Hasta La Gadget!

Competition is a good thing in any market. The more businesses you have working for the consumer’s dollar, it tends to lead to better prices and service. Google announced not long ago that it would be rolling out its Google Fiber Internet service in Austin, Texas.

The announcement from Google has existing Internet providers within Austin scrambling to try and keep customers on their service.

For starters, Internet provider Time Warner Cable has announced that it will be offering all of its subscribers free access to Wi-Fi hotspots within the city. Time Warner says that its existing customers with standard cable packages or above can now get free access to the citywide Wi-Fi network that the company is building.

Time Warner went so far as to specifically point out Google Fiber as the reason it is speeding up the deployment of its Wi-Fi network. Still, I suspect that Time Warner will be unable to compete on pure performance and a lot of its customers will still defect to Google Fiber when it’s available.

[via Gigaom]

Some artists choose to drink alcohol while they work, but British artist Carne Griffiths chooses to use vodka, brandy, and tea traditional paint to create the unique colors and textures of her eye-catching and enthralling work.

No, you’re not looking at an early preview of Star Wars Episode VII — it just might represent the future of air transport, though. Boeing has spent years developing a truly quiet supersonic airliner concept, the Icon II, and what you see is an aerodynamics test of a mockup in a vaguely Death Star-like wind tunnel at NASA’s Glenn Research Center. The starfighter design is for more than just show, as you’d suspect. Its V-tail design moves sonic booms further back, reducing the chance that shockwaves will reach the ground (and our ears) intact, while the top-mounted engines isolate engine noise. Boeing and NASA are ultimately hoping for production passenger aircraft discreet enough to fly over land at supersonic speeds, although we can’t help but think that the sci-fi look is a convenient bonus.

Filed under: Transportation, Alt

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Source: New Scientist

These days you need to have a bunch of different cords to connect all of your handheld electronics to your computer. Now you can hide all of those cords in a drawer and have all of those different USB connections at your fingertips (or in your pocket) with this one tool. It is the Swiss Army Knife of the cyber age.

You might be inclined to think that airport security is not the best place to wear Google Glass. You’d probably be right, but given the amount that I travel it was pretty-well inevitable that I’d cross through some security checkpoint before the course of this testing would be through.

I’m honored to be part of the XPRIZE Visioneering conference this week, a gathering of incredible minds putting their considerable brainpower behind the creation of competitions to make the world a better place. But, to take part I’d have to get out to California, and that meant yet another long flight across the country — and another trip through the full-body scanner. The question is, how would the folks at airport security react to it?

Filed under: Wearables, Google

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