Toyota is opening the door to the hydrogen future, making available thousands of hydrogen fuel cell patents royalty free. Announced today at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show, this Toyota initiative will spur development and introduction of innovative fuel cell technologies around the world.

Toyota will invite royalty-free use of approximately 5,680 fuel cell related patents held globally, including critical technologies developed for the new Toyota Mirai. The list includes approximately 1,970 patents related to fuel cell stacks, 290 associated with high-pressure hydrogen tanks, 3,350 related to fuel cell system software control and 70 patents related to hydrogen production and supply.

“At Toyota, we believe that when good ideas are shared, great things can happen,”

via Toyota Opens the Door and Invites the Industry to the Hydrogen Future | Corporate.

Skiplagged.com found out that you can buy a cheaper ticket from A – B if you buy a ticket to C where B is a stop on the way (A – B – C) and then just get off at B.

For example, a customer buying a ticket from New York to Los Angeles, where competition is high, could get a lower rate than a flight to Chicago, but could simply get off the plane during a stop in Chicago and avoid a higher fare.

United and Orbitz are going all ballistic on Aktarer Zaman’s (Skiplagged.com) arse because of not liking a) their own stupidity exposed and b) not liking competition.

Airline, travel site sue over 'hacked' airfares.

Skiplagged is taking contributions to his legal defence, he probably needs it.

Company marketed specialized computers designed to produce the cryptocurrency but delivered useless machines, according to an FTC complaint.

via Bitcoin-mining company Butterfly Labs shut down by FTC – CNET.

Airpooler – an Uber for plane rides – fucked up private pilots in the US flying people to destinations for the price of fuel (and so to get their hours) by asking the FAA for clarification of a 1964 rule.

The FAA clarification not only extends to ride sharing services, but also to the old fashion word of mouth / paper board note that has been in use pretty universally.

The FAA states that this kind of flying is commercial and for that you need to spend huge amounts of money on a commercial pilots license.

FAA Bans Planesharing Startups | TechCrunch.

Interestingly, recruiters spend only 6 seconds reviewing an individual resume!

They spend that time looking at:
Name
Current title / company
Previous title / company
Previous position start and end dates
Current position start and end dates
Education

If you add a picture, they spend 19% of that time looking at the picture, not the information.

Professionally re-written resumes score 60% better on “usability” – they are easier to read.

Professional resumes had less data, were evenly formatted and
were described as “clearer.” They scored 40% better than before a re-write.

Note that the study is commissioned by TheLadders, a professional CV writing company, so the results are clearly interpreted in their favor, but the above points remain valid.

TheLadders-EyeTracking-StudyC2.pdf.

This time, 36% of people tested still do not realise that Google Adwords are ads.

Furthermore, about a quarter of people don’t know that Google had any advertising at all. And this despite the yellow text box proclaiming ‘ads’.

via 36% of people still don't realise that Google Adwords are ads | Econsultancy.

Bitcoin Now on Bloomberg | Blog | Bloomberg L.P..

This is an incredible story: The Silk Road 2.0 decided not to fold and has been repaying customers that lost their BTC by randomly assigning service costs BTC to duped customers instead of paying it out to staff.

How Silk Road Bounced Back from Its Multimillion-Dollar Hack | Motherboard.

This will probably cost the copyright owners millions, because the current system won’t work any more. Considering studies keep showing that freely shared content sells better than DRM content, copyright will shoot itself further in the foot. Well done on furthering shortsighted, US business interests, EU.

The Netherlands Must Outlaw Downloading, EU Court Rules (Update) | TorrentFreak.

China’s central bank has ruled that all banks and payment service providers in the country must cease dealing in Bitcoin.

The ruling, effective from April 15th, basically shutters all Bitcoin trading sites in the Middle Kingdom and means cash purchases will soon be the only way to buy into the virtual currency.

via Bitcoin bloodbath as China shutters all trading sites • The Register.

OKCoin has grown rapidly over the past few weeks and is now the biggest Chinese exchange, according to its CEO Star Xu. He claims the exchange’s current daily trade volume is approximately 50,000 bitcoins per day.

Interestingly, on top of that, the exchange allegedly trades 5 million litecoins per day. The company claims that at its peak it reached over 300,000 bitcoin and 13 million litecoin trades.

OKCoin Raises $10 Million to Become China’s ‘Largest Exchange’.

The city-state says the regulations for transacting digital currencies will be similar to those currently imposed on money changers and remittance businesses that undertake cash transactions.

BBC News – Singapore to regulate virtual currency exchanges.

After having lost court case after court case, NORMA has won in the highest courts, saying that it should get money for each form of media – hard disk, ipod, SD Card, basically anything that allows digital content copied to it – in order to ‘pay the artists’ that could, potentially have their music copied to this media. Not only will the artists not see any of this money, but there is no way of determining who should get how much! Do Dutch judges not understand digital thingamies? Are they still locked into a battle with paper and pen whilst the rest of the world has advanced into a tablet and pc world?

Hoge Raad: bevriezing thuiskopieheffing illegaal – Webwereld.

The link has a whitepaper and a generator

http://m.slashdot.org/story/196547

It’s a huge library of video courses you can take for free.

Learn to Invest: Learn how to buy stocks and how to invest.

UK government plans switch from Microsoft Office to open source | Technology | theguardian.com.

All stakeholders are welcome to contribute to this consultation. Contributions are particularly sought from consumers, users, authors, performers, publishers, producers, broadcasters, intermediaries, distributors and other service providers, Collective Management Organisations, public authorities and Member States.

The objective of this consultation is to gather input from all stakeholders on the review of the EU copyright rules.

Review of the EU copyright rules – Consultations – The EU Single Market – European Commission.

The link above has a few documents for you to download. Choose one and fill in the questionaire in the consultation document and send it back. Easy!

Superscammer. And relevant when compared to the wolf of wallstreet!

http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/the-dark-lord-of-the-internet/355726/?single_page=true

Summarizing 400 studies over the past 60 years, the report concludes that humans perform only “the same as or slightly better than chance.” Given that the TSA has spent almost a billion dollars on the program, that’s a pretty poor record.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/13/5100702/tsa-screening-works-only-a-little-better-than-chance-according-to

This includes extensive studies of the TSA SPOT programme over 2011 & 2012

In 2012 I bought an apartment specifically to rent out on airbnb. I’ve been managing it remotely for the past year. This post includes everything I learned as well as some revenue numbers

http://gizmodo.com/i-bought-an-apartment-just-to-rent-it-out-on-airbnb-1458666661/@whitsongordon?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+lifehacker%2Ffull+%28Lifehacker%29

The gist is pretty simple: drive traffic to sites via links, recieve money (about $1 per 1000 hits) via their affiliate advertising programmes.

http://torrentfreak.com/making-money-from-movie-streaming-sites-an-insiders-story-131019/

What is the world coming to when the largest patent trolls, namely Apple, MS, and Samsung as well as BlackBerry, Cisco, HP, Intel, Yahoo, Google are trying to reign in new EU laws that would make patent trolling easy? Could it be that even they recognise that the patent system is outmoded and harms innovation and sales in a big way?

Techreuzen: EU wordt walhalla voor patenttrollen – Webwereld.