This is a Kickstarter that has been funded 2,180,650of their initial $80,000 goal.It doesn’t necessarily need your help to become a reality – but you’ll probably want one in your reality.
3D printers are still fringe for some of the population even though they’ve been around for a while. They’re very cool, have so many amazing consequences for the future, but have been a little expensive and carry a little bit of a intimidating barrier to entry for the general population.
The OLO on the other hand, comes in at a slick $99 clams, is portable at just over a pound, runs on AA batteries, and is super easy for both new users and pro’s. This one sentence says it all, straight from the Sauce:
“Imagine being able to print 3D objects directly from your smartphone… for just $99.”
Actually, OLO dudes, we weren’t able to imagine that… Now we can though. OLO won the World Maker Faire Editor’s Choice Award in October 2015 and has since blown people’s minds, just like it did ours, worldwide.
We wish we may we wish we might, have the wish we wish tonight.
Tonight, we’re wishing on Apps ( cos we’re super fun and cool like that). Apps have been around for so few years (5.5 to be exact) and yet we just don’t know how we would live our technocratic lives without a lot of them!
BUT. There’s some blank spots. Here’s our wish-list for Apps of the future.
1. An App that tells you when you’re being stupid.
2. An App that buys the perfect gift for people, and wraps it.
3. An App that tells you exactly how many calories is in a meal or specific food item by scanning it.
4. An App that helps you pick which charity is most in need
5. A Space-Time jumping App, obviously.
6. An app that learns your priorities and then organizes your to-do list accordingly.
7. An App that tells you exactly when you would really be missing out on the best time ever by choosing to stay home and watch Diners Drive-Ins and Dives.
8. An App so you can communicate with animals.
What Apps do you wish existed? Telekinesis would be nice, actually, now we think about it…
Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin. What are we to do with you? Not a lot of people know about you, far less understand you or how you work, you’re super unstable and yet you’re growing. You’re the new in thing to talk about in media and that somehow continues to be the new in thing to talk about as if you know what you’re talking about.
Honesty corner: We don’t really know what we’re talking about when it comes to Bitcoin, but this is what we do know: It’s a cybercurrency that is created, distributed and authenticated outside of banks or governments.
People mine for them using their own computers by assisting other people’s Bitcoin transactions. And then they have them, and they can spend them. Right? We’re learning! We feel like it might be a thing we really need to learn, because it’s moving from a thing that you read about on the internet, to a thing that people are using as proper currency on the internet quite quickly.
Case in point: Online discount retailer Overstock.com is now accepting Bitcoin. In fact, more than 800 purchases, equaling $130,000 were made in the first 24 hours the company was accepting the cybercurrency.
Patrick Byrne, the company’s chariman and CEO had this to say:
“Digital currency will be an important part of the future and Overstock is excited to be the first major online shopping retailer to accept it,” said Patrick Byrne, Overstock.com chairman and CEO. ”As one who believes in limited government, this attracts me because it is a form of money that no government mandarin can will it into existence.”
More retailers are saying they will be accepting Bitcoin – most recently the Sacramento Kings, making them the first professional sports franchise to accept them starting on March 1st this year in the team store and in ticket sales.
Kings owner Vivek Ranadive says accepting Bitcoins is the next step in allowing fans to leave their wallets at home. Solving situations like this one, at the very least;
Other companies such as Paypal are considering making the move to accepting the currency in the future. In the meantime they are perhaps waiting for it to stabilize, perhaps they too are unsure of what the consequences are of accepting the currency. On Thursday, one Bitcoin was worth approximately $850.
Meanwhile, Kanye West has sued, and won against similar cybercurrency Coinye for using his image. Silly Fish Sticks. Doesn’t he know it’s the way of the future? We could’ve all been using Coinye!
So guys, it’s almost 2014, which means it’s almost the future, right? And what better way to realize that then by realizing that sharks are now using Twitter?
Yup, You heard us correctly.
Off the coast of Western Australia there are 320 sharks ( Great Whites included) outfitted with transmitters that automatically update Surf Life Saving Western Australia’s Twitter feed when the sharks get too close ( within 0.6 of a mile) to any of the coast’s popular beaches.
The move is to keep surfers and swimmers safe and aware of the sharks’ presence, which is vitally important with 6 deaths due to shark attacks off Western Australia in the past two years.
For example, a tweet sent early Saturday in Australia reads: “Fisheries advise: tagged Bronze whaler shark detected at Garden Island (north end) receiver at 06:0700 AM on 27-Dec-2013.”
We love this. Sure, it’s a program designed to protect life and it seems to be working and all that good stuff, but it’s also sharks sending tweets.
Do you guys remember a lil’ while back when a video featuring a blocky, stack together futuristic idealistic mobile phone started doing the social media rounds?
This one:
If you haven’t seen it, definitely check it out. There are some really smart ideas in there, formed by some people really thinking about how to make the future of tech better.
The phone in the video above is designed by a group called Phonebloks, and it’s a design prototype; it’s not real, yet. Turns out Motorola has been thinking along the same lines as the guys from Phonebloks, and now they’re working together on a project that is super exciting.
Over the last six months, our MAKEwithMOTO team took Sticky, a truck wrapped entirely in velcro and filled with rooted, hackable Motorola smartphones and high-end 3D printing equipment, across the country for a series of make-a-thons.
On that trip we saw the first signs of a new, open hardware ecosystem made possible by advances in additive manufacturing and access to the powerful computational capabilities of modern smartphones. These included new devices and applications that we could never have imagined from inside our own labs. Open fuels innovation. See some examples here, here, and here.
After the trip, we asked ourselves, how do we bring the benefits of an open hardware ecosystem to 6 billion people? Meet Ara.
Led by Motorola’s Advanced Technology and Projects group, Project Ara is developing a free, open hardware platform for creating highly modular smartphones. We want to do for hardware what the Android platform has done for software: create a vibrant third-party developer ecosystem, lower the barriers to entry, increase the pace of innovation, and substantially compress development timelines.
Our goal is to drive a more thoughtful, expressive, and open relationship between users, developers, and their phones. To give you the power to decide what your phone does, how it looks, where and what it’s made of, how much it costs, and how long you’ll keep it.
Here’s a sneak peek at early designs for Project Ara:
The design for Project Ara consists of what we call an endoskeleton (endo) and modules. The endo is the structural frame that holds all the modules in place. A module can be anything, from a new application processor to a new display or keyboard, an extra battery, a pulse oximeter–or something not yet thought of!
We’ve been working on Project Ara for over a year. Recently, we met Dave Hakkens, the creator of Phonebloks. Turns out we share a common vision: to develop a phone platform that is modular, open, customizable, and made for the entire world.
We’ve done deep technical work. Dave created a community. The power of open requires both. So we will be working on Project Ara in the open, engaging with the Phonebloks community throughout our development process, as well as asking questions to our Project Ara research scouts (volunteers interested in helping us learn about how people make choices).
In a few months, we will also send an invitation to developers to start creating modules for the Ara platform (to spice it up a bit, there might be prizes!). We anticipate an alpha release of the Module Developer’s Kit (MDK) sometime this winter.
So stay tuned. There will be a lot more coming from us in the next few months.
–Paul Eremenko, and the Motorola Advanced Technology and Projects group, Project Ara Team
Cool Features, New Releases | iPhone-Antidote | 
April 19, 2016 5:30 pm | 
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