Skip to main content

New York City too hot? Uber will deliver air conditioners right to your door

new york city hot uber will deliver air conditioners demand aros conditioning
Image courtesy Quirky

As the weather in New York City starts to heat up and melt away everyone’s memories of winter, many are starting to feel the burn — of not owning an air conditioning unit.

But before the heat gets so bad that your clothes start sticking to your body, transportation company Uber has just the “cool” solution for you.  And you won’t even need to leave your apartment.

Through a partnership with development company Quirky and GE, the Uber app will give New Yorkers the option to buy a brand new Aros air conditioner for $300 over the next couple of weekends.  Interested buyers just need to type “UberCOOL” in the app’s promotion bar, as well as their credit card information, and the Aros unit will be delivered straight to their door via ice truck.

In a blog post about the promotion, Uber says they’ll even walk the air conditioner up “six flights of stairs.”

“For a lot of New Yorkers, getting an A/C unit into an apartment is a difficult and time consuming task,” said Bret Kovacs, Quirky’s head of marketing. “So when we were thinking about how we could make this process better, Uber immediately came to mind. We couldn’t think of a ‘cooler’ brand to help us launch the world’s smartest air conditioner.”

Developed by Quirky and GE, the Aros conditioner isn’t your typical, cruddy window unit.  According to Quirky, the air conditioner can be controlled remotely through a mobile app, and the unit can actually “learn” from your budget, location and schedule to maintain the perfect — and affordable — temperature for your apartment.

So now that practically anything can be delivered in New York City, residents really have no need to step outside ever again.

Editors' Recommendations

Optical illusions could help us build the next generation of AI
Artificial intelligence digital eye closeup.

You look at an image of a black circle on a grid of circular dots. It resembles a hole burned into a piece of white mesh material, although it’s actually a flat, stationary image on a screen or piece of paper. But your brain doesn’t comprehend it like that. Like some low-level hallucinatory experience, your mind trips out; perceiving the static image as the mouth of a black tunnel that’s moving towards you.

Responding to the verisimilitude of the effect, the body starts to unconsciously react: the eye’s pupils dilate to let more light in, just as they would adjust if you were about to be plunged into darkness to ensure the best possible vision.

Read more
Meta wants to supercharge Wikipedia with an AI upgrade
the wikipedia logo on a pink background

Wikipedia has a problem. And Meta, the not-too-long-ago rebranded Facebook, may just have the answer.

Let’s back up. Wikipedia is one of the largest-scale collaborative projects in human history, with more than 100,000 volunteer human editors contributing to the construction and maintenance of a mind-bogglingly large, multi-language encyclopedia consisting of millions of articles. Upward of 17,000 new articles are added to Wikipedia each month, while tweaks and modifications are continuously made to its existing corpus of articles. The most popular Wiki articles have been edited thousands of times, reflecting the very latest research, insights, and up-to-the-minute information.

Read more
The next big thing in science is already in your pocket
A researcher looks at a protein diagram on his monitor

Supercomputers are an essential part of modern science. By crunching numbers and performing calculations that would take eons for us humans to complete by ourselves, they help us do things that would otherwise be impossible, like predicting hurricane flight paths, simulating nuclear disasters, or modeling how experimental drugs might effect human cells. But that computing power comes at a price -- literally. Supercomputer-dependent research is notoriously expensive. It's not uncommon for research institutions to pay upward of $1,000 for a single hour of supercomputer use, and sometimes more, depending on the hardware that's required.

But lately, rather than relying on big, expensive supercomputers, more and more scientists are turning to a different method for their number-crunching needs: distributed supercomputing. You've probably heard of this before. Instead of relying on a single, centralized computer to perform a given task, this crowdsourced style of computing draws computational power from a distributed network of volunteers, typically by running special software on home PCs or smartphones. Individually, these volunteer computers aren't particularly powerful, but if you string enough of them together, their collective power can easily eclipse that of any centralized supercomputer -- and often for a fraction of the cost.

Read more