I like the idea… just wish he smile in the pictures. It is not like humans are lifeless.
The brief was to optimize the application of BASF’s plastic material ULTRADUR and the result was an Induction Iron. Utilizing ULTRADUR’s heat resistant heat resistant properties to his advantage, Therese came up with a bare minimal design that has been “stripped down to the essentials.”
via Induction Iron by Therese Glimskar in collaboration with BASF » Yanko Design.
sometimes i love the world we live in… and how it can “get better” or in my definition COOLIO!
want some OLED on your ticket booths? they tried electronic ink but that is failing so switching to OLED is making head ways for the advertisement community.
why is it that my vision is either one step behind or one step ahead? LOVE IT!
There are some signs that the algae-based fuel industry might be ready to bloom.
One of the nascent industry’s biggest and most well-heeled players, Sapphire Energy, announced last week that it would be producing 1 million gallons of diesel and jet fuel a year by 2011, double its initial estimates.
The La Jolla, Calif.-based company – with big-name backers like Bill Gates and the Rockefeller family – says it will be producing more than 100 million gallons a year by 2018 and 1 billion gallons a year by 2020 – enough to meet almost 3 percent of the U.S. renewable fuel standard RFS of 36 billion gallons.
But there’s a hitch: Federal law makes no room for algae-based fuel in the RFS. The 2007 energy law caps corn ethanol production at 15 billion gallons a year by 2015 and has the remaining 21 billion gallons of renewable fuels coming from advanced biofuels, including 17 billion gallons from cellulosic biofuels and biodiesel.
via Is Algae the Biofuel of the Future?: Scientific American.
Solar panels may be one of the solutions to our growing energy needs, but they can be a hassle to have installed requiring space on a rooftop or area of land that can’t then be used for anything else. One company aims to make installing and using solar panels easier in any building, however, by integrating them directly into panes of glass.
That company is called Konarka and they have developed solar cells made of flexible plastic that are transparent. Because they are clear it is possible to mount them inside glass opening the way for buildings to start taking advantage of solar power without the hassle of installation as they automatically get installed with the windows.
This isn’t technology we have to wait to see in a few years time as Konarka has already signed an agreement with Arch Aluminium to start using its Power Plastic solar solution. Together the two companies will produce glass products that can deliver energy generation in commercial building projects. Arch Aluminium specializes in producing glass products for commercial buildings in a range fo designs making them an ideal partner for Konarka.
Like an MC Escher optical illusion this incredible rug is not quite as it first appears – on one hand it appears to be a 3D wooden sculpture, and on the other it is a fluid textile. Designed by Elisa Stroyzk, a design student at Central Saint Martins in London, the rug is made from wood veneer offcuts bonded to a textile backing. Inspired by her materials and using them in new ways, Stroyzk blurs the reality between hard surfaces and fluid movement.
via Inhabitat » Incredible Geometric Rug Made from Pieces of Wood.
Restaurants | Kogi Korean BBQ sells their signature tacos primarily through two trucks in the Los Angeles area. In order to know where to find them, customers follow Kogi on Twitter, and it’s not unusual to find hundreds of the company’s 19,000+ Twitter friends lined up and socializing while awaiting their turn at the Kogi truck. More »
Automotive & parking | In the greater New York area, Central Parking System and other parking companies offer half-price parking for Smart fortwo owners. The service, which is a partnership with Smart USA, is based on the notion that drivers shouldn’t have to pay full price if their car only takes up half a parking spot. More »
Q & A | Led in part by Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake, Hunch is an online decision-making tool that gets to know a user through his or her answers to seemingly random questions. Based on those answers, Hunch aligns users with other people that are like them—their twinsumers—and can offer personalized answers to complex questions like: “Should I go to medical school?” More »
Mobile telephony | New Jersey-based Rentobile provides a wide selection of the latest cell phones for rent on a monthly basis so that consumers can try out various devices without being limited by a long term contract. A Netflix for phones, indeed. More »
via trendwatching.com’s May 2009 Trend Briefing covering INNOVATION JUBILATION.
Move over, Roomba. Make way for Fukitorimushi, an autonomous floor-cleaning robot that crawls like an inchworm and uses a super-absorbent nanofiber cloth to wipe up microscopic dust and residue that ordinary vacuums leave behind. Unveiled at the recent Tokyo Fiber Senseware exposition in Milan, Fukitorimushi (lit. “wipe-up bug”) is designed by Panasonic and incorporates nanofiber technology developed by textile maker Teijin, Ltd.
via Fukitorimushi: Autonomous floor-wiping robot ::: Pink Tentacle.
Last fall, a New York-based startup called Aviary went live, offering digital artists an online image-editing tool with features that could normally only be found in expensive software. Last month, the company released software that lets anyone integrate these tools into their website; some sites are now using the software to reinvent the way that they use images, allowing visitors to contribute cartoons for contests, modify photographs in newspapers, and even tweak the overall design of an online storefront.
The new application programming interface (API) that makes this possible has tapped the potential of collaborative image editing. Aviary’s CTO, Israel Derdik, says that the New Yorker used the company’s API to hold a cartoon design contest. Participants visited the New Yorker site and selected from a preloaded library of cartoons that they could modify and edit, turning layers on or off, to generate a unique cartoon.
via Technology Review: A Powerful Way to Edit Images Online.
Technology Review: Color E-Paper That Rivals the Real Thing.
Despite Amazon’s promise to reinvent the newspaper and magazine industry with its new, large-screen Kindle DX electronic reader, some people may be reluctant to embrace the technology until full-color displays are possible. A new approach developed by Philips now offers fresh hope for color e-paper displays that are so bright and clear that even traditional liquid crystal displays (LCDs) will pale in comparison.
According to Kars-Michiel Lenssen, who headed the work at Philips Research, based in Eindhoven, in the Netherlands, the new approach has the potential to create color images that are three times brighter than displays that use color filters, including LCDs. “This is the closest an electronic-paper technology ever got to printed paper,” he says.
Color displays normally require four subpixels–red, green, blue, and white–to create each full-color pixel. “That costs you in terms of resolution,” says Pieter van Lieshout, head of product research and development for Polymer Vision, which was spun off from Philips Electronics three years ago to develop flexible electronic-paper displays.