2025 was the year technology stopped being tomorrow’s promise and became today’s anchor. What began as a surge in generative AI and platform innovation two years prior crystallized this year into concrete shifts in how people work, governing bodies legislate, and markets invest. Across continents and industries, the arc of technology bent toward practical impact, regulatory reality, and economic weight.

At the heart of the year’s story was artificial intelligence’s jump from novelty to infrastructure. LLMs and multimodal models moved beyond demos into everyday workflows, influencing how documents are written, campaigns are conceived, products designed, and code generated.

Enterprises that once hesitated began deploying AI tools at scale, with early adopters reporting measurable productivity gains by integrating copilots into core processes, a trend visible in surveys showing widespread adoption among software professionals.

This editorial isn’t a chronicle of every press release.

It’s a reflection on how 2025, at the crossroads of technology, governance, and economic strategy, brought about a series of inflection points that will shape the next era of creation, competition, and control.

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When imagination became infrastructure

OpenAI’s release of GPT-5 in August pushed the boundaries of what AI could do, delivering notable gains in coding, math, and multimodal understanding. But unlike the jaw-dropping debut of ChatGPT a couple years prior, this new generation of foundation models arrived to a more measured reception.

Tech leaders and investors had begun asking harder questions: beyond impressive demos, could these models drive real products and revenue?

Google’s answer was Gemini 3, launched in November as its “most intelligent model” and immediately woven into Google’s flagship product, Search. For the first time, an AI model upgrade wasn’t just about boastful leaderboard scores, it was about transforming user experience.

Typing a query into Google now often meant receiving an AI-generated synthesis instead of the familiar list of links, a sea change in how information is delivered. Google even unveiled a Gemini “agent” that could execute multi-step tasks like booking travel or organizing email, hinting at a future where AI acts more like a digital butler than a chatbox.

Anthropic’s Claude 4 model, for instance, gained a strong following among developers by expanding how much it could handle at once, processing entire codebases with tens of thousands of lines, rather than by producing viral one-liners.

AI grew up in 2025: it was still improving at breakneck speed, but it also had to earn its keep in real products and justify the billion-dollar bets fueling its rise.

Chips and Gadgets

Driving this AI explosion was a parallel leap in hardware. The hunger for AI computers in 2025 was insatiable, and chipmakers raced to deliver.

NVIDIA, whose GPUs had become the era’s essential infrastructure, rolled out its new Blackwell architecture with chips like the B200 that boasted up to 3× the training speed of its predecessor. Cloud data centers around the world scrambled to deploy these to keep up with demand from model training and inference.

Rival chipmakers weren’t idle either: AMD and a cadre of startups pushed innovative AI accelerators, while even Intel signaled ambitions to catch up, reportedly exploring an acquisition of AI chip designer SambaNova.

Perhaps most tellingly, tech giants themselves started designing silicon tailored for AI workloads, recognizing that owning the chip means owning the future of computing.

Beyond AI chips, consumer hardware saw its own milestones. After years of anticipation, augmented reality glasses and mixed-reality headsets finally had their moment, sort of.

Apple’s Vision Pro headset, unveiled in late 2023, reached select markets in 2024; by 2025 developers were crafting the first wave of immersive apps. However, mass adoption lagged due to the device’s sky-high price and bulky format.

Competitors like Meta’s Quest line offered cheaper VR headsets and modest improvements, but the “metaverse” hype of yesteryear largely fizzled out, users and investors had shifted their excitement to generative AI and tangible productivity tools.

Smartphones and laptops in 2025 continued incremental improvements (faster Apple M3/M4 chips, foldable screens becoming more common), yet it was clear the next paradigm shift in personal tech was still on the horizon.

Even so, one hardware frontier made concrete progress: quantum computing. Industry leaders like IBM and Google demonstrated prototype systems with ever-larger qubit counts and made strides in error correction, inching closer to viable quantum machines.

These advances, while esoteric to the public, underscored a broader theme, from AI accelerators to quantum chips, the machinery under the hood of tech was evolving rapidly to enable the software of tomorrow.

Regulators strike back

If 2025 proved anything, it’s that technology no longer operates above the law. This was the year regulators moved from intent to enforcement, with Europe leading the charge.

After years of debate, the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act came into force, becoming the world’s first complex AI law. From February, certain “unacceptable risk” uses, such as social scoring and real-time biometric surveillance, were banned outright.

By August, transparency rules followed, forcing companies to label AI-generated content and comply with new obligations for general-purpose models. The signal was unmistakable: in Europe, the era of unchecked AI was over.

Companies now face audits, penalties, and real consequences if their systems cross legal or ethical lines, a regulatory moment European officials openly compared to GDPR’s impact on data privacy.

The pressure didn’t stop with AI. In 2025, regulators also went after the gatekeepers. The EU’s Digital Markets Act forced long-resistant changes from Big Tech, most notably when Apple opened the iPhone to third-party app stores and sideloading in Europe, dismantling a 15-year walled garden.

At the same time, enforcement of the Digital Services Act intensified. Platforms were scrutinized for how they handle disinformation, with companies like X warned or penalized during periods of geopolitical tension. In response, social networks expanded moderation teams, adjusted algorithms, and exposed more of their inner workings to researchers.

Elsewhere, governments followed suit.

The US issued an AI executive order and signaled tougher enforcement through agencies like the FTC, while states stepped in, including New York’s law requiring mental-health warnings on addictive social features.

In China, new draft rules targeted AI systems designed for human-like interaction, tightening licensing and ideological oversight. By the end of the year, the freewheeling phase of tech disruption had given way to something more restrained. The question was no longer whether regulation would catch up, but how deeply it would reshape innovation itself.

Platforms pivot & users change course

The platform shake-up that began in 2023 gathered real momentum in 2025, as both companies and users adjusted to a post-pandemic, AI-saturated reality.

Nowhere was this clearer than in social media. Elon Musk’s X, which entered the decade with noise and bravado, found itself on the defensive. Meta’s Threads, initially dismissed after an early spike, steadily closed the gap, nearing parity with X in daily mobile users by mid-year.

X’s audience shrank as policy whiplash and leadership churn eroded confidence, and while its remaining users were still deeply engaged, the era of unquestioned Twitter dominance was over. Disenchanted users scattered across a fragmented landscape, from Meta’s polished Threads to decentralized alternatives like Bluesky and Mastodon, breaking the old Facebook–Instagram–Twitter equilibrium.

The recalibration extended well beyond social feeds.

Major platforms retooled around changing habits: Google reshaped Search around generative answers to fend off AI assistants and algorithmic discovery, while Microsoft pushed its Copilot deeper into Windows, Office, and Bing, betting on “AI inside” as a platform reset.

Everyday behavior shifted too. Smarter voice and chat assistants returned to daily use, handling emails, refunds, and scheduling with little friction. At the same time, screen fatigue set in. Digital-detox travel gained traction, and younger users gravitated toward apps that promised less algorithmic pressure and more human curation. Even streaming came full circle.

After years of fragmentation, providers began rebundling services, offering combined video, music, and gaming packages that looked suspiciously like cable TV reborn, a reminder that while technology moves forward, user preferences often move in cycles.

Society grapples with tech’s consequences

Amid the gains and momentum, 2025 also became a year of reckoning. As AI systems spread, society began grappling with their cultural and ethical cost. Creators who once marveled at generative tools started pushing back, arguing that their work had been absorbed without consent or compensation.

A wave of lawsuits moved through US courts, with authors accusing companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Google of scraping books and articles to train models. By year’s end, the message was unmistakable: if AI is built on human creativity, many believe its rewards can no longer flow in one direction alone.

Public trust in technology was also tested by a rise in malicious uses and misuses. In the financial domain, sophisticated deepfake scams caused real damage. The frequency of such incidents spiked sharply; cybersecurity firms reported a 3000% increase in deepfake-related fraud over two years, and authorities scrambled to educate businesses on new verification practices.

Misinformation continued to be a menace: during elections and conflicts, AI-generated fake images and videos spread on social media, forcing newsrooms to set up rapid-response fact-checking teams.

Encouragingly, 2025 also saw growth in countermeasures, from better deepfake detection algorithms to nascent standards for cryptographic content authentication (the Coalition for Content Provenance, including major publishers and tech platforms, expanded efforts to watermark authentic media).

Still, the information ecosystem remained fraught, as even savvy citizens found it ever harder to tell the truth from fabrication online.

And then there’s the human element: how all this tech is affecting everyday lives and livelihoods. Workplace AI adoption soared this year; tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot and a host of AI assistants became common on office desktops. Studies showed productivity boosts but also raised concerns about workers becoming overly reliant on AI suggestions.

Meanwhile, fears of automation resurfaced in certain sectors, for example, as chatbots took over more customer service and code-generation tools improved, professionals in call centers and junior programming positions wondered about long-term job security.

These anxieties fueled calls for new approaches to education and training, so that the workforce of 2030 will be prepared for more creative, complex tasks that AI can’t easily handle.

The editor’s verdict: Lovable wins 2025

Lovable (Stockholm, Sweden) came as one of the most remarkable AI software stories of the year, for me. What began as an open-source project evolved into a commercial platform that lets users build fully functional websites and apps using plain-language prompts, no traditional coding required.

This approach, known in the industry as “vibe coding,” turns ideas into production-ready software simply by describing what you want in natural language.

Lovable’s growth in 2025 was extraordinary by any measure. Eight months after its launch, the company hit over $100 million in annual recurring revenue and raised a $200 million Series A at a roughly $1.8 billion valuation, making it one of Europe’s fastest-growing software startups ever.

By year’s end, Lovable had secured $330 million in Series B funding at about a $6.6 billion valuation, and was rapidly scaling globally.

What makes Lovable meaningful beyond the numbers is what it represents: a shift in how software is built. It demonstrated that AI can democratize development, giving power to non-technical founders, creators, and teams to go from concept to product without traditional engineering barriers.

In an industry long centered on specialized skills and team structures, Lovable’s rise suggested a future where natural language becomes the primary interface to software creation.

On a more hopeful note, 2025 showed signs of a maturing tech culture. Ethical design moved from talking point to practice. Major platforms began experimenting with limits, turning off infinite scroll for teens, adding prompts that nudged users to pause, and treating “time well spent” as a real metric rather than a slogan.

In AI, transparency gained ground. Under pressure from regulators and researchers, companies like OpenAI and Google disclosed more about how their models are trained and where they fall short.

Researchers formed new alliances to share safety techniques, and a second global AI Safety Summit brought dozens of countries together around questions of alignment and control.

None of it amounted to binding rules, but it marked a shift in tone: even the architects of powerful systems openly acknowledged the need for restraint.

Taken together, these moments made 2025 a turning point. For years, technology had surged ahead of the institutions meant to guide it. This year, that gap began to close.

The breakthroughs were real and transformative, but so were the responses to them: laws passed, norms reset, alliances formed. If 2024 was the year the world grasped the power of generative AI, 2025 was the year it began deciding how that power should be used.

The story of technology is no longer just about what can be built, but about how it fits into the lives it shapes, and who gets to decide that fit.

Regardless of whether you take photos with the best camera phone or use a real camera, it is almost always impossible to get everything from the foreground to the background in focus. However, a new breakthrough could soon make this a very real possibility.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have managed to develop a new type of camera lens that offers spatially selective focusing, allowing cameras to focus on an entire scene at once. A blog post about the development details that allow this technology to capture photos “where every detail, near and far, is perfectly sharp – from the petal directly in front of you to the distant trees on the horizon.”

Carnegie Mellon University

Unlike traditional cameras, which can only perfectly focus on a flat plane of a scene at a time, the new computational lens uses a mix of optics and algorithms to “adjust focus differently for each part of a scene.”

The resulting system uses two autofocus methods, contrast-detection autofocus (CDAF) and phase-detection autofocus (PDAF), to automatically determine “which parts of the image should be in focus,” essentially giving each part of the image its own focus button.

What this could mean for future cameras

This computational lens has the potential to pave the way for a new range of smartphone cameras that capture sharper photos with less background or foreground blur. The technology also has other potential applications, such as improving how microscopes focus on objects, helping robots and self-driving cars see details from all distances, and making AR/VR much more realistic.

The team presented their results for the first time at the International Conference on Computer Vision earlier this year, where they received the “Best Paper Honorable Mention” award. While the technology is still in the research stage, it will be interesting to see how and when it makes its way into real cameras and consumer devices.

Researchers have unveiled a new AI video generation technique called TurboDiffusion that can create synthetic videos almost instantly. It can generate AI videos up to 200 times faster than existing methods without sacrificing visual quality.

The work is a joint effort between ShengShu Technology, Tsinghua University and researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. According to its developers, the system is designed to dramatically reduce the time it takes to generate video, a process that has traditionally been slow and computationally intensive.

TurboDiffusion sets a new speed benchmark

ShengShu technology

When tested on a consumer PC with Nvidia’s RTX 5090 graphics card, TurboDiffusion reduced the time required to generate a 5-second video clip in standard definition from more than three minutes to just 1.9 seconds. For high-resolution clips of the same length, the time dropped from nearly 80 minutes to just 24 seconds, a roughly 200x improvement.

Current tools like Shengshu’s Vidu and OpenAI’s Sora still require several minutes to create short video clips. Instead of waiting hours for short clips to render, creators could create usable videos in seconds or minutes.

TurboDiffusion can solve a major bottleneck in AI video generation by drastically reducing computation time. This acceleration could enable faster animation, filmmaking and content creation workflows without compromising on quality.

What near-instant AI video means next

Adobe

This breakthrough also suggests that the era of real-time or near-instant AI video creation may be closer than many had expected. But it also raises familiar concerns. Faster video generation may also increase the onslaught of deepfake-style content.

As the production of AI-generated videos becomes faster and more cost-effective, questions about verification, misuse and safeguards are likely to intensify, especially on platforms that already struggle with AI weaknesses.

TurboDiffusion comes as other AI video tools continue to evolve. Google’s Flow Video Creator, which adds richer creative controls, and Adobe’s Firefly, which expands to text-based video editing and native video generation in Premiere Pro, underscore how quickly the market is changing.

This post is brought to you in a paid partnership with NEXPURE.

A good hair dryer should be fast, light, and gentle enough to not blow your hair out. The NEXPURE 1800W Professional Ionic Hair Dryer checks all of these boxes. It’s currently heavily discounted to $24.99, a significant drop from its usual list price of $88.99, making it one of the more affordable hair tools you can buy today.

What you get

This NEXPURE dryer uses ionic technology to reduce frizz and leave hair looking smoother after drying. The 1800W motor provides strong, consistent airflow so you can dry your hair quickly without the need for extreme heat. You also have both hot and cool wind options, which is particularly useful for setting styles without dealing additional damage.

The dryer comes with two magnetic attachments, typically including a concentrator nozzle for focused airflow and a diffuser option for curls or more volume. The magnetic design makes it easy to change while styling. The overall shape is compact and modern and the handle is designed for a comfortable grip during longer sessions.

Why it’s worth it

Many dryers in this price range seem underpowered or lack features like ionic conditioning and multiple attachments. The NEXPURE model is characterized by combining solid performance with thoughtful design at a very affordable retail price. If your current dryer is loud, slow, or your hair feels dry and frizzy, this is an affordable upgrade.

It’s also a smart backup option for travel, powder rooms or gym bags. For $24.99, you get a tool that looks and feels much more expensive than the price suggests.

The conclusion

The NEXPURE 1800W Professional Ionic Hair Dryer is a good choice for anyone who wants faster drying and smoother hair without spending salon-style money. With a 72% discount get to the point $24.99it’s an easy addition to your daily routine or holiday gift list.

What happened? One of the biggest problems with ChatGPT has now been fixed. Sam Altman announced in an X post that ChatGPT will now comply when specifically telling users not to use dashes in the Custom Instructions tab. By adding a rule to the custom instructions to avoid using dashes, you can finally get ChatGPT to stop using them.

• The update addresses a long-standing complaint that ChatGPT’s heavy reliance on Em-Dash caused its output to look “bot-written.”
• The change only works if the setting is set in Personalization or Custom Instructions settings. Saying this verbally in a request may not ensure compliance.
• Altman said this is part of a broader push toward customization: ChatGPT already supports personality presets and save features, and this is one of the earliest “style” controls introduced.

Small but nice victory:

When you tell ChatGPT not to use dashes in your custom statements, it finally does what it’s supposed to do!

— Sam Altman (@sama) November 14, 2025

Why this is important: Punctuation may seem negligible, but it plays a crucial role in the tone, readability, and professionalism of the writing. For many users, such as writers, students and professionals, the dash became a flashing signal that a text was AI-generated, undermining confidence in ChatGPT’s usefulness for “human-style” writing. This update shows that OpenAI understands that users don’t just want accurate content; They want style control. The ability to customize the way ChatGPT writes (tone of voice, slang, punctuation) makes it more like a real writing assistant than a generic text generator.

However, the solution also raises larger questions: If the model has struggled with a punctuation mark for years, what other stylistic quirks remain? And how many of those require user-specified rules rather than an inherent AI improvement? This could be a step toward deeper AI personalization, but also shows how behavioral quirks persist in large-language models.

Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends

Why should I care? If you use ChatGPT to write important things like emails, reports, scripts, essays, or social media posts, this update gives you more control over how the AI ​​sounds, not just what it says. Style consistency is important, and removing obvious “AI tells” like excessive use of dashes can make output feel more natural and personal. It’s a small change, but it signals a larger shift in allowing users to shape their AI’s personality.

• It reduces the amount of editing you have to do by eliminating one of ChatGPT’s most well-known typos.
• This makes the AI ​​behave more like a true, customizable writing assistant rather than a unit generator.
• It hints at more granular personalization tools in the future, giving you greater influence over tone, formatting and style habits.

Okay, what’s next? Now that ChatGPT can give up its em-dash habit on command, the real question is how far this new obedience will go. If OpenAI continues to push in this direction, we may soon see deeper style controls: from sentence length to emoji tolerance to whether the AI ​​should sound like a calm assistant or someone who has had three too many coffees. This update also brings personalization back into focus.

Therefore, you can expect creatives, students and companies to test how configurable the model really is and whether these little switches can lead to an AI that finally blends in with your texts instead of standing out. It’s still early days, but if ChatGPT continues to take notes so well, your future drafts may look a lot more “you” and a lot less “AI.”

OpenAI introduced a set of new personality presets last month with ChatGPT 5.1, giving users the ability to customize the main voice and tone of the chatbot’s responses. Now the company is introducing additional customization options that allow users to further refine ChatGPT’s personality.

In a recent post on The company added four new characterization adjustments to ChatGPT’s personalization settings called “Heat,” “Enthusiasm,” “Headers and Lists,” and “Emoji.”

Each of these options can be set to More, Less, or Default, allowing users to control how warm or enthusiastic ChatGPT sounds, while also customizing how often emojis, headers, and lists are used in replies. These options allow users to make ChatGPT a more personal conversation partner that better suits their style, mood, or workflow.

These new customization options build on the core presets introduced in version 5.1, such as Professional, Candid, and Quirky. While these presets set a general tone, the new options allow users to dial in subtle nuances, creating a more personalized conversation experience.

Customize ChatGPT to suit your style

ChatGPT’s personalization settings are a direct response to user feedback and respond to complaints that the chatbot’s responses feel too formal, overly cautious, or shallow. By giving users more granular control, OpenAI can design ChatGPT to feel more natural, engaging, and tailored to their personal preferences.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman first promised this feature in October after backlash following the release of GPT-5, which introduced a more restrictive and less dynamic version of ChatGPT compared to GPT-4o. At that time, Altman also announced a new adult mode that would “enable even more, like eroticism for verified adults.” While the new personality settings are now live, the company recently confirmed that Adult Mode has been delayed until 2026.

ChatGPT joins YouTube, Apple Music, Google Photos and Spotify in publishing a personalized year-end summary that looks back at how users spent their time with the chatbot in 2025. The new “Your Year with ChatGPT” feature allows users to revisit the chats and ideas that shaped their year.

OpenAI announced the feature in a recent post Once it’s live, users in these regions will see a “Your Year with ChatGPT” banner in the chat interface, and tapping it will open the summary.

Your year with ChatGPT!

Now available to everyone in the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia who have saved references and reference chat history enabled.

Just make sure your app is updated. pic.twitter.com/whVkS1qxKu

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) December 22, 2025

Alternatively, users can tap the “+” button and use the “Show me my year with ChatGPT” prompt to access the year-end summary. The summary includes an overview of topics discussed throughout the year, as well as chat statistics such as busiest chat day, total number of conversations, number of messages sent, etc.

Beyond stats and chat history

ChatGPT’s year-end summary also highlights a chat style based on the user’s writing or speaking habits and offers an “archetype” based on the way they used the chatbot. Additionally, it will include an AI-generated poem, a personalized pixel-style artwork inspired by user activity, an award tied to usage patterns, and predictions that provide clues about how users might use ChatGPT in 2026.

The feature is available in all ChatGPT tiers, including the free version. While year-end roundups are largely playful, ChatGPT’s implementation offers users a snapshot of how they are increasingly incorporating AI into their daily routines. From quick questions to brainstorming sessions to longer work-related conversations, the summary provides them with an easy way to reflect on the role the chatbot has played in their daily lives and workflows throughout the year.

One of the most important things about the people and companies we talk to at Trending Forwards is that they need to do something different… and that’s certainly what Syntilay is doing.

They have the lofty goal of changing the world of shoe production – not only in terms of how they are made, namely through 3D printing based on reams of data, but also by changing the way they are designed, designed and worn.

Syntilay uses advanced foot scanning technology to map and measure your feet. This involves taking thousands of measurements, which are then fed into a 3D printer that builds a shoe that fits just you – for the price of standard Birkenstocks.

This sounded truly revolutionary and you can read more about my colleague Peter’s experience when he decided to buy a pair for himself. However (spoiler alert): they are the best-fitting shoes he has ever worn.

With this in mind, we reached out to Syntilay to see if they would be participating in the Trending Forward series to see where technology is going and how it will change our lives in different ways.

Sintilay

Peter Horan and I were joined by Ben Weiss, CEO of Syntilay, and Joe Foster, the legendary founder of Reebok, representing the new brand’s leadership team.

In our conversation, we had the opportunity to talk to both of them not only about the technology used to create shoes using AI and 3D printing, but also about the cultural and fashion aspects of creating highly customized shoes.

Joe, 90, has seen tectonic shifts in the shoe business throughout his career. Shortly after the Second World War, he joined his family’s sports shoe business in Great Britain.

It was an innovator in the sports shoe business for its time, introducing new production methods (similar to what Syntilay is doing now). But Joe and his brother recognized the running boom of the early 1970s and founded Reebok to capitalize on it.

Joe said the “white space” that Reebok moved into, where the company saw a gap in the market for more mainstream athletic shoes that it could grow into and build incredible success, felt similar to the space that 3D printed shoes now offer.

First a technology company

Peter Horan / Digital Trends

The personalized note that accompanies the purchase of new shoes

From the start of our conversation, it’s clear that Syntilay’s goal is not just to make cheaper, custom-made shoes (although this is an essential part of the business model), but to revolutionize the market. They are already working with content creators and influencers to enable new forms and ideas, reducing production costs by 99% in some cases.

“[Our question was] “How do we give content creators their own shoes and brands… a fundamentally original design,” Ben said. “How do you actually give a creative expression that is authentic and different and that captures the creator’s brand or vision from the start?”

But the desire to revolutionize goes beyond that – while Syntilay uses advanced technology to make the shoes, Ben believes the company will be known more for technological changes than the shoes themselves. And it’s inspired by the revolution brought about by the big tech brands.

“We’ve seen the kind of dent the Apple Watch has made in the watch industry,” says Ben. “I mean, it completely changed the way traditional watch companies worked. They had their own versions of it.

“But there are a lot of great concepts from the Apple Watch that you could apply to shoes. I mean, the idea of ​​a single screen with endless design possibilities is really cool. You know, you can do a lot of customization (with shoes), and there’s a lot you can do. But I think.” [we can also give the user their] “Everyone seems to be interested in learning more about themselves.”

This means sensors and batteries are integrated into the footwear, allowing for more data about posture and health while being powered naturally by the wearer’s movement. 3D printed shoes that talk to your connected device ecosystem – and maybe even are powered by your own movement.

They believe that Syntilay not only uses technology to create personalized shoes for individuals, but can also offer personalization beyond the capabilities of any other brand. Currently, the sneakers and slides are made from TPU (thermoplastic polyurethane), a highly versatile elastomer with unique properties that offer both superior performance and processing flexibility.

However, the company has added additives to make it feel more like foam instead of hard plastic. But that doesn’t help solve a big problem: production is currently limited to half a million units, compared to the millions that brands like Nike can crank out.

It will be a matter of finding a way over this, because once the designs of someone like a UFC fighter or influencer prove successful, they can be produced in millions.

Much more was discussed in our in-depth conversation with Ben and Joe, such as how they can create a “leather effect” by giving people a 3D scan of their feet that can be used over and over again, and how they believe they can truly revolutionize a multi-billion dollar industry.

Don’t forget to follow Digital Trends on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok to stay up to date on the latest technology and more from Trending Forward as we talk to the people trying to use technology to change the world.

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has just made a massive intervention in the drone industry, blocking new foreign-made drones – including those from DJI – from entering the American market. By adding them to the Covered List, the agency is effectively classifying these devices as a national security threat. That’s a blow to DJI, which currently owns about 90 percent of the consumer market, as Washington increasingly fears that these drones could be used by Beijing to take a look at sensitive U.S. data.

Washington is expanding restrictions as concerns grow over the dominance of Chinese drones

The FCC’s new rule means new drone models from DJI or other designated foreign manufacturers cannot receive the agency’s seal of approval for import or sale in the United States. The Commission is not just concerned with data protection; They have warned of possible drone attacks and unauthorized surveillance. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr made it clear that while drones are great for innovation, they are being used as a weapon by “hostile foreign actors,” and the U.S. is no longer willing to take that risk.

drone Unsplash

However, there is a small glimmer of hope for the current owners. The ruling does not mean that the drones that are already flying will remain on the ground. If a drone or component was already approved before this ban, it can still be used and even sold. This is a huge relief for the police departments, farmers and construction crews who already have fleets of DJI drones in the air. Still, it is a clear sign that the US is trying to move away from Chinese air technology as quickly as possible.

The move was cheered by “China hawks” in Congress.

Representative Elise Stefanik and Senator Rick Scott quickly called this a victory for American security and argued that we must not allow sensitive mapping data from our infrastructure to be sent abroad. They see this as the first step toward establishing “US drone dominance” and moving away from dependence on foreign hardware.

drone Unsplash

Not surprisingly, China is not happy. A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington accused the US of using “national security” as a convenient excuse to mess with global trade. DJI also hit back, expressing deep disappointment and pointing out that the US had actually provided no public evidence that its drones had been compromised.

So where does this leave the industry? Even if your current drone isn’t going to fall out of the sky tomorrow, the path forward looks much more limited. This ruling creates a great opportunity – and great pressure – for American drone companies to finally take action and offer a real alternative. We are entering a time in which the drone market will be as shaped by international politics as it will be by new cameras or better battery life.

My name is Alexandru Stan and this article continues the dialogue I started after taking over TNW. Following the recent transaction, TNW Spaces will remain with the Financial Times as we continue the mission of the site, events and global community. We already have a dedicated team at tekpon that runs the platform, events and community initiatives. Our goal is to expand and strengthen the team as TNW accelerates its next chapter. TNW is already a global media platform with millions of readers. We’re not starting from the beginning. We are building forward. Why TNW Matters Today Technology is entering a…

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