Business Playground
Where Creativity and Commerce Collide – send us ideas to feature
Categories: environment, ideas | Comments Off

from the New York Times 9th annual year in ideas

Copenhagen has begun to create a system of as many as 15 extra-wide, segregated bike routes connecting the suburbs to the center of the city. The Bicycle Office of Copenhagen’s design calls for service stations (with air pumps and tools for simple repairs) and plans to [...]

From Yahoo.
Here’s a fairy tale that could only happen in the movies. Man makes YouTube video. Goes to Hollywood. Gets pots of money and a movie deal. Except this story is true.
An unknown producer from Uruguay, Fede Alvarez, shelled out about $300 to create a cool video of a robot invasion in Montevideo, the capitol [...]

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.

A cool steampunk desktop computer design from here.

Categories: design | Add a Comment

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.

Categories: art | Add a Comment

Creativity comes in myriad different forms. For Andy Goldsworthy it’s making ephemeral art and from the things he finds in nature. His work is inspiring and beautiful. This extract is from the film about his work “Rivers and Tides.”

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

Categories: innovation | Add a Comment

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 [...]

Categories: science | Comments Off

from the New York Times 9th annual year in ideas

For dairy farmers, whether to name their cows may seem like a matter of taste. But it might not be. It could be a business decision. A study of several hundred British dairies published in the journal Anthrozoös in March compared responses to a survey about [...]

Categories: innovation, music | Add a Comment

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 [...]

Categories: advertising, design | 1 Comment

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

Bad sound quality is destroying the music business.

The quality of sound delivered through typical ear bud headphones devalues the music according to Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, who as a solution have created a line of high end headphones called Beats. In this article in the Financial Times, Iovine describes how he is trying to [...]

Or is the other way around. Fuse Project out of San Francisco developed this revolutionary  solution to reduce use of packaging materials.

This weekend saw the release of the latest film in the Lady Dior series starring the French Oscar winning actress, Marion Cotillard, and her Dior handbag.  The latest film is directed by David Lynch and has a distinctly Twin Peaks feel to it. The previous film directed by Jonas Akerlund has the gorgeous Ms Cotillard [...]

Categories: businesses | Add a Comment

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 [...]

Categories: advertising | Add a Comment

If you bought a book by Belgian’s most famous crime writer, Pieter Aspe, you got this bag.

Categories: environment | Add a Comment

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

When you’re done with this cardboard box you can tear it up and plant it.

Seeds embedded in the recycled card will grow up to 100 trees. See more here.

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.

Categories: design, products | Comments Off

From the New York Times 9th annual year in ideas

The Great Depression inspired American fashion this year, from men’s wear by John Bartlett that looked like a stylized version of Lewis Hine’s New York to frocks by Ralph Lauren that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Dorothea Lange photograph. Meanwhile, off the runways, [...]

With the flick of a switch, Philips Electronics may have just dramatically lowered America’s electric bill. In September the Dutch electronics giant became the first to enter the U.S. Department of Energy’s L Prize competition, which seeks an LED alternative to the common 60-watt bulb. Sixty-watt lights account for 50% of the domestic incandescent market; [...]

Categories: environment | Add a Comment

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 [...]

Categories: design | Add a Comment

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…

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

Categories: technology | Add a Comment

Looks like a regular business card but when you break of ac couple of pieces it becomes a USB flash drive.

Job seeker Ramiro Pareja Veredas, a telecommunications engineer from Spain, created this PCB business card to set himself apart from other job seekers  and it houses his resume, cover letter, [...]

Categories: science | Add a Comment

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 [...]

Categories: advertising | Add a Comment

The title says it all.

Categories: design | Add a Comment

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

Categories: advertising | Add a Comment

A great way to advertise Copenhagen zoo.

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

Categories: advertising | Add a Comment

This an online video for driving direction device Tom Tom’s new selection of voices, including the Dark Lord himself.

Categories: technology | Add a Comment

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

Categories: science | Comments Off

From the New York Times 9th annual year in ideas

April, the world was introduced to Ruppy, the first known fluorescent dog. In natural light, Ruppy seems to be an almost-normal beagle — though his paws look as if he has stepped in pink ink. Under ultraviolet light, the effect is quite evident: he emits an [...]

Categories: children | Add a Comment
Categories: products | Add a Comment

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 [...]