Business Playground
Where Creativity and Commerce Collide – send us ideas to feature
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…

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 [...]

A cool steampunk desktop computer design from here.

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.

Nokia has unveiled the first pedal-powered phone battery charger. According to the Financial Times cyclists will be able to plug their handsets into a charger mounted on their handlebars and connected to a dynamo that harnesses electricity from the wheels. It would take two-and-a- half hours for a cyclist riding at 15km an [...]

Reap what you sow. Or, in this case, is it sow what you reap…? Whatever, it’s a good idea to have business cards that do more than clog up your wallet.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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In honour of National Poetry Month the Books For Walls project has launched The Haiku Your Book Challenge. This is the haiku one of the contributors wrote to describe Punk Marketing: Get Off Your Ass and Join the Revolution, the book Mark Simmons co-authored in 2007 with Richard Laermer.
Revolutionize.
Thwart the competition, yo!
Bust the mold. Create.

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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

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Love this little device demonstrated at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. It’s called the Light Touch and is by UK company Light Blue Optics.

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

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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 [...]

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

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 [...]

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

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; [...]

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These ads captures why kids love LEGO through simple visuals and no words. Perfect.

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This bulb has built-in solar panels so it can be used in places off the grid.

Made by Nokero the rain-proof light bulb is about the size of a standard incandescent bulb and contains a replaceable, rechargeable battery that can be charged during the day to provide light at night. Nokero says [...]

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 [...]

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A great way to advertise Copenhagen zoo.

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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 [...]

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

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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
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// ]]>If you want to start a company and are working on new ideas, here’s how I’ve always done it and how I [...]

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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, [...]

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

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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 [...]

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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.”

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