The Global Humanitarian Forum, chaired by former UN president Kofi Annan, aims at being a unique platform to address key humanitarian challenges. The Forum was launched in October 2007 and aspires to build a stronger global community to better meet the needs of the poor and vulnerable.

The first annual conference of the Forum at the beginning of this week in Geneva focused on the humanitarian challenges of climate change. In the aftermath of Myanmar’s Cyclone Nargis and in view of the ongoing global food crisis, the Forum’s President Kofi Annan called together 300 leaders from all sectors of society worldwide to urgently address what he calls “the human face of climate change”: the world’s poorest and most vulnerable populations are affected by ever more violent storms, drought and floods.

The Annual Meeting 2008 pooled the expertise and experience of an uncommon combination of leading people from across sectors. They worked to develop creative solutions and boost action to meet the urgent needs of those worst affected by climate change.

In solidarity with the world’s most vulnerable, the Meeting will place climate justice high on the agenda as the guiding principle in the international response to climate change and as the basis for any future global climate agreement.

BrainStore will take part in the project “Give climate change a human face” by conducting several idea finding workshops to come up with practical solutions which will help the vulnerable communities in the affected regions.

See more information on the forum on their website

At BrainStore, for instance, we have our own daycare called the “MiniBrains” that helps us do this. Everyone at BrainStore gets in touch with kids between one and nine years old on a pretty regular basis, and it is a lot of fun. Listening to children, their views of the world and their interpretation of the weird stuff that goes on on this planet is crucial for us. So the grown Brains spend time with the Minis, playing Lego, eating Fishfingers, discussing the universe in general.

You can learn so many things from children. And most of all, it is often hilarious. My 5 year old daughter Ella asked me at the Birthday party of my Grandfather, when a lot of black and white pictures were shown: “And since when is there color in the world?”, clearly analysing that, not always, has the world been full of color. Or my son, when explained that “this was a long long time ago, when your father was a child” stated: “Oh, during the middle ages?”.

Clearly, this is not only fun, but also very instructive for your own way you look at the world. So go out and get in touch with not only your inner child, but children in general.

Human behavior rather reflects a dynamic interaction between two distinct subsystems of the brain, as a new study by psychologist Adam Alter of Oppenheimer Lab at Princeton University fortifies. While a first affective system follows heuristic cues, a second conscious and rule-based system monitors the quality of these emotional signals. Although perceived as one single act, decision-making appears to be a two-step process.

This dualism is very well reflected within as well as over all the three major phases of the BrainStore method. For inspiration boosting we pull emotional triggers, in compression we integrate emotional yes or no sessions and systematic criteria scans. At the end of the day, decisions on ideas are taken rationally - given that our emotions play along.

To get started, players download a toolbar. When they log in to PMOG, software tracks the sites that they visit, and gives them points for each unique URL they visit within a 24-hour period. Then they can create and take missions. For example, a PMOG player might visit the homepage for the forthcoming Batman movie, The Dark Knight, and find a pop-up from a fellow player inviting him to learn about the history of Batman. If the player elects to follow the mission, a series of pop-up windows would lead him through sites where he might, for example, view cover art from the Batman comic books, read trivia on the Batman TV series, and view information about the making of the new film. At each site, he’d find pop-up windows displaying notes written by the mission creator, perhaps giving additional background on the site, telling a story, or leaving clues to a puzzle.

Suddenly the Internet is not a series of untouchable exhibits, but rather a hackable, rewarding environment!

Start now: http://pmog.com

The city of Solothurn is an inconspicuous small Swiss town and within easy biking distance from the BrainStore headquarters in Biel. To explore it, Brains (as the employees of BrainStore are called) can from now on leave their bikes in the garage. Taking a tour on www.touchtown.ch comes as close as one get to actually strolling downtown Solothurn on a sunny day!

Using the latest image-rendering technology this virtual tour is nothing like you have experienced before: it does not only allow city strollers to enjoy every corner of Downtown Solothurn by the clicks of your mouse – no – it takes you inside many shops, bars, restaurants, hotels and even churches!

If you are planning a stay in town or an evening out, this website constitutes a real and valuable innovation: before you make your reservations you can check out the restaurant or the hotel of your choice and decide on your favourite room and table.

Galenson classifies the painters Cezanne, Renoir and Pissaro as experimental innovators. They did their best work in the mid to late periods of their careers. Experimental innovators explore their chosen area of expertise step-by-step: experimenting, reflecting, learning and then experimenting again until they perfect their craft. Conceptual innovators such as the painter Picasso, the poet Ezra Pound or the entrepreneur Bill Gates, are conceptual innovators. Conceptual innovators take the quantum leap. They usually make their greatest contribution in the earliest part of their careers.

Understanding that people approach tasks differently and bring different perspectives to the table is a core element of the BrainStore process. We recruit and involve a mix of people as diverse as possible in our innovation development – age, gender, nationality, academic background, experience, learning preferences and so on.

BrainStore believes that everyone has something to contribute when looking for good ideas.

Imagine a phone made from cotton. Soft, pliable and light , yet never compromising on power or performance. The Soft Phone concept by designer Qian Jiang takes what we know about electronic cellulose structures and squeezes every last ounce of performance out of it. Literally!

The is a series of discs with electronic fabric stretched in between. The interface uses a combination of tactile gestures like squeezing to hang-up and touch which detects a deformation on the surface to register input. The fibers are fine enough and optically clear allowing light energy to pass thru to display simple contextual menus. Whenever you need a full QWERTY just unfurl the collapsible structure. The cell antenna, battery, camera, and micro electronics are contained inside a tiny clip which itself is made of soft, squeezable, stress-reducing silica.

source: yankoDesign

You just define the topic you are designing and how complex you want your design to be. That’s it! The machine searches the web for images that match your topic and chooses them completely freely, and as many images as you ordered and wildly combines them.

And the result? Your art looks exactly the same as in cool and trendy magazines. We suspect the fancy designers used the NetArtGenerator for years.

We in BrainStore like NetArtGenerator because the principle is similar to that of our IdeaMachine: the IdeaMachine incorporates the concept of random combinations to produce something really new. This element of random combination is only one part of how the IdeaMachine produces new and great ideas. Should NetArtGenerator increase their complexity and control possibilities, we love them even more.

On illustration: 6 images about the topic “dog” combined in 10 seconds.

The Conference lasts for three days and looks for ways how R&D in Africa can be boosted and collaboration North-South and South-South can be increased.

BrainStores task is to develop 15 - 20 ideas with the conference participants, who are members of Parliament of African States, Scientists, delegates of UNECA and other UN Organisations as well as representatives of other organisations and associations.

To read more, visit www.uneca.org/sciencewithafrica

We are having a great time here and are impressed with the diversity, hospitality and positive spirit of this wonderful continent.

Clone the “BrainStore Blog Inspiration” pipe and fit them to your interests. And even begin to use flickr.

Pipes is a free online service from yahoo that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code. Learn more…