Hasta La Ideas

Check out this nutty video of DARPA/Boeing’s DiscRotor concept, a flying craft that combines the VTOL (vertical takeoff/landing) capabilities of a helicopter with the long-range capacity of an airplane. It starts off looking like a normal ‘copter, but once it hits speed the rotors retract into a low-drag disc atop the machine; then forward momentum coupled with vertical propellors or turbines mean the conventional wings can keep it aloft. Pretty darn inventive.

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CNN has an interview up with Nigel Waller, the CEO of Movirtu Limited and the man behind their Cloud Phone. Waller dropped the surprising statistic that worldwide there are one billion people who use cell phones–but don’t own one; instead they share, borrow or rent them.

The Cloud Phone was intended to serve this market. At first Waller tried to create a cell phone that could be manufactured for just $5 so that everyone could afford one, but he couldn’t pull it off:

…There are three key components in every mobile phone today, which cost about $5 or $6. There’s the display, the keyboard and there’s the RF [radio frequency] chip. Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars of phones that are manufactured, they still don’t seem to be able to reduce the price of those three key elements. You add up those elements and you’ve got $18 or whereabouts. You add $1 for the battery, $1 for the SIM-card holder and you’ve got $20, $25.

Instead Waller went with a $25 phone, but designed it so that a village of users could share it while still maintaining individual phone numbers accounts on a single phone. Activation cost? Just 10 to 20 cents per person.

Read the full interview, which is filled with interesting insights on how the other half uses their phones, here.

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Thank you to EVERYONE (all 10,738 of you!) who are now following @Unclutterer on Twitter and who are participating in our Kindle giveaway. Now, let’s get on to the good stuff …

At 10:00 a.m. EDT, the random number generator picked the following number:

5320

Which means, the winner of today’s Kindle Wireless Reading Device is:

@austinmomof7

I have direct messaged the winner of the Kindle and she has 24 hours to respond.

Remember, there is one more giveaway this Thursday, October 28, so you can still sign up to follow @Unclutterer on Twitter. Congratulations, again, to @austinmomof7.

Is this the first you’ve heard of the giveaway? Learn more.

Like this site? Buy Erin Rooney Doland’s Unclutter Your Life in One Week from Amazon.com today.

Pratt Institute raised a record-breaking $522,000 last week at the school’s annual Legends scholarship benefit, held at 7 World Trade Center in Manhattan. More than 400 guests turned out to honor artist Ellsworth Kelly, fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger, and philanthropist Emily Fisher Landau (pictured at left), who were selected as “distinguished individuals whose accomplishments and values resonate with those of Pratt.” The healthy take from ticket sales got a surprise boost from on-the-spot pledges that brought the total amount raised to $560,000: Pratt Trustee James D. Kuhn donated $28,000 in honor of his wife and event co-chair Marjorie Kuhn while Larry Leeds, chairman of Buckingham Capital Management, donated an additional $10,000 in honor of Hilfiger. When it came time to hand out the awards, designed by Pratt industrial design undergrad Klara Varosy (who also got to present them to the honorees), Kelly looked back on his own student days at Pratt in the 1940s. “I want to thank Pratt for putting me on the road to becoming an artist,” he told the crowd, which included architect Robert Siegel, art director George Lois, artist Mickalene Thomas (Pratt alums all); Pratt Trustees and event co-chairs Kurt Andersen and Amy Cappellazzo; and artists Francesco Clemente, Glenn Ligon, and Edward Mapplethorpe. Later, Landau spoke of her legendary eye for artistic talent. “You could take me into any gallery with art around the room and I could tell you which was the best,” she said. “And that was usually the one the artist wasn’t selling.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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