Square
There might not be a piece of tech more due for an update than the cash register. Enter Square, a payment platform created by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. With the aid of a tiny magnetic card reader that attaches to a smart phone, Square lets anyone process credit cards. It might not do away with paper entirely — plenty of people still prefer cash — but you certainly don’t need to wait for a receipt: sign on the screen, and Square sends a copy straight to e-mail.
Google’s Driverless Car
Is it an auto automobile? An aut2.0mobile? Whatever you call it, Google’s new Prius — tricked out with radar sensors, video cameras and a laser range finder — has driven itself 140,000 miles without an unscheduled meeting with a light pole. Other geek squads have been running driver less vehicles in the California desert for years, partly at the behest of the U.S. Department of Defense. But only Google can rev the petabyte-sucking mapping technology that guides its car along busy streets and highways. The goal is safety — an admirable one given the world’s million-plus auto fatalities each year. Driver less technology is logical and efficient, and in the near future, it could transform your commute into stress-free transport on a motorized sofa. The sad part for road hogs: if Google is successful in marketing its technology to automakers, you may never get to flip the bird at another driver again.
Edison2
Perhaps the easiest way to make a car more fuel-efficient is to make it lighter. The designers of the Edison2 concept vehicle have taken auto dieting to the extreme. The car — as aerodynamic as it is anorexic — weighs less than 800 lb., which helps it get 102.5 m.p.g. That was good enough to share the Progressive Insurance Automotive X-Prize, an award set up to encourage development of production-ready cars that are super-fuel-efficient. Sadly, Edison2 team owner Oliver Kuttner says you won’t see the car at your dealer anytime soon. But it’s a hopeful sign for an oil-pinched future.
Antro Electric Car
The car of the future, now coming from: Hungary. Yes, it sounds like communist propaganda circa 1967, but the Hungarian designer Antro might just have made a superefficient, supercheap car that could put Western manufacturers to shame. The Antro Solo can hold up to three people — a driver and two passengers, one on either side — who pedal to help drive the ultralight car. The rest of the forward motion comes from an electric motor that’s partly powered by solar panels. If you need a bigger car, Antro has a solution: two Solos can be combined, Transformers-style, to create the family-friendly Duo. Look for it in 2012.
Electric-Car Charging Stations
It’s the chicken-and-egg problem of electric vehicles: until there’s a network of road-embedded rechargers (see No. 17) or a series of stations where drivers can charge their batteries — similar to the gas stations we depend on now — an electric car is inherently limited. Coulomb Technologies is working to break that deadlock. The company is building a system of automated charging stations in public places that are connected to utilities, so the charge for your charge can be added to your home electricity bill. And if your utility hasn’t partnered with Coulomb, you can call a toll-free number and pay with your credit card.
The Straddling Bus
A boom in car sales has caused traffic mayhem in many of China’s major cities. One company wants to improve the situation — by putting even more people on the road. But rather than add more cars, Shenzhen Huashi Future Parking Equipment is developing a massive “straddling bus.” Cheaper than a subway, the partly solar-powered behemoth will span two lanes and carry up to 1,200 people in a carriage raised 7 ft. above the roadway, thus allowing cars to pass, or be passed, underneath. Passengers on the new bus should rightly expect to feel above it all. The company is awaiting government approval for a trial project in Beijing. If that comes through this year, test runs could begin by the end of 2011.
Terrafugia Transition
The Terrafugia Transition could redefine the convertible. And door-to-door travel. Designed by a team of MIT aeronautics engineers, including Terrafugia co-founders Carl Dietrich and his wife Anna Mracek Dietrich, the Transition is a street-legal, airworthy, airbag-and-parachute-equipped flying car that at $200,000 is priced less than a Lamborghini. The first models will be delivered next year. True, with its wings retracted like football goalposts, the Transition, whose 100-horsepower engine gets it 35 m.p.g. on terra firma, isn’t going to be a match for an Italian sports car. But extend the vehicle’s gull wings — and you are requested to do this at an airport — and the rear-propeller-powered Transition can fly two passengers about 500 miles at a cruising speed of 105 m.p.h. After you land, you will not be heading to the rental counter.
Power-Aware Cord
We’d all like to be more energy-efficient. But watching the meter doesn’t intuitively show how much juice is being used minute to minute. The Interactive Institute, a Swedish nonprofit that explores technology and design, had an idea: what if you could actually see the electricity flowing into your machines? The Power-Aware Cord embeds wires around a cable that pulse light in relation to how much electricity is being drawn off the grid. The more current, the brighter and faster the blue light spirals. In testing the device, researchers found that making the invisible visible tuned consumers in to their bad habits, nudging them to power down and offering some surprising appliance insights: when a radio broadcasts drumbeats and bass riffs, its electricity consumption jumps. Talk about being plugged in.
eLegs Exoskeleton
For paraplegic patients, being able to stand — not to mention take a few steps — under their own power is a cruelly unattainable goal. Or at least it has been. But the makers of eLegs, an innovative exoskeleton, are hoping to change that, one step at a time. The robotic prosthetic legs use artificial intelligence to “read” the wearer’s arm gestures via a set of crutches, simulating a natural human gait. It’s the first such device to do so without a tether, and it was inspired by military exoskeletons that soldiers strap on to lift heavy packs. The device requires some getting used to, so it will initially be available only at rehabilitation centers for use with a trained physical therapist, but it may hit the home market by 2013.
EyeWriter
How do you communicate when your brain is active but your body isn’t? The EyeWriter, a collaboration from the Ebeling Group, the Not Impossible Foundation and Graffiti Research Lab, uses low-cost eye-tracking glasses and open-source software to allow people suffering from any kind of neuromuscular syndrome to write and draw by tracking their eye movement and translating it to lines on a screen. The device was created for Tony “Tempt” Quan, an L.A.-based graffiti artist who was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2003. After trying the EyeWriter — the first time he’d drawn anything since he was fully paralyzed — Quan said, “It feels like taking a breath after being held underwater for five minutes.”
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