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Volvo's two-hour delivery leaves packages in your trunk
Volvo has been toying with the idea of delivering goods to your car instead of your home since 2014. After some testing, the company's so-called in-car delivery service is ready for the masses. Teaming up with Swedish startup Urb-it, Volvo is offering drop-offs for the items that you order online in under two hours. Urb-it's speedy service is guaranteed to deliver items a couple of hours after you complete a purchase on your phone, only instead of bringing it to your home, the package is left in the trunk of your Volvo automobile.
Announcing Trunk, an app store for Evernote
Evernote announced a new extension to their platform today, Trunk. It's essentially an App Store for Evernote, highlighting applications, hardware and platforms created by third parties which integrate with Evernote in various ways. Trunk offers easy access to new tech for users, as well as a means for third-party developers to capitalize on their work. Evernote has been a shining example of making good on the "Freemium" business model, where you offer a basic service for free and provide an upgrade path to paid plans (in Evernote's case, a $5 per month Premium plan). It's a very common business model on the 'net, but not everyone manages to turn a profit on it to the extent that Evernote has. The announcement of the Evernote Trunk includes the promise of an App-Store-esque model for developers to make money and share in profits. Among the developers featured on the Trunk and in today's press conference were Egretlist, Voice2Note, SAP StreamWork and social application Seesmic. The latest version of the Evernote Mac client has a button in the top toolbar for Trunk, where you can see services, mobile and desktop apps and hardware which can be added to Evernote to expand its functionality. Some services are free, some are premium. Voice2Note, for example, adds search to voice notes and the ability to add notes via your phone. 5 transcriptions per month are free, but you pay about $30 a year for unlimited transcriptions plus the ability to tag notes by adding "tag with..." to the end of an audio note. Social notebooks from the likes of BlackBook and Make Magazine are now available through Trunk as well. Evernote also mentions potential future enhancements such suggestions (similar to SpringPad, I assume) and semantic analysis. Notable, but not part of any press coverage today, is a change in the tag display of the new Mac client. Selecting View > Show Unassigned Tags will trim the visible tags in the sidebar down to just tags related to the current search or selected note. It's a major improvement to usability and one I'd been hoping would show up for quite some time. Evernote is a free service which can be upgraded to transfer 500MB per month and store any type of file for $5US per month or $45US per year. The desktop client for Mac is free, and so are the iPhone and iPad versions (the iPad app is especially cool). Take a look, and check out the Trunk to see what functionality you might want to add to Evernote.
Festo's strong and agile robot arm is based on the elephant's trunk, scares the bejesus out of us (video)
Festo's unveiled some pretty impressive tech over the years, from fluidic muscles to robotic flying penguins, but this next one has us a bit worried. The Bionic Handling Assistant is ostensibly patterned after the elephant's trunk, designed to be both agile and delicate... but have you seen the thing? We're pretty sure that it was patterned after the tentacles of Doctor Octopus, and that it will crush you and everyone you care about without a second thought. But if you're the trusting type, the company assures you that this is just the thing for all those delicate processes you've been meaning to automate but haven't been able to in the past: everything from handling fruit to animal husbandry is a cinch with this "hierarchically arranged system of muscles and evolutionary optimized movement patterns"! But don't take our word for it: peep the video after the break.
Monolab Design Trunk spares no expense to accomodate expensive gear
While most of us can get by with a laptop bag on our travels, if you really need to have your primo gear with you at all times, you may want to take some cues from this one-of-a-kind trunk from the folks at Monolab Design. Apparently, this project began years ago when its creator was living from hotel to hotel, and it has now wound up as a fixture in the first Monolab|Workspace in Palo Alto, California. Not exactly fulfilling its purpose, to be sure, but it is undeniably a pretty impressive piece of work, with the entire 300-pound rid constructed out of anodized aluminum, and it boasting custom-built accommodations for a Mac Pro, a 23-inch Apple Cinema Display 23″, a Music Hall Mambo amplifier, and a pair of aluminum-enclosed Webern loudspeakers. No plans for building your own, unfortunately, but you can get a better look at it by hitting up the read link below.
Pinel & Pinel offers up iMac rig carrier, cleverly dubbed iTrunk
Sure, the iMac's all-in-one design makes it a tad easier to tote around than, say, every other non-conjoined computer rig, but it still lacks the mobility true road warriors crave. Aside from the iLugger bag, hauling around that iMac was a struggle at best, but now you've got a way to not only bring along your trusty computer when you hit the highways, but your entire host of very necessary accessories can tag along too. Pinel & Pinel, creators of customized hauling cabinets and other random knick knacks, has crafted an all-inclusive rolling carrying container for your iMac, speakers, printer, keyboard, mouse, and basically anything else that feels at home when connected to your Mac. We're not sure if the bottom compartment sports a fuel-powered generator, but it looks that you could add one if you so choose, and while we've no idea how much coinage this gigantic box would run you, those even remotely interested probably aren't worried about dollars and cents in the first place.[Via Slashgear]
