Archive for Cool videos
Where will your innovative ideas pop up?
Where do your best and brightest ideas come from?
A lot of organizations are continually trying new ways to tap into that thing that sparks our creativity in order to help solve a problem or bring innovative new products and solutions to the marketplace. How does groundbreaking innovation happen? Check out this video story of how we generate the ideas that push our careers, our lives, our society, and our culture forward. Let me know if it sparks any great ideas!
Will we someday eat lab-grown meat?
Grow your own meat?
Killing animals for meat may someday become a thing of the past. Scientist Mark Post is the head of the department of vascular physiology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, and he is at the forefront of developing research to produce meat without the need for livestock breeding. In this video, Post explains this fascinating research and how he and his colleagues are attempting to duplicate the flavor of meat from cows and pigs.
For those who may be squeamish about lab-grown meat, Dr. Post points to the way we now buy most of our cheese–not from farms but from factories. He asks, “Why should meat be any different?”
Dr. Post is one of the few people to dream big about creating lab-grown meat from muscle stem cells. If this works, it could transform the way we produce food. He says the benefits of this process is especially appealing to those in the animal rights movement. In fact, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animal (PETA) has announced a $1 million prize for the first company to bring synthetic meat to shops in at least six US states by 2016.
Read more here.
LEGO takes toy ideation to the crowd
LEGO® has found a way to bring consumers, manufacturers and anyone else with an innovative toy idea to try out crowdsourcing. LEGO CUUSOO (meaning “imagination” in Japanese) is a new international web-based open innovation and crowd sourcing platform. You simply create a LEGO project, share your idea and see what other people think.
Once the idea is posted online, visitors to the site will vote. If your idea gets 10,000 thumbs up, it gets reviewed by the company for a chance to become an official LEGO product.
There’s a big payoff besides the notoriety. The owner of the idea will receive 1 percent of the total net sales. There are some interesting projects up for votes right now, and you can see them here.
Check out the video to see more on how this innovative idea works:
Hello McFly! New shoe propels Nike back to the future
Here’s a story about an innovative shoe, and a unique way to get them sold for a much higher amount than what it takes to manufacture them, all for a good cause. Nike is teaming up with eBay to introduce one of the most futuristic—and expensive—shoes for the future. Nike’s 2011 MAG is inspired by the move Back to the Future II’s character Marty McFly and his amazing shoes that light up, but don’t power lace quite yet.
Thousands of fans went to the ebay auction site and helped raise nearly a million dollars for Michael J. Fox’s (the actor who played Marty) foundation to fight Parkinson’s Disease, which the actor has been battling for more than a decade. Interestingly, it is the fans who inspired the new shoe. Back in 2007 fans started a grassroots effort named McFly2015 to ask Nike to make the shoe with the automatic lacing system, which Nike tried to make. We’re not quite to the future yet though, and Nike is promising to launch those power laces by 2015—the year that Marty in the movie shows off his new shoes.
The popular film trilogy just celebrated its 25th anniversary last year, so fans are already looking for anything that they can get their hands on relating to the movies.
Nike released only 1,500 pairs of the shoes, and started its ten-day sale last week marketing to the highest bidder on its auction on eBay. Prices are already in the thousands! Nike is donating all proceeds to the Michael J. Fox Foundation, and Google Founder Sergey Brin are matching donations up to $50 million.
New concept car takes green to a new level with zero emissions
Not too long ago I blogged about the YEZ electric car that is changing the way manufacturers think about energy efficiency and media connectivity. In a few weeks you’re going to hear a lot about Nissan’s zero-emission ESFLOW electric sports car, which will be featured at the International Motorshow in Geneva. Talk about green innovation!
This photo is one of many you’ll want to check out on the AllCarsElectric site. It’s a concept car that will hopefully be in production someday. It is aerodynamic, futuristic and downright cool in my opinion. Nissan says it gets 150 MPC (miles per charge),but no word yet on the price one of these might cost. The 2011 Geneva Motorshow opens March 11.
Here’s a video of the ESFLOW concept car:
Photo courtesy allcarselectric.
Valentine’s Day rendezvous for NASA
Want a unique and innovative way to spend Valentine’s day with your sweetheart? Gather your favorite people around the computer or the NASA channel to see something historical.
Monday the NASA’s Stardust spacecraft will fire up its camera as it comes face-to-face with a crater that was created six years ago by a NASA space probe. In 2005 the Deep Impact probe crashed into the comet, “Tempel 1,” at 23,000 mph, sending a huge plume of debris. This will be the first time we’ve seen pictures of the damage to the comet made by the impact.
Check out this NASA video of the impact itself:
Comets are irregular bodies of ice and dust that orbit the sun, and these photos are expected to yield some new learnings about them.
The Stardust spacecraft launched in 1999 and has traveled 3 1/2 billion miles. For the past four years NASA has targeted Valentine’s Day 2011 for a rendezvous date with the comet. The Stardust will fly within 124 miles of the comet, and will snap 72 pictures as it passes by. The photos will be beamed back to Earth and then uploaded on NASA TV and on the NASA website.
Crowdsourcing, video games and open innovation make boring job fun!
Crowdsourcing is something I believe businesses need to weave into their social media strategy, and here’s a great example of how it can work. The National Library of Finland has put together an effort to digitize all of its archives—no easy task—by using crowdsourcing and videogames!
The project is called, Digitalkoot, which when translated means Digital Volunteers. Now normally digitizing archives is a dull, tedious job as you could imagine. With millions of pages of historical and cultural magazines, newspapers and journals, it would be easy for mistakes to hamper this process.
So the library partnered with Microtask, a company that designed two video games to make this work more entertaining. ‘
Here’s one of them, called “Mole Hunt.”
Mole Hunt actually shows players how to spot erroneous words in archived material. Not only that, but the game helps make sure digitized materials are accurate and searchable. The hope is that teachers and children will find the volunteer project appealing enough to sign up.
The Skin Cell gun
Science has found a new way to help people suffering from bad burns heal faster than we could ever imagine. This new technology is much like a paint spray gun that helps skin heal.
Click on the video and check out this astounding innovation that I think will change the face of how our medical professionals treat soldiers, firefighters and anyone else susceptible to burns. This “Skin Gun” uses the cells of the burn victim’s own skin to regenerate growth. The first day this video was posted on YouTube, it got over 100,000 views. And for good reason:
Top ten consumer trends for 2011
I am an avid follower of consumer trends, and I advise my clients to be as well.
Here is a terrific video I found on YouTube from JWT. It has several interesting elements I found particularly comforting, like the fact that human downtime and relationships still matter even as we become more and more attached to technology. (There’s even a mini-trend to de-tech!)
Comments are always welcomed! I’d love to hear your thoughts.