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Wade Eyerly, CEO of Surf Air, says the airline industry is “desperate for disruption.” As he put it to NPR: “Airlines are literally the only industry that ranked below cable companies for what people think of them — dead last among 47 industries surveyed. No one likes flying June 04, 2013 at 04:51PM

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Platform enables passers-by to tip buskers with Bitcoin

The rise of digital piracy — and to some extent, streaming services such as Spotify — has hit the music industry extremely hard. We’ve already seen efforts to help fight back with innovative payment systems to reward artist directly, and now we’ve come across a new startup built around the idea of “tipping”. READ MORE…

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Future Farms Will Be Home To Ground-Crawling Robots And Airborne Drones

by Michael Keller

Not too long from now, those peaches and peppers you love will be getting some TLC from a few farmers’ friends made of silicon and metal.

Engineers at a number of institutions and companies are working on systems that will help farmers tend their crops by offering new insights into real-time conditions of the plants, soil and atmosphere.

“Agriculture right now is at a unique point, with lots of R&D going on,” Gary McMurray, a mechanical engineer who leads the Georgia Tech Research Institute’s efforts in food processing technology, tells Txchnologist. “In the next five to 10 years, you’re going to see a significant change in the farm. There’s a lot of technology coming.”

McMurray says robots, his area of research expertise, are going to be the main enabling technology. The drivers of farm innovations, he says, are U.S. Department of Agriculture research funding and defense contractors looking for new opportunities for their technologies after current conflicts taper off. “Even venture capital is going into agriculture companies,” he says.

In Illinois and at Georgia Tech, for example, researchers are taking steps to use flying and ground-crawling robots to help farmers better manage the land and plants.

Read More

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Nick Stockton, wired.com

Computers are already smart, just in their own ways. They catalogue the breadth of human knowledge, find meaning in mushroom clouds of data, and fly spacecraft to other worlds. And they’re getting better. Below are four domains of computing where …

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Underground fridge goes back to basics to save money and the environment

With all of the smart, connected Internet of Things devices we’ve seen recently, it’s refreshing to see entrepreneurs still drawing inspiration from the simplest and most effective ideas from the past. The eCool, an underground fridge for cooling canned drinks, is one such device. READ MORE…

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across all 10 countries surveyed by YouGov on behalf of the Reuters Institute, 36% of 18-24s say they use smartphones as their primary access for news.

More digital disruption ahead for mainstream news groups, says survey (via gerdfeed)

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The disintermediation of healthcare could mean we begin to use comparison sites to manage our health in the same way we manage our holidays. Pharma companies must consider this future now to develop their brands.

By Charlie Stott

When Bluetooth was launched in the late 1990s an email...

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The Rift is designed to make users feel as though they are actually inside the world of the game by following your movements in real time. While video games are the target market for the Rift, the technology also has implications for architecture design, emergency response training, phobia therapy, and much more.

10 New Innovations That Could Change the World (via gerdfeed)

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Cory Doctorow on intellectual property in a digital age

In his keynote speech for The Literary Consultancy’s 2014 conference, author and renowned digital publishing pioneer Cory Doctorow talks about his creative experiments on and offline, and addresses head-on the thorny question of ‘Intellectual Property in a Digital Age’.

The conference is taking place until this Sunday - you can follow today’s action at the Guardian Book Blog’s liveblog, on Twitter with #TLC14. Learn more about TLC and the conference at literaryconsultancy.co.uk

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One barrier to mainstream use of renewables is integrating sustainable energy sources into the current power grid. Big data and artificial intelligence have made it easier to predict how much power wind turbines will produce.

10 New Innovations That Could Change the World (via gerdfeed)

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Australian internet users are more concerned about deleting their browsing history (74 per cent) than changing their passwords every six months (49 per cent)

Aussies ready for change but feel unsafe in the digital world, says Intel (via gerdfeed)

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There’s too much trash in our cities. 

In our new post we explore a radical idea that could massively reduce this: buying absolutely nothing new or second hand for an entire year. 

Could you do this?

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Scientists solve solar energy’s burning question: how to make it cheaper than fossil fuels

In a fight between solar and fossil fuels, the latter has always had a killer question up its sleeve: “What about supercritical steam?" That’s the method by which the most advanced power stations generate electricity, superheating water until it instantly becomes steam, a feat that’s only possible (and affordable) by burning coal or gas. Or, at least it was. Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization has managed to use solar energy to the same effect, boiling liquid to temperatures of 570 degrees Celsius in a test chamber.

Full Story: Endgadget

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"Paradigm Shift" Reported In Making Biofuel From Plants

by Michael Keller

The possibility of using nonfood plants to cheaply and sustainably fuel our vehicles may have just veered into the fast lane.

Scientists report they have successfully genetically engineered bacteria to convert complex carbohydrates in tough grasses directly into ethanol, a type of alcohol that can fuel internal combustion engines.

“Making biofuel from plants is really important because it’s carbon neutral—the same CO2 you put in to grow it comes out when you burn it,” says Janet Westpheling, a University of Georgia genetics professor who led the research. “It’s one of the reasons why the future of energy in this country has to rely at least in part on plants.”

At the heart of the work conducted at UGA and Oak Ridge National Lab, is what Westpheling calls a paradigm shift in approaching a longstanding problem in producing biofuels.

Read More

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That’s compared to 7.8 for road-only construction. Cities that want to boost employment need to invest in cycling. 

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In a decade, cognitive enhancement may have gone mainstream. Pills can already help you stay up longer, bring more focus to your work, and who knows what else. But what might sound good on an individual level could create societal disruptions, or so Palo Alto think-tank the Institute for the Future proposes in its latest Ten-Year Forecasts.

How Human Rights Will Change When Everyone Can Upgrade Their Brains (via futuristgerd)