Posted by Stephen Hess
In this brief talk, Saul Griffith unveils the invention his new company Makani Power has been working on: giant kite turbines that create surprising amounts of clean, renewable energy
In this brief talk, Saul Griffith unveils the invention his new company Makani Power has been working on: giant kite turbines that create surprising amounts of clean, renewable energy
For many reasons, electric cars are awesome in theory, and sucky in reality. On Thursday, Tesla motors will publicly demo a technology that will bring electric cars one step closer to their amazing potential. That technology is called battery swapping.
It's pretty simple: electric cars can currently only go a few hundred miles without a charge. With battery swapping technology, you could drive your electric car that few hundred miles--then just open up the chassis, switch out your dead battery for a new one, and drive on. Like changing the batteries in a flashlight. Except it's your car.
Battery swapping technology has been unsuccessfully attempted before. Let's hope Tesla keeps up the problem-solving until the awesome potential of electric cars displaces the not-so-awesome reality.
Bellevue-based asteroid mining company Planetary Resources is poised to launch the first crowd-funded, publicly-accessible orbiting telescope into space, and Synapse is proud to join the ranks of their supporters.
Planetary Resources wanted to build a publicly-accessible orbiting space telescope called the ARKYD "to make space exploration accessible to everyone". So they launched a Kickstarter project to help them reach their goal.
SInce Synapse loves innovation, our community, and making it happen, we're now a proud backer of the ARKYD Kickstarter project!
We're looking forward to our pledge reward, a totally rad "Space Selfie" that will feature our company image with Earth in the background.
You can check out the ARKYD Kickstarter page HERE. Thanks for being awesome, neighbors! We wish you success!
Around this time last year, to commemorate and as an example our society's progress on sexuality, Nike unveiled a limited "Be True" line of gay pride sneakers sold in gay friendly U.S. cities like New York City, San Francisco, and Portland. This year, they're expanding that rainbow-hued line online, and will continue to donate proceeds from the sales to the LGBT Sports Coalition, a non-profit that hopes to end discrimination in all sports, Esquire reports.
The magazine also points out that Jason Collins, the pro NBA baller who recently came out, was recently snapped in a "Be True" T-shirt, which could very well mean that Collins is set to become the Nike "Be True" spokesman. He was already aligned with the company before he came out, and a Nike spokesperson recently confirmed, “Jason is a Nike athlete. We are a company committed to diversity and inclusion.”
And to think, there was a time when players like Collins stayed in the closet to get closer to a major company like Nike.
Bellevue-based asteroid mining company Planetary Resources is poised to launch the first crowd-funded, publicly-accessible orbiting telescope into space. The ARKYD, a cute brass cylinder that looks like the lovechild of R2-D2 and C3PO, would capture gorgeous shots of space stuff both within and without our solar system. It would also hunt for mineable asteroids and, if its Kickstarter funding reaches $2M, search for extrasolar planets.
With 17 days to go, the ARKYD has already garnered $890,000 in Kickstarter funds. Nearly ten percent of that sum was brought in by the ARKYD team's promise that a $25 pledge would buy the backer a "space selfie", an image of the backer beamed to a screen on the ARKYD's hull and photographed with Earth in the background.
The fact that Planetary Resources is crowdfunding this is almost as awesome as the fact that they're making it happen. Big congrats, neighbors!
Apple has finally pulled the curtain off their new Pro desktop.
Some basic specs:
Up to 12-core Intel Xeon E5 Dual AMD FirePro GPUs PCIe Flash Storage 6 Thunderbolt 2 ports 4 USB 3 ports Supports up to 3 4k displaysComing later this year!
Martine asked me recently, "so... what are you caked-up about lately?" (whatever that means...)
After thinking about it, I thought I'd share this morning's ride in to the office...
Wearables are happening, but they don't have to make their users look like Borg. Regina Dugan, SVP for advanced technology and projects at Motorola, showed off some gadgets at D11 last week that went beyond the frame of wearable tech to downright biointegrated: an ingestible user authentication device activated by stomach acids, and a tattoo sensor that actually looks pretty bad-ass.
"Electronics are boxy and rigid," Dugan says, "[but] humans are curvy and soft. That's a mechanical mismatch problem."
Mechanical mismatches notwithstanding, such devices address Tim Cook's concern that wearables such as smartwatches aren't relevant or appealing to a watchless generation. My only question is, when do we get skull guns?
The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital Conference that wrapped up on Thursday focused on the trends of wearable technology and ubiquitous sensors.
It started on the first night when Apple CEO Tim Cook, who was wearing a Nike+ Fuelband on stage, said that he thinks that wearables “could be a profound area for technology.”
Even Disney and the San Francisco 49ers are big on wearable technology. Tom Staggs who runs Disney’s theme parks, showed off Disney’s MagicBand, a wrist-strap that serves as your admissions ticket, electronic wallet and park ID. You can use it to arrange an experience within the park or — as an option — to let a Disney character automatically know your child’s name.
The target computer is picked. The order to strike has been given. All it takes is a finger swipe and a few taps of the touchscreen, and the cyberattack is prepped to begin.
For the last year, the Pentagon’s top technologists have been working on a program that will make cyberwarfare relatively easy. It’s called Plan X. And if this demo looks like a videogame or sci-fi movie or a sleek Silicon Valley production, that’s no accident. It was built by the designers behind some of Apple’s most famous computers — with assistance from the illustrators who helped bring Transformers to the silver screen.
“Say you’re playing World of Warcraft, and you’ve got this type of sword, +5 or whatever. You don’t necessarily know what spells were used to create that sword, right? You just know it has these attributes and it helps you in this way. It’s the same type of concept. You don’t need the technical details,” says Dan Roelker, the cybersecurity specialist who helped develop some of the world’s most widely-used intrusion detection software, came up with the idea for Plan X, and joined Darpa to make it happen.
Big companies have been trying hard to make the long-awaited smartwatch "revolution" happen, so tick tock, what's taking so long?
Smartwatches are just not very smart when left to their own devices - they need to be connected to a smartphone for full functionality.
While the industry is growing quickly, nearly all still need a smartphone's Bluetooth connection to tell you much more than just telling the time.
Apple's smartwatch is rumoured to exist already... or not exist at all. Or exist sometime soon
What a smartwatch could potentially do, at least to thousands of children in the 80s, was typified by the wristwatch David Hasselhoff's character used in Knight Rider to control his car.
But the industry is still so new there are many different approaches.
"Smartwatches can already be split into three or four categories," says senior analyst Josh Flood, of ABI Research.
"There are notification watches - the really basic ones which just link to the phone, voice-capable smart watches which is a really cool idea and health and fitness smartwatches for heart rate and running."
Others see even greater potential.
"Through NFC [near field communication], could you transfer travel cards to the watch?" says Skooks Pong, vice president of Synapse, a company working with Nike to develop its FuelBand activity tracker/watch hybrid.
