Netflix, Inc. is an American provider of on-demand Internet streaming media available to viewers in North and South America, the Caribbean, and parts of Europe. It started its subscription-based digital distribution service in 1999, and by 2009 it was offering a collection of 100,000 titles on DVD and had surpassed 10 million subscribers.In 2007, Netflix announced its billionth DVD delivery. In April 2011, Netflix announced 23.6 million subscribers in the United States and over 26 million worldwide. By 2011, the total digital revenue for Netflix reached at least $1.5 billion.
As of mid-March 2013, Netflix had 33 million subscribers. That number increased to 36.3 million subscribers.
On January 16, 2014, the nomination of The Square (2013) for an Academy Award became the first ever nomination for a Netflix original production.
Netflix was founded in 1997 in California by Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings, who previously had worked together at Pure Software. The idea of Netflix came to Hastings when he was forced to pay $40 in overdue fines after returning Apollo 13 well past its due date. Netflix was offered to Blockbuster for $50 million in 2000, but Blockbuster declined.
In 2005, 35,000 different film titles were available, and Netflix shipped 1 million DVDs out every day. In February 2007, the company delivered its billionth DVD and began to move away from its original core business model of mailing DVDs by introducing video on demand via the Internet. Netflix grew while DVD sales fell from 2006 to 2011. Virtualization took the market!
Robot furniture that builds itself
Imagine that the chair you’re sitting on became a sofa on demand as the day moved from light to dark. Or if all your furnishings could move out of your way as you walk through a room. These thoughts could one day become reality through research being conducted at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL).

The EPFL biorobotics lab is developing self-configurable robotics known as “Roombots,” which can merge with materials and furnishings to create adaptable furniture for the home and office.

It’s a bit of a science-fiction project in my lab to create intelligent furniture which can change shape and functionality. The team envisage the Roombots moving and combining to create a diversity of elements including tables and chairs. The goal is to create furniture that can be re-used in multiple ways.

Designs would consist of Roombot modules which resemble two dice stuck together, and contain a battery, three motors for movements and pivoting, and a wireless connection. Each module is just 22cm long and the team imagine just 10 of them could combine to build a broad range of furniture.

The Roombots would be coupled with more passive materials such as a table top or cushion to create the end results.

The team’s immediate goals are to create mobile furniture to assist the elderly and those with reduced mobility. “Let’s say an elderly person is using a walker, the furniture could have modules attached for it to move out of the way in a cluttered apartment or have a stool follow the person and remain close by,” describes Ijspeert.

For now, the team have managed to enable a few modules to interact, coordinated by algorithms on a PC, but they plan to improve human-robot interactions by either embedding cameras to track where users are or using voice recognition for people to instruct their furniture.

Further hopes lie in using tablets to display a room virtually, with people using augmented reality to then move and place furnishings as they desire. Eventually we want less and less human interaction to have a more fluid transition of furniture.

Designs aren’t limited to the home and could be applied to the workplace to create high-end conference rooms that reconfigure according to functionality, and eventually anywhere, with people creating their own uses for the building blocks.

What the team really hope is to provide Lego blocks for people to find their own use such as artists or designers.