The new micro-learning platform Uptime recently received a serious boost of $16 million in seed funding. It presents five-minute knowledge hacks derived from courses, documentaries, and books. The idea behind the app is to let users quickly gain insight from the creative minds, authors, and instructors they trust and without spending much of their precious time. Content creators could also use the app as new means to reach their audiences with short presentations of their full work.

Uptime Will Allow Its Users to Get the Original Source of Each Knowledge Hack

According to the creators of Uptime, it presents hacks in a unique visual story format that is designed to be inspirational and should make learning effective, engaging, fun, and shareable. Apparently, the knowledge hacks of the app will also be verified by experts. The end of each Hack gives the user an option to buy the original source.

The founders of Uptime are the serial entrepreneurs Jack Bekhor and Jamie True and the former Facebook and YouTube executive, Patrick Walker. Other investors include Sir Terry Leahy, Lord David Alliance, and Federal Street SPV. Patrick Walker recently said in an interview that with people spending a lot on watching documentaries and online courses, Uptime gives a huge opportunity to these kinds of content creators while allowing its users to find their work without having to sift through an oversaturated market.

The Goal for Uptime Is to Become a One-stop Shop for Knowledge

Uptime is supposed to present only the best content from the most trusted experts and sources. People will be able to choose the topics in which they have an interest, unlocking the key elements of the content in easy-to-absorb video, audio, and text. According to the app’s founders, Uptime targets people who want to learn but have a short amount of time and resources to do so. Its goal is to also offer constructive and uplifting content.

Some have criticized the app for being a parasitic aggregator that monetizes other people’s work — its founders, however, have argued that it actually helps deliver new audiences to content creators by providing a small taste of their work.

Axiom Space, the world’s first private space habitat company, is going to embark on an intrepid space research mission next year. The company offers paid space excursions in its commercial space station. For the first time, the company’s four private astronauts are set to travel to the ISS or the International Space Station to conduct research experiments.

The Mission

As a part of the company’s highly anticipated Ax-1 Mission, Axiom is set to send their first crewed flight to the ISS, incoming February 2022. The shuttle carrying the crew inside will be a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, which is the first of several SpaceX Crew Dragon flights Axiom purchased in March 2020 from SpaceX, to open a smooth two-way manned transportation between the planet and the ISS.

The Goal

One of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets will be launched under Ax-1 next February. While reaching the ISS, the rocket will spend two days in orbit. After being docked with the orbiting lab, the Axiom crew will spend 8 days onboard, conducting the research, which should be completed by an estimated 100 hours. The four crew members will have company at the space station. A group of Russian cosmonauts, German astronauts, and NASA astronauts are currently up there, who will join the experimentation.

The Path-breaking Research

Among the 25 research experiments on the mission, the focal research will include experimenting with stem cells to scale how space impacts aging. The crew will also perform a two-day 3D hologram projection demonstration with the help of a Microsoft HoloLens. NASA has already demonstrated a one-way ‘holoportation’ from the ground to the space station, but this time a two-way holoporting dialogue will be conducted by one of the Axiom Space crew members.

The Men on the Mission

The Axiom flight crews onboard Ax-1 will include Michael López-Alegría, the former NASA astronaut and the mission’s commander. The three other members are Larry Connor, an American nonprofit activist investor, Canadian investor Mark Pathy, Israeli investor, and former Israeli fighter pilot Eytan Stibbe. They have all paid $55 million each to ride onboard Ax-1 and helped in deciding the research experiments to be conducted.