What if these were the 10 digital killer ideas of the year?

It’s come around again, one of my favorite annual events: NetExplo. Founded in 2007 by Thierry Happe and Martine Bidegain in partnership with the French Senate and the French Ministry for the Digital Economy, NetExplo began as an international observatory created to study digital innovation technology and its impacts on society and business. Every year at the NetExplo Forum, the 10 most promising and impressive innovations from around the world are rewarded and celebrated. In the past, NetExplo unveiled Twitter, Shazam, Spotify, Siri and World Lens.

For this 8th edition, over 1 200 initiatives were counted from all around the globe. Among the 100 initiatives that made the shortlist, innovations stemmed from North America, Europe, Israel, South Korea, but also emerging countries and universities. This year, the general theme was "My Smart Life", and the main trends in digital innovation were divided up into the following categories: Smart Protective Surroundings (Smart Places), Smart Relations for Development and Empathy (Smart Relations), and Smart Sustainable Futures. You can read NetExplo's previous years' studies here.

This year’s Grand Prix Winner, from the Smart Futures category, is the Wearable Thermo-Element from South Korea. We all are familiar with the frustration of an uncharged mobile device. Thanks to the Wearable Thermo-element, this kind of irritation might soon be something of the past. Developed by Professor Jo Byeong-jin of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), the Wearable Thermo-element is a lightweight, flexible, 10 cm long strip made of fiber glass that turns our body heat into electricity- powering our electronic devices. (It even works while we're asleep!) This wearable thermoelectric, power-generating strip can be embedded into our clothing or worn directly on the skin. If our future is wearable connected devices that we use to pay, show identity, track our health, control our homes, our accounts, and so on, the Wearable Thermo-element is perhaps the enabling solution, allowing our body heat to keep all of our technologies powered and ready to use! The Wearable Thermo-element will be commercialized within two to three years, as long as research teams resolve issues related to “element integration process optimization and mass-production.”

This year, I was given the honor of representing TBWA\ and presenting the award to a highly impressive, ecological and democratic innovation called the WOELAB 3D Printer, an environmentally-friendly 3D Printer developed in Togo, in West Africa. This awe-inspiring technology comes to us from Woélab, a community hackerspace in Lomé, and is made of recycled components they gathered from the piles of electronic waste dumped by developed countries in Africa. This innovation costs only $100 (seven have been made so far), and has been praised and rewarded by the African Innovation Summit and the NASA Space App Challenge. This is a great example of how far innovators can go and what can be achieved with limited resources.

Another Award-winning innovation that caught my eye this year is Slack. If you aren't already using it or haven't yet heard about it (where have you been?), Slack is a communication hub, or platform, already used by over 30 thousand teams in a multitude of large companies and start-ups including Twitter, Airbnb, Dropbox, Ebay, Yelp, The New York Times, and many others. Slack combines all of our professional communication tools and devices into one place, and is one of fastest-growing business app out there. Developed by the co-founder of Flickr, Stewart Butterfield, Slack is, according to many, the brighter future of professional communication and collaboration within teams. Many believe Slack will quickly replace all internal email thanks to its user-friendly platform that supports a multitude of integrations and is compatible with most major tools and apps we use today. Watch Slack's introduction video to better understand why users spend an average of 10 hours per day in the app, and enjoy their great sense of humor:

A big Congratulations to all of the teams that worked on these various innovations! Watch the presentation videos of the other inspiring NetExplo Award Winners of this year below.