Just five days after the $500 million deal closed, Zipcars are showing up at New York regional airports. Skift reported this morning that the Avis Car Rental pick-up facilities at JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark now house a handful of Zipcars, available at rates ranging from $12 per hour to $89 per day.

“The availability of Zipcars at airports will provide increased options for members who may not need a full day rental car, or for those who need to travel somewhere not easily accessible by public transit,” Zipcar president Mark Norman said. “We believe this is the first in many new offerings that will enhance the value of Zipcar membership that we can provide thanks to the support of the Avis Budget Group.”

This small expansion to airports is just the beginning. Norman said Zipcars will be available in additional airport locations over the course of the year, marking a departure from Zipcar’s traditional placement in cities and college campuses.

Avis and Zipcar announced the deal on January 2nd, but the papers were officially signed on March 15. Within hours, Zipcar’s CEO Scott Griffith resigned and COO Mark Norman took the job as top dog. Despite Zipcar’s popularity (it was 730,000 members and 1 million customers), the company was never able to turn a profit, losing about $55 million since 2007. The Avis acquisition will help both companies expand their reach and offer greater choice to consumers.  

“By combining with Zipcar, we will significantly increase our growth potential, both in the United States and internationally, and will position our company to better serve a greater variety of consumer and commercial transportation needs,” Avis Budget Group CEO Ronald Nelson said in a statement. “We see car sharing as highly complementary to traditional car rental, with rapid growth potential and representing a scalable opportunity for us as a combined company.”

Zipcar now operates as a subsidiary of Avis. Avis said it expects “to generate $50 to $70 million in annual synergies” in relation to the deal.

Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have different plans, however. The powerful duo are proposing to build a $82 million facility for private and corporate jets at Mineta San Jose International Airport.

According to a news release issued by the airport, Signature Flight Support will be awarded a 50-year lease on the airport’s West Side “to develop and operate a 29-acre, $82 million facility, in which they will manage, most notably, the personal aircraft of the principals at Google, among other clients.”

The issue of where to park your planes is certainly an important one. The combined fleet of Page, Brin, and executive chairman Eric Schmidt is estimated at around 8 jets, not including Google’s corporate fleet. The planes are currently housed at Moffett Federal Airfield in Mountain View, which is spitting distance from Google’s headquarters. However, last year Iowa Republican Senator Charles Grassley made a fuss claiming that this situation wasn’t fair and Google was getting the sweet end of the deal. As Boeings can’t just be locked up on the street or tucked away in a garage, an alternative location was needed.

What’s a billionaire to do?

In this case, the answer is to build your own airport, complete with an executive terminal, hangars, aircraft and car parking, office space, and retail shops. This deal represents a significant boost to the struggling San Jose airport. Mineta recently went through a $1.4 billion renovation and can use the additional revenue. Mayor Chuck Reed is quoted in a Mercury News article as saying he is “excited” because “each of those airplanes is a property tax generator.” Furthermore, the airport will bring in rent and other fees that amount to at least $3 million a year.

A committee comprised of city and airport officials and real estate and airline executives chose Signature Flight Support’s proposal for the project because of the British firm’s financial stability.It cites itself as the world’s largest operator of ‘fixed base’ airports and has private air facilities in 113 locations, including San Francisco, Chicago O’Hare and Boston Logan international airports. Director of aviation Bill Sherry said that the company is committed to ”the private aviation needs of local high-tech companies, most notably the personal aircraft of the principals at Google.”

Google could be the first of many major clients to store their aircraft in San Jose. Executives at international businesses often travel extensively for work and don’t want to drive all the way to San Francisco International Airport, which is about 10 minutes further away from Mountain View than Mineta. Time is money, after all.

Really, it is a win-win situation. Google executives have a safe, friendly, personal place to store their airplanes, without having to interact with regular people or the federal government. For San Jose, the project creates hundreds of new jobs and bolsters its local budget.

Even if building an airport really does work out well for everyone, I am sticking with my initial dreams for my wealthy and powerful future. Unicorn farming.

With all the potential sources of anxiety, spending too much for flights shouldn’t be one of them.

This holiday season, VentureBeat worked with Kayak and Visual.ly to create an infographic of the best and worst times to travel. Kayak analyzed more than a billion search queries and unwrapped a few key findings, and well as some interesting comparisons between holiday travel general year-round travel and between international and domestic journeys.

The most important takeaways? The earlier you book, the better, and traveling on Christmas Day or New Year’s Eve can save you significant amounts of money. Kayak also discovered that Florida is a hot spot for holiday travel as well as for weather.

The three top trending Christmas destinations (based on a year-over-year comparison) are all in Florida, and Orlando is the number one holiday destination this season. But spending your Christmas in the sun has its drawbacks. Miami, Phoenix, and Orlando have the highest increase in airfare this Christmas. While New York remains the most popular place for New Year’s, Las Vegas and Orlando are also high on the list.

No matter where you are going, flying around the holidays is going to be expensive. The average airfare is $528, and this number is on the rise. To keep costs in check, Kayak offered two main pieces of advice: Be flexible with your travel days, and book well in advance.

As for dealing with your family once you arrive at your destination, the team at Kayak has no advice. Although maybe this explains why so many people head to the beach.

PowerKiss makes a small receiver (the Ring), which plugs into mobile phones, and an electrical transmitter, which is built into a piece of furniture like a table (the Heart). You place your device on the table and it charges wirelessly. Currently, the Ring is only available for phones, but PowerKiss plans to add new receivers for laptops.

The PowerKiss charging technology was developed in-house and is based on resonating field induction that creates an electromagnetic field around the Heart transmitter. The Ring receiver adapts the current produced by the field to the requirements of the mobile device.

Induction of this kind has a very short range, so the transmitter and receiver must be close together. Other methods for transmitting power wirelessly, like converting radio waves to DC power, have a longer range but are more suitable for low-power devices like wireless sensors.

A Californian company called PowerBeam uses optical transmitters and receivers that convert electricity into optical power to transmit. The receiver turns the optical power back into electricity. Power can therefore be “beamed” to any device within the line of sight.

PowerKiss is targeting public places like airports, hotels, restaurants and conferences. The company already has a partnership with travel food specialists SSP to roll out wireless charging in the restaurants of 30 airports. Combine this with Amsterdam Schiphol airport’s new robot-powered baggage system and it looks like European airports are going high-tech.

PowerKiss was founded in 2008, is located in Espoo Finland (where phone maker Nokia also has its headquarters), and has 15 employees. It has been funded to date by angel investors and a government-backed VC fund.

Schiphol is one of the major transportation hubs in Europe and is the 15th largest airport in the world. Currently the airport handles around 50 million bags a year. Handling more would normally require a lot of new space which Schiphol doesn’t have. So the baggage system had to be made smarter rather than bigger.

In most baggage handling systems, bags can only be located when entering or exiting the system. Schiphol’s new system developed by IBM, dutch airline KLM and Vanderlande Industries can locate every bag at any point in its journey. 60 percent of all baggage will be handled by robots.

After check-in bags go directly into the bag storage, waiting to be loaded on to planes. The robots pull bags from bag storage on demand, releasing baggage on to the baggage conveyor belt only when needed to prevent overload of the system. Linking into real-time flight information allows for quick off-loading of baggage when a passenger misses his flights and for redirection of bags on alternative flights when connections are missed.

The 21-kilometer transport conveyor also uses innovative technology like an automated storage and retrieval system, which automatically places and retrieves loads from 4200 bag storage positions using 36 cranes. Destination coded vehicles load single baggage items into tubs or carts and transport them individually to the required destinations for baggage offloading. Six robot cells for the automated loading of bags into containers and carts complete the system.

Schiphol’s “brains over brawn” baggage system might even tempt me to start checking in luggage again after years of travel ling with a carry-on. But only if I can see the robots first.