Walk into any grocery store in America and you'll find a variety of fresh apples for consumption. It's remarkable to think how developed markets have managed to secure the availability of apples year-round. That miracle is made possible through lots of behind-the-scenes work that takes place at packing houses to ensure only the best fruit makes its way to grocery store produce sections. Take Washington State for example, where 58% of the apples grown in the United States are produced at a value of $2.5 billion yearly. Somewhere around 100 packing warehouses across the state work almost year-round to provide apples for domestic consumption with 30% of the product getting exported across the globe.

With roughly the same population as the State of Missouri, Lebanon is a small country of six million people that borders Syria and Israel. Due to its location, the country has been subjected to a multitude of political and religious factions inhabiting the state. People frequently fight over whose invisible friend is better, and the country has faced long periods of instability including wars with Israel, civil wars and internal conflicts, and most recently some spillover from the Syrian war – which means lots of Syrians flying around on motorcycles. All of this turmoil has contributed to structural problems in the economy such as chronic fiscal deficits that have increased Lebanon's debt-to-GDP ratio to the third highest in the world. Economic growth has slowed to 1-2% over the past decade which constrains government investments in necessary infrastructure improvements. Notwithstanding these challenges, day to day life in Lebanon is pretty awesome.

We're into our second year of publishing a "Global AI Race" series of articles on artificial intelligence startups from around the world and it continues to pose a challenge. We use an objective measure of "total funding taken in so far" and that excludes any firms that choose not to disclose funding or are bootstrapped. We search for various categorizations like "artificial intelligence" or "deep learning" and that means we'll miss any firms that haven't chosen those categories in their Crunchbase profile. But the ones we worry about the most are those firms that we might include in one of our "top AI startups" lists that don't actually do AI. It's a huge problem, and one that was highlighted recently by a European venture capital firm, MMC Ventures, that surveyed 2,830 startups in Europe that were classified as being AI companies and found out that 44% of these companies were incorrectly classified as being "AI startups."

We talked recently about how the possibility of artificial intelligence creating the world's next trillionaire would only be realized if some company provided one or more of the following; AI hardware, AI software, or AI as a Service (or as we've decided to coin it, AAS). Someone said recently that the worst AI algorithm can become the best AI algorithm if you feed it enough delicious big data so let's consider AI software and "big data" as synonymous. The company that has the best data therefore, also has the best algorithms. This may be the most compelling reason to think that Google is the current leader in AI. Regardless of which companies develop the best AI algorithms, they'll all need hardware.

We talked recently about how the possibility of artificial intelligence creating the world's next trillionaire would only be realized if some company provided one or more of the following; AI hardware, AI software, or AI as a Service (or as we've decided to coin it, AAS). Someone said recently that the worst AI algorithm can become the best AI algorithm if you feed it enough delicious big data so let's consider AI software and "big data" as synonymous. The company that has the best data therefore, also has the best algorithms. This may be the most compelling reason to think that Google is the current leader in AI. Regardless of which companies develop the best AI algorithms, they'll all need hardware.

Israel is a country full of history, which is why they have more museums per capita than any other country. They also have the oldest continuously used cemetery in the world and the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. Hearing that, you'd think that not a whole lot has changed over the years, but one thing that has constantly been evolving is their ability to innovate and be productive. Next to the U.S. and Canada, Israel has the largest number of publicly traded companies, which shows that they can also build successful businesses. Our recent article on "The Top-10 Biggest Startups in Israel by Funding" proved to be quite popular so we decided to do another article on the top 10 Israeli artificial intelligence (AI) startups.

The Spanish term "mañana, mañana" is all about putting off what you should be doing now in favor of something more fun – like smoking cannabis and getting nude in public – both of which are legal in Spain. Unrelated to the country's lackadaisical outlook on life, the economy has suffered for almost ten years after the 2008 collapse of the housing market and the global financial crisis that followed. Unemployment rates peaked at 26% with youth unemployment stagnating around 55% for more than a year. Today, the economic decline is finally over and the country's economy has returned to its pre-recession size, although unemployment still remains above 18%. The newly invigorated environment has helped Spain's startup ecosystem grow, and this growth is underpinned by the quality of their education system, the availability of public and private funding, and the growth of incubators and accelerators.

Over the years we've found many companies out there that really want to tell their story but don't know the best way to do that. What they usually end up doing is paying some PR firm who will then cold call us asking if we want "a pitch," and we then tell them to pack sand unless they're willing to give us some of those fees they're charging their clients. On the other hand, founders or senior management who contact us wanting to tell a story will always be given a warm welcome. There's no need for a middlewoman (most PR people who reach out to us are ladies for whatever reason) so let's just do away with that unnecessary cost layer going forward. Then, we come across companies that don't really care.

The Land of the Rising Sun is a peculiar mix of tradition and modernity. Nowhere else in the world can one see centuries-old shrines sitting comfortably next to high tech skyscrapers in such harmony. Nowhere in the world does the airport ground crew stop what they're doing so they can wave goodbye to departing planes until they're out of sight. Nowhere in the world will you find customer service that drips with genuine sweetness with no tips expected. Nowhere in the world will you find a people as endearing as the Japanese.

In our recent article on Indonesia's Big "Big Data" Problem, we looked at how technologies like blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) are being used to uncover new sets of data that corporations can use to better understand the world's fourth biggest country by population. A consistent theme throughout the time we spent talking to local tech firms was that great potential was simply waiting to be unlocked, and that probably holds true at a smaller scale for many developed market corporations. For example, think about something like "data entry." The mere fact that you require a human to take data from FORM A and then manually input that data into FORM B means that your archaic business processes need changing. This is the equivalent of those backwards companies that ask you to fax them a form in order to request a change of address for your account.