You can now download a free chapter from our book The Business Playground: Where Creativity and Commerce Collide.

Hunch is an interesting new business idea
It helps people make decisions by asking you 10 questions and using the collective knowledge of the community to give advice. this is how they describe it on the website…..
Look. Decision-making is difficult, and decisions have to be made constantly.
What should I be for Halloween? Do I need a [...]

A couple of years ago, Seth Frader-Thompson was driving a Prius. Priuses have little screens on the dashboard that tell you what gas mileage you’re getting, in real time, as you drive. It crossed Frader-Thompson’s mind that houses should have something similar. So he built the EnergyHub Dashboard, a little device, with a screen, that [...]

from New York Times mags 9th annual year in ideas called “it happens when nobody is watching” and placed in a bus shelter in Berlin, was a one-time installation sponsored by Amnesty International. When a person in the shelter was looking at the poster, he saw, along with the words, a photograph of an amiable [...]

Howard Gossage, an icon of 1960’s advertising, talking about “mammanoids” and “tediophobes.”
mammonoids and tediophobes

Businesses that give two hoots about innovation are finding novel ways to collaborate with artists who have ideas coming out of their ears. Artists for instance, like Dave Stewart, my co-author on The Business Playground. I recently asked him about his advisory role to Nokia. Dave was stranded in London on the [...]

The title says it all.

A young designer has invented a revolutionary folding bicycle that will stop thieves in their tracks.

Kevin Scott, 21, designed the space-age bike that wraps around a lamp post so it can be locked-up safely – without the need for a lock or chain. The De Montfort University graduate used a ratchet [...]

A single use toilet for slums in the developing world where there are no permanent toilets .

Developed by Swedish architect Anders Wilhelmson who told the New York Times “Not only is it sanitary, they can reuse this to grow crops.” Once used, the bag can be knotted and buried, and a layer of urea [...]

Watch the film on the manufacturers website of it morphing. It’s a real product from the Netherlands.
http://www.bloomframe.nl/

It’s like getting your first Big Wheel all over again — and you don’t even have to pedal. An innovative bicycle-design concept derived from the old-fashioned penny-farthing, the YikeBike is a folding electric bicycle out of New Zealand. The rider sits on the seat, holds on at the sides and zooms around at a top [...]

We held a launch event at the head offices of Live Nation on Thursday night, featuring an interview with Live Nation, Mike Rapino, a Q&A session with co-authors Dave and Mark and a great improvised musical performance by Mr. Stewart and violinist Anne-Marie Calhoun.

The LA Times was there to cover the event and this is [...]

You will have seen the announcement earlier this year that pop sensation Lady Gaga has become the creative director for instant camera company Polaroid. The cynical amongst us might view this as a publicity stunt that won’t translate into anything more than a few column inches. After all, now that all pictures are pretty much [...]

I liked this blog post from entrepreneur Chris Dixon and decided to reproduce it in its entirety. Thanks Chris.
Developing new startup ideas
March 14th, 2010 | careers, product design, startups
//
})();
// ]]>If you want to start a company and are working on new ideas, here’s how I’ve always done it and how I [...]

MIT researchers are developing a microchip that could help blind people regain partial eyesight. Though it won’t completely restore normal vision, it will enable a blind person to recognize faces and navigate a room without assistance. The chip, which is encased in titanium to prevent water damage, will be implanted onto a patient’s eyeball. The [...]

I thought this was funny, maybe for no other reason than because it’s so nerdy!
See here for more.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. Here’s one.

The OneDown mousetrap swings upright from horizontal due to a rodent’s own weight to clearly indicate that it has been trapped. There is no risk of snapping the fingers and creating any mess or smell as the [...]

A cool steampunk desktop computer design from here.

The Information Architects have plotted the top 140 Twitter influencers on a map akin to those showing how the universe began. The blobs are placed according to name, handle, category, influence, activity and when they joined the service. Full story here.

Fro the New York Times magazine 9th annual year in ideas.

Nature may well be the art of God, but that isn’t keeping mere mortals from trying their hand at it. This year, a group of British engineers recommended building a forest of artificial carbon-filtering “trees” across the United Kingdom to combat climate change; and a [...]

One company has made swimming safer and more fun.

Ask any parent about trying to teach their kids to swim and they’ll most likely tell you a story of their child being too afraid to get in the water. Whether it’s a river, the ocean, or even just the shallow end of a pool, the water [...]

This ad for free WiFi in McDonald’s gets the idea across through a simple visual that sells the brand.

When announcing an effort to launch Googly TV head of engineering, Vic Gundotra, was making an obvious reference to Apple when he said at the press conference: “If you believe that the only way to get a good smartphone is to bet on one man, one device, one carrier, and one choice, that is [...]

Since time immemorial — or at least since Pong — one barrier that has stood between gamers and total Tron-like immersion in their video games has been the controller: the joystick, trackball, mouse, light gun or whatever. This year Microsoft demonstrated a technology, code-named Project Natal, that enables players to control games using only body [...]

Dutchman Peter van de Werken has invented and successfully developed a new kind of rose: rainbow coloured rose. By treating the stalk with natural pigments, van de Werken has managed to make each petal a different colour. Watch the Reuters story here…

Ozzy Osbourne pretended to be his own waxwork figure at Madame Tussauds in New York as a way to promote his new album, “Scream” which is out on June 22nd.

Half chair, half Vespa. And that’s all there is to it.

The homes will be made of recycled materials – pallet flooring and framing, waterproofed cardboard walls, aluminum can roofing – and some donated materials.
Architect Arthur Dyson is working with construction management students at Fresno State to create an unprecedented “Eco-Village” of tiny homes for homeless folks. If successful, it seems [...]

Mind maps are a good way of visualizing solutions to challenging problems.

IDEO’s Tim Brown at a recent TED talk. Interviews with Tim appear in Business Playground, the book.

Plenty of people’s Twitter feeds appear to be connected directly to their egos, but one scientist’s is actually wired to his brain. In April, University of Wisconsin doctoral student Adam Wilson — working with adviser Justin Williams, above — tweeted 23 characters just by thinking. He focused his attention on one flashing letter after another [...]

It took Kutiman just two months to finish ThruYOU, the project that would make him both a musical pioneer and an Internet celebrity. Kutiman — a.k.a. Ophir Kutiel, an Israeli musician — took footage posted on YouTube by amateur musicians and mixed it together (drums, piano, synth, theremin, vocals, whatever he could find) into video [...]

Director Michel Gondry always has wonderful ideas for his films. This is mesmerizing.

Punk band Anti-Flag and useless.org released a limited edition tee shirt for Earth Day. The shirts are unwanted shirts that were gathering dust in Anti-Flag’s warehouse, that have now been repurposed with a new message. All proceeds fund a water and sanitation project in Sierra Leone.
See more details here.