Tech Brief
On Tech Brief today: A novel use for old plastic bottles, Garmin's sat-nav fightback against Google, and the end of the line for Facebook's virtual gift shop.
• , according to Buzz Beast:
"The company is called Bionic Yarn, and the brand name is a perfect representation of what the company stands for. Bionic Yarn has durability, strength, and a refined quality. It is available in either yarn or fabric form with primary applications in backpacks, luggage, handbags, active/outdoor apparel, work wear, casual apparel / denim, footwear, and home / outdoor furnishings."
The yarns are neither easy to make, nor entirely recycled, instead mixing more traditional materials with plastic bottle leftovers:
"The Bionic yarn constructing is achieved by covering a PETE (recycled plastic) corespun yarn in a helix formation with two surface filament layers in opposite directions. This creates a counterforce on each component and there by binds them together, having an effect similar to a 'Chinese finger trap.' This in turn creates an extremely durable fabric. The alternate fibres used in the core and the helix of bionic hlx yarn are nylon, high tenacity polyester, lycra, and cotton."
• Billionaire investor Warren Buffett, . After Mr Buffett suggested that he should be paying YouTube for the pleasure, they announced a special new type of account via the YouTube blog:
"The 'Oracle of Omaha' also suggested that YouTube should be charging him 'a lot of money' based on the enjoyment he gets from YouTube. We agree and are happy to announce a new subscription offering: YouTube Pro. Pro will be offered for a limited time at the low price of $100 million/year. We don't expect to sell many, but if Mr. Buffett wants to make sure he's paying his fair share, we take cash, credit and, for him, personal check."
The blog also offered a big *Wink* to its readers, to be sure they knew it was only a joke!
• When Google announced turn-by-turn satellite navigation for its Android-enabled smartphones, some observers predicted the possible demise of sat-nav companies like Garmin and TomTom. The Guardian Technology Blog points out that :
"Using Google Maps on an O2 Pay As You Go tariff, the company set out to see how much a summer tour of France would cost with only an Android phone for company... A return Calais-to-Paris (185 miles) trip by car notched up £74 of data roaming charges, using 12-13 megabytes of data."
Though O2 says that the figures Garmin provided overstated the actual cost of data-roaming:
"An O2 spokesperson, unavailable when contacted before publishing, told us: 'Those figures are incorrect. O2 charges £3 per MB, so 12-13 MB would cost £39 at most. Once you reach £40 per month, O2 stops charging you until you reach 50 MB. We then offer you the high user bolt-on, which gives you up to 200 MB for £120.'"
• Finally for today, . CNet takes up the story:
"The social network announced Thursday that its Gift Shop--the feature it launched in 2007 that allows users to send personalized items to friends on the network--will close on August 1 to allow the company to focus on improving other features. Gifts that users receive before that date will continue to appear on their pages, and users will still be able to use third-party applications to send and receive greeting cards and other items."
Facebook said in a blog post that it was giving up the gift shop to focus on more commonly used features on its site. But the financial impact is difficult to discern, as Steven Musil explains:
"As a privately held company, Facebook isn't required to publish financial performance information, so it's unknown how this feature may have financially benefited the site. But many expected the virtual-goods feature to be a cash cow for Facebook as gifts generally cost $1 (or 10 credits) to send. However large that revenue, it probably can't hold a cupcake's candle to the $835 million in revenue social games like Farmville are expected to generate this year."
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