The 1971 feet (601 m) long and 75 feet (23 m) wide Sellwood Bridge in Portland, Oregon, was built in 1925. Due to cracks on the bridge and public safety issue, engineers decided to repair the 1,100-foot, 3,400-ton truss of that bridge. To do so, they had to move that portion. Recently, engineers have moved the entire bridge without cracking it.

The Sellwood Bridge, designed by Gustav Lindenthal, was a truss bridge that spans the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon, in the U.S. It was Portland’s first fixed-span bridge. It linked the Sellwood and Westmoreland neighborhoods of Portland on the East side with Oregon Route 43/Macadam Avenue on the West side. The bridge is owned and operated by Multnomah County.

By the 1980s, cracks started to appear on the bridge and for this the bridge’s mid portion (1,100-foot long span) gradually started becoming incapable for taking loads of more than 30,000 vehicles or 32 tons of weights that pass the bridge daily. On January 2004, engineers found that portion of Sellwood Bridge was able to take load a maximum 10 tons. After long discussions and planning, Multnomah County commissioners decided to repair that portion.

On Saturday, January 19, in just 14 hours engineers flawlessly moved the entire Sellwood Bridge. Engineers built tracks, covered with Teflon pads and doused with liquid soap to make them slippery between the Sellwood’s old and new locations. Then forty 150-ton hydraulic jacks picked up the bridge and placed it on ski-like steel beams that could slide inside the tracks. Finally, a second set of jacks pushed the bridge inch by inch to its new position. Here’s a video capturing the action:

Right now, engineers are constructing a replacement bridge. The new bridge is expected to open in 2015, after which the old Sellwood will be scrapped.

Bang With Friends, a social network for people to hook up with their Facebook friends, has gained both notoriety and popularity this year. It’s inevitable that format will be reworked – and in this case, Indonesian developer Yudhi Mandey has come up with TristUp.

TristUp is a social network for people to “level up” their friendship. Just like Bang With Friends, after logging in using your Facebook account, you will get to choose which friends you’d secretly like to hook up with. To get a match, both parties need to choose “date or shag” (yes, those are the actual options). If not, they will be notified that there’s a “misfire” and there are no possible connections.

The friend selection screen is similar to Bang With Friends’ Pinterest-like layout. Too bad the TristUp friend selection is simply arranged alphabetically as I think randomized is better. You can filter the selection based on some preferences like religion and interests. But it didn’t work when I tried. Maybe that’s because none of my buddies have signed up for TristUp.

Going viral in Indonesia and Australia

Does TristUp have what it takes to go viral just like its inspiration site? It seems like it so far. Launched just last month, Yudhi says it has 500 registered users (pretty much among friends and friends of friends) in its first three days of operation. But after one and a half weeks, the site reached almost 3,000 users with zero marketing. While the team’s primary targets are Indonesian, almost 70 percent of TristUp’s registered users come from Australia – more specifically from three colleges in Queensland and some from Brisbane.

Yudhi is still confident that TristUp is suitable for more conservative Indonesians. He did a bit of research that found most Indonesian singles aged 16 to 28 are too shy to reveal their intention to get out of the so-called friendzone. He believes that TristUp can help them fill that need anonymously, and will start pushing Indonesian targeted ads within the month. He also added that anything that smells of sex and controversy can sell in Indonesia.

More dating features

To set the startup apart from Bang With Friends, Yudhi will add a video chat speed dating feature to TristUp in the next three months. The new TristUp feature will choose 10 women and guys based on things like location, interests, and age. Users will then have a limited time to introduce themselves and chat with their potential mates.

During that timeline, TristUp will also add a chat-like platform and smartphone apps, which have app-specific features like looking for a date nearby. At the end of the year, TristUp will also hold an offline meetup in Bali. Ambitiously, Yudhi hopes to have one million users by the end of this year.

Monetizing on the dancefloor

I don’t think Bang With Friends is monetizing its product yet. How would the Indonesian version be different? By using a freemium model. First will be a premium user category on TristUp. Free users will get limited feature usage, like a maximum number of video chat speed dating instances per month. Yudhi plans to charge users $2 a month. The app’s “find the nearest user” feature will also be premium. Users need to buy TristUp’s tokens to access the location-based flirting.

Interestingly, the team is also in talks with nightclubs in Jakarta, Bandung, and Bali for possible cooperation. The idea is to use TristUp’s apps as free entry to the club for premium subscribers. Using TristUp, users can detect other users who are inside that same club and maybe use the app to get a dancefloor partner. So far, two clubs have jumped onboard.

Yudhi is also in talks with local VCs to get the startup energized further in its attempt to get one million users by the end of this year. Before TristUp, Yudhi previously built babycare information site BibTalk and medical info startup TipsDokter.

The European Commission’s vice president and digital chief Neelie Kroes is spearheading a campaign that looks to change the way Europeans connect to the Internet. It is estimated that roughly 100 million people in Europe face restrictions, including throttled Internet speeds and blocked content, from their service providers. The Netherlands and Slovenia are the only countries in Europe that have net neutrality laws to prevent ISPs from blocking competing services, however Kroes would like to see these laws expand to cover all of Europe.

“Services like Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) or messaging services – like Skype or WhatsApp – offer real innovation for consumers,” she said at an event in Belgium on Tuesday. “But some ISPs deliberately degrade those services, or block them outright, simply to avoid the competition.”

Kroes cited a 2011 study by European regulators that found a number of online services are often blocked or degraded, often without a consumer’s knowledge. One in five fixed lines are affected by these actions, as well as more than one in three mobile users. She added that while these policies impact consumers, they are significantly hurting startups.

“They lack certainty about whether their new bright ideas will get a fair chance to compete in the market,” she explained.

Kroes argues that service providers must be more transparent when offering service to new customers. She notes that key details such as hidden fees, real-world speeds and more are often hidden inside “long and complex contracts” that can mislead consumers.

“We all deserve a clear promise before signing up – not a nasty surprise after,” she said. “After all, when you buy a carton of milk, you don’t expect it to be half-empty: the same goes for 50 Megabit internet.”

The European Commission will be examining current policies employed by various service providers. The agency will attempt to prevent ISPs from blocking access to programs like Skype and WhatsApp, throttling of Internet speeds and removing barriers such as early termination fees that prevent consumers from switching service providers.

Kroes’s proposal looks to provide a “safeguard for every European, on every device, on every network: a guarantee of access to the full and open internet, without any blocking or throttling of competing services.”