Teller and colleagues say they’ve spent time contemplating levitation and teleportation. The latter was nixed as an area for further study in part because any unique item that you would want to teleport—a Picasso, say—would have to be completely destroyed before it could be reconstituted on the other end.

Inside Google’s Secret Lab - Businessweek (via kirtan)

The problem with the way to make music today, these are turnkey systems; they come with preset banks and sounds. They’re not inviting you to challenge the systems themselves, or giving you the ability to showcase your personality, individuality. They’re making it as if it’s somehow easier to make the same music you hear on the radio. Then it creates a very vicious cycle: How can you challenge that when the system and the media are not challenging it in the first place?

- Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter in an interview with Billboard, 5/10/13

This hits on an interesting topic that crosses over between music and tech. In technology, the phenomenon of abstraction(through services like Twilio and Stripe) are making it easier for entrepreneurs to create interesting applications while bypassing difficult technology infrastructure. In music, software (including Traktor and Serato) are allowing artists to quickly remix music by abstracting concepts like “beatmatching” to algorithms.

With every level of abstraction in music and technology, we become more powerful in the ability to push the boundaries of the technology’s application. This has led to startups like GroupMe, which make group messaging simple, and musicians like the Hood Internet, who mash-up existing songs into new ones. We’ve entered a world in which the user experience is the value-added layer of the application or track.

However, we need more innovators like Daft Punk and solutions like Bitcoin to continue to push the boundaries of the low-level infrastructure that define our system.