Tech History Lesson: The Cellphone
40 years ago this week, the first cellphone call was made. Why? Mostly, for spite. The Atlantic reports that on April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper, and a Motorola design team had a cellphone prototype. To celebrate, Cooper made a call to the landline at Bell Labs, where he was connected to his counterpart, Joel Engel.
Disney has shut down LucasArts, and plans to move from developing video games internally, to a licensing model, reports Mashable. That would mean that games from series like Star Wars and Indiana Jones would be done via other developers, and that current games in development by LucasArts, which includes Star Wars 1313, have also been scrapped. Also, see what Boogie, aka Francis, thinks about the situation here.
There aren't any ads in Facebook's photo-sharing platform Instagram, so how are marketers coping? By coming up with "sponsored posts" on their own -- with no revenue going to Facebook. For example, reports AdAge, a recent Beyonce instagram shows the artist in a collage with a can of Pepsi (for which she is now a brand ambassador.)
A startup company called Moon Express is hoping to strike it rich by offering governments, companies and pretty much anyone else a chance to deliver packages to the moon, reports Wired. And not just to become the UPS of space, but to begin the process of "industrializing" space -- mining resources and setting it up as a place Earthlings can move to one day. Ever since asteroids started crashing onto the moon, its surface is now home to precious metals like platinum.
Do you miss the 1970s? Head over to Scarfolk, an online-only community that is perpetually stuck in that decade. According to its mayor, R. Littler, who spoke to Creative Review, the community is a "town" in England that is stuck in a perpetual loop of that decade. A blog makes available the artifacts of that decade -- from PSAs to ice-cream ads -- and goes beyond the nostalgia to show the darker side of what wasn't a very fun time to live in.
