Z Flip Prime Day Price Drop; Prime Day-Laptop Price Cut; French Battery Recycling Firm Gets More Funding; Bluesy Adds Email Verification 

If you have been thinking about a folding phone, and don’t want to drop almost $2 grand, there is the Samsung Galaxy  Z Flip 5. It has been a still strong $1120, but for Prime Day, Samsung has dropped it back down to its lowest price ever…$920…so you can save a quick $200 if you act fast. It’ the latest of Samsung’s little foldable model that can be squeezed into a jeans pocket or small purse. Samsung is running deals on most of its line for Prime Day, so if you are in the market, now’s the time. 

There are tons of deals for Prime Day, and on a wide variety of products. Here’s one that caught my eye from a list assembled by arstechnica.com. If you are in the market for a laptop and aren’t a power user, there’s a Lenovo Flex 5 14 inch laptop that runs on an AMD Ryzen 5 processor that has been dropped from $880 down to $612 at Amazon. You can even pick up a Lenovo 3i Chromebook cheaper…the formerly $300 rig is now $255! I you are a power user, there’s a Razer Blade 15 Gaming Laptop…15 inch screen, 12th Gen Intel Core i7, and 3080Ti that has been cut from $3700 down to $2400! Have at ‘em!

As more devices and more vehicles run on batteries, the need only grows to recycle those batteries. Now, thenextweb.com says a French company called Mecaware has raised 40 million euros in funding to scale up its battery recycling tech. The startup has bee around since 2020, and came out of research from the University of Lyon. They use a chemical process that uses CO2 to separate the different metals in battery cells in order to recover, restore, and reuse them. Mecaware claims its process is eco-friendly, and perhaps as importantly, cost-effective. Considering the scarcity of some of the metals used in the batteries and where they come from, recycling them is going to be a big deal. The EU Commission says by 2050, the EU will need 60 times more lithium and 15 times more cobalt to hit climate neutrality by mid century.

Bluesky, the Twitter (now X) competitor headed by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, has added a way for users to change and verify their email addresses as part of a larger effort underway to improve account security and authentication on the network. Plus, the app will now warn users of misleading links by flagging them. TechCrunch.com notes it is all as the fledgling app tightens security. Bluesky still remains invite only. I have been wait listed for months, has have several other people I know. Bluesky presently just claims a million users…about half of Mastodon’s 1.8 million, and a tiny base compared to Threads’ over 100 million registered users. X claims to have 666 million users, but knowing Elon Musk’s love of numbers and symbols, that may be one he just picked for the shock value to some religious people. 

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.