Tech Money: Ideas

More people than ever will be able to ditch their landline phones with T-Mobile’s new Wi-Fi router:

At the moment, it is not a commercial device but it could be soon. The technology exists. Nokia has built a concept that demonstrates how future cell phones might be stretchable and flexible in order to allow the user to transform their mobile device into radically different shapes. The concept is named Nokia Morph.

Nokia Morph would use nanotechnology to give a flexible body with transparent display and self-cleaning surfaces. The device also would include a keyboard and a touchpad to satisfy the user’s needs. “We hope that this combination of art and science will showcase the potential of nanoscience to a wider audience. The techniques we are developing might one day mean new possibilities in terms of the design and function of mobile devices”, Dr. Tapani Ryhanen, Head of the NRC Cambridge UK laboratory, Nokia, said.

The concept device will be on display from February 24 to May 12, 2008 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and it is part of the “Design and Elastic Mind” exhibition.

Nanotechnology is a possibility to integrate complex functions to current devices and the advantage would be the low cost. These technologies can be implemented within the next seven years.

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Related article: 7 Jobs That Nokia’s Phone of the Future Will Be Good For

Google hosts “Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day,” where research scientist Ellen Spertus explains why it’s important to reach out to middle-school girls:

The American missile impacted the spy satellite with toxic fuel and reduced it to ball-sized chunks, but the Pentagon said that there is not a 100% guarantee the fuel tank has been destroyed, an official spokesman said Thursday.   
   
“Thus far, we have seen nothing larger than a football”, James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared during a press conference. 
 
“We also have a high degree of confidence that we also got the tank… we are working our way throughout that, we will not be at a point where we can say for sure”, he said. 
   
A missile launched from a US Navy ship hit the old American spy satellite that was drifting toward the Earth. According to the Government, the operation was executed  to avoid problems with a satellite falling to Earth with potentially hazardous fuel.

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The KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid) is very powerful when it is applied to a website. And Hot or Not is a great example. Hotornot.com was originally a site where people could rate the registered users by using a scale of 1 to 10. The scores were published to both the user and the public. This simple idea and smart work from the founders were enough to make this site really popular.

HotorNot.com was founded by James Hong and Jim Young in October 2000. Initially, they had no real plans for the service to be anything other than a fun site for a few friends. One day, they launched the site and emailed 40 friends. But they were able to get 40,000 visitors that day.

Now, almost eight years later, Hotornot.com is not only a rating site, but also an online dating site. It has a service called “Meet People”. It is very similar to the basic rating service, but you can know more details about the users. You must click ‘YES’ on the people that you would like to meet. If somebody also clicks ‘YES’ to you, he or she will appear in your double-match list.

HotorNot.com has become a profitable business by establishing three revenue sources: advertising (including Adsense), virtual flowers and a Premium service that allows users to connect with other users with no restrictions. In the last days, Hotornot.com was acquired by Avid Life Media. The buyers paid around $20 million for the site. Not bad at all for a website run out of the living room by two guys.

Take a look, click here.