Julie Bykowicz & Angela Greiling Keane:

Tesla Motors was in trouble in North Carolina. Prohibited from opening showrooms there, it was on the way to being unable to sell cars at all when the state Senate voted unanimously to block online auto sales.
 
 Then Tesla turned out a lobbying weapon that, in the home state of stock-car racing’s hall of fame, spoke louder than money: It parked a Model S at the Capitol and invited lawmakers and Gov. Pat McCrory, R, to take it for a spin.
 
 “When you accelerate it, it was the same sort of feeling I got when I test-drove a Mustang Boss back when I was probably 23 years old,” Republican House Speaker Thomas Tillis, 53, told the Raleigh News & Observer.

Yann Gourvennec:

Gartner’s four phases of “cognizant computing”
 
 “sync me”: this is the most obvious phase, the one which most of the Computing giants have achieved; it is composed of storage and the syncing of personal data,
 the “see me” phase: this is all about our digital footprint. “This phase is still not very intelligent, and not many companies are taking advantage of this” the Gartner analysts said,
 the “know me” phase: this is about understanding who the user is, what he likes and what he does through the data he stored; so that he can be presented with offers and messages which are relevant to him,
 
 “be me” phase: this is where services are acting on the user’s behalf based on learned or explicit data.
 
 Yet, looking at how many companies do this show that there is still room for improvement:

Benedict Evans:

The interaction model for the desktop internet was pretty much settled 15 years ago. It turned out that the answer was a web browser. Stand-alone apps such as Pointcast were a mostly blind alley, and while apps persisted for email and IM, and for very specific things like music, the words ‘web’ and ‘internet’ became effectively synonymous to anyone non-technical. Over time we added Ajax and better search and better social, but everything really happened inside the browser.
 
 In mobile this is quite different: nothing is settled. We have the web and apps and of course apps, and then we have many complications – voice, in-app payments, web apps, hybrid apps, widgets, push notifications, social messaging apps, Google Now and Siri. Then there’s the hardware layer – images, barcodes, NFC, bluetooth, location, motion sensors etc. Innovative and disruptive new interaction models can very often find a route to market, far more easily than they could on the desktop internet. Sometimes, they scale to a hundred million users in a year to two. And we have more and more waves of innovation coming, with things like local wireless from Apple and deep linking to within apps from Android, and a very fast-evolving social messaging space, and more things in 2014 and beyond.
 
 So, we can actually have a pretty limited idea of what the dominant interaction models will be in 5 years.

Chris Arnade:

My first year on Wall Street, 1993, I was paid 14 times more than I earned the prior year and three times more than my father’s best year. For that money, I helped my company create financial products that were disguised to look simple, but which required complex math to properly understand. That first year I was roundly applauded by my bosses, who told me I was clever, and to my surprise they gave me $20,000 bonus beyond my salary.
 
 The products were sold to many investors, many who didn’t fully understand what they were buying, most of them what we called “clueless Japanese.” The profits to my company were huge – hundreds of millions of dollars huge. The main product that made my firm great money for close to five years was was called, in typically dense finance jargon, a YIF, or a Yield Indexed Forward.
 
 Eventually, investors got wise, realizing what they had bought was complex, loaded with hidden leverage, and became most dangerous during moments of distress.

IBM Research:

In 2004, MRSA accounted for 94 percent of all healthcare-associated infections per 1,000 patient bed days in the Pittsburgh Veterans Administration Health System. Precautions and education about the disease have lowered incidents significantly, but reports of new outbreaks of this health hazard still appear in the news regularly.
 
 In earlier chip development research, IBM researchers identified specific materials that, when chained together, produced an electrostatic charge that allows microscopic etching on a wafer to be done at a much smaller scale.
 
 This newfound knowledge that characterization of materials could be manipulated at the atomic level to control their movement inspired the team to see what else they could do with these new kinds of polymer structures. They started with MRSA.
 
 The outcome of that experiment was the creation of what are now playfully known as “ninja polymers” – sticky nanostructures that move quickly to target infected cells in the body, destroy the harmful content inside, and then disappear by biodegrading without causing damaging side effects or accumulating in the organs.

David Prest:

Earlier this year Nissan began production in Sunderland of the Leaf, the first electric car to be mass-produced in the UK. But 40 years ago, about 100 electric cars were built on the Isle of Wight to a design which was years ahead of its time.
 
 The Enfield 8000 was a prototype electric vehicle which emerged out of a competition run by the United Kingdom Electricity Council in 1966.
 
 Enfield Automotive beat rival bidders like Ford for the contract and made more than 100 cars at its works on the Isle of Wight.
 
 With a top speed of 48mph (77kph) and a range of up to 56 miles (90km), the car was aimed at low mileage urban users, and was expected to supply a much needed boost to Britain’s export push.

Jaclyn Trop:

When Lindsay Frandsen thought about registering for gifts for her wedding, she realized that what she and her husband really needed was a car.
 
 Ms. Frandsen and her husband, Christian Burris, opened an account with a start-up company that lets potential car buyers reach out to their social networks for gifts.
 
 One year later, the couple had scraped together a down payment from their savings and the gifts from the registry. Hyundai also gave them a $500 credit for taking part in the program.
 
 “We got a good chunk toward our down payment,” Ms. Frandsen, a 26-year-old driving instructor from Atlanta, said without being specific. “It’s like 500 free dollars, basically.”

Pecan Street Research Institute:

Electric vehicle (EV) owners are charging their cars much less during hot summer afternoons than most behavioral models predict.
 
 That is one of the findings from a new PSR Analytics report that measured Summer 2013 vehicle charging in the nation’s highest residential concentration of electric cars. The analysis found that charging behavior is much more diverse than has been predicted, represents a much more manageable energy load and may be highly elastic to time-of-use pricing and similar tools.
 
 If such findings are confirmed by other research, it could significantly increase utility industry estimates on the number of EVs the electric grid could handle without triggering disruptions or requiring major system upgrades.
 
 PSR Analytics is produced by Texas-based energy research firm Pecan Street Research Institute. The institute’s electric vehicle research trial in Austin, Texas has what appears to be the highest U.S. concentration of electric vehicles, including over 50 in a single half-square mile neighborhood. The institute’s data-intensive research trials (currently in three states) has produced the world’s largest research database of residential energy use.

Farhad Manjoo:

I believe the children aren’t our future. Teach them well, but when it comes to determining the next big thing in tech, let’s not fall victim to the ridiculous idea that they lead the way.
 
 Yes, I’m talking about Snapchat.
 
 Last week my colleagues reported that Facebook recently offered $3 billion to acquire the company behind the hyper-popular messaging app. Stunningly, Evan Spiegel, Snapchat’s 23-year-old co-founder and CEO, rebuffed the offer.

Pew Internet:

Two-thirds of online American adults (67%) are Facebook users, making Facebook the dominant social networking site in this country.1 And new findings from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project indicate there is considerable fluidity in the Facebook user population:
 
 61% of current Facebook users say that at one time or another in the past they have voluntarily taken a break from using Facebook for a period of several weeks or more.
 
 20% of the online adults who do not currently use Facebook say they once used the site but no longer do so.
 
 8% of online adults who do not currently use Facebook are interested in becoming Facebook users in the future.