Technology

Volvo is teasing its upcoming, and first, all-electric car, with some initial sketches and a few details of the XC40 SUV. The upshot: Volvo is emphasizing a simpler design that discards some of the features found on gas-powered vehicles.

The XC40 SUV won&t have tailpipes, for instance. The traditional front grille, which is used to cool down gas-powered cars, is also gone. And then therethe frunk — the front trunk that is found in Teslaelectric vehicles along with a few other recent entrants.

For now, Volvo is only sharing sketches of the new car, which will debut October 16.

Take note, in the photo below, the lack of tailpipes.

Volvo XC40 BEV design sketch

In this next photo, Volvo shows off the frunk, which it says provides around 30 liters of extra load space.

Herea more detailed look at the front of the vehicle. Gone is the traditional grille found on gas-powered Volvo vehicles.

&Without the need for a grille we have created an even cleaner and more modern face, while the lack of tailpipes does the same at the rear. This is the approach we will explore more and more as we continue down the road of electrification,& Robin Page, head of design at Volvo Cars, said in a statement that accompanied the images.

Volvo revealed a few more details of the upcoming electric SUV. The vehicle will come in eight exterior colors, including a brand new &Sage Green& metallic option. A contrasting black roof comes as standard. Two new 19-inch and 20-inch wheel options will also be available.

Volvo changed the driver interface inside the SUV to provide relevant information such as the battery status. The interior design package features sporty styling details as well as carpets made of recycled materials, the company said. Volvo also emphasized the roomy interior, thanks in part to extra space it captured because thebattery pack is integrated into the floor of the car.

The vehicle includes more functional storage space in the doors and under the seats, a fold-out hook for small bags and a removable waste bin in the tunnel console.

API and microservices platform Kong today announced that it has acquired Insomnia, a popular open-source tool for debugging APIs. The company, which also recently announced that it had raised a $43 million Series C round, has already put this acquisition to work by using it to build Kong Studio, a tool for designing, building and maintaining APIs for both REST and GraphQL endpoints.

As Kong CEO and co-founder Augusto Marietti told me, the company wants to expand its platform to cover the full service life cycle. So far, it has mostly focused on the runtime, but now it wants to enable developers to also design and test their services. &We looked at the space and Insomnia is the number one open source API testing platform,& he told me. &And we thought that by having Insomnia in our portfolio, we will get the pre-production part of things and on top of that, we&ll be able to build Kong Studio, which is kind of the other side of Insomnia that allows you to design APIs.&

Insomnia launched in 2015, as a side project of its sole developer, Greg Schier. Schier quit his job in 2016 to focus on Insomnia full-time and then open-sourced it in 2017. Today, the project has 100 contributors and the tool is used by &hundreds of thousands of developers,& according to Schier.

Marietti says both the open-source project and the paid Insomnia Plus service will continue to operate as before.

In addition to Kong Studio and the Insomnia acquisition, the company also today launched the latest version of its Enterprise service, the aptly named Kong Enterprise 2020. New features here include support for REST, Kafka Streams and GraphQL. Kong also launched Kong Gateway 2.0 with additional GraphQL support and the ability to write plugins in Go.