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Digital Planet: New Year's Tech Resolutions

Factual: Science & Nature

People sit around computers at a café

06/01/2015

New Year's Tech Resolutions

BBC World Service - Digital Planet, New Year's Tech Resolutions

Portugal's innovative mobile wi-fi network, designing your own spacecraft, 3D printing

If technology has become a huge part of our lives do we need to pay more attention to how we shape it before it shapes us? Gareth Mitchell and Bill Thompson discuss their tech New Year's resolutions. How might we make ourselves safer online, and is there ever a need for an internet sabbatical?

Porto Mesh on the Buses
A company that originates from Portugal has created a large-scale mobile wi-fi network that could be a model for many cities around the world. The scheme was first launched in the Portuguese city of Porto. In the system, buses and taxis are equipped with routers that serve as mobile wi-fi hot spots for the thousands of commuters. The routers also collect data from the vehicles - and from sensors on rubbish bins dispersed in the city - and relay the data back to HQ to facilitate better civic planning. Click hears from Venium's CEO João Barros.

Pocket Spacecraft
Michael Johnson is the man behind Pocket Spacecraft - a crowd-sourcing space exploration project. To date, space exploration has relied on large, expensive custom-built spacecraft over the years, mass-produced and mass-customised and generic, made by the likes of NASA and the European space agency.  But have you ever thought of building and designing your very own spacecraft? Well now you can, courtesy of Michael Johnson and Pocket Spacecraft who produce and manufacture an open-sourced mass generic spacecraft for interplanetary exploration.  Johnson joins Click to explain how it works.

Autodesk Pop-Up 3D printing
3D printing, as witnessed at CES this year, continues its inexorable rise.  More and more designers are beginning to explore its use in generative design – cloud computing used to generate options that a designer might never have thought of. Gareth Mitchell travels to Paris to a pop-up gallery organised by Autodesk to demonstrate the possibilities opened up by 3D printing.


(Photo: People sit around computers at a café. Credit: AFP/Getty Images)

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