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The silicon economy is the data and platform economy where people, companies, autonomous vehicles and IoT devices interact with each other. The term “Silicon Economy” plays on its proximity to Silicon Valley, but in fact it stands for a paradigm shift: the proprietary, i.e. manufacturer-bound, systems from Silicon Valley are being replaced by open, federal structures in the Silicon Economy.

Today's oceans contain 26 to 66 million tons of waste, with approximately 94 per cent located on the seafloor. So far, the efforts to collect the waste have focused mostly on collecting it at the surface, with only a few local efforts to gather underwater waste, mostly using human divers. The SeaClear project funded by Horizon 2020 is breaking new ground. Cosmin Delea and Johannes Oeffner from Hamburg-based Fraunhofer-Center for Maritime Logistics and Services CML explain the strategy.

With the establishment of new laboratories and testbeds at Fraunhofer IML, the National Centre of Excellence for Logistics and IT now enables the specific transfer of research results to industry, aiming at an international audience. The important topics in which the researchers do not least offer market overviews and perspectives of new technologies and systems in Germany and Europe include highly innovative picking methods, exoskeletons for use in logistics, or mixed reality (XR) in education and training.

The international logistics companies Dachser, DB Schenker, duisport and Rhenus have now established the Open Logistics Foundation in Berlin. The purpose of the non-profit foundation is to build a European open-source community aiming to promote digitalization in logistics and supply chain management based on open source and standardize logistics processes through de facto standards. Not only is a technology initiative like this unique in logistics to date, the founding members are also taking on a pioneering role as to the future topic of open source.

»Ledger Man«, the superhero, is supposed to make blockchain technology more tangible, know and popular. It is quite a while ago, that the Blockchain Europe NRW team had the idea for the funny cartoon character. In the meantime, there are already five episodes as video in cartoon style.

Swarms of autonomous vehicles are the symbol for logistics 4.0. With the small, innovative "LoadRunner®" transport robot, scientists at Fraunhofer IML and TU Dortmund University have now developed an intelligent vehicle system to be used in intralogistics that shows its full strength in the swarm.

Deutsche Telekom and the Fraunhofer-Institute for Material Flow and Logistics IML, based in Dortmund, are founding the Telekom Open IoT Labs. At the new facility, up to six scientists from Fraunhofer IML, and three IoT experts from Deutsche Telekom, will work together to develop and test Internet of Things (IoT) solutions and get them market ready.