#Luna Wash cleans dirty clothes right in the hamper Luna Wash It doesn t matter
if you live in a sprawling mansion or a tiny apartment, one thing is for sure, you know laundry day will be a long and laborious task.#
#But a new concept washing machine, developed for this year s Electrolux Design Challenge, aims to change that.
This is the Luna Wash, the#in-hamper#washing machine.####Designed by Juan Camilo Restrepo Villamizar, the Luna Wash is like a miniature dirt-destroying Death Star that uses static electricity
and steam to coax your clothes clean. To get the wash going, you first fill the Luna Wash with a small amount of water and plop it down into your laundry.
The Luna Wash then produces a cloud of steam. The surrounding clothes relax in the heat,
letting go of the dirt on their fibers. Next, it swaps to dirt-magnet mode,
emitting an electrostatic charge that sucks that loosened dirt right into its own metal frame.
Vibrating and pulsing its way all the way to the bottom of your hamper the Luna Wash finishes its cycle by blowing your#fresh-cleaned#clothes dry with hot air.
It s a fantastic idea, and one that could get even the laziest of bachelors to wash their clothes.
The only downside we can see, if the Luna Wash can actually be built, is that it would leave you clothes as wrinkled as a raisin in the desert.
If we could just get our hands on a#robot butler#to iron and fold our clothes for us,
we d have this laundry day problem solved. Via Dvice Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorat t
#Self-healing plastic grows back after damage The newly-developed self-healing plastic can take rather extensive damage
and heal it through a process of regeneration. There are several self-healing substances in the world, ranging from the LG G Flex s scratch-healing casing to Stanford synthetic self-healing skin.
A plastic developed by the University of Illinois is one of the latest plastics developed that regenerates when damaged.
The difference between this plastic and scratch-healing gadgets presently available is the amount of damage that can be tolerated.
The newly-developed self-healing plastic can take rather extensive damage and heal it through a process of regeneration,
filling the cracks or breaks with regrown plastic. Said the university s Professor Sottos, Vascular delivery lets us deliver a large volume of healing agents which,
in turn, enables restoration of large damage zones. The vascular approach also enables multiple restorations if the material is damaged more than once.
The future prospects of such a material are exciting. Smartphones, for example, would be able to heal actual cracks in the casing, rather than micro-filling small scuffs and scratches that result from a pocket full of keys.
On a grander scale, the material could be used in aerospace applications where a crack or break could prove difficult to repair or deadly.
Via Slash Gear Shar r
#The Cloud might be the most disruptive innovation ever What makes the cloud so disruptive is that it compels legacy players to change their business models.
In Harvard professor Clayton Christensen 1997 management classic The Innovator Dilemma, he coined the term disruptive innovation.
The central premise was that a change in technology can completely transform the basic economics of an business.
A key example was steel minimills such as Nucor. Originally, they could only produce the lowest quality steel
and weren seen as a serious threat to the big integrated mills. Nevertheless, as the technology improved
they ended up disrupting the entire industry. In the decade and a half since Christensen published his book,
wee learned a lot about disruption and know the warning signs to look out for, such as a change in the basis of competition, new market entrants and new types of consumers.
when he looked at accounting software for small business. Unlike consumer technology, which was quickly moving to a web-based approach,
business software was sold still in boxes. That made it difficult to integrate with other software
and almost impossible for the people who used it to collaborate effectively. So he went to his friend and accountant
Hamish Edwards, and together they decided to build a software company that centered on the relationship between small businesses and their accountants.
Rather than just transferring files every quarter or so, their product would allow accountants to act as real-time advisors.
In 2006, they launched Xero, which has been revolutionizing how small business operate ever since. It goes far beyond just keeping the books,
it seamlessly integrates with a wide array of add-on software tools, from point-of-sale to timesheets to invoicing and payroll.
Xero currently has a market capitalization of over $3 billion and is still growing fast. Low-end Disruptions To get an idea of why companies like Xero are so disruptive
think back to how software used to work. You would buy a package from a vendor
and it would be installed on your company server or PC. Through partnerships and acquisitions, the software company would could then offer you additional products with expanded capability.
This was not only time consuming and expensive, but it limited you to the vision of your software provider.
If you had a restaurant and wanted to start selling takeout on the Web, you had to either buy a product that was compatible with your accounting software or basically run two sets of books.
In the best case you were held hostage to the partnerships and acquisitions your vendor saw fit to make.
Most of the time though, your ability to was hampered by the strategies and vision of your software provider.
If it didn see why your point-of-sale system needed to be integrated with e-commerce, you were basically out of luck.
But cloud technology works differently. Typically, an application programing interface (API) is set up so that any developer that wants to make its product compatible can do so on its own.
There even a company called Zapier. com that combines applications automatically in the cloud for you.
Power has shifted from software companies to everyday consumers. Large scale Disruptions Most data are unstructured. Everyday there are millions of social media posts,
customers filling out comment cards, mentions in mass media and on blog posts. For a large enterprise, a keyword search would turn up thousands of hits per day.
It simply not possible for a human to read it all but now machines can. Lexalytics developed one of the most powerful text analysis software packages for exactly that purpose.
The company product can analyze tremendous amounts of content for meaning. So, for example, customer service organizations can monitor the web for complaints
in order to intervene and financial analysts can track sentiment on the companies they cover. The company former Marketing Director
Oleg Rogynskyy, thought there was a better way. He saw that by putting Lexalyticstechnology in the cloud,
It could be downloaded by nontechnical users, in under three minutes and used for less than $1000,
When Tesla suddenly ran into a very public problem with its batteries, it installed Semantria in minutes
but also improve the software. Because all of the data is housed together rather than distributed on clientsservers,
the algorithms are able to learn and improve from a much wider data set. Semantria business is booming, growing at 20%per month.
Wee All Being disrupted Now Mike Saliter, Global Head of Market Development at Qliktech predicts that the cloud approach will soon become standard.
Anybody with an idea can go to Amazon, Microsoft or Oracle, sign up for a platform as a service and be up and running in minutes.
Competition is fierce and prices are falling while features are expanding. But what makes the cloud so disruptive is that it compels legacy players to change their business models
including pricing strategies, sales channels and even basic technology. The winners will prevail not by dominating the value chain,
but through making it easy for developers to collaborate and for users to adopt the technology cheaply and easily.
It seems the cloud is now disrupting every industry it touches. The world most advanced technologies are not only available to large enterprises who can afford to maintain an expensive IT staff,
but can be accessed by anybody with an internet connection. That a real game changer. One thing is clear.
#The next Great Space Race Space-Based Power stations Futurist Thomas Frey: Earth appetite for power continues to grow.
Since the 1960s, power consumption has quadrupled around the globe, with many countries opting to build large oil
and coal plants to meet the demand. But for Japan, a burgeoning economy without large oil and coal reserves,
after the Fukushima disaster occurred, an in depth review concluded the most viable long-term strategy was to focus on spaced-based power systems.
For this reason, the Japan aerospace exploration agency (JAXA) recently announced its 25-year plan to build the world first 1-gigawatt power plant in space.
The vision of harvesting solar power from space and beaming it to earth has been around ever since Dr. Peter Glaser first proposed it in 1968.
What most people don realize is that solar panels in space are 10 times more efficient than those on earth
Many other countries won be comfortable with Japan having the world only expertise in building space-based power stations.
The island itself will be glistening from the massive net studded with billions of tiny rectifying antennas designed to convert microwave energy into DC power Next to the antennas is a large substation that sends vast amounts of power through an underwater cable to Tokyo,
to help keep the factories of the Keihin industrial zone humming and the neon lights of Shibuya shining bright.
neither the giant solar collectors in geosynchronous orbit nor the beaming microwaves, coming down to the island from 24,000 miles above Earth.
Space-based power stations have been the subject of research and a common theme among the sci-fi authors for decades.
This is about the same output as a typical nuclear power plant. Every year of technological advancement brings a drop in the cost of building it.
In the 1980s, the cost was estimated to be over $1 trillion. But by 2030, the cost is anticipated to drop to the $20 billion range.
2-MW satellite experiment 2028 200-MW demonstration power station COMMERCIAL PHASE (2031040) 2031 1-GW full-scale power station 2037 Commercial space-based
most will imagine a space-based solar array powering our energy hungry businesses on earth, but that only part of the equation.
Mastering Six Critical Disciplines The JAXA power station is estimated to weigh more than 10,000 metric tons and when fully deployed, stretch several miles across.
To construct and operate an electricity-generating satellite, JAXA will have to demonstrate mastery of six critical disciplines:
hoping to use it to beam power to buildings, cars, and dirigibles until his funding was canceled by J p morgan.
In 1960 William C Brown, the inventor of the cross-field amplifier, used a remote control helicopter to demonstrate his breakthroughs using wireless microwave power on the Walter Cronkite 6: 00 pm news. Citing Tesla same logic,
Brown was convinced this was the wave of the future. The reason for converting energy to microwaves is because it impervious to weather condition and water in the upper atmosphere.
In its broad-beam form, microwaves become safe for birds and insects to fly through. Microwaves also have an efficiency advantage.
Typically power has to be converted twice: first from DC power to microwaves aboard the satellite, then back to DC again on the ground.
In lab conditions, researchers have achieved about 80%efficiency in this kind of power conversion, which is far better than with other forms of power.
Optimal Satellite Design Two Approaches JAXA researchers are working on two different approaches. The first one involves a huge square panel (measuring over 1 mile per side) that is covered with photovoltaic receptors on the top and transmission antennas on the bottom.
This panel will be suspended by 6-mile-long wires connected to a small bus which will house the satellite controls and communication systems.
Using a technique called gravity gradient stabilization, the bus acts as a counterweight to the huge panel.
The panel, which will be closer to Earth, will experience more gravitational pull down toward the planet and less centrifugal force away from it,
while the bus will be tugged upward by the opposite effects. This balancing of forces will keep the satellite in a stable orbit,
requiring a less-active control system, saving millions in fuel costs. However, this approach still has problems.
Since the photovoltaic panel orientation is fixed the amount of sunlight that hits it varies greatly as the geosynchronous satellite and Earth spin.
Approach#2 Two huge reflective mirrors For this reason, JAXA has come up with another more sophisticated approach that solves the solar collection problem by employing two huge reflective mirrors.
The mirrors will be positioned so they can direct light onto two photovoltaic panels 24 hours a day.
The two mirrors will be untethered from the solar panels and the separate transmission unit, requiring a far more advanced navigating system to keep them properly aligned.
Final Thoughts The Battle to Be First Call it national pride or a desire to have written your name in all of the history books,
Creating the first space-based power system will be no exception. With U s. influence eroding across Europe and Asia,
a space-based power station has the potential to reinvigorate NASA and give a needed dose of excitement to the thousands of space companies that support it.
#Financial services ripe for disruptive innovation Technology is having a profound impact on so many sectors, creating opportunities,
oftware is eating the worldand financial services are no exception. The market is ripe for disruption, with incumbent banks, insurance,
payments and investment management companies no longer able to bamboozle consumers with jargon, hidden costs and arcane language.
The time is right for entrepreneurs and new technology to shake up these industries. New online financial lending communities, from Lending Club and Ondeck in the US to Zopa and Funding Circle in the UK, are sprouting up as traditional banksare less willing to take risk
and have less capital available to lend. They can offer more competitive rates and cut out the middle man,
as well as offer the convenience of simple apps and websites. Simple provides mobile-first banking with no need to visit a branch, no hidden fees and great customer service.
Transferwise is shaking up the sleepy world of sending money overseas through high street banks. They are helping consumers all around the world exchange money with each other safely and transparently, through their peer to peer model.
Customers send more than a million pounds euros from Manchester to Spain or pounds from Stockholm to the UK through Transferwise every day.
Rather than being overcharged with large hidden fees and inferior exchange rates, you get market rates and low costs.
There is a focus on transparency, with best price guarantees. Plus, rather than the archaic, lengthy practice of queuing in shops,
there is an easy-to-use app or web-based money transfer service. Here in the UK, our challenger bank Virgin Money are disrupting that idea with stunning free lounges,
where people can relax, share ideas and enjoy themselves instead of simply complete transactions in a sterile environment.
In the very traditional payments Market square is enabling plumbers, window cleaners and street market vendors to grow their business
and sell on the go using smartphones. Clinkle is introducing a mobile wallet for day to day transactions
so rather than put your hand in your pocket for small amounts of cash you can just pay with your phone.
Elsewhere, regulatory changes around crowd funding and peer-to-peer lending are creating great opportunities for people to turn dreams into reality.
Indiegogo, a company Ie invested in recently, empowers anyone, anywhere to raise funds for creative,
entrepreneurial or cause-related ideas using its online platform. From vital signs scanners to solar classrooms, mosquito patches to aerial robot photography, it is helping meaningful projects come to life.
While there are great opportunities to make investments and build profitable businesses these sectors also allow businesspersons to use their entrepreneurial skills to help create a better word.
New financial technology is already having a positive impact upon people lives, and new innovations will give more opportunities for companies to do business for good.
Most great ideas come out of frustration All of these businesses were built by entrepreneurs who saw models that didn make sense
and came up with technology to consumerslives easier (as well as their own!).Financial services are ripe for disruption by a new breed of entrepreneurs.
What kind of innovation would you like to see next? Do you think entrepreneurs have lost the will to innovate
#IBM creates a solar magnifying glass that could power the Earth IBM, the American multinational technology and consulting corporation are renowned the world over for being technology leaders
and innovators with an aim to hape the future of society and make the world work better
The team at IBM have developed a system called High Concentration Photo Voltaic Thermal (HCPVT), which is capable of concentrating the sun rays into a stream 2000x more powerful.
The process of trapping sunlight also produces water that can be used to produce potable water and other modern day amenities such as air conditioning.
Scientists are predicting that the HCPVT could provide sustainable energy and fresh water to communities all around the world.
Current solar technologies on the market today are too expensive and slow to produce, require Rare earth minerals and lack the efficiency to make such massive installations practical.
The HCPVT system uses a large parabolic dish, made from a multitude of mirror facets, which is attached to a tracking system that determines the best angle based on the position of the sun. Such system can be applied profitably in sunny regions where sustainable energy,
drinkable water and cool air are in short supply. With manufacturing and maintenance processes required, this idea will also create much-needed jobs around the world.
This in turn means the cost of the energy itself could be as low as 10 cents per kilowatt hour (KWH.
and Australia with the possibility of moving into further markets such as tourism where energy supply is scarce or low r
#Airhelp gets you money back for canceled or delayed flights It can be hard to a book flight on an airline website,
so imagine how hard it must be to claim compensation for delayed, canceled or overbooked flights.
Meet Airhelp, the startup that will save you all the hassle and claim money for you.
Video) efore today, you had to go to our website or app to give us your flight information.
Airhelp CMO Nicolas Michaelsen told me in a phone interview before Disrupt. ow, you connect your Gmail account,
you can claim money for that. But how much exactly can you claim? For a delayed, canceled
That why airlines will fight you very hard not to give you your money back.
Not only Airhelp will do the hard work for you, but it will also generate some substantial revenue at the same time.
And this is Airhelp secret sauce every time the company goes through the compensation process it takes a 25 percent cut.
Digging through all your email could take a while. So after connecting to your Gmail account
you can just close the window and do something else. Youl receive an email with interesting stats and potential claims a few hours later.
After that, you have to give Airhelp the rights to handle the claims, and it done.
It can take a few weeks to get your money back. Finally, the startup will ask for your bank information to transfer the money.
But even though this sounds like a cumbersome process, 90 to 95 percent of it is automated.
or two. ee been making revenue since day one, Michaelsen said g
#Top 15 emerging agriculture technologies that will change the world Below are 15 emerging technologies related to agricultural and natural manufacturing under four key areas of accelerating change:
Sensors, Food, Automation and Engineering. Sensors help agriculture by enabling real-time traceability and diagnosis of crop, livestock and farm machine states.
Food may benefit directly from genetic tailoring and potentially from producing meat directly in a lab. Automation will help agriculture via large-scale robotic
and microrobots to check and maintain crops at the plant level. Engineering involves technologies that extend the reach of agriculture to new means, new places and new areas of the economy.
Of particular interest will be synthetic biology, which allows efficiently reprogramming unicellular life to make fuels, byproducts accessible from organic chemistry and smart devices.
We have included predictions based on consultation with experts of when each technology will be scientifically viable (the kind of stuff that Google,
governments and universities develop), mainstream (when VCS and startups widely invest in it), and financially viable (when the technology is generally available on Kickstarter).
Sensors Air & soil sensors: Fundamental additions to the automated farm, these sensors would enable a real time understanding of current farm, forest or body of water conditions.
Scientifically viable in 2013; mainstream and financially viable in 2015. Equipment telematics: Allows mechanical devices such as tractors to warn mechanics that a failure is likely to occur soon.
Intra-tractor communication can be used as a rudimentary arm swarmplatform. Scientifically viable in 2013; mainstream in 2016;
and financially viable in 2017. Livestock biometrics: Collars with GPS, RFID and biometrics can automatically identify
and relay vital information about the livestock in real time. Scientifically viable in 2017; mainstream and financially viable in 2020.
Crop sensors: Instead of prescribing field fertilization before application, high-resolution crop sensors inform application equipment of correct amounts needed.
Optical sensors or drones are able to identify crop health across the field (for example, by using infrared light).
Scientifically viable in 2015; mainstream in 2018; and financially viable in 2019. Infrastructural health sensors:
Can be used for monitoring vibrations and material conditions in buildings, bridges, factories, farms and other infrastructure.
Coupled with an intelligent network, such sensors could feed crucial information back to maintenance crews or robots.
Scientifically viable in 2021; mainstream in 2025; and financially viable in 2027. Food Genetically designed food: The creation of entirely new strains of food animals and plants in order to better address biological and physiological needs.
A departure from genetically modified food, genetically designed food would be engineered from the ground up. Scientifically viable in 2016;
mainstream in 2021; and financially viable in 2022. In vitro meat: Also known as cultured meat or tubesteak, it is a flesh product that has never been part of a complete, living animal.
Several current research projects are growing in vitro meat experimentally, although no meat has yet been produced for public consumption.
Scientifically viable in 2017; mainstream in 2024; and financially viable in 2027. Automation Variable rate swath control:
Building on existing geolocation technologies, future swath control could save on seed, minerals, fertilizer and herbicides by reducing overlapping inputs.
By pre-computing the shape of the field where the inputs are to be used, and by understanding the relative productivity of different areas of the field,
tractors or agbots can procedurally apply inputs at variable rates throughout the field. Scientifically viable in 2013;
mainstream in 2014; and financially viable in 2016. Rapid iteration selective breeding: The next generation of selective breeding where the end-result is analyzed quantitatively
and improvements are suggested algorithmically. Scientifically viable in 2014; mainstream and financially viable in 2017. Agricultural robots:
Also known as agbots, these are used to automate agricultural processes, such as harvesting, fruit picking, ploughing, soil maintenance, weeding,
planting, irrigation, etc. Scientifically viable in 2018; mainstream in 2020; and financially viable in 2021.
Precision agriculture: Farming management based on observing (and responding to) intra-field variations. With satellite imagery and advanced sensors, farmers can optimize returns on inputs while preserving resources at ever larger scales.
Further understanding of crop variability, geolocated weather data and precise sensors should allow improved automated decision-making and complementary planting techniques.
Scientifically viable in 2019; mainstream in 2023; and financially viable in 2024. Robotic farm swarms:
The hypothetical combination of dozens or hundreds of agricultural robots with thousands of microscopic sensors,
which together would monitor, predict, cultivate and extract crops from the land with practically no human intervention.
Small-scale implementations are already on the horizon. Scientifically viable in 2023; mainstream and financially viable in 2026.
Engineering Closed ecological systems: Ecosystems that do not rely on matter exchange outside the system. Such closed ecosystems would theoretically transform waste products into oxygen,
food and water in order to support life-forms inhabiting the system. Such systems already exist in small scales,
but existing technological limitations prevent them from scaling. Scientifically viable in 2015; mainstream in 2020;
and financially viable in 2021. Synthetic biology: Synthetic biology is about programming biology using standardized parts as one programs computers using standardized libraries today.
Includes the broad redefinition and expansion of biotechnology, with the ultimate goals of being able to design,
build and remediate engineered biological systems that process information, manipulate chemicals, fabricate materials and structures,
produce energy, provide food, and maintain and enhance human health and our environment. Scientifically viable in 2013;
mainstream in 2023; and financially viable in 2024. Vertical farming: A natural extension of urban agriculture, vertical farms would cultivate plant
or animal life within dedicated or mixed-use skyscrapers in urban settings. Using techniques similar to glass houses,
vertical farms could augment natural light using energy-efficient lighting. The advantages are numerous, including year-round crop production, protection from weather, support urban food autonomy and reduced transport costs.
Scientifically viable in 2023; mainstream and financially viable in 2027
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