Rightbridge Ventures Group AB (publ) ("Rightbridge" or "the Company") has today subscribed for shares in the directed new issue in Adventure Box Technologies AB ("Adventure Box"). Rightbridge has committed to subscribe for 9,375,000 shares at a subscription price of 0.16 SEK, amounting to 1.5 MSEK. After the transaction, Rightbridge's ownership in Adventure Box amounts to approximately 19.3%. The consideration is paid in cash following the completion of Rightbridge's previously announced issue.

Adventure Box with its online platform KoGaMa offers user-friendly tools for creating and sharing unique gaming experiences. With its innovative multiplayer editor, KoGaMa enables users to collaborate, create, and customize content in a dynamic social metaverse. The company's world-leading streaming technology is patent-protected.

The KoGaMa platform has approximately 750,000 monthly active users, with some games having over 50 million plays and over 40,000 games created by users. The platform generates revenue through advertising sales, in-game purchases, and other partnerships.

"The investment in Adventure Box and KoGaMa is more than just a financial investment, it is the beginning and an important step in our shift of focus as we have previously communicated. We are in dialogue with Adventure Box for future collaborations and partnerships," says Claes Kalborg, newly appointed CEO of Rightbridge Ventures.
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The collaboration between CF Entertainment and Rigthbridge Ventures means that Rightbridge has exclusive rights to find partnerships and develop concepts within gaming and web3, and the investment in Adventure Box is a first small step in this collaboration.

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Sportswear brand Adidas has opened up a digital pop-up store on the metaverse gaming universe Roblox, carrying officially licensed digital clothing and bespoke outfits for the platform.

The Adidas pop-ups will appear in various Roblox experiences, including Princess Dress Up Obby, Cotton Obby!, Seaboard City, Theme Park HeideLand, Noob Train, Dream Island, and Ultimate Ragdoll Playground.

They will showcase a diverse range of digital apparel and accessories, inspired by the sportswear brand’s SS24 physical collection, including its firebird tracksuits.

To coincide with the launch, Adidas has joined forces with top Roblox creator Rush Bogin (Rush X) to craft a range of exclusive, limited-edition pieces that will be available on a first-come-first-served basis for the first 10,000 units.
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MILAN — “I feel we’ve stepped into fashion design 3.0,” said Istituto Marangoni’s managing director Stefania Valenti on Tuesday evening, when she presented a new digital format developed by the fashion and design school.

Dubbed “I Am AI,” the project consisted of a fashion show grouping the work of seven students from its international campuses that have developed digital-only collections with the help of artificial intelligence. Presented in the metaverse space that Istituto Marangoni unveiled last year, the event was intended to transcend the geographical boundaries across the institution’s different schools and invite a global audience to partake the experience, all the while showing a different take on graduates’ fashion shows and the overall progress it has made in offering students new skill sets.

Each fashion design graduate represented a different campus — hailing from Milan, Florence, Paris, London, Mumbai, Shanghai and Shenzhen, China — and presented three looks digitally crafted in CLO3D, after exploring AI tools during their research and inspiration processes. AI algorithms also played a key role in the show’s artistic direction, generating the different backgrounds that acted as sets of each collection, for example.

“The students were selected by an internal commission with different criteria compared to those we generally apply for our traditional graduate shows,” noted Valenti, underscoring that innovation was considered a key aspect in this process.
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“We see digital as the enhancement of physical. These two worlds are no longer separate but need to converge. They fuel each other, sparking a creative potential to the nth degree,” she said.

The executive said the school embarked on such a journey already during the pandemic, when it revisited and updated courses to integrate new tech tools with the mission to further empower talents in their training experience. “But theory was not enough — we felt they needed a proper gym to train and experiment,” said Valenti.

Hence, the school will soon launch laboratories in its metaverse space. If so far the accessible pavilions on the platform mainly included areas dedicated to collecting information on courses and showcasing the work of the best students and projects in partnership with companies, now it is to offer digital counterparts to classes such as pattern-making, product design, and visual merchandising, among others.
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Founded in 1935, Istituto Marangoni is controlled by Galileo Global Education Italia, the Italian branch of the international private higher education company GGE. Private schools operating in the fashion, art and design fields under GGE Italia’s umbrella also include Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti — better known as NABA — and Domus Academy.

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From climate change to gender parity, there’s no end to the pressing global challenges that Millennials and gen Z have taken upon themselves to help solve. This new wave of innovators, with their disruptive mindsets, are shaking up industries and dismantling traditional ways of doing things. This is how they entered the entrepreneurship arena and how they plan to remain in it.
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Kaarel Kotkas

Company: Veriff
Country: Estonia
Age: 28
Forbes 30 Under 30, 2023, Europe, Technology category
Kaarel Kotkas has not even reached the age of 30 and already he’s the founder of a unicorn valued at more than US$1.5 billion, which makes Veriff the ninth Estonian unicorn alongside the likes of Skype, Playtech, Wise and Bolt. With interactions in the virtual realm only increasing, it’s only natural for online businesses to be concerned about safety and transparency. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Veriff’s customer base has grown quite rapidly, which has led the company to focus on investing in marketing and sales teams, and expanding its workforce and products. This has been possible with the help of US$200 million in funding and AI automation.

“Organizations and consumers needed to verify identities online more than ever before in 2021 – from onboarding remote employees, to creating a safe space for gaming in the metaverse, and conducting business fully online – which makes the establishment of digital trust and transparency incredibly critical,” Kotkas noted.
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Alexander Lempka

Company: Connect Earth
Country: UK
Age: 26
Forbes 30 Under 30, 2023, Europe, Social Impact category
Reducing carbon emissions takes more than setting ambitious targets; to make progress, you need to be able to measure your carbon footprint. London-based Connect Earth uses carbon tracking technology to enable financial institutions to measure and reduce the emissions of their customers. Having recently secured more than US$5.6 million in seed funding, the Co-Founders plan to dial up their presence in the United States and Europe. So far, their application programming interface (API) tracking tool has been successfully integrated into community banks, banking groups and fintechs. APIs can also be embedded in mobile apps to estimate carbon emissions for financial transactions to better help organizations meet their sustainability goals. According to Connect Earth, their mission is to “bridge the gap between intent, knowledge and action”. The company is headed by Nicolas Carmont Zaragoza and Alexander Lempka, whose passion for combining fintech with sustainability has been channeled into this two-year-old venture.
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Philipp Bosshard

Company: YASAI
Country: Switzerland
Age: 29
Forbes 30 Under 30, 2023, Europe, Social Impact category
YASAI, which translates to ‘vegetable’ in Japanese, brings together architects, designers, engineers and plant scientists who have turned to vertical farming as a solution to feeding future populations. It’s an efficient method for cultivating leafy greens and herbs that requires less space and precious natural resources – essentially growing more with less. Rather than using soil, the plants float in a liquid solution comprising water and nutrients and are placed on growing tables that are stacked up to 15 vertical levels high. With the addition of LED lighting and automation, the system allows for year-round growth to take place. Plus the entire operation is run on renewable energy and without chemical pesticides.

Since launching in 2019, the Swiss company has amassed an astounding US$9 million in funding, but finding a suitable location required the founding team to develop a success-oriented criteria. After some initial stumbling blocks, the team secured a lease for an industrial site located close to a railway station. Alongside expanding their edible portfolio, Bosshard and Co-Founders Mark Zahran and Stefano Augstburger are planning for larger locations.

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Full list here

(...)Europe’s more cautious spending is largely due to concerns around ethics and bias driven by the more regulated European market. However, European companies remain optimistic about generative AI’s impact on their business. Consequently, they are much more confident in their ability to train and recruit talent, as well as manage and control generative AI systems.

For the Generative AI Radar 2023 – Europe report, the organisation surveyed 1,000 respondents from companies across 11 Western European countries. This included Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Luxemburg, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the UK. The research, which is also supported by interviews with business leaders and AI practitioners, highlights the following insights.

France and Germany lead spending and adoption

• France expects to double spending on GenAI, to nearly $730 million. Germany is expected to spend almost $610 million in the next 12 months.
• In both countries, nearly 50% of companies have either implemented GenAI or implemented and created business value from it. This is compared with roughly 40% in UK, Benelux, and Nordics.
• The UK is expected to move past Benelux into third place in the next 12 months. Spending is expected to more than double to nearly $510 million.
• Nordic companies are expected to increase spending at the highest rate in the next 12 months. Growing spend to by more than 2.5x their current level, to more than $470 million.

European companies are deploying GenAI

• Despite high levels of experimentation and implementation with GenAI, only 6% of European companies generate business value with their GenAI use cases. France, Germany and the UK lead the region, with about 10% of companies reporting value delivered by GenAI projects.

Ethics, bias and regulatory concerns

• European companies are more focused on ethics and bias, and confident about managing and controlling GenAI than North American companies.
• European companies identified ethics and bias as the second biggest challenge, after data privacy and security. North American companies are less concerned with ethics and bias. It was the fourth biggest challenge behind issues such as data privacy, unusable data and a lack of skills.
• European companies also have more board directors involved in GenAI policies, reflecting their concerns around regulations. In Europe, boards of directors set regulations and policies for more than 30% of companies and are primary sponsors nearly 20% of the time.
• More than 70% of European respondents are confident in GenAI management abilities.

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[Dubai, UAE, December 6, 2023] At the UN Climate Change Conference (COP28), AE4RIA and Huawei hosted a session with the UNFCCC Global Innovation Hub to “Accelerate Green Innovation” and released a white paper, Twin Skills for the Twin Transition: Defining Green Digital Skills and Jobs. Developed in collaboration with the ATHENA Research Centre, Sustainable Development Unit under AE4RIA, PwC, and with the contribution of EIT Digital, the report promises a guide to developing new training that will equip the green digital workforce needed to achieve net-zero.

Speakers at the Accelerate Green Innovation session at COP28, in Dubai, UAE

Opening the session, Vicky Zhang, Vice President of Corporate Affairs at Huawei, said: "I am proud to launch the new report today with our partners. The report focuses on developing a new classification for Green Digital Skills that will define the course of action to reskill and upskill people to build and spread the net-zero technologies needed to achieve the Paris Agreement objectives."

Indeed, as Salvatore Moccia, Head of Education and Skills, EIT Digital, highlights, "More than three-quarters of companies in the EU report difficulties finding workers with the right skill set. With the acceleration of the digital and green transitions, a paradigm shift in defining, identifying, and developing skills for the twin transition is thus required. This is fully aligned with our reskilling and upskilling programs."
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But does Europe have the skills to accelerate the green transition? SolarPower Europe, the trade group for Europe’s solar photovoltaic sector, predicted that in the EU solar sector alone, one million jobs will emerge by 2025. With new industrial and technological challenges, the educational offering has to evolve and meet new needs. Industry players like Huawei stand ready to increase training offerings. In 2023, we have provided over one thousand trainings for tens of thousands of PV installers. A collaborative ecosystem to qualify and upskill professionals will be the keystone of this new era.

Prof. Phoebe Koundouri, President EAERE and Chair of SDSN Global Climate Hub, who led the research efforts, also warned: "In the context of the European Green Deal, the Twin Transition is accelerating structural changes in labor markets. And while the EU is developing a new net-zero industrial strategy to strengthen its competitiveness, talent may be short. I am proud of this collaboration, which will inform educational, industrial, and policy stakeholders about the new labor needs to achieve climate neutrality by 2050."

Huawei Vice President for European Public Affairs, Dr. Hui Cao, concluded, "I hope we can all join forces to disseminate the report. The challenges posed by climate change are vast, but together we can develop the talent needed to unleash the potential of digitalization to revolutionize how we approach sustainability.”

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The Robotic Container Handling System (RCHS), when mounted on an electric and unmanned feeder vessel, enables unmanned container logistics to local ports even those without loading and unloading capacity
This week saw the successful end of the European MOSES research project. The MOSES project started in July 2020 with the aim to enhance the Short Sea Shipping component of the European supply chain by addressing the vulnerabilities and strains related to the operation of large containerships. A two-fold strategy was employed, in order to reduce the total time to berth and to stimulate the use of SSS feeder services to small ports that have limited or no infrastructure.

TNO’s work within MOSES focused on developing and demonstrating a Robotic Container Handling System (RCHS) in cooperation with consortium partner MacGregor. The RCHS, when mounted on an electric and unmanned feeder vessel, enables unmanned container logistics to local ports even those without loading and unloading capacity. The RCHS monitors the environment and may trigger an emergency stop when a dangerous situation occurs, and notifies a remote operator of the danger.

The MOSES research has led to a demonstrator of such a system which is able to detect people, cars, and other objects, and can autonomously detect and move shipping containers. The crane system generates a 3D Digital Twin model which can be used by an operator to (re)build situation awareness in a remote shore control center.
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The MOSES project had a total budget of around 8 million Euro funded by the European Commission. 17 partners from 7 European countries (Greece, Cyprus, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Denmark and Finland) worked together from 2020 to 2023 and joined their expertise to enhance the sustainable short-sea shipping.

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LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM, December 6, 2023 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Immerzo, the first gaming and metaverse creator-led marketing platform, is excited to announce its upcoming launch on March 25th, 2024. Accompanying this announcement, Immerzo is releasing a unique video campaign that turns an ordinary marketing department day into a hip-hop showdown. The video features award-winning performers Nicci Brighten and Mark Janicello as marketers, lyrically showcasing Immerzo's innovative features. This creative approach underscores Immerzo's commitment to transforming digital marketing in gaming and the metaverse, tapping into a burgeoning market where the global metaverse gaming market is forecasted to reach USD 1,300 billion by 2033.

Unparalleled Platform for Dynamic Brand-Creator Collaborations
Co-founded by Michael Coppola and Kai Cheung, Immerzo is designed to empower brands and creators to build impactful connections with audiences in gaming and the metaverse. The platform streamlines the process of creating, managing, and executing a variety of projects, ranging from branded games to digital attire and in-game product placement. Immerzo facilitates seamless discovery and collaboration between brands and the finest gaming and metaverse creators in a market boasting over 400 million monthly active users.

Visionary Leadership Driving Digital Innovation
Michael Coppola, Co-Founder and CEO, leverages his rich experience as a filmmaker, creative, and entrepreneur at Immerzo. His expertise in storytelling and virtual reality is key to developing engaging brand narratives within the digital realm. "Immerzo stands at the intersection of creativity and technology, enabling brands to weave their stories within the rapidly evolving gaming and metaverse environments, leveraging collaborations with creators," states Coppola.

Kai Cheung, Co-Founder and CTO, brings his extensive cybersecurity and machine learning expertise to the forefront. An inventor of numerous patents on Homomorphic Encryption and a veteran in software development and leadership, Cheung's role is integral to ensuring the platform's advanced technological capabilities and security. "Our commitment at Immerzo is to offer a secure, innovative platform that meets the ever-changing demands of the digital age," explains Cheung.
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​With the metaverse gaining strong global attention, and increasingly seeing the real world adapted into a virtual setting, businesses and organisations of all kinds must understand the potential the metaverse holds for business, as well as economic and social growth.

The metaverse has been gaining strong global attention in recent years. It’s hard to not see why; after all, it’s an early iteration of a fully immersive and realistic virtual world that promises to cater to all our senses in the near, digital-first future.
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Enter the enterprise metaverse. Powered by virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies, these areas of the metaverse hold significant promise in transforming various segments of the economy through its realistic virtual simulation and interactivity with these simulated objects. Here, communications service providers (CSPs) will play a crucial role in delivering the high-performance, mission-critical networks required to power the metaverse to the benefit of all economic sectors.
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Seamless experiences for both VR and AR rest heavily on high-speed networks. Without them, lags and glitches will continue to plague the Metaverse experience, as highlighted during last year’s Metaverse Fashion Week. The current challenge is that VR experiences are only properly accessible over high-speed fixed networks. This also does not resolve the latency issues that are not just counterintuitive to the VR experience but can also cause nausea and headaches for its users.

Meanwhile, AR experiences are often dependent on mobile network quality. If we want to extend its potential beyond games like Pokémon GO – especially for AR to act as a seamless overlay on the world around us – we would need networks with high capacity, high bandwidth, and ultra-low latency. For this, greater preparation in the 5G space is required to prepare for the roll-out of 5G-Advanced networks which can reliably power more immersive AR applications.

An ‘ultimate’ form of the metaverse will be a world that combines VR, AR, and other technologies to immerse a person into a cyber-physical confluence. What this means is that, instead of removing us from reality, it will become part of everyday life; an always-on extended reality (XR) that blends the physical, digital, and virtual that allows us to bring the metaverse wherever we go.
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CSPs and enterprises must already begin thinking about how to harness the metaverse’s potential. For instance, one consumer-focused development may be creating devices that encourage people to spend more time with metaverse experiences, such as a lighter and higher-resolution VR headset or affordable AR glasses. If launched at the right price point, such devices may create the same disruptive impact on the metaverse as the iPhone on the mobile internet.

Yet, truly realizing the benefits of the metaverse on economies rests on wider industrial and enterprise adoption. Already, we are seeing enterprises exploring a wider range of practical metaverse applications. This includes cross-industry use cases such as training, collaboration, remote sales, and even product training (where VR can be used to demonstrate large products to potential customers without the need to travel).
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As more enterprises start waking up to the metaverse’s innate potential, Australia’s CSPs must be prepared to meet the growing demand for private wireless networks and 5G network slicing. They should also look to participate in or lead ecosystems to deliver metaverse platforms and applications to enable more use metaverse use cases to take off – changing our perception of how to experience and interact with the world around us.

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Innovators, stakeholders, and practitioners are looking at the first fields of application of Metaverse technology, ranging from making education more accessible to supporting medical professionals in their work.

During Meta’s ‘Immersive Education Symposium’ in Brussels on 30 November, speakers discussed virtual reality (VR) and extended reality (XR) and how they could be incorporated into future classrooms.

Several use cases and innovative solutions emerged when applying immersive technologies in various sectors. For example, in education, students could see historical sites and events, making it more memorable, and more accessible to those who could not make a real-life field trip.

Such technologies could help medical professionals, too. For example, surgeons could see the human body and what they will see on the operating table in 3D. It could also help doctors collaborate on a patient’s case and be able to see more than CT or MRI results.

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