Electric power without transmission lines

Hundreds of companies are investing in electricity transferred through magnetic fields.

Nikola Tesla, the inventor and rival to Thomas Edison, in the early 1900’s built the Wardenclyffe Tower, a 187-foot-high structure on Long Island, which he said could transmit electricity wirelessly. Financier J.Morgan backed the Wardenclyffe Tower. The project failed, and Tesla ended up broke. (In an earlier experiment in Colorado, Tesla had wirelessly lit up 200 lamps over a distance of 25 miles, but pedestrians witnessed sparks jumping between their feet and the ground, and electricity flowed from faucets when turned on. Oops.)

 

 

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11 major trends in mass energy storage

What are energy CEO’s thinking?

Grid-Scale Energy Storage in North America 2013: Applications, Technologies, and Suppliers, author Chet Lyons spoke with dozens of energy storage CEOs and summarized their thoughts in a recent report. Below is an excerpt of his 311-page report, highlighting eleven common threads shared by energy storage executives.

 

 

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More than 20% of government organizations will have appointed a chief digital officer by 2014

The government CIO  role is increasingly under pressure due to the development and implementation of digital government strategies, leading to the creation of new roles, according to Gartner, Inc. Gartner predicts that by 2014, more than 10 percent of government organizations will have appointed a chief data officer and over 20 percent will have appointed a chief digital officer.

 

 

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5 trends for the future of food packaging

Sensors that indicate when a product is no longer good will replace the ‘best before’ print.

Sometimes, packaging may appear very wasteful to people. The packaging is used only temporarily and the act of throwing it away does not feel good. The ‘throw away society’ has given way for a society that shares and reuses as much as possible. However, packaging, even for one time use, is still vital in our way of live. As a fact, packaging design can help make sustainable lifestyle choices. Here are five trends in the future of food packaging which we will see in the coming years.

 

 

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Is connecting your product to the Internet of Things a good business decision?

Companies today are more excited than ever about the Internet of Things thanks to widespread Internet adoption and over 10 billion connected devices around the world. Nearly every business, including those from traditionally low-tech industries, wants to get on the cloud, track a group of devices, and gather data. The question is why would a company is connect a previously “dumb” product to the cloud. Or stated differently, if a company invests in making my toaster talk to my lawnmower, is that really a good business decision and why?

 

 

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Airline coach seats are getting even worse

There’s a new low for the long-haul traveler. Airlines are ordering new Dreamliner 787s and Airbus A330s and are asking to have them fitted with 16.7″-wide coach seats. These are planes intended for intercontinental flights — six to 14 hours! — and they’re shaving the armrests, squeezing the seats, and otherwise cramming in passengers. The airlines say it’ll all be OK — they’ll just distract you from your terrible circumstances with big meals and TV.

 

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Competing for the World’s Largest Infrastructure Project: Over 100 Million Jobs at Stake

Elon Musk and Daryl Oster, competing for what could become 
the world’s largest infrastructure project

Futurist Thomas Frey: When Tesla Motors CEO, Elon Musk, mysteriously leaked that he was working on his Hyperloop Project, the combination of secrecy, cryptic details, and his own flair for the dramatic all contributed to the media frenzy that followed.

 

 

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World’s first Bitcoin ATM to launch in Canada

Bitcoin is an emerging digital currency that isn’t controlled by any authority such as a central bank.

The world’s first Bitcoin ATM is believed to launch in Canada this week.  CBC reports, Mitchell Demeter, co-founder of Vancouver bitcoin trading company Bitcoiniacs and part-owner of Robocoin, has invested in five such machines to be placed across Canada.

 

 

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The dangers of stock trading with highly automated systems

High-frequency trading.

Futurist Brian David Johnson describes his job as a “futurehunter” and his fascination with both algorithmic trading and high-frequency trading (HFT) in this excerpt from Humanity in the Machine: What Comes after Greed?. Both methods use computer programs to automate and accelerate the execution of certain financial transactions. Yet heavy reliance on such technology in the finance world can be dangerous—the Flash Crash of 2010 cited by Johnson stands out as a prominent example.

 

 

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Mobile trends in job searching

The number of mobile job seekers will climb to 50% by the end of 2015.

Simply Hired reports in a new survey on job search trends that the use of mobile devices for job seeking continues to increase. Simply Hired found that 30% of its job search traffic came from mobile devices. LinkedIn reported a similar trend in the third quarter of 2013, with mobile accounting for 38% of unique visitors.

 

 

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