- Warning: When Selling Domestic Drones, Mileage May Vary
As the debate continues over drones in U.S. skies, other countries could show the way.
When I visited Australia a couple of years back, I picked up the phrase “no worries” which I still use in my speech today. And when it comes to domestic drones, it appears Aussies really are less worried than Americans.
- Startup EnerVault Rethinks Flow Battery Chemistry
EnerVault later this year will test its first grid-scale flow battery that uses low-cost materials and proprietary pumping system.
Flow batteries have emerged as one of most promising ways to store many hours of energy on the electricity grid. To make costs more competitive, startup EnerVault is pursuing a novel chemistry and unique mechanical design.
- Five Opportunities for Mobile Computing
Thousands of startup companies see mobile computing as their chance to strike it big. We picked five.
About three dozen mobile-computing startup companies get funded by investors each month in the United States, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Around the world, tens of thousands more entrepreneurs are dreaming and coding and trying to invent something big.
- Skipping the Water in Fracking
The push to extend fracking to arid regions is drawing attention to water-free techniques.
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, uses large amounts of water injected into wells under high pressure to help free natural gas and oil from shale deposits (see “Drilling for Shale Gas”). Yet some of the world’s largest sources of shale gas are found in deserts, making the technique seem impractical.
- No Map? No GPS? No Problem
Startup Navisens says it can find people indoors using motion sensors and math.
Now that it’s easy to find your way in the real world with just a smartphone in hand, the next logical navigation frontier is indoors, where GPS doesn’t work and maps are often nonexistent. Australian startup Navisens says it has a plan to track everyone from firefighters searching through burning buildings to consumers wandering through shopping malls, without requiring any special wireless signals.
- Is Google Keep Better Than a Post-It?
Keep’s paper-like qualities might just beat its computery ones.
In January, I did something heretical for a productivity-app-obsessed tech writer: I threw away the “list” apps on my phone and went back to paper. As a queryable, bottomless, always-accessible database of my every passing thought, a Post-It stuck to my iPhone certainly falls short compared to Evernote or Clear. But here’s what I realized: for me, most of the time, I don’t need a database, nor do I want to spend time querying and managing one. I’m with Bret Victor: interacting with software mostly sucks on principle. For the job of “jotting” random stuff, paper’s form (physical, flexible, direct) just plain beat software’s function.
- Why the Bankruptcy of Suntech Matters
The Chinese government is allowing major solar companies to fail, and that’s a good thing.
The Chinese government helped finance a massive expansion of the solar industry, helping to create a glut of solar panels—and leading to rapidly reducing prices for solar. But now it has let the main subsidiary of its most prominent solar panel manufacturer, Suntech Power, go bankrupt.
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