GIGS2GO is a small set of ‘Tear and Share’ USB drives, about the same size as a credit card, that can be torn off and used or handed out to others… the four-pack of thumb drives is made from 100% post-consumer molded paper pulp with no plastic. You can tear off an individual 1GB drive like a phone number on a flyer for a cat-sitter.
![NYC’s Pneumatic Tube Mail Network, c. 1897
Each tube could carry between 400 and 600 letters and traveled at 30-35 miles per hour. In its full glory, the pneumatic tubes covered a 27-mile route, connecting 23 post offices…. 95,000 letters were moved daily [and] it took 4 minutes to get from the General Post Office to Grand Central using a transverse tube that cut across Manhattan.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/4b2780ee852c3337bb59cca8f89f91d1/tumblr_mju2t1HRtv1qzsvqyo1_500.jpg)
NYC’s Pneumatic Tube Mail Network, c. 1897
Each tube could carry between 400 and 600 letters and traveled at 30-35 miles per hour. In its full glory, the pneumatic tubes covered a 27-mile route, connecting 23 post offices…. 95,000 letters were moved daily [and] it took 4 minutes to get from the General Post Office to Grand Central using a transverse tube that cut across Manhattan.
Tesla Is The New Apple
Steven Johnson on the impending electric car revolution being led by Tesla:
And if that’s the case, then the automobile industry will go through exactly what the computer and software world went through with the rise of the PC, the Web, and the mobile revolutions. Smaller companies that bet heavily on the new paradigm will become dominant in an amazingly short amount of time; behemoths who cling to the old models will swiftly become afterthoughts. The EV revolution will be like Hemingway’s classic line about going broke: it will happen gradually, then all of a sudden.
Agreed. This is going to happen sooner than most people think.
[via Daring Fireball]
The full post is worth reading.
"I didn’t get into space or transportation or solar because I saw them as good [investment] opportunities. I saw them as places where something needed to be done."
- Elon Musk, SXSW keynote (via Wired.com)
America of the Future, c. 1910s-30s.
"I love it for no other reason than that it actually feels like we are being pulled forward. It’s hard to say that something like that has happened since the iPhone. The innovation aspect just makes it seems like a big pull forward."
- Ian Shafer, CEO of Deep Focus | Is Google Glass A Smartphone Killer?
"It’s often easier to make something 10 times better than it is to make it 10 percent better."
- Astro Teller: Google X Head on Moonshots: How 10X Is Easier Than 10 Percent | Wired.com (via ronenreblogs)
(via bre)
Video Maps Of The World’s Bike Lanes Let You Preview Your Ride | FastCo.Exist
Another cycling innovation is making its way from the Netherlands to this side of the Atlantic. Cyclodeo is a bike-focused mapping website that pairs videos of bike lanes with Google maps.
(via emergentfutures)
Dubbed Hardiman, the suit was funded by the U.S. military, and was designed to mimic the user’s natural movements, enabling him to lift up to 1,500 lbs. Of course, this impressive power came at a price — the suit itself weighed 1,500 lbs and included 28 joints and two grasping arms connected by a complex hydraulic and electronic network.
Looking to Industry for the Next Digital Disruption
The outlook for technology-led economic growth is a subject of considerable debate. In a recent research paper, Robert J. Gordon, a prominent economist at Northwestern University, argues that the gains from computing and the Internet have petered out in the last eight years.
Since 2000, Mr. Gordon asserts, invention has focused mainly on consumer and communications technologies, including smartphones and tablet computers. Such devices, he writes, are “smaller, smarter and more capable, but do not fundamentally change labor productivity or the standard of living” in the way that electric lighting or the automobile did.
But others say such pessimism misses the next wave of technology… [For example] Today, G.E. is putting sensors on everything, be it a gas turbine or a hospital bed. The mission of the engineers in San Ramon is to design the software for gathering data, and the clever algorithms for sifting through it for cost savings and productivity gains. Across the industries it covers, G.E. estimates such efficiency opportunities at as much as $150 billion.
(h/t infoneer-pulse)
"We’re already seeing blood-sugar sensors for diabetics that plug into phones, sensors for environmental pollution, and I think we will rapidly see the growth of body-oriented sensors as part of the “quantified self” movement. Remote sensing of the chemical composition of the blood and even simple imaging devices will contribute to the growth of medicine and again, smartphones plus sensors in the body and sensors in the environment will lead to a new medium unlike smartphones as we know them today."
- What does the future hold for the mobile industry? (via thenextweb)
(via thenextweb)
