With almost $1 billion in funding and ambitions to replace petroleum-based cars with a network of cheap electrics, Shai Agassi’s Better Place was remarkable even by the standards of world-changing startups. So was its epic failure. A 21st-century cautionary tale.

"So this is the car." I'm standing outside a shopping mall somewhere in Tel Aviv, Israel, as Guy Pross shows me his ride.

As some aspects of the tech industry continue to mature, others are putting efforts into ways of using tech to disrupt decidedly non-tech businesses. In one of the latest developments on this front, Vengo Labs, NYC-based makers of mini vending machines selling everything from chewing gum to mini speakers, which also doubles as an ad network, have raised $2 million in funding to expand their business to new markets.

In December 2011, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner powered by two GEnx jet engines set a pair of world records for the fastest eastbound trip around the world and longest flight for an aircraft in its class.

The Atlas humanoid robot, unveiled last year by Boston Dynamics, a company later acquired by Google, is a marvel. It can clamber over rubble and operate power tools. But these abilities don’t come cheap. Atlas has a price tag well above a million dollars, and it consumes around 15 kilowatts of electricity when in operation, meaning hefty power bills for its owner and limiting its practicality. “That’s enough to power a small city block,” says Alexander Kernbaum, research engineer at the nonprofit research agency SRI International. To be truly practical, he says, Atlas “needs to be many times more efficient.”