The ax isn't typically something we think of as modern or revolutionary. It's one of the oldest tools in the human toolbox.
But some guys at Vipukirves, in Finland, have discovered a huge flaw with the tool: It's really hard to use. As a matter of physics and engineering, splitting wood with an ax requires a huge amount of power to drive the wedge into the wood and split it without getting the ax stuck. Traditional axes can also be dangerous since they can hit your leg if you miss the target. This is why using an ax is such a macho test of strength, and not a simple household task you can assign to a child.
One day, some guy thought to himself, "Eureka! I need to work on this!" (according to the history of Vipukirves). After testing out a few different methods, the company realized that leverage was the answer to the problem. A regular ax uses virtually no leverage — it simply strikes wood at a 90-degree angle, like a sharp hammer. Leverage — in which a shallow angle is used to maximize the force of the weight on the other end of the lever creating the angle — is a more efficient way of transferring force.
And so the Leveraxe was born.
The traditional ax is based on using a wedge that requires enough momentum to split the wood. This is why lumberjacks tend to be buff, ripped men. But the Leveraxe is based on a lever mechanism and a rotational action. The head is attached from the side, not the center, which alters its center of gravity. There's also a wider edge. When the ax hits the wood, the head twists in your hands and for a brief moment the sharp edge of the ax becomes a lever, breaking off whatever chunk of wood is at the side of the blade.
Logs simply collapse into slices as a result:
Watching a log get demolished by a Leveraxe with a few swift chops is an oddly pleasing and mesmerizing experience, and there's a video of that happening at the bottom of this post.
According to Vipukirves, each swing of the Leveraxe splits a piece of wood, and the ax will not get stuck.
And because it requires minimal force to use, even kids can split wood with the Leveraxe.
The traditional ax may take loads of effort and time, but Vipukirves' solution makes it easier to end up with as much wood as this guy.
To see the Leveraxe in action, watch this video:
(Spoiler alert: He kind of does the same thing over and over, so you probably need not watch all seven minutes.)
Webvan, the online grocery business Louis Borders founded in 1999 in the thick of the dot-com bubble, went bankrupt only two years after it IPO'd. The company collapsed when it tried to expand outside the San Francisco Bay Area, because it had neither a sustainable business model nor much demand outside of the Valley.
Webvan's history has lived on as a story of the dot-com disaster and as a cautionary tale to delivery startups today, but Borders wasn't discouraged.
He's back to give his grocery delivery service idea a "take two," according to Re/code's Jason Del Ray, who discovered a stealth startup called Home Delivery Service on the site of Borders' incubator.
According to its description, HDS "offers consumers a single online store to shop for fresh foods and general merchandise from the world's leading retail brands." The company will have distribution centers where it will assemble multiretailer orders in returnable totes that it will send to users free, with same-day delivery.
Not only is Borders boldly going where he has gone before, but he's entering a space that is much more crowded than it was back in 1999. FreshDirect has been gaining traction in more and more markets, Amazon has been working on Fresh for years, Google is experimenting with Shopping Express, Walmart and eBay have both tried to enter the market, and Instacart and a handful of other smaller startups are all working on the quick delivery of groceries, too. No one company has emerged as the obvious leader in the space yet.
Still, although there's undeniably growing interest from consumers in the idea of food and other necessities delivered fast, HDS — when and if it launches — will be facing fierce competition. Perhaps it believes that its "patented, automated distribution technology" will be the secret sauce it needs to pull ahead.
On Friday, social network and recruiting site LinkedIn announced via blog post that it had officially surpassed 300 million members, with 100 million members based in the U.S. alone. Acquiring roughly 100 million users since January 2013, the company noted that much of the growth in traffic has come from two areas: internationally and on mobile. LinkedIn stressed that it was on the verge of its “mobile moment,” meaning that sometime in 2014, mobile use will actually surpass desktop traffic. Both feed directly into each other — apparently mobile accounts for more than 50 percent of LinkedIn's international traffic already. But the company conveniently side-steps any stats related to Monthly Active Users, perhaps a sign that the company is still trying to make its platform a daily destination.
Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
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Ever since Dolly the sheep was cloned eighteen years ago, scientists have been trying and failing to use that same technique to create cloned human embryos from adult cells. Now, they've finally succeeded, in what could a major step toward personalized organ transplants and other therapies that rely on a pool of stem cells.
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-- For more information read the original article here.
-- For more information read the original article here.
-- For more information read the original article here.
Remember last December, when Beyoncé caused a music industry firestorm by releasing her new album via her website and iTunes a full week before retailers like Amazon and Target could sell it?
Well, unbeknownst to them, these three guys were part of the controversy. Their company, DigitalOcean, runs the cloud service that hosts Beyoncé's website. But they didn't know about her album plans until they saw the traffic go crazy on their cloud that day.
"We had no idea," co-founder and CEO Ben Uretsky told Business Insider. "Her development team chose DigitalOcean because of our fast cloud servers."
That Beyoncé's web developers had full confidence that this startup could safely handle the load when millions of people all jumped on the website the second the album launched says a lot about the startup.
But it was just another milestone in a whirlwind that began two years ago, when brothers Ben and Moisey Uretsky met Mitch Wainer through Craigslist.
"We met on Craigslist, but it wasn't the personals," laughs co-founder and CMO Wainer. "Ben and Moisey put out a job listing and I answered it."
Wainer was bored with a dead-end job at a startup where he had no equity, and was surfing for new options. He had gotten an offer from another hot New York startup, ZocDoc, but made a "big bet" to go become a founder instead.
The bet paid off. DigitalOcean landed a spot in the TechStars 2012 class in Boulder, Colo., and the team built a cloud service that quickly became astoundingly popular.
In less than two years, mostly through word-of-mouth, DigitalOcean has become the ninth largest cloud infrastructure company in the world, according to a site that tracks such stats, Netcraft.
IT professionals love it for something called "droplets," which is what the company calls its cloud computers. Droplets can be set up in 55 seconds, they use superfast solid-state disk (SSD) flash storage (that's what Beyoncé's team liked) and cost as little as $5/month.
Today the company hosts about 1.5 million "droplets" and was adding more servers per month than Amazon's cloud, Netcraft says. It has 150,000 customers and recently opened a new Amsterdam data center, too.
In March, DigitalOcean nabbed a big $35 million Series A at a $153 million valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz (it has raised $37.2 million total). And, unlike many Silicon Valley cloud startups, DigitalOcean didn't need the money. It's already profitable, Wainer says.
They don't plan to use the investment to operate at a loss.
"We'll grow as fast as possible as long as we're at break even," Wainer says. "The moment we start to go into the red, we would take a step back. We just love running profitable companies. That's a contrast with New York. We're real. We're down to earth. We don't run a fantasy revenue model."
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