#Skytran an on-demand levitating monorail Skytran There are many people who advocate for public transportation but there are also those who are accustomed to being able to move about in an individual manner with cars.
However, a futuristic on-demand 500m monorail test loop being built at the#Israel Aerospace industry (IAI) campus#in Lod,
Israel combines the best of both worlds and might have you thinking differently about transit.##
Many of the demonstration renderings and footage show the cars moving through what seem to be business districts,
but in more residential areas, residents might be opposed to the cars roving past their windows and disrupting their privacy.
Instead of large vehicles that run on a schedule, Skytran s cars will be small and personal, designed for two people,
and will be summonable with a smartphone app. The system s automated nature, transit expert Joe Dignan told#BBC News,
could be a good test of whether the public is mentally ready for#autonomous cars. It s also a test of whether anti-train elected officials actually hold such views for practical reasons,
and with its NASA campus headquarters and#Space Act Agreement#funding, it could actually go places.
Benches can now be added to the list of things like watches, cars, phones, and everything else that comes in a smart variety.
the benches will feature plugs to charge your smartphone, and will also wirelessly connect to the internet to provide location-based information, like air quality data.
Your cell phone doesn't just make phone calls Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh said in a statement Friday, the Globe reports.
Why should our benches just be seats? The Soofa was built and designed by three female engineers working with the MIT Media Lab spinoff startup Changing environments, according to Yahoo Tech.
We want to make cities updated for our generation, Sandra Richter, one of the three inventors of the Soofa, told Yahoo Tech.
One trait we have is we run around with our phones all the time, and they die every five minutes.
So for us it s really important to be charged up all the time and be connected to each other.
covered by Cisco systems at no cost to the city, the Globe says. And while the first wave will only occur in the Soofas hometown,
Changing environments has plans for future installments in San jose, California, and New york too, Yahoo Tech says.
Via Business Insider Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorat t
#Banking with startups a growing trend Majority of the people in the U s. could bebanking with startups in the next three to five years.
For investors and entrepreneurs, when looking for opportunity in the financial industry where technology can have the greatest impact,
the best place to start has been with one of our oldest institutions: banks. However, while critical to our economy, banks are generally inefficient,
have fixed high costs and don t exactly elicit happy thoughts from the average consumer. It s for these reasons, among others, that the biggest opportunities in the financial world revolve around the disintermediation of these banks and core financial services.##
##Given this backdrop, it s not hard to imagine that a majority of the people in the U s. could bebanking with startups, in one form or another, in the next three to five years.
It s been happening for some time, but the pace and volume of business taken away from banks by startups in the last few years have been significant
and this trend will continue to grow. Disintermediation of Consumer credit For starters, we have to look no further for evidence of the inefficiency of our banking system than during our most recent recession.
In 2009 the credit crisis was at its peak, and it was practically impossible to get a loan, even for prime borrowers.
Interest rates were low, with consumers receiving 0. 25 percent on a savings account and prime borrowers paying upwards of 18#percent annual percentage rate.
The spread was huge, and so was the opportunity. The credit crisis showed the tech industry that one of the biggest areas of opportunity for startups was in re-imagining consumer lending.
People were looking to alternative forms of lending for answers and thanks to the problems above,
interest in solutions like peer-to-peer lending were on the rise. Not surprisingly a cohort of companies emerged to take advantage of these trends, beginning with Prosper,
which was followed soon by Lending Club and a litany of others. At the core of this emerging market was the desire to take banks out of the equation
and connect investors directly with those in need of capital. In other words, disintermediation. Furthermore, investors looking for options in a down economy wanted stability, transparency, shorter duration and less credit risk,
while maintaining solid returns. Compared to traditional options like high-yield bonds, peer-to-peer lending had appeal.
Today, companies like Prosper and Lending Club continue to thrive. Prosper has#raised$145 million to date from a host of investors
including Sequoia and DFJ, and projects that it will hit $2 billion in loans originated this year.
Lending Club had issued $4 billion in loans by the end of March 2014, and became cashflow positive in 2012.
Of course, it wasn t an easy road for either company. Both had to survive significant regulatory scrutiny and approval by the SEC,
and investors were understandably wary of newer lending models, like peer-to-peer. As a result, it took Lending Club five years to issue $1 billion in loans (2007-2012),
but once it passed regulatory scrutiny and both consumers and investors alike came around, these companies grew quickly.
It then#took the company only one year to top $2 billion (2013. By the end of the first quarter, Lending Club had reached $4 billion,
and part of the reason that both it and Prosper have continued to see steady growth is made that they peace with taking their time and built measured growth into their DNA.
In Lending Club s case, it took time to set the table to register with the SEC,
earn real trust with consumers and lenders, and achieve growth while avoiding sub-prime borrowers.
They had to be measured in their growth strategy and each step had to be completed and in place before they could move on to the next.
The other factor that has led to Lending Club s success and plays into the theme of disintermediation we ve been seeing over the last five years is that it has looked to differentiate itself from traditional lenders
(and other startups) by adopting a model that has been used by many other successful tech companies, like#ebay#and#Amazon, for example.
Few have talked about it, but Lending Club and Prosper s key differentiator is that they are marketplaces.
Most other lenders aren t. They have to borrow money either by going after warehouse lines of credit
or they loan out equity capital. Lending Club and Prosper, however, connect buyers and sellers through peer-to-peer lending marketplaces.#
#And as a result, and this is key, it doesn t have the same balance sheet risk as other traditional lenders might have.
Mobile and the Disintermediation of Bill Pay, Processing & More Of course, the opportunities for disruption at the hands of disintermediation extend beyond lending.
The smartphone and increasing mobility of our world is changing the game. The consumerization of the enterprise and thebyod (bring your own device) trend within businesses mean that phones
and tablets are entrenched becoming features within the corporate and consumer worlds. Companies like Intuit, ebay/Paypal,
Mint. com started the ball rolling when it comes to disintermediation, and today a new generation of companies like Square, Braintree, Dwolla, Simple, Venmo, Indinero and Check are taking it to the next level.
But it s not just startups#alone. Consumer brand giants are leveraging both startups and the reach of the new mobile phone network to edge into territory that has traditionally been controlled by banks.#
#Starbucks partnering with Square#to be the main processor at thousands of locations is just one of many notable examples.
While banks have owned traditionally the small business space platforms like Square, Intuit and Paypal and even Amazon and Groupon are playing thedisintermediator
and are putting credit card processing in the hands of SMBS (small and medium businesses) and consumers.
Not only that, they re bundling in other services with processing and targeting them at SMBS.
The growing mobility of the average consumer has allowed businesses to spring up and grow by assuming roles traditionally reserved for banks.
Check is one of these businesses trying to do anend-around on banks by giving consumers the ability to aggregate
and manage all of their critical banking information and bills in one place on their smartphones.
Rather than consumers being forced to go to their banks websites, their utility company s website and so on,
it put all of these services in one place. And again, the first generation of financial technology companies (and banks) have taken notice,
and one doesn t have to look far for examples:##BBVA acquired Simple#in February for $117 million;#
#Braintree acquired Venmo#in 2012 for $26. 2 million;##Paypal acquired Braintree#last September for $800 million;
and#Intuit acquired Check in May for $360 million. Disintermediation of the Second Tier With a loss of faith in the banking system, mobility on the rise and SMBS beginning to take back some control,
we ve also begun to see an increasing number of people not only turning away from traditional banks,
but begin to embrace virtual marketplaces. Just as Lending Club and Prosper took advantage of the limited access to banking capital that begin during the Credit crisis, marketplaces like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Venmo, Crowdtilt,
and Fundly are giving people and businesses an easier way to test, build and fund their products, invest in businesses,
pool money, pay friends and facilitate microtransactions. Disintermediation is also beginning to seep into otherolder financial services markets, like wealth advisory.
Not unlike banks, wealth advisory is an inefficient cottage industry that traditionally comes loaded with fees and a total lack of transparency.
Companies like Wealthfront, Betterment, Sigfig, Futureadvisor and more are looking to help consumers minimize fees
and maximize returns. As people start to rely less and less on the institutions that have acted traditionally as sole providers of those services
and have maintained a viselike grip on market share, we ve begun to see disintermediation arrive in complementary financial services to the second tier,
if you will. And if the last five years is any indication, it won t stop at second-tier services.
What s Next##in the Wake of Bitcoin? So, as we look forward, at all the possibilities inherent in crowdfunding, microfinance and microlending,
we re seeing new potential for companies to provide the next generation of those payment rail systems the kind for which people have relied traditionally on from banks.
As we all know, money transfer is far from instantaneous and even further from being free.
That s why bitcoin and the latest forms of cryptocurrency are so exciting. Digital currencies like bitcoin have the potential to drive down transaction fees in a big way.
Say, for example, you sell electronics or operate a business where profit margins are slim, say under 5 percent.
In this case, the traditional 2. 5 percent payment fees eat up half of your margins. But with bitcoin, companies could see a significant reduction in transaction fees and,
as a result, a boost to their bottom line. What s more, many small businesses struggle with accepting international payments,
but with a distributed, decentralized digital currency, international borders and monetary systems decrease in importance and relevance.
It also could be hugely beneficial for micropayments, especially on mobile platforms, and a digital currency of record could become the micropayment system for the web,
allowing publications, for example, to accept fractions of a cent for every article a reader consumes.
It opens up a whole new set of monetization options and alternatives to the traditional paywall.
Of course, while the prospect of a digital currency becoming a sort of free rails for moving money is exciting,
interchange fees still exist today with bitcoin, and regulation, true anonymity and volatility still remain question marks.
But the world of digital currency remains an exciting area of opportunity. Other areas that are prime for disruption by startups include underwriting
and risk scoring; both areas are being reinvented today through the availability and abundance of new data types.
From the rise of peer-to-peer lending models, mobile wallets, digital investment advisory, to the bitcoin revolution, today s digital disintermediation comes in many forms##all of
which challenge banks to innovate. To those startups that aim to fundamentally change the way we transact for the better,
we ll be cheering you on. Photo credit: Caplinked Via Tech Crunch#Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorat s
#We will be 3d printing our clothes in 10 years: Ray Kurzweil Openknit 3d printing is one of those new things that gets hyped all the damn time.
Retail UPS stores carrying pay-peruse printers, Makerbots in every school, a new brick in the Great Wall,
and guns, guns, guns, to name a few examples. Video) There has been a lot of hype lately about 3d printing,
but it's not for nothing. As noted futurist and self-proclaimed technology oracle Ray Kurzweil said at Google S i/O conference last week, the hype,
while partly a result of the boom-bust-recovery theory of capitalism, should be taken seriously at least for the sake of fashion.
In less than ten years, you're probably going to be able to print your own open source clothes for a few cents,
he told the audience, presenting more upward trending graphs than a keynote at a hot air balloon convention.
And he s probably going to be right as he has been with many of his other educated guesses about what the future will hold for us, technologically speaking (three quarters precisely correct predictions,
he said). As of 2014, digital fabricators that make clothes, such as knitting machine Openknit, are already available and inexpensive;
it costs about $700 to build your own Openknit machine, with both the hardware and software still in the do-it-yourself stage.
Naturally, you can print a bunch of the parts to make the digital loom with a 3d printer.
There's also an online repository for open source digital patterns already up and running. Called Do Knit Yourself,
it s currently got four designs available that have thei m in the Matrix on the Nebuchadnezzar type of thing going on around the edges,
but nevertheless look like legit prototypes. Imagine what could happen with millions of dollars of R&d
refinement, and much better printers and software. Eventually, printing clothes is going to be as easy as ordering a burger and fries from your smart watch.
Print green t-shirt, wear for a day, throw in the recycler, print blue-t-shirt (with recycled clothes matter) for tomorrow.
The cheap printing of socks and underwear doesn t look that far off, except that, unsurprisingly,
the fashion industry isn't too comfortable with fledgling designers and home-based fashionistas disrupting the way we make
and buy clothes like Martin Starr's character Gilfoyle disrupted that hotel bathroom in Silicon valley.
One fashion company already made Openknit edit their branding out of its promo video. Kurzweil said transnational fashion enterprises aren t into it because
like other industries, they're afraid their bottom line is going to suffer, that somehow, giving people the ability to create their own clothes is going to destroy the industry.
evolve, and create new and better products that add greater valuea cornerstone of the capitalist enterprise.
After all, just because I can build a computer (and I have built in fact every desktop I ve owned),
it doesn't mean I m going to have the time and resources to build some of the bleeding edge mobile computing hardware available today on the cheap.
So too for fashion. Printing socks and underwear may go on to reduce the difficulty of making jeans to making toast
A new nanomaterial recently invented does the seemingly impossible: It hides things from touch. Just a thin layer of this amazing polymer will hide anything under it from being perceived by your sense of touch.
How is this magic possible? According to the scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of technology, this crystalline material structured with sub-micrometer accuracy...
The metamaterial structure directs the forces of the touching finger such that the cylinder is hidden completely.
I d pay money for. And I d love a camping blanket that perfectly absorbs any rock and twig on the ground, leaving a smooth surface to sleep on o
#Google announces Google Drive for Work with unlimited storage for businesses Google Drive for Work#will cost $10 per month
Google just announced a new product that will offer business users unlimited storage for a set monthly fee per user.#
##Google Drive for Work#will cost $10 per month and come with unlimited storage, as well as a full license for Gmail and Google Apps.
It s a huge change for Google, which previously had a maximum storage limit of 30gb per user for Google Apps,
with extra storage tiers starting at $1. 99 per month for 100gb and going up to 30tb for $300(!)
per month. No more. Now every user will have unlimited storage, with no catches. Google is also increasing the maximum file size to 5tb larger than the largest hard drive on any PC available today.
I asked Google Drive product manager Scott Johnston what type of file could possibly run into the previous 1tb limit,
and he suggested high-defintion video (like 4k from a Gopro camera) or exceptionally large data files the kind of files usually stored on servers.
The move to unlimited storage was inevitable Box CEO Aaron Levie predicted this day on Twitter#back in March
and Microsoft just increased its storage limit for Onedrive business customers from 20gb to 1tb#on Monday.
But now that it s here, competitors like Box and Dropbox will have to step up and offer significant value beyond storage.
These competitors can no longer rely on cross-platform compatibility as a selling point, either. Johnston told me that Google absolutely intends to offer feature parity between mobile and web,
and between all different platforms. You ll see the gaps between mobile and web close significantly,
Johnston told me. We ll march in lockstop with Android and ios . I don t see where any competitor has a better story in terms of cross-platform.
We recognize the importance of that to users. Johnston also emphasized that Drive is not exclusively for Google Apps customers,
but will be catered to all companies, including those with heavy investments in Microsoft office. We want to remove all barriers to entry on getting efficiency out of these cloud tools.
Drive is a way to get started, you don t have to change your existing workflows. To that end,
Google is also addressing some longstanding complaints with Google Apps and Office file compatibility by integrating Quickoffice, acquired more than a year ago, into the suite.
Now, users will be able to edit Microsoft-formatted files directly within Google Apps without converting them to Google s file formats.
Some features like real-time commenting, will still require files to be converted, but Google Apps director of product management Ryan Tabone promises that round-tripping will be more reliable in these cases.
Google Apps is also getting revision tracking and commenting, another long-overdue feature inherited from Quickoffice.
In addition to making storage size irrelevant, Google is also offering features designed to reassure IT managers who might be nervous about moving files to the cloud,
including much more granular permissions, with support for groups stored in existing directories. Within Apps, we have the concept of organizational units.
Those sync with Microsoft Active directory or with any generic LDAP framework, Johnston said. There will also be much better visibility into
what users are doing with files, and an API into the audit log for developers, who will be able to build special-purpose apps for industries where compliance is critical, like banking.
On the security front, Google will offer encryption at rest on its servers. In addition to encryption in transit and between data centers,
which was already in place.)Overall, the improvements are an important indication that Google has given not up on the enterprise.
The Apps suite has been pretty static for the last couple of years, and it seemed that Larry page was satisfied to keep the product around as a decent side business (advertising still makes up 90%of Google s more than $40 billion in annual revenue) and a thorn in Microsoft s side,
but didn t think of it as a core part of Google s larger strategy. Today s announcements,
along with the improvements and aggressive pricing for the Cloud Engine#announced in March, show in fact that Google won t cede any part of its enterprise cloud business to newcomers.
You shouldn t expect Google to get into verticals like CRM or HR management, but as far as broad-based infrastructure and horizontal Saas offerings go,
Google is in the enterprise game to stay. Photo credit: Cruxial CIO Via Cite World Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorat d
#New recyclable plastics discovered by accident A collection of new plastics that are recyclable and adaptable have been developed by researchers
and the discovery began with a laboratory mistake. They include strong, stiff plastics and flexible gels that can mend themselves if torn.
The findings, reported in the journal Science, could lead to cheaper and greener cars, planes and electronics.
It is the first time that durablethermoset plastic has been produced in a recyclable form. Dr Jeanette Garcia, from IBM s Almaden Research center in San jose, stumbled upon the first new class of thermosets in many years when she accidentally left one of three components out of a reaction.
I had this chunk of plastic and I had to figure out what it was told, Dr Garcia the BBC.
I had to smash my round-bottomed flask with a hammer. That chunk of plastic, produced from unexpectedly simple ingredients,
proved to be tremendously hard and stable. Crucially, it could be digested in acid, reverting to its original components.
This digestion reaction allows the chemical building blocks, or monomers, to be reused. It was definitely fortuitous,
Dr Garcia said. The first thing I did, of course, was to hit the literature, to try and see
if it d been done before. I just assumed that it had been it s such a simple reaction.
But her search turned up nothing. This was new. Once she understood what she had created,
thermosets are used throughout modern cars and aircraft, often mixed with carbon fibers to form composites. Some 50%of the new Airbus a350 jet, for example, will be made from composites.
Yet until now, none of this thermoset plastic could be recycled. The potential impact here is said phenomenal
Dr Charl Faul, a materials chemist at the University of Bristol. He says the study offers avery simple, elegant answer to a very old problem.
Dr James Hedrick who was in charge of the research at IBM, is excited by the possibilities.
When a large or expensive component is damaged or reaches the end of its useful life, he explained,
it could be repaired or recycled instead of thrown away. The ability to rework saves a tremendous amount of money
Beyond replacing thermoset-based composites in current technology, Dr Hedrick sees the potential for many more innovative applications.
Every time you discover a new polymer-forming reaction it leads to all sorts of new materials.
As well as very hard and durable plastics the researchers adapted their procedure to a different monomer and produced flexible, self-healing gels.
These could be useful in anything from cosmetics, to paint, to the design of drug capsules, because of their particular solubility properties.
allowing the printer to lay down more material with the same number of movements. But thicker layers means sacrificing the printer s resolution,
because the place where one layer ends and the next begins becomes obvious. So a national lab and a corporation set out in the past year to completely reinvent the concept of the 3d printer.
Oak ridge s monster machine Oak ridge National Laboratory decided to make a faster printer by embracing thicker layers.
which reported that BAAM is capable of printing objects as large as tables and chairs by extruding plastic in layers 0. 3 inches wide.
Chairs recently on display at the RAPID conference each took about 2 hours and 30 minutes to print.
On a normal printer, a chair would take days to print and need to be printed in pieces.
The site also reported that Oak ridge is considering processing 3d printed objects after they are printed so that they appear smooth.
This could involve sanding or treating the plastic with a chemical like acetone, which is used commonly to make desktop printed items smooth.
The lab plans to take orders for the machine around the end of the year, according to 3dprint. com,
highly customized modules that will go into Google s Project Ara phones, 3d Systems turned to an old concept:
The printers deposit different colors and types of materials on phones whizzing past them on an oval-shaped track.
The system is an ingenious way to work around the typically tricky process of building a full-color 3d printer,
or a few nozzles to switch back and forth between colors. 3d Systems does make a line of color printers,
but even the largest units would have trouble keeping up with the volume of phones Google expects to need.
The Robox, for example, uses one extruder that prints a large volume of plastic, while a second extruder prints thin strands to add detail.
which have driven heavy interest in the 25 year old professional printer industry, only appeared 10 years ago.
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