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Weekly#111

    • The European Patent Office (EPO) has announced its finalists for the 2015 European Inventor Awards, honoring brilliant inventions from a range of scientific fields. (QZ)
    • Companies spend more than $300 billion on servers, software and IT services each year, but growth in those markets is flat, said Richard Villars, an analyst at IDC.

      The infrastructure-services market, which Amazon dominates, doubled in 2014 to more than $9 billion, and is expected to expand to $16 billion in 2016. “It’s clearly where companies are spending money to transform their business,” said Mr. Villars.

      According to Amazon, AWS makes up the bulk of that category, which accounted for $1.67 billion in net sales during the fourth quarter of 2014, and $4.5 billion for the year.
      (WSJ)

    • Netflix subscribers streamed 10 billion hours last quarter,that’s roughly 55 hours per subscriber, per month.
      First Quarter Earning Reports [PDF] (QZ)
    • How Makerspaces Help Local Economies (The Atlantic)
      The first is the availability of “hacker” or makerspaces. There are some 2,000 of them around the world
    • Google Fi Project

    • WhatsApp now has 800 million monthly active users, continuing a pace of growth that may put the mobile messaging app on track to hit one billion users later this year. (WSJ)
    • For much of the early 2000s, the price of a solar panel or module hovered around $4 per watt. …
      ….Then, from 2007 to 2014, the price of crystalline silicon modules dropped from $4 per watt to $0.50 per watt, all but ending the development of thin films…..
      ….Ten years from now we could easily see the cost of solar modules dropping to 25 cents per watt, or roughly half their current cost (QZ)
    • In World First, Scientists Genetically Modify Human Embryos (Discover Magazine)
    • Airbnb Ad – Never A Stranger