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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 [...]

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.

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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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 [...]

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

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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 [...]

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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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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 [...]

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

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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.”

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 [...]

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

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

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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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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.

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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 [...]

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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A great way to advertise Copenhagen zoo.

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.

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

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

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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 [...]

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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, [...]

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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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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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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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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 [...]