DMY Maker Lab
Yesterday I visited DMY Berlin, one of Berlin’s leading design festivals. In this post I’d like to share a few impressions. This year, DMY was held at the recently-closed airport Tempelhof, so needless to say the architecture there is quite a backdrop for a design festival. (Check out what Flickr has to offer on Tempelhof.) [...]
iPhone Killer Prototype
Says my friend and open design guru Ronen Kadushin: Whenever a new hand held device, or new exciting smartphone hits the market, a questions roars through the internets, tech blogs and news: Is this the iPhone killer? The answer is always…well…not quite, not yet…. So I was thinking, maybe these guys who make these devices [...]
Grassroots mapping (kite, camera, coke)
Grassrooots Mapping: Field Mapping Training from TungstenMonkey on Vimeo. Grassrootsmapping.org: Seeking to invert the traditional power structure of cartography, the grassroots mappers use helium balloons and kites to loft their own “community satellites” made with inexpensive digital cameras. The resulting images are georeferenced and stitched into maps which are 100x higher resolution that those offered [...]
Design I Love: The Alchemy Goods Urban Messenger Bag
Designer Daily has a fun little game going on, a describe-your-favorite-design contest. How could I pass up this chance to give props to my the makers of my beloved new messenger bag? After all, especially small brands, shops and makers need all the promo they can get, and this case is no exception. What I’m [...]
FDCareer brings roleplaying games to business networking online
A quirky, but interesting approach to business networking combines pen-and-paper style roleplaying games with career networking sites like LinkedIn or Xing. It’s aimed at students and young professionals. Going by the (not so hip) name FDCareers, the service lets you choose a character class and gain experience points, eventually giving you level-ups for your accomplishments. [...]
TechCrunch wants internet tablet, builds internet tablet
Just a little over a month ago, Techcrunch announced that they’d like to have a simple, cheap, yet powerful internet tablet. It should run Firefox and Skype, have a touch screen and should be available for $200 max. Nobody had built something like this so far and there were no signs of one being built. [...]
Mobile apps I’d like someone to build
Part one of my new series “mobile apps I’d like someone to build“, where I’m going to collect all those mobile apps I’d love to use, but can’t build myself. On my Blackberry I’m kind of restricted in terms of mobile apps, so I might have to switch to an iPhone or some flavor of [...]
Alaska Airlines rethinks check-in, saves millions (and a lot of time)
Alaska Airlines saves millions by rethinking check-in flow: A great example of how companies can greatly improve their services & structure by simply rethinking the way they run things. Summarizes the (must-read!) 37signals blog: The airline studied theme parks, hospitals, and retailers to see how they handled similar situations. Then, the team built mock-ups in [...]
Muji comes to Berlin
This is completely off-topic for this blog, I guess, but: Today, Muji opened a store in Berlin. And since I’ve been a total sucker for Muji for years, this makes me very happy indeed. In case you’re not familiar with this Japanese department store, they’re basically the makers of all kinds of things non-branded and [...]
The LEGO Lesson: Embrace Your Fans
In Forrester‘s Josh Bernoff / Charlene Li blog, Josh relates this story by Jake McKee (formerly Lego) of how Lego changed by engaging with AFOLs (Adult Fans Of Lego, sometimes referred to as ALE: Adult Lego Enthusiasts). There’s a lot to learn in this story – particularly for companies with a top-down corporate culture. Here’s [...]
