No more cardboard boxes? 3M invents an ingenious new way to ship products

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The company is launching a new material that could reduce the time, materials, and space required to ship products by 50%.

Getting things delivered has never been more convenient. With just a few clicks, you can have a new bottle of shampoo sitting outside your door the next day, or that cool T-shirt you’ve been eyeing on Etsy. But when those items arrive at your door, there’s a good chance they’ll be in a too-big box, stuffed with lots of wasteful packaging filler.

That’s why the Minnesota-based materials company 3M is releasing a new type of packaging that requires no tape and no filler, and it can be customized to fit any object under 3 pounds—which 3M says accounts for about 60% of all items that are bought online and shipped. 3M claims that the material, called the Flex & Seal Shipping Roll, can reduce time spent packing, the amount of packaging materials, and the space needed to ship packages.

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1,000 times faster computers by 2013

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 IBM is developing “skyscraper” computers using huge sandwiches of silicon chips.

Get read  for next-generation computers and smartphones that are up to 1,000 times faster than the systems you use today. Computer maker IBM is developing “skyscraper” computers using huge sandwiches of silicon chips by sticking layer after layer of chips covered with tiny components together. The process, for which IBM has roped in glue maker 3M, will make PCs and smartphones up to 1,000 times faster than the existing ones and are expected to be available in market by 2013.

 

 

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3M Rolls Out MPro 150 Pocket Projector With 1GB Of On-Board Storage

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3M just got done pushing out its MPro 120, and here at CES people are already feasting their eyes on the MPro 150. For all intents and purposes, this is just an MPro 120 with 1GB of internal storage and a microSD expansion slot. It was spotted it over at CES Unveiled, and while the VGA video wasn’t anything special, the ability to open and display PDFs, Excel files and PowerPoint documents (in addition to the traditional movie and audio files) was indeed a nice add for the traveling salesperson. Hit up the full release after the break if you’re thirsty for more details, and you should see it ship next month for just under $400.

3M Launches First Pocket-Size Projector

 3M Launches First Pocket-Size Projector

The Pocket Projector: It’s tiny! 

That’s projector, not protector. But geeks will rejoice nonetheless. The pocketsize projector has been the Holy Grail of gadgets for many years, and now we’ve got it. 3M sent us one of their first samples of their MPro110 mini projector a few weeks ago (but asked us to keep it on the down-low for a while). I immediately plugged it into a DVD player and watched Blackhawk Down on my desk-literally, on it, as I aimed it at my white Ikea desktop. (Ah, to be owned by a Swedish company.) It also worked on the wall, on a piece of 8.5-by-11-inch printer paper and on the back of my colleague, Doug.

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