I can't vouch for the quality of their products or service, but I know Robocoin is one of the leading Bitcoin ATM manufacturers. According to Coin ATM Radar, there currently are 44 Robocoin ATMs operational worldwide, in the United States, the UK, Canada, Spain, Japan,... Robocoin provided the very first Bitcoin ATM machine in the world, in October 2013 in Vancouver, Canada.

They are currently ranked 2nd, after Lamassu with 90 ATMs. But the Lamassu ATMs are mostly smaller and cheaper one-way machines (cash to Bitcoin), although they do sell a two-way solution now.

On Coin ATM Radar, a total of 267 operational Bitcoin ATMs are registered at the moment.

If their first project with Internet.org is an indication, only after you pay up. The "free internet" project in Zambia gives people only access to 13 websites (including Facebook, of course) for free, and if they want to exit the walled garden (e.g. by clicking on a link in Facebook), they have to pay. Also, Facebook didn't invest money in the project, the local (private) operator pays for this so they can get more paying customers later on.

"Vrije University" in the title sounds realy strange to me, as a native Dutch speaker. Vrije isn't a city, "Vrije Universiteit" means "Free University," which indicates it's not linked to e.g. the Catholic church. Just FYI.

The Verge had a good article criticizing this project. The article doesn't break down the project completely, but points out why their goals are far-fetched, and people should not get too exited.

Also note that when looking at the project, it's not initially clear that a connection with the main electricity grid is still necessary. At night, displaying the signs and defrosting the road is done with electricity from the net. During the day, the solar panels can transfer electricity back to the grid. Their current implementation doesn't include batteries to store electricity locally, and this wouldn't be very environmentally friendly anyway.

Bitcoin Magazine has a good article on this subject: Mining Pool Centralization At Crisis Levels. It also suggests a number of solutions.

The primary solution is for miners to switch to a peer-to-peer mining pool. In these the control is decentralized, just like the Bitcoin network itself. Even if such a pool hits 51% market share, it will not be able to actually block or reverse transactions, since the mining pool is decentralized and so its power is vested in the network as a whole.

Now there is a Slashdot story on the front page about this year's displat by Alek, with a video interview.

I'm a happy Mobile Vikings customer for almost two years now, and I applaud their move to accept Bitcoin. I will be using this option from now on.

Mobile Vikings are a small, tech oriented operator. Like several small operators in Belgium they use the cell tower network of one of the 3 big operators. MV were the first in Belgium to offer a decent plan for mobile data usage, a 15 € per month prepaid formula with 2 GB data included, while other operators where still billing (a lot) per MB used. When a lot of customers switched, this forced the big operators to offer similar plans (although they still cost more).

Like almost all online merchants who accept Bitcoin, they set their price in euros or dollars and the price in BTC is calculated at the moment of sale. Mobile Vikings uses BitPay as a payment processor who offers this service, another one is Coinbase.

Also very impressive is LS3, Legged Squad Support System, a.k.a. AlphaDog. This is the successor of Big Dog.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7ezXBEBE6U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNUeSUXOc-w

There is no centralization. It's just that the genesis block (the first block in the chain, or in case of eMunie the first block of the tree) does not start with a balance of zero. After that there is nothing centralized in the system, it's a peer-to-peer network without central servers just like Bitcoin.

I'm one of those who gave some BTC to get a part of the initial eMunie supply. That makes me a victim in your eyes I suppose :-)

I like the fact that Dan (the creator of eMunie) is very transparent and open in these matters, we will know how much money he collects. I trust him when he says these funds will be used to further develop and promote eMunie. And I don't have a problem with him being paid for the work he does. In fact, he has be working full time on this project for more than half a year now, completely on his own expense.

Although not everything is known yet, the creator of eMunie has explained a lot of the mechanisms involved, mostly in forum posts. Those people, like me, who participate in the private beta, see the system working each day. And yes, everybody can apply for the beta.

There is no central mint involved. An initial number of coins will be pre-allocated in the genesis block. All of those coins will be sold (for dollars, Bitcoin & Litecoin), and everybody can participate. From then on new coins are distributed in two ways: everybody who has coins gets a small percentage of his coins as interest, and clients who register transactions (called "hatchers") get a fee to do that job. The "hatchers" don't do the same calculation all together, like Bitcoin miners, but transactions are appointed to them.

eMunie looks like a good alternative to Bitcoin. It does not only give a solution to the anonymity issue, but solves a number of other issues with Bitcoin, like the huge block chain size, the long time before a transaction is confirmed and waste of electricity through mining. The start of the production network is expected for the end of January. I'm really looking forward to see if it can hold up to all its promises, but the developer is a really capable and motivated guy (he was the owner of the company that developed NFC used in a lot of smartphones today).

Even with modern broadband, latency is still an issue for these kinds of applications. In the article are some examples of currently used server side gaming enhancements, like "Forza 5 will even use cloud computing to monitor the way you drive, and alter virtual drivers’ AI (artificial intelligence) accordingly." That has no need for low latency. But if you want the environment to immediately react to players actions, there need to be low latency. And you can't remove the distance (and related network infrastructure) between the player and the data center.

As was explained in the Apple keynote, a capacitive (not optical) sensor is used, which scans sub-epidermal skin layers. So lifting a fingerprint will not work.

Here is an extensive explanation of the technologies used.