Fresh Takes on Innovation

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

This Pipe takes the BrainStore Blog, passes it thru a Content Analysis and uses the keywords to find Photos at Flickr for Inspirations. The photos appear in date order.

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…

I wouldn’t wear one of these, but as we like to blog just about every crazy brain-gadget, I’ll have to blog this brainy cap and the gelatine mold to make delicious deserts with a bizarre canibalistic touch. Find more of these anatomically correct products at the Anatomical.com shop.

So this is the second list of 2007 innovations. The Popular Science magazine titles it best of what’s new. Their innovation of the year is a nanosolar powersheet, letting you bake your toast with solar energy from the rooftop. The other categories feature a sunscreen-soap (personal health), a beautiful tower to be built in Chicago by architect Santiago Calatrava (engineering) and a stylish flat phone with a fatfingered screen (gadgets). Forgot it’s name, sorry.

It’s only November, but TIME and CNN are already featuring the best innovations of the year 2007. The winner is: the iPhone. Take a look at the 14 categories and find some cool new devices, vehicles and technologies.

We’ll keep you updated, when other media publish their best-of-lists. We’ll ignore rip-offs, though.

We are thinking about equipping our female IdeaDirectors with this beautiful BrainBag by Jun Takashi. But then again it would be too small for a laptop. Hmm…

Found on BoingBoing

Everybody knows that a short but effective mid-day nap will help you to enhance workforce and productivity for the rest of the work day.

Born from the realization that individuals can significantly increase their energy with a brief daytime rest, MetroNaps committed themselves to the development of professional power nap products and services.

After researching and testing at the Carnegie Mellon University a new relaxing “machine” was born, called the EnergyPod. The EnergyPod is an elegant yet simple device that counters the problem of employee’s daytime fatigue. Each EnergyPod is equipped with built-in music loaded onto an internal memory card. Sound is played through speakers or headphones.

MetroNaps also developed the Enhanced Energy Seminar, that teaches employees effective sleep techniques to boost personal and professional productivity. The seminars are divided in categories:

• Night Time Sleep: Getting a better night sleep by optimizing sleep routines and the bedroom environment.
• Day Time Rest: Boost energy during the workday by recharging with a quick nap.
• Jet Lag Management: Learn valuable tips for staying productive while traveling.

I could need one of these, what about you?

This is propably the most high tech bar in the whole world. The IBar finds out which drink you’re having by using sensors that calculate the glass shape and then link it to the content of the glass. So if you drink a prosecco, the IBar will recognize that because you won’t usually have a whiskey on the rocks in a similarly shaped glass.

So what’s happening, I ask myself, if you’re drinking a cosmopolitan… How will the bar recognize that you’re not having a Martini? Will the IBar identify it because of the customer’s gender? Men don’t usually drink cosmopolitans, or do they now? What if the guest is a gay man or a female whiskey amateur?

But experts say that within a few years we’ll be using it to pay for our drink by simply placing a credit card on it. They also say the interactive device will be able to upload pics and videos from your mobile to show off to other bar guests in the same way. Plus punters will be able to flick through food menues, special drinks offers and jukebox tracks on the multitouch bar surface.

The first ever iBar was this week installed at London’s swanky Soho nightclub 24.

As an IdeaFactory, we have been talking about it for years and years, and it keeps coming up as a solution in many idea finding projects: Electronic Paper. It should have a similar look and feel as “normal” paper, but also have the ability to change and update content. Just imagine a newspaper that updates itself during the day, as events unfold and change. Pretty cool, huh?

My beloved Economist just has published an article in its technology section about the evolution of ePaper and what we can expect of it in the future. And it seems to be the case that we will pretty soon see the first applications that really work.

Here your pictures come alive: Search for a picture online, klick on “montage” and watch a new picture unfold that is made up of all the pictures that come up for your search. Under Advanced Options you can have more influence on the outcome. Enjoy! Montage-a-google.