Southern Europe tomorrow

What’s awaiting us tomorrow is a mystery. But, if you want to catch a glimpse of the future, Southern Europe’s vibrant start-up and innovation scene might be the place to look. French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese visionaries are coming up with life-altering ideas daily and managing to turn them into reality in no-time. Welcome to Southern Europe’s future.

Photo © Pazzi

TOMORROW’S FOOD
The nine-million-euro pizza

The robots are officially taking over, and they start their journey in Val d’Europe, a commercial centre near Disneyland Paris. Here, PAZZI opened last month, the world’s first 100 per cent automated pizza restaurant. Developing the technology had a price tag of nine million euro but was worth every penny. After ordering your pizza on a screen, robots prepare it in front of you with nothing but fresh products. Five minutes later, you are eating. The menu counts 14 options, including the whimsical ‘La Queen Epazzibeth’, royally covered with tomato sauce, mushrooms, ham and cheese.

Photo © Unsplash

TOMORROW’S RESEARCH
Every step you take…

Spain’s statistic agency INE has commenced its biggest experiment ever. For eight days, they will track the location of every phone in the country to get a better notion of the Spaniard’s travelling habits. This could help them improving traffic issues, amongst other things. The three biggest phone operators will collect the data and send them anonymously to INE. The first five days of tracking are already behind us, the last three are planned on Christmas Day, 20 July and 15 August.

Diple. Photo © Pixabay

TOMORROW’S CAMERA
A detailed look

The quality of our phone cameras has increased a lot over the last decade. Now, the Italian start-up Diple wants to make an even bigger leap forward by turning them into microscopes. All you need is a starter’s kit with a standard and one or more lenses. You can already get a basic set for less than 50 euros. Their top model, the Diple Black 150x, will allow you to magnify up to 0.7 microns, enough to see cell details and bacteria. Having received over double the amount of money they were aiming to gather on Kickstarter in mere days, the team has now started producing the system. By May 2020, it should be on the market.