the top 10 happiest countries in the world, as well as the 10 saddest places.

World’s 10 Happiest Countries

1. Finland
2. Denmark
3. Norway
4. Iceland
5. Netherlands
6. Switzerland
7. Sweden
8. New Zealand
9. Canada
10. Australia

World’s Saddest Countries

1. South Sudan
2. Central African Republic
3. Afghanistan
4. Tanzania
5. Rwanda
6. Yemen
7. Malawi
8. Syria
9. Botswana
10. Haiti

Source: Forbes

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Your bartender may tell you what bourbon he used, but where did the distillery get its corn? Did the farmer pay his workers fairly? Did he use pesticides? Where did the orange come from for that zesty strip of peel? How long did it sit in a warehouse before it finally made its way here, to your favourite bar?

Questions like these forced Ryan Chetiyawardana, aka Mr Lyan, to find an answer. Chetiyawardana is a regular winner of global bartending awards and the creative light behind this year’s World’s Best Bar, Dandelyan, and groundbreaking sustainability restaurant, CUB, both in London. So he turned to cryptocurrency, or more precisely, the technology that underpins it, blockchain.

“We are the last link in a long chain of events that is hidden from our eyes. We hold ourselves accountable for our actions. But what of the others in this chain? There’s no point in having an amazing drink if the farmer at the start is being exploited,” he states in an open letter to the bar industry. “We wanted to see if there was a way of highlighting good practice and illustrating the need for it to exist all along the supply chain. And this is where the technology underpinning cryptocurrencies – blockchain – became interesting to us.”

Cryptocurrency inspires extreme opinions. While some herald it as a universal panacea to the tyranny of corporate control, others dismiss it as a dangerous frivolity doomed to implode. But while the debate continues, the digital ledger known as the blockchain, through which most cryptocurrencies function, may well be where the truly valuable potential of the technology lies.

Blockchain is a decentralised, distributed and public digital ledger, which means that it is not controlled by one entity, such as a bank, but is rather upheld by a wide network. Once a transaction is recorded on the blockchain, it cannot be changed. The blockchain was originally designed to be public, so anyone could join and participate in the network, although blockchains can now be private.

The blockchain can bring to light the hidden costs behind your cocktail by recording every “transaction” involved in the chain: the corn farmer could record when he sows the seed, what he fertilises with and when, when he harvests, and when the corn is sent to the distillery. The distillery would then note when the corn arrives, and record each step in the fermentation and distilling process, including minutia such as the mineral content of the water used. And so on.

These recorded transactions also help when things go wrong: while tracing an ingredient that has made customers ill back to a supplier with paper records can take a week, on the blockchain it can be a matter of seconds before the contaminated product is identified and discontinued.

Innovative small brands are particularly embracing the distributed ledger. Irish craft beer brand Downstream is probably the world’s first blockchain beer. After it was revealed in 2016 that Heineken Ireland beer was being mislabelled and sold as local craft brews, Shane McCarthy of export distributor Ireland Craft Beer knew he had to do something.

He partnered with Arc-net, a Belfast-headquartered technology company that develops online platforms to manage food safety and authenticity, to launch Downstream beer. Each can of Downstream has a QR code printed on the side that can be scanned with a mobile phone. The code links you to the Downstream website, which shows you every step the beer has gone through.

“The blockchain offers an immutable record of events,” says McCarthy.

“We are beer nerds at heart and the ingredients in our cans are very high quality. We want to protect that by ensuring authenticity throughout the brewing, packaging and shipping process.”

Arc-net has also worked with Irish whiskey distillery Blackwater to track their production process, as well as Ardnamurchan, which bills itself as Scotland’s greenest distillery, to record details of a limited-edition release of spirit. They are also working on a project to track the rearing and transport of pork from Europe to China.

“From the birth of an animal, including its parentage, through its life, and shipping it to China, we record all events and can identify the product throughout. When it gets to China, buyers can scan the bar code, and can be sure it’s the same product that left the UK,” says Drew Lyall, general manager of Arc-net Scotland.

But while a distillery, brewery or pig farm would already have a system to manage its own internal records which could be repurposed for the blockchain, what makes Chetiyawardana’s Blocktail project so complex is the scale: the numerous ingredients in a cocktail involve multiple players who would all need to work together and agree to be completely transparent.

Getting brands on board has not been easy. While their fresh produce comes from their supplier, Natoora, who “personally know each farmer whose produce they sell”, the Mr Lyan team are still looking for a spirit producer that is “brave enough to bare all”, as Mark Low of Mr Lyan Studio, the company’s bar consulting arm, puts it.

“Often the biggest challenge is explaining why blockchain is needed in the first place, what it brings to the party,” says Robin Honhold, Chetiyawardana’s business partner. “The second biggest challenge is engaging suppliers in becoming a part of our blockchain; there is very little perceived incentive outside of a philanthropic gesture that challenges our norms.”

Nevertheless, they are only one or two ingredients away from having a fully realised chain.

“With the right partners it wouldn’t take much effort to reassure larger players that this is a truly viable formula,” says Honhold.

Blockchain technology has its downsides…

While blockchain’s potential to track provenance and boost food safety is appealing, critics have been quick to point out the technology’s pitfalls.

A quality often touted as proof of blockchain’s superiority is its immutability – once a transaction is recorded, it cannot be altered. But, in situations in which it is a company recording their own processes, there is no guarantee that the original information recorded is correct.

This takes trust, but it is still less trust required than when a brand makes claims of its environmental and social credentials with no public record of its behaviour.

Powering the blockchain is also a cause of concern. Last year, a specialist in bitcoin, the world’s first cryptocurrency which runs on blockchain technology, estimated that the cryptocurrency gobbles 22 terawatt-hours (TWh) per year – almost the same as Ireland, and four times as much as Google. But more worrying is that this massive energy consumption is mostly fuelled by coal-fired power plants in China, where coal-based electricity is available at very low rates.

While private blockchains, such as the hyper-ledgers used by Arc-net, require a lot less energy, similar to cloud computing, a solution for the environmental costs of data storage is yet to be found.

“It would be great to see some innovation in this space,” says McCarthy. “Perhaps the waste products of brewing could be turned into a renewable energy source.”

Source: Luxury Launches

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A business administration and computer science student when she founded and established the school as an IT Training Institution in 2012, Ms. Adzogble is also the developer of Admission in 30 Minutes, Everyday Travels and Tours Caroline Technology Solutions, and the Mercy Heart Foundation. She has many more ventures that are sister companies to Potters International College which she runs successfully. She boasts seven years of international consulting experience.

She currently manages four business ventures; Potters International College, C-Tech Solutions, The Mercy Heart Foundation and IAES. She founded the Potters International College with the aim of empowering young people with vocational skills at certificate and diploma levels in areas such as Information Technology, Business, Journalism, Beauty Care, and Public Relations.

She is partnering with foreign schools through her school, Potters International College to provide travel and study options for students who want to pursue programmes outside of Ghana. With an interest in technology, Ms Adzogble started coding and developing websites at a young age and this spurred her to set up C-Tech Solutions; the company renders comprehensive IT services to companies in the areas of mobile app development, website deployment, data integration, software development, online marketing and other areas of consultancy.

During the course of building her international college, she also set up what is now known as International African Education Summit, a pan-African education event platform which works with foreign universities to provide students with study opportunities overseas. This programme was set up to organize education tours in 52 countries bringing institutions and students together to share recruitment information and simplify admission processes.

Through her Caroline RISE Awards, Ms Adzogble provides 10 scholarships every year to deserving students to study in Ghana or overseas. These awards and several other community-based initiatives are carried out under the auspices of a non-profit organisation, The Mercy Heart Foundation.

Ms Adzogble’s interests are not only into ventures and charity, she is also a writer and her e-book series “the Super Agent and School Guide” is amongst the various ways she has broken barriers and women stereotype. She has set new frontiers for young women trying to establish themselves as successful entrepreneurs, without any funding, she has been able to ignite the spirit of “I Can” spurned by enthusiasm and passion, to set new foot prints for young ladies the world over.

Adzogble was recently quoted saying, “I am on the quest to uplift Education within Africa and beyond. To make Education the most accessible and affordable to students located in over 146 countries.”

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Mercedes Benz’s Energising Comfort Control option is the automotive business’s first attempt at a “wellness experience”, some years after the notion entered the world of hospitality. When the sixth generation S-class first entered production three years ago it introduced the idea of “fragrancing”, little spritzes of scent when sensors detected that the inside was getting a little sniffy or stale.

In the new Benz, this concept is taken to the next level and the fragrances are programmed to work in harmony with the seat and steering wheel heaters (old tech), the door panel heaters (new), the seat massage programmes (middle aged), the programmable mood lighting (defiantly 21st-century tech) and – and here’s the kicker – the car’s music system. Local laws permitting, it’s the next best thing to driving in a fresh, fluffy bath robe.

There are a number of settings; “freshness”, “warmth”, “vitality”, “joy”, “comfort” and “training”. Choose your settings and the new S-Class will assault all your senses, bar taste. But give that one time.

Settings veer from scents to wake you up to more sedate fragrancesThis being Mercedes’ flagship car, the world’s best-selling limousine and for many generations a harbinger of technologies to come, it does feature some rather more serious new technology also, including the first in a new generation of straight six cylinder engines, abandoned for V6 engines back in the late 90s.

The first of the new engines are diesels – the most powerful in Benz’s history – but there are mild-hybrid petrol engines to come and even a plug-in hybrid. Further up the range a new four-litre, biturbo V8 picks up a name famous from S-Class history – S560. Above that sit eight and 12 cylinder AMGs.

The little steps towards autonomous control are packaged under the Distronic Active Proximity Assist and Active Steer Assist, which now uses map and navigation as well scanning and visual data allowing the car a greater degree of anticipation of corners and junctions. There’s no leaving the driver’s seat yet though, although you can ask the car to park itself via a smartphone app once you have reached your destination.
Luxury at it’s best…

Source & Images: Telegraph UK 

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