Business – Page 71

Analysis, Architecture, Business, Latest Trend

Why rent is so expensive in cities: Parking spaces

October 10, 2014

Underground parking is extremely expensive to build.

Many factors contribute to drive up the price of rents, but parking is among the most significant, according to University of California Los Angeles professor and renowned parking guru Donald Shoup. During the CityLab 2014 conference in Los Angeles last week BuzzFeed News sat down with Shoup to talk about how parking makes housing more expensive. His point: “It’s unfair to have cities where parking is free for cars and housing is expensive for people.”

Continue reading… “Why rent is so expensive in cities: Parking spaces”

Analysis, Business, Latest Trend, New Viewpoints, People Making a Difference, Science & Technology News

Disrupting Healthcare – When Devices Replace Medicine

October 9, 2014

Futurist Thomas Frey: Doctors today are constantly selling.

No, it didn’t start out that way, but a system has evolved that richly rewards members of the physician’s food chain if sales continue.

Continue reading… “Disrupting Healthcare – When Devices Replace Medicine”

Alternative Transportation, Business, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

SurfAir – the Uber of the skies

October 8, 2014

SurfAir

SurfAir is a new airline hoping to deliver some overdue disruption to the not-so-friendly skies.The fast growing year old company is a subscription-based model for private planes, but it’s at a price point that could actually be accessible for frequent fliers.

Continue reading… “SurfAir – the Uber of the skies”

Analysis, Business, Health & Fitness, Science & Technology News

The evolution of IBM’s Watson supercomputer and where it’s taking healthcare

October 8, 2014

IBM’s Watson is a cognitive computing system originally designed to vanquish human competitors on Jeopardy in 2011. Watson has been winding its way into more and more healthcare and health-related use cases. But like most novel technologies, a number of people still don’t understand exactly what Watson is or does — or what IBM’s roadmap for the technology is.

Continue reading… “The evolution of IBM’s Watson supercomputer and where it’s taking healthcare”

Business, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

Circle – a new bitcoin bank takes cryptocurrencies mainstream

October 7, 2014

A Bitcoin ATM

Circle is a new Bitcoin bank that opened its doors to the public last week, following a stealth development period which saw it raise $25m from some of Silicon Valley’s biggest venture capitalists.

Continue reading… “Circle – a new bitcoin bank takes cryptocurrencies mainstream”

Architecture, Breakthrough Thinking, Business, People Making a Difference, Photo Perspectives, Science & Technology News

Calgary’s Snøhetta-designed public library will be the Apple Store of libraries

October 5, 2014

Library designed by architectural firm Snøhetta.

Shaunacy Ferro: Hanging out at the library might just become cool as Calgary, Canada has plans to build a new lending library. The library will be designed by Snøhetta, an architecture firm. The library will have a 240,000-square-foot center and will be more than just a repository for plastic-protected books. Twice as large as Calgary’s existing public library, it’s designed to be both a circulating public library and a community gathering space, a combination bookstore/computer lab/cafe/event space/social hub that provides a pathway between two disconnected neighborhoods. (Photos)

Continue reading… “Calgary’s Snøhetta-designed public library will be the Apple Store of libraries”

Analysis, Brain, Breakthrough Thinking, Business, Latest Trend, New Viewpoints, People Making a Difference, Science & Technology News

Computing’s Next Big Transformation – Semantic Intelligence

October 3, 2014

Futurist Thomas Frey: I had great difficulty completing this column. This is partly due to the complex nature of the technology and partly because its implications may indeed be so far reaching that I’ll sound over-reaching in describing it.

Continue reading… “Computing’s Next Big Transformation – Semantic Intelligence”

Analysis, Animals, Business, Food, Science & Technology News

Why is lab-grown beef better than ranchers raising cows?

October 3, 2014

If they can grow muscle, can they make meat?

Modern Meadow is a startup based in Brooklyn, New York. They are aiming to commercialize leather and meat products that are not made from slaughtered animals but brewed in cell-culture vats. If it works, and if the market embraces the resulting products, it would lead to vast savings in water, land, and energy use associated with livestock production.

Continue reading… “Why is lab-grown beef better than ranchers raising cows?”

Business, facebook, Globalism, Internet, Science & Technology News

Facebook’s solar-powered internet delivering drones could be in use by 2018

October 1, 2014

Facebook internet delivery drone.

Facebook is pushing toward thousands of solar-powered internet delivering drones. They will have the wingspan of a jumbo jet and fly at 17 mile height. The semi-autonomous drones will be the size of jumbo jets which will fly 17 miles above the Earth to provide wireless internet access to the four billion people currently unable to get online. They want to fly them for months and years at a time. The drones will need to rise above the weather, flying at between 60,000 and 90,000 feet – around 17 miles above the ground.

Continue reading… “Facebook’s solar-powered internet delivering drones could be in use by 2018”

Business, Energy, Great Videos, People Making a Difference, Science & Technology News, Solar Power

Airlight Energy and IBM’s new sunflower-shaped solar concentrators produce energy and fresh water

October 1, 2014

High Concentration PhotoVoltaic Thermal (HCPVT)

A cutting-edge solar system that resembles a 10-meter-high sunflower has just been unveiled by IBM Research and Swiss solar technology company Airlight Energy. The High Concentration PhotoVoltaic Thermal (HCPVT) system can concentrate the sun’s radiation 2,000 times and convert 80 percent of it into useful energy, generating up to 12 kilowatts of electrical power and 20 kilowatts of heat on a sunny day—enough to power several average homes. It can also produce clean, fresh water as a result of the process used to cool the solar cells. (Video)

Continue reading… “Airlight Energy and IBM’s new sunflower-shaped solar concentrators produce energy and fresh water”

Business, Energy, Science & Technology News, Solar Power

Elon Musk’s SolarCity to build a Gigafactory for producing solar panels

October 1, 2014

Tesla/SpaceX chief and sustainable energy champion, Elon Musk, has finalized plans to build a 1.2 million square-foot megafactory in Buffalo, NY through his company SolarCity. The factory targets to create enough solar panels a year to harness a gigawatt of the sun’s energy.

Continue reading… “Elon Musk’s SolarCity to build a Gigafactory for producing solar panels”

Alternative Transportation, Business, Science & Technology News

iPhone manufacturer Foxconn invests $811M in building electric cars in China

September 30, 2014

Foxconn wants to make an electric car priced less than $15,000.

Foxconn, Apple’s manufacturing partner, is notorious for its empire of iPhone-assembling employees and robots, but the electronics manufacturer is looking to shift gears, by building a dirt cheap electric car and it’s already investing $811 million to speed up the process.

Continue reading… “iPhone manufacturer Foxconn invests $811M in building electric cars in China”