BlackBerry was once at the top of the smartphone market in the U.S. In 2010, almost half of smartphone subscribers in the U.S. used BlackBerrys, according to Comscore.
The phones were well-known for having a tactile keyboard and for BlackBerry’s advanced cybersecurity — often favored among businesses and governments.
But after its phones fell out of favor with users, BlackBerry altered its course, taking some of the cornerstones of the business with it.
“After a few years, we realized that we would never get the volume up — and it’s a volume game,” said John Chen, CEO of BlackBerry. “And so we made that pivotal shift to a software-only company and focus on security and cyber and things of that sort.”
“Currently, BlackBerry has two main business units, a cybersecurity business unit and an IoT business unit within the cybersecurity business unit,” said Charles Eagen, chief technology officer of BlackBerry.
Its cybersecurity unit focuses on securing things such as smartphone applications and mobile banking websites. Its internet of things unit focuses on the communication of technology within connected and autonomous cars.
“We now have the lion’s share of embedded software in most of the cars,” Chen said.
BlackBerry’s technology is in roughly 215 million cars and this side of BlackBerry is continuing to grow, according to the company.
“If we look at the industry opportunity itself, it’s our expectation that the auto software industry is going to roughly triple in size from 2020 through 2030,” said Luke Junk, senior analyst at Baird.
However, BlackBerry does face competition in the cybersecurity industry, and in 2021 its revenue from cybersecurity was $500 million.
“I think that the company can reach likely a lower peak than we’ve seen in the past but a more sustainable growth trajectory and potentially more profitable future as well on a margin percentage basis,” Junk said.
CNBC visited BlackBerry’s Autonomous Vehicle Innovation Center and interviewed Chen to find out what’s next for the company.
After years of anticipation, the cryptocurrency ethereum finally implemented a major network upgrade that completely changes how the blockchain verifies transactions, mints new coins and secures its network. Called proof-of-stake, this system has reduced ethereum’s energy consumption by more than 99%.
Energy usage has been one of the cryptocurrency industry’s biggest targets for critique. But it’s not likely that bitcoin will follow suit.
Instead, the bitcoin network is sticking with a system called proof-of-work, in which highly specialized computers try to guess a winning number that serves to validate transactions and create new coins. This is what’s known as mining.
At the moment, guessing a winning number takes over one hundred sextillion tries. All of this work helps to secure the network by making it nearly impossible for bad actors to accrue enough computing power to take control. But recent research also shows that in 2020, mining Bitcoin consumed 75.4 terawatt hours of electricity, more than all of Austria or Portugal.
This is the system formerly used by ethereum. But now the network has swapped out miners for validators. Instead of playing a massive computational guessing game, validators are assigned to verify new transactions, and earn ether as a reward for doing so.
To ensure that these validators act honestly, they essentially have to make a security deposit by staking a certain amount of ether coins into the network. If a validator tries to attack the network, they’ll lose their stake. Ethereum proponents say this penalty will make the network more secure, while bitcoin enthusiasts see proof-of-work as the more secure, tried and true approach.
However, the optics of bitcoin’s energy use in the midst of the global climate crisis has become a problem for the network. In response, some major bitcoin miners are starting to seek out renewable energy to power their data centers and trying to change the narrative by touting bitcoin’s energy use as an asset, as it helps drive investment into the nation’s aging electrical grid.
Just a couple of years ago, it seemed that space mining was inevitable. Analysts, tech visionaries and even renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson predicted that space mining was going to be big business.
Space mining companies like Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, backed by the likes of Google‘s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, cropped up to take advantage of the predicted payoff.
Fast forward to 2022, and both Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries have been acquired by companies that have nothing to do with space mining. Humanity has yet to commerciallymine even a single asteroid. So what’s taking so long?
Space mining is a long-term undertaking and one that investors do not necessarily have the patience to support.
“If we had to develop a full-scale asteroid mining vehicle today, we would need a few hundred million dollars to do that using commercial processes. It would be difficult to convince the investment community that that’s the right thing to do,” says Joel Sercel, president and CEO of TransAstra Corporation.
“In today’s economics and in the economics of the near future, the next few years, it makes no sense to go after precious metals in asteroids. And the reason is the cost of getting to and from the asteroids is so high that it vastly outstrips the value of anything that you’d harness from the asteroids,” Sercel says.
This has not dissuaded Sercel from trying to mine the cosmos. TransAstra will initially focus on mining asteroids for water to make rocket propellant, but would like to eventually mine “everything on the periodic table.” But Sercel says such a mission is still a ways off.
“In terms of the timeline for mining asteroids, for us, the biggest issue is funding. So it depends on how fast we can scale the business into these other ventures and then get practical engineering experience operating systems that have all the components of an asteroid mining system. But we could be launching an asteroid mission in the 5 to 7-year time frame.”
Sercel hopes these other ventures keep it afloat until it develops its asteroid mining business. The idea is to use the tech that will eventually be incorporated into TransAstra’s astroid mining missions to satisfy already existing market needs, such as using space tugs to deliver satellites to their exact orbits and using satellites to aid in traffic management as space gets increasingly more crowded.
AstroForge is another company that believes space mining will become a reality. Founded in 2022 by a former SpaceX engineer and a former Virgin Galactic engineer, AstroForge still believes there is money to be made in mining asteroids for precious metals.
“On Earth we have a limited amount of rare earth elements, specifically the platinum group metals. These are industrial metals that are used in everyday things your cell phone, cancer, drugs, catalytic converters, and we’re running out of them. And the only way to access more of these is to go off world,” says AstroForge Co-Founder and CEO Matt Gialich.
AstroForge plans to mine and refine these metals in space and then bring them back to earth to sell. To keep costs down, AstroForge will attach its refining payload to off-the shelf satellites and launch those satellites on SpaceX rockets.
“There’s quite a few companies that make what is referred to as a satellite bus. This is what you would typically think of as a satellite, the kind of box with solar panels on it, a propulsion system being connected to it. So for us, we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel there,” Gialich says. “The previous people before us, Planetary Resources and DSI [Deep Space Industries], they had to buy entire vehicles. They had to build much, much larger and much more expensive satellites, which required a huge injection of capital. And I think that was the ultimate downfall of both of those companies.”
The biggest challenge, AstroForge says, is deciding which asteroids to target for mining. Prior to conducting their own missions, all early-stage mining companies have to go on is existing observation data from researchers and a hope that the asteroids they have selected contain the minerals they seek.
“The technology piece you can control, the operations pieces you can control, but you can’t control what the asteroid is until you get there,” says Jose Acain, AstroForge Co-Founder and CTO.
To find out more about the challenges facing space mining companies and their plans to make space mining a real business watch the video.
