Five for Friday: What’s new this week in 5G, AI, IoT – and the case of the missing trillion bucks

They’ve been giving out Nobel prizes all week, but where’s the category for “AI technology that makes Zoom calls better”? In this week's quick reads, you can get the scoop on a potential frontrunner for when they add that category next year. Plus: Get the latest on the IoT, a major 5G player hiding in plain sight, and a trillion dollars' worth of inefficiency waiting to be reclaimed in the energy industry.

1. Thanks to some AI magic from NVIDIA, you may soon start to hear the following phrase slightly less often: “Sorry, Zoom is freezing up on me.”
2. Microsoft’s IoT Signals Report joins the chorus documenting how COVID-19 has significantly driven acceleration of IoT adoption in 2020.
3. The US Postal Service has over 31,000 owned or leased real estate facilities, within a 1-mile radius of 44 million people. Some speculate that adds up to a major 5G opportunity. (Oh, they have a few trucks and some field personnel, too.)
4. If you’re going to bandy about the phrase “petro-Darwinism,” be prepared to back it up with a juicy statistic or two. Such as: There’s somewhere “between $500 billion and $1 trillion in trapped value from inefficiencies in global oil and gas.” Standardizing data practices and injecting intelligence into the enterprise can help release those trapped inefficiencies (ka-ching!) says one Forbes contributor.
5. The concept of “process mining” has started to move from academia to the board room. The author of The AI Advantage offers an overview in the Harvard Business Review.

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