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 crystals breaks down the waste into fertilizer, killing off disease-producing pathogens found in feces.

In the developing world, an estimated 2.6 billion people, or about 40 percent of the earth’s population, do not have access to a toilet, according to United Nations figures. It is a public health crisis: open defecation can contaminate drinking water, and an estimated 1.5 million children worldwide die yearly from diarrhea, largely because of poor sanitation and hygiene.

Wilhelmson plans to sell the bags for two or three cents each

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 recommend you do it.  Be the opposite of secretive.  Create a Google spreadsheet where you list every idea you can think, even really half-baked ones.  Include ideas you hear about (make sure you keep track of who had which idea so you can credit them/include them later).

Then take the spreadsheet and show it to every smart person you can get a meeting with and walk through each idea.  Talk to VCs, entrepreneurs, potential customers, and people working at big companies in relevant industries. You’ll be surprised how much you’ll learn.  The odds that someone will hear an idea and go start a competitor are close to zero.  The odds you’ll learn which ideas are good and bad and how to improve them are very high.

Every conversation will contain some signal and some noise. Separating the two is tricky. Here are some broad rules of thumb I’ve developed for how to filter feedback based to the profession of the person giving it to you.

1) Employees at relevant big companies. These people are great at providing facts (“Google has 100 people working on that problem”) but their judgment about the quality of startup ideas is generally bad. They tend to have goggles on that makes them think every good idea in their industry is already being built within their company.  For example, every security industry person I talked to thought SiteAdvisor was a bad idea.  (If it wasn’t, they think, someone at McAfee or Symantec company would have already built it!)

2) VCs. VCs are good at telling you about similar companies in the past and present and critiquing your idea in an “MBA-like” way:  will it scale? what are the economics? what is the best marketing strategy?  I would listen to them on these topics but pretty much ignore whether they think your idea is good or bad.

3) Potential customers.  If your product is B2B, remember you’ll be selling to that person 2-3 years from now and by then the world and their priorities will likely have radically changed.  If your product is B2C, it’s interesting to hear how regular consumers think about your product but often they really need to use it fully built and in the proper context to really judge it.

4) Entrepreneurs. This is the one group I listen to without a filter.

Even though I have no intention of starting a new company for a long time (if ever), I still keep my idea spreadsheet and update it periodically.  Some of the ideas I wrote down a few years ago are now companies started by other people (some successful, some not).  A few I had the chance to invest in. It’s interesting to compare my notes and ratings of each idea with how those companies have actually performed. I also keep a list of “on the beach” ideas in case I have time in between startups. These are mostly non-profit ideas.  I don’t know if I’ll ever get to those but they are particularly fun to think about.

A beautifully designed car by Norman E. Timbs. according to Supercars.net mechanical engineer Timbs created this dramatic streamliner in the 1940s which in many ways was the ultimate American hot rod. He designed and fabricated much of the project himself which included a custom aluminum body and steel chassis.  At first the Streamliner was only used on the show circuit until Jim Davis of California bought it in 1952. He used it in and around Manhattan Beach, California and let Motor Life photograph it for a feature article. The car was discovered in the desert pretty much intact in 2002. It was bought at auction and restored by Dave Crouse at Custom Auto, Inc. in Loveland, Colorado for owners Gary & Diane Cerveny of Malibu, California. After its “complete and exacting” restoration, it debuted at the 2010 Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance in a class reserved for Motor Trend Cover Cars.

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 hour to fully charge a battery, the Finnish group said. It is hardly the kind of technological breakthrough that is likely to worry Apple, as Nokia struggles to find an answer to the US group’s iPhone in the crucial smartphone market. But the bicycle charger highlights efforts by Nokia to shore up its dominant position at the lower end of the market in the developing world, amid rising competition from cut-price Chinese handsets.

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 instant, the Polaroid brand could be accused of desperately trying to find a reason to exist. And for a performer whose most recent music video featured, count them, NINE product placements, one more brand could be put down as just another endorsement deal.

But wait, scratch a little beneath the surface and there’s more substance to the deal than first appears. Polaroid is not quite the has-been it almost became. After being close to closing shop a couple of years ago, Polaroid has found a new lease of life that makes its positioning of instant pictures relevant the digital age, with new designs and new range of products that include mini portable printers. And as for Lady Gaga, or Stefani Germanotta as she used to be called, she is a long-time Polaroid fan and says she sees this as a big opportunity to add her artistic vision to an iconic brand. See what she said on CNBC, the news network: “I want to make very high quality products that speak to the Polaroid consumer in a way that is very lifestyle oriented. It’s all about, for me, the functionality and the feeling.” She speaks intelligently and comes across more like a brand manager than a pop star puppet.

There has been a shift in the relationship between bands and brands over the past few years and the deal between Lady Gaga and Polaroid, while unusual, is by no means unique.  (In 2007, for instance, Puff Daddy was made the brand manager for Diageo’s Ciroc vodka.) The shift has occurred for a number of reasons that together have encouraged brands and bands to want to, well, get into bed with one another. First reason being that music sales have taken a dive and artists and their managers have been forced to look elsewhere for revenue. It used to be, sales of recordings were the number one source of income, now it’s live performances and third party sponsorships. Second reason, marketers have found that as media fragments and consumers have discovered new ways to be distracted (phones, ipads, Facebook, Twitter, games to name just the obvious ones) it’s more difficult to engage them for any length of time or with any depth. Those annoying ads just won’t cut it any more.

So, enter music, stage left. Fans have a deep emotional connection with music, so the logic is that if the brands form partnerships with the artists they can get a bit of it too. But, in Lady Gaga’s case it’s about more than just her music. She is a brand in her own right and she’s taking the artistic vision that shaped that brand and applying it to Polaroid.  Gaga sees herself as not just a singer, but a renaissance woman with creative skills that work across all sorts of lifestyle products.  Even before Polaroid she had launched a line of high quality headphones called Heartbeats. She describes them as “headphone jewelry” and in a press conference announcing their launch, she told reporters she “loved the idea of creating a headphone that sonically made it possible for fans to listen to music the way that producers and artists intended for them to hear it.”

Lady Gaga is very savvy about branding and, while she has a whole team of marketing people from Universal Music Group advising her, she clearly knows what’s she doing. When she first stated to perform music in bars at New York University she was largely ignored by the drunken students there until she stripped down to her underwear – and barely one year later she had crafted an image that made her a superstar. Music industry veteran told Forbes Magazine last December: “She is directing every frame of her music and her life, imagining how clips will appear on YouTube and what people will tweet after she appears on the VMAs.”

The video for her latest single, ‘Telephone’, with Beyonce was an epic that she co-wrote with director Jonas Akerlund. At a time when budgets for music videos have been largely nonexistent, this 9-minute extravaganza took three days to film and a month and a half to edit. There were product placements throughout – the nine mentioned at the beginning of this piece – but only a few of them were in fact paid-for endorsements. Others were included by Gaga just because they added to the story. The brands that did stump up to be featured provided much needed cash for a hefty production budget. Her manager, Troy Carter, told US advertising magazine Advertising Age: “If Michael Jackson was making ‘Thriller,’ he would do this too. These million-dollar music videos have to have partners to be produced.” ‘Bad Romance,’ another Gaga video, has thus far been viewed 180 million times on YouTube, making it the second most viewed of all time (the first being a baby biting his brother’s finger).  We don’t think this is selling out. The fans are in on the joke and get the music they want without having to pay for it. We applaud the fact that the music industry, not too long ago a poster boy for an industry desperately in search of a business model, is fast becoming a hotbed for innovation, and that marketers are seeing value in artists for their branding as well as their musical talents.

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.

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.

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