In February, Facebook purchased the WhatsApp messaging service for the mind-boggling sum of $19 billion. It was the largest acquisition of a venture-backed company ever, but it also proved a clear, albeit subtle, point: Our relationship to personal data is shifting. WhatsApp charges users $0.99 a year, a fee it justifies in a straightforward way—no ads, no data mining, no kidding. Now that one of the world’s most prolific data miners owns WhatsApp, we’ll see if the service can continue to guard privacy in the same way. Regardless, the lesson stands. People are realizing just how much their data is worth.
Is there any bastion of human misery more wretched than the airline luggage check? Abandon all hope, ye who reach suitcase sizes exceeding 50 pounds. AirFrance-KLM, at least, is trying to ease the pain. They've developed an electronic luggage tag that will let users skip the lines.
Brett Doar tried architecture, drove buses, and edited films before carving out a career designing absurdly intricate Rube Goldberg machines. His latest project:a kinetic sculpture made of toys and householdobjects to advertise GoldieBlox, a construction set for girls. Here’s how Doar orchestrated his unique living.
Keurig machines boldly accelerated the path to a caffeine fix, getting rid of the measuring and the whole-pot wait. With the simple drop of a pod into a machine, a single-serving of coffee-flavored drink is made within seconds. But what if instead of having a mug full of steaming hazelnut brew dispensed, you got a cold bubbly beverage? Well, it's happening –Coca-Cola will be working exclusively with the makers of Keurig to produce Coke-brandedsingle-serve, pod-encased cold drinks.
You might like carbs, but probably not in the way Percival Zhang does. Zhang, a chemical engineer at Virginia Tech, runs a lab that's dedicated to converting carbohydrates into electricity. The lab's inventions include proofs of concepts showing that carbohydrates are able to power everything from cellphones to cars.
The Michelin Man's familiar rolls may get a material makeover in the next decade. French tire company Michelin, supported by a subsidy from France's Environment and Energy Management Agency, will spend $71 million (52 million euros) over the next eight years researching whether it's feasible to make tires in part from plant-based materials, the U.K.'s The Guardian reports. Tires are normally made with a combination of natural rubber from rubber trees and synthetic rubber made from petroleum by-products.