NetApp wins California Stewardship Arrow Award

Congratulations to NetApp for winning the California Stewardship Arrow Award. Specifically, NetApp has won the Infinity Award for for Service and Takeback. The California Product Stewardship Council sums up the reasons for NetApp's success:

"NetApp provides customers with innovative data storage, management, protection, and retention solutions. While their products enable customers to do more with less thanks to their storage efficiency technologies, they have created a service and take back program that truly ‘closes the loop’ and minimizes the waste generated from their products through a comprehensive electronic waste recycling program. For more than 5 years, this program has achieved a landfill diversion rate generally over 99% for all of their products."

This is a great story for such an amazing and innovative data storage company.

Liquid Metal: What is it?

Gizmodo recently wrote an article about Apple's new material company called Liquidmetal. In short, Gizmodo author John Herrman writes the following:

"The scientific definition of Liquidmetal goes something like this: Liquidmetal is a member of a class of metal alloys known formally as bulk metallic glasses—because the material shares some properties most closely associated with glass, like impact brittleness, and, instead of a fixed melting point, a gradual loss of integrity at higher temperature. It's a mixture of stuff you've probably heard of: copper, titanium, aluminum and nickel. So yeah, fundamentally, it's just a type of stuff, like a polymer, an aluminum alloy, or a glass."

So what does this really mean to people or firms like you and me? In essence, this new material can result in higher quality products that we as consumers put a lot of wear and tear on including cell phones and laptops, essentially replacing the plastic body that surround most of our electronics that we are all fond of. Why haven't we seen it yet prominently in the market? Cost. 


However, I feel that with economics behind this new material in play, we can see the price to manufacture this material go down and see this new material in future gadgets and devices in the near future, whether we are aware of it or not. 


See the video below for more information: