December 4, 2017

The number of American states that use one or more election services from Amazon Web Services (AWS), according to a presentation seen by Reuters. “While it does not handle voting on election day, AWS … now runs state and county election websites, stores voter registration rolls and ballot data, facilitates overseas voting by military personnel and helps provide live election-night results.”

The number of electric vehicle charging stations that will constitute Ford-Amazon’s proposed network. The two companies teamed up to establish the largest charging station network in North American with 12,000 different locations.

Already, 320 people have paid the fee for a near-space-orbit trip aboard Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, which comes with exclusive gold-lined space suits by Under Armour that were unveiled earlier this week. When asked where else she would wear it, one would-be space tourist said, “every Halloween for the rest of my life.”

The remaining number of founding members of Libra, the embattled Facebook-led cryptocurrency effort that now lacks many of the high-profile companies that originally voiced support for the effort. PayPal, an original signatory to the Libra Association charter, announced last week it was withdrawing its support. On Friday, payment giants Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and eBay announced they would no longer be associated with the project followed by the defection of Internet company Booking, which operates sites like Booking.com, OpenTable and Kayak.

The combined quarterly advertising revenues for Google and Facebook, among the few firm numbers available to estimate the value of the Internet. The question has renewed importance as policy-makers — including California Gov. Gavin Newsom — have “proposed creating a ‘data dividend’ that would require large tech companies to pay users for their data, which requires an understanding of how much the data is worth to companies such as Google and Facebook.”

A Dutch company, Urban Crossovers, is piloting an emissions-free aviation fuel. It is a kind of kerosene, made from passing electricity through a mixture of carbon dioxide and water taken from ambient air. Proponents call the potential “limitless” but concede that the capacity of the current plant’s output is only 1,000 liters of the new fuel a day — an amount a jet will consume in five minutes of flying. That in a world with 225,000 flights a day.