Here’s the 3-D Printed Duffel Bag Ronaldo Will Tote to the World Cup

Nike's Flyknit tech is making its World Cup debut this year in the form of the Magista. But three players will also be toting around this cutting-edge 3D-printed duffel bag. Photo: Nike

Nike's Flyknit tech is making its World Cup debut this year in the form of the Magista. But three players will also be toting around this cutting-edge 3D-printed duffel bag.

Photo: Nike

Neymar Jr., Wayne Rooney, and Cristiano Ronaldo will be carrying the matching Rebento bag, almost as lightweight as the Magista itself. Photo: Nike

Neymar Jr., Wayne Rooney, and Cristiano Ronaldo will be carrying the matching Rebento bag, almost as lightweight as the Magista itself.

Photo: Nike

The 3-D printed base mimics the pattern and construction of the Magista, and attaches to a leather upper and bag the straps without any adhesives. Photo: Nike

The 3-D printed base mimics the pattern and construction of the Magista, and attaches to a leather upper and bag the straps without any adhesives.

Photo: Nike

Along with the bags, players will get another, more utilitarian, accessory: set of shin guards, dubbed the Mercurial Flylite. Photo: Nike

Along with the bags, players will get another, more utilitarian, accessory: set of shin guards, dubbed the Mercurial Flylite.

Photo: Nike

To make it, Nike’s designers replaced the traditional foam found in guards with a 3-D printed honeycomb-patterned piece of plastic. Photo: Nike

To make it, Nike’s designers replaced the traditional foam found in guards with a 3-D printed honeycomb-patterned piece of plastic.

Photo: Nike

The web has pips—small, raised sections—that connect it to the protective exterior of the shin guard. That small gap turns each section into a little shock absorber while cutting materials, according to Nike. Photo: Nike

The web has pips—small, raised sections—that connect it to the protective exterior of the shin guard. That small gap turns each section into a little shock absorber while cutting materials, according to Nike.

Photo: Nike

The World Cup starts this week, and as much as the tournament represents the hopes and dreams of many nations, it’s also a big deal for Nike and its marketing machine, which is fighting tooth and nail with Adidas for presence on the world stage.

Its current flagship innovation, Flyknit, didn’t exist during the last World Cup. When Nike created a kind of digital knitting technology to create a one-piece mesh shoe weighing in at just a few ounces, it was a major coup for the company, because it satisfied a long running request from athletes for shoe that feels more like a sock. On the field this summer, dozens of players will be outfitted in the Magista, Nike’s first Flyknit soccer cleat, released this spring. A select few players—Brazil’s Neymar Jr., England’s Wayne Rooney, and Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo, to be precise—will also be carrying the matching Rebento duffel, a 3-D printed bag almost as lightweight as the Magista itself.

Only three Rebento bags exist. The 3-D printed base mimics the pattern and construction of the Magista, and attaches to a leather upper and bag the straps without any adhesives. Along with the bags, players will get another, more utilitarian, accessory: set of shin guards, dubbed the Mercurial Flylite. To make it, Nike’s designers replaced the traditional foam found in guards with a 3-D printed honeycomb-patterned piece of plastic. The web has pips—small, raised sections—that connect it to the protective exterior of the shin guard. That small gap turns each section into a little shock absorber while cutting materials, according to Nike.

The new designs have an admittedly limited reach, given only three all-star athletes will be toting the bag around. But that’s not the point—what likely matters to Nike is that they were first to land the 3-D printed accessories market, right when the whole world will be watching.

This Brazilian Soccer Team Plays for a Chance to Battle Their Prison Guards

Prisoners from the Geraldo Beltrão Penitentiary in João Pessoa, Brazil play soccer on a barbed wire encircled court. Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

Prisoners from the Geraldo Beltrão Penitentiary in João Pessoa, Brazil play soccer on a barbed wire encircled court.

Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

A prison guard handcuffs an inmate from Cell 13. Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

A prison guard handcuffs an inmate from Cell 13.

Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

Cell 13 players warm up inside their cell. Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

Cell 13 players warm up inside their cell.

Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

The team from Cell 13 of the Geraldo Beltrão Penitentiary in João Pessoa, Brazil. April 2014. Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

The team from Cell 13 of the Geraldo Beltrão Penitentiary in João Pessoa, Brazil. April 2014.

Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

The guards from the Geraldo Beltrão Penitentiary in João Pessoa, Brazil. April 2014. Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

The guards from the Geraldo Beltrão Penitentiary in João Pessoa, Brazil. April 2014.

Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

Prisoner portrait from the Geraldo Beltrão Penitentiary in João Pessoa, Brazil. Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

Prisoner portrait from the Geraldo Beltrão Penitentiary in João Pessoa, Brazil.

Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

Prisoner portrait from the Geraldo Beltrão Penitentiary in João Pessoa, Brazil. Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

Prisoner portrait from the Geraldo Beltrão Penitentiary in João Pessoa, Brazil.

Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

Guard portrait from the Geraldo Beltrão Penitentiary in João Pessoa, Brazil. Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

Guard portrait from the Geraldo Beltrão Penitentiary in João Pessoa, Brazil.

Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

Guard portrait from the Geraldo Beltrão Penitentiary in João Pessoa, Brazil. Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

Guard portrait from the Geraldo Beltrão Penitentiary in João Pessoa, Brazil.

Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

The soccer court inside the Geraldo Beltrão Penitentiary in João Pessoa, Brazil. Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

The soccer court inside the Geraldo Beltrão Penitentiary in João Pessoa, Brazil.

Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

Prisoners practice inside their cell at the Geraldo Beltrão Penitentiary in João Pessoa, Brazil. Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

Prisoners practice inside their cell at the Geraldo Beltrão Penitentiary in João Pessoa, Brazil.

Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

All the games are played barefoot because it's a sand court. Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

All the games are played barefoot because it's a sand court.

Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

Inmates juggle in the Geraldo Beltrão kitchen. Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

Inmates juggle in the Geraldo Beltrão kitchen.

Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

The winning inmate team played a team made up of prison guards for the grand championship. Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

The winning inmate team played a team made up of prison guards for the grand championship.

Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

Cell 9 v. Cell 15 in the penitentiary championship. April 4, 2014. Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

Cell 9 v. Cell 15 in the penitentiary championship. April 4, 2014.

Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

Cell 15’s Ivonaldo Rodrigues da Silva Filho, 24, has been incarcerated for six years for murder and theft. Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

Cell 15’s Ivonaldo Rodrigues da Silva Filho, 24, has been incarcerated for six years for murder and theft.

Photo: Nicolò Lanfranchi for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014)

For one week each year, the Geraldo Beltrão maximum security penitentiary in João Pessoa, Brazil holds a soccer tournament for the prisoners. Five-member teams from the various cells compete against each other on a barbed-wire-encircled sand court until there’s just one left standing.

The winning team members each get a box filled with rice, beans, and other basic food items. More importantly, though, the winning team also gets to play against the prison guards for the grand championship.

This year Italian photojournalist Nicolò Lanfranchi was there to document the tournament for Colors magazine, and he followed the prisoners as they trained and played.

“It’s an event that people take very seriously,” he says. “And it’s a good way to release tension.”

Lanfranchi’s photos are timely, as the World Cup starts this month in Brazil and his work raises questions about an overcrowded prison system and the vast sums of money Brazil is spending to host the event.

Nicolò Lanfranchi shot photos at the Geraldo Beltrão Penitentiary for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 – Football (June 2014).

The article in Colors points out that since 2008, Brazil has spent $670 million dollars on prisons and prison upkeep as opposed to $3.5 billion on new soccer stadiums. At the moment there are 400,000 inmates living in prisons that are only meant to hold 260,000 people. Things are so bad a Brazilian judge proposed using the new World Cup stadium in Manaus as a temporary detention center for a nearby, overcrowded prison once the tournament is over.

The Geraldo Beltrão prison, where the tournament takes place, is overcrowded as well. Cells that were meant to hold seven people sometimes hold 15. Lanfranchi says the prison tournament is probably a response, at least in part, to these conditions. Prison officials want the prisoners to have the chance to get out and enjoy themselves, but they also get media attention.

“Someone at the prison is trying to make a name for themselves,” he says.

In the end it was players in Cell 15 this year who beat all the other prison teams and made it to that last game. Like some of the most gut-wrenching World Cup games of all time–Italy and Brazil in 1994 and Italy and France in 2006–the prison guard game ended in penalty kicks. Lanfranchi says he can’t remember the final score, but he does remember that the guards won.

“The prisoners were pretty sad,” he says. “They really wanted to kick the guards’ asses.”

Google’s New All-Seeing Satellites Have Huge Potential—For Good and Evil

Building SkySat-1 in the clean room of Skybox in Mountain View, CA, in 2013. Photo: Spencer Lowell

The reach of Google’s online empire is hard to overstate. In a sense, the Google search engine is the loom through which the entirety of the public internet is woven. With tools like Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs, the company also handles many of our private online tasks. Using the data generated by these services to target online ads, Google has built a business that generates tens of billions of dollars a year.

Now, with the $500 million purchase of Skybox, a startup that shoots high-res photos and video with low-cost satellites, Google can extend its reach far across the offline world. Thanks to its knack for transforming mass quantities of unstructured data into revenue-generating insights, the unprecedented stream of aerial imagery to which the company is gaining access could spark a whole new category of high-altitude insights into the workings of economies, nations, and nature itself.

But this acquisition will also demand assurances from Google that it will incorporate privacy safeguards into its vast new view of the world. Already Google gets a lot of flack for tracking user behavior online. With Skybox’s satellites, Google may gain a window into your everyday life even if you don’t use Google at all.

Really Big Data

In his WIRED feature story on Skybox, David Samuels describes some of the stunning ways high-resolution images shot from space are being used to unlock secrets about life on the ground. One company is tracking cars in parking lots to create retail forecasts. Images of pits and slag heaps reveal the productivity of mines. Pictures of property damage from above can tell insurance companies whether a claim is valid.

“Many of the most economically and environmentally significant actions that individuals and businesses carry out every day, from shipping goods to shopping at big-box retail outlets to cutting down trees to turning out our lights at night, register in one way or another on images taken from space,” Samuels writes. “So, while Big Data companies scour the Internet and transaction records and other online sources to glean insight into consumer behavior and economic production around the world, an almost entirely untapped source of data–information that companies and governments sometimes try to keep secret–is hanging in the air right above us.”

In a statement, Google has said that, in the short term, it plans to use Skybox’s satellites to keep Google Maps up to date. And, in the future, the company says, it could use them to help spread internet access to remote areas, something that will help improve the reach of its existing services. But imagine all the other things Google could do turns its artificial intelligence expertise onto a constant stream of images beamed down from above.

One Skybox insider told Samuels that satellite images alone could be used to estimate any country’s major economic indicators. Take, for example, this Skybox case study of Saudi oil reserves measured from space. Now consider the insights that could come from marrying that visual data with Google’s Knowledge Graph, leveraging all the company’s algorithmic might. Google could learn all kinds of new things about the world.

Gold Mine in Uşak, Western Turkey. Photo: Courtesy of Skybox

Military-Industrial Ties

But it could also learn all kinds of new things about you. Skybox can take photos from 500 miles up with a sub-one-meter resolution of the ground below. That isn’t not likely to sit well with privacy activists who already don’t trust Google. What does the right to be forgotten mean when Google can always see you anyway?

Skybox’s pedigree likely won’t help assuage anyone who likes a good conspiracy theory. According to Samuels, one of the company’s co-founders, John Fenwick, had previously worked as as a liaison in Congress for the National Reconnaissance Office, “the ultrasecret spy agency that manages much of America’s most exotic space toys.” A major investor had worked as an intelligence officer in the French army, while its CEO held previous jobs that brought him into close contact with the Department of Defense.

That’s not to suggest there’s anything nefarious about Skybox or its intentions. It’s hard to get anything into space without entreé into government and military circles. But Skybox CEO Tom Ingersoll told Samuels that the government is interested in his company’s imagery. “In the end,” Samuels writes, “the government will likely commandeer some of Skybox’s imaging capabilities under terms similar to those imposed on other vendors.” With Google now involved, that begins to sound a lot like the NSA commandeering the internet servers to spy on U.S. citizens.

Skybox or Skynet?

Even if a network of high-powered imaging satellites could give Google the power to track an individual from space, it probably wouldn’t. Setting aside any legal or moral constraints, there’s just no percentage in it. Monetizable insights of the kind that would interest Google or companies willing to pay Google for access to that data are derived from observing patterns and populations, not individuals. As geeks of all varieties are fond of pointing out, n=1 is a terrible sample size.

If Google finds ways of using these satellites that ends up making users’ lives more interesting and convenient, most people are unlikely to object, just like revelations of NSA surveillance haven’t exactly dented Gmail’s market share. But people may find the idea of Google looking down from the heavens on their physical selves more discomfiting than peering through their browsers at their virtual personas. After all, putting an all-seeing Google eye in space gives a whole new meaning to “do not track.”