Rinspeed adds axle, battery pack to Smart Electric Drive
by: Gizmodo , 2011-12-07 18:27:17 UTC
Wacky automotive modifier Rinspeed comes up with a way of giving electric cars more range, with an extra battery pack supported by its own axle.

Originally posted at The Car Tech blog

Box CEO Aaron Levie: To Create Something Exceptional, Do Sweat The Small Stuff
by: fast company, 2011-12-07 17:23:24 UTC

Business schools and most jobs don’t teach you how important it is to sweat the small stuff.  

In fact, we’re mostly told the opposite--don’t be a micromanager, don’t be penny wise and pound foolish, don't miss the forest for the trees. The implied wisdom is that abstract and conceptual thinking always prevails over narrow determination and single-mindedness. And yet, when we look at the greatest inventions, greatest companies, and greatest teams of our time, their success always comes down to tireless concern over every last detail.

Big, sluggish companies--you know the ones, with brands that elicit ambivalence instead of aspiration--are fat, dumb, and uncaring for a reason. Their products, from airline flights to consumer electronics devices, feel like the result of an accident or a hassle rather than the core purpose of their existence. In these instances, system thinking--with the goal of managing and improving processes, logistics, and throughput--reigns supreme in the organization, replacing a maniacal focus on delivering great products or services by attending to every last excruciating detail.

It’s certainly easy as a startup to focus on the small things, because when you’re small, every issue is big. This is why, counterintuitively, a small, nimble company with far fewer resources often delivers the most innovation and a superior user experience. By focusing on every level of detail, because survival is on the line, better products and service emerge. As organizations grow, this responsibility dissipates, founders move on, and quality suffers--it can always be someone else’s problem to worry about the small, nuanced, granular things. Those are tactical issues, and I’m strategic, right?  

Yet, the best companies in the world are those that have scaled by turning those tactics and granular efforts into the reason for their success. This is why you get a near-uniformly positive experience when flying Virgin compared to often-abysmal treatment from other airlines, or why Apple unequivocally makes products that just feel better than other PC manufacturers.

Why the small stuff is so important

In management, we can easily slip into thinking about the holistic delivery of a product distinct from the perfect delivery of every subcomponent or part that makes up that service. Everyone has been in those meetings--executives feel that the small things can be left to everyone else, instead focusing on the areas of "higher value." Phrases like "this is good enough," or "customers won’t notice" should be stamped out of any management team’s or individual’s vocabulary.  

Because ultimately, your product or service is consumed on that granular level that's being ignored. Whether it’s clicking on a link, signing up for a product, playing with a dial, or conversing with an attendant, these are the interfaces from which customers experience your brand. No customer cares that you have the best logistics and supply chain in the world if the final manifestation of your product is flawed. 

And with the Internet amplifying how people share their love or hate for products, increasing global competition, and contracting wallets, the quality of these interactions are more important than ever before.  

The small things have a disproportionate impact on customers' feelings. It’s the way Kindle knows your name when you first load it up, the consistent experience you get from Starbucks baristas, the dozens of optimizations Spotify does to make sure your music starts streaming instantly, or the richer sound and better comfort you get from Bose headphones. We're taught that quality and cost should scale proportionally, but many of the best experiences don't come with a larger price tag at all. Just a greater level of attention to the details.

The combination of an insane attention to these details and neurotic level of focus on customer experience in all areas is what sets apart the great companies from the good. Organizations that do decide to adopt this level of intensity will always have superior offerings, an instant differentiator from the indistinguishable competition.  

Building a culture around sweating the small stuff

"Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected," Steve Jobs once famously and said. 

Most companies have given up on caring about excellence altogether, so there aren’t too many examples that we can live by. M.G. Siegler argues that leaders need to aim for less deference to produce high-quality work. While this has been proven to work across film, fashion, and technology, it’s also a cop-out for the entire team. It should be everyone’s responsibility to push for a higher standard and level of experience. 

Unsurprisingly, we're actually well-incented to make our work the very best--it's better for profits, long-term morale, and it's more gratifying--but we often don’t know why it's so critical until it's too late. The product gets shipped to poor reviews: fail. Customer unrest thanks to poor support: double fail. And amidst the infinite varying priorities and market changes, it becomes shockingly easy to undervalue quality even in a well-run organization.  

In any organization, quality bars are subjective and moving targets, making them hard to identify and address, let alone maintain. But when they’re not defined or upheld, most organizations will regress to the mean, which we can assume is the average output. But leading organizations are built by exploiting the fringe--the fringe in quality, in performance, in experience, in cost, and so on.

To sweat the small stuff means to be uncompromising about anything that affects the quality of a product or experience for customers. It means making tradeoffs of time and effort for the efficacy of the final output. It means implementing systems, social or formal, that ensure high bars are maintained at all times and in any circumstance. It means delaying product releases, extending work hours, or losing a little extra margin to make things just right.  

Asking "What would be best for our customer?" doesn’t go nearly far enough. Leading through this question gets you to average results. Instead ask, "What will blow our customers' minds?" Repeat the question "Can we do better?" until the point of migraine-induced annoyance, and see how much things change. Create a culture that forces this challenge multiple times, every step of the way, and you’ll see remarkable changes in every deliverable. Implement a we-won’t-ship line in the sand that can't be subverted for any reason if quality standards aren't met. There are other tactics to distribute the enforcement as well.

Mark Pincus, the CEO of Zynga, pushes on the notion that every employee is the CEO of something. This empowers individuals to take responsibility for their area of ownership, adding a level of accountability and fulfillment that can drive quality. In many ways this is a psychological trick to ensure success and quality in the most narrow and distinct of areas. For customer delight, Zappos became determined to build a winning culture for its company that would make employees love their jobs, and thus reflect this inspiration and happiness on their clients.  

If you don't seem paranoid about perfection, you're probably not aiming high enough. Sadly--for consumers--the vast majority of companies will never put this level of focus on their products, services, or interactions.  But building it into your culture, and making sure it's a collective and distributed effort, is a winning way to ensure your products are superior.  

Author Aaron Levie is the CEO and co-founder of Box, which he originally created as a college business project with the goal of helping people easily access their information from any location. 

For more leadership coverage, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

[Image: Top: Flickr user Jez Page; bottom: scobleizer; thumbnail: thorswiftphotography]

2012 TED Prize Winner is an Idea, Not an Individual: The City 2.0
by: TreeHugger Design, 2011-12-06 19:14:00 UTC
It is an idea upon which our planet’s future depends.

Twine, A Tiny Gizmo That Holds The Internet's Future
by: Co.Design, 2011-12-05 21:47:31 UTC

"In the future, your house will send you a text message to warn you that your basement is flooding." Sounds like the kind of hooey you only hear in those fantastical "future of..." videos, doesn't it? Not anymore. Two MIT Media Lab graduates have created a "2.5-inch chunk of the future" called Twine that does exactly that, and more, and is available right now.

Well, not quite: It will be available in early 2012, thanks to its wildly successful Kickstarter campaign. And the best part about it, the part that surely made that fundraising surge to over $170,000? With Twine, you can make that future magic happen without any coding skills at all, right out of the box.

It's "the simplest way to get the objects in your life tweeting or emailing."

Here's the basic idea behind Twine: Software and physical stuff should be friends. You can program webpages, data, all kinds of apps to do whatever you want them to--and even use awesome tools like IFTTT.com to hack them together without knowing how to code. But making that software talk to stuff in the real world--especially stuff that's just laying around your house, and not pre-designed to be a "smart product"--takes PhD-level skills. And that, according to Twine creators David Carr and John Kestner, is just plain wrong.

Twine is a small slab of gray plastic that hides that PhD's worth of engineering magic--a bunch of internal and external sensors and a Wi-Fi hub--"the simplest possible way to get the objects in your life texting, tweeting or emailing," in Carr and Kestner's words. To create the aforementioned "house that alerts you when the basement floods," just plunk your Twine in the basement where its built-in moisture sensor will get wet if there's a flood. (And make sure it can still connect to your home Wi-Fi signal.) Then head to Twine's companion webapp, Spool, and create a simple rule-based program: "If Twine gets wet, send me a text message." (Yep, the "programming language" is actually that simple.) And blammo, that's it. You now have a "smart" house.

Carr and Kestner created a completely ingenious incentive to send their Kickstarter ask over the moon: For every $10,000 they received in pledges, they promised to build in another sensor to Twine's repertoire. Out of the box, Twine can sense temperature, motion, moisture, and magnetism; if Carr and Kestner keep their promise, Twine will ship with 13 additional sensors, all controllable and programmable from the elegantly simple Spool web interface. That should be enough built-in "smart product" power to handmake a personalized version of Ericsson's phony super-home, but in real life. Not bad for a couple of guys working in their spare time.

[Read more about Twine at Kickstarter]

Nissan's Leaf-Charging Wireless Pad Could Signal An Industry Surge
by: fast company, 2011-12-06 21:55:04 UTC

Wireless charging is still not common, particularly with the disappearance of the Palm Pre, which was one of the main gadgets to utilize the trick for ultra-convenient connection to a battery-boosting charger. That makes Nissan's moves with its Leaf EV all the more interesting: To charge your 2013 Leaf, all you'll have to do is park it on the requisite spot of your garage.

The setup is rather simple at first glimpse: Instead of flipping open a door on your car and connecting in a large electric plug, wired to a wall charger point, you reverse your Leaf over a large plastic pad on the floor.

[youtube dvCkTGdZJx8]

But this otherwise innocuous pad contains the coils of a wireless induction loop and some electronics--induction is how electricity makes its way through a transformer, magnetically, with no physical connection between the coils. And you can think of the pavement pad as one half of a transformer. The other coils are installed beneath the floor of the Leaf itself. To charge it up the car is electrically reversed over the pad into the sweet spot with the aid of a dashboard display; sensors tell the car when to stop. Turning the main alternating current on connects the loop in the pad with the loop in the car, and after being converted into DC, it can charge up the car's battery.

The simplicity and benefits are obvious for EV users, who would simply have to park their cars at night in order to drive away with a full battery in the morning. No messing with plugs or cables--which saves time, and could be safer. That's why Nissan has revealed it's making the charging system available for new Leaf vehicles from 2013 (though it's unlikely it'll come to earlier vehicles in a retrofit).

But there are also other benefits that are more commercial in nature: Due to their more resilient design, and zero reliance on users connecting up electrics correctly--including not dropping the heavy plugs accidentally, or driving off with the cable hooked-up--it's possible that wireless charging mats like this will become commonplace at roadside rest stops and garages. This would cause more frequent stops for motorists, what with range anxiety still a real concern for EV drivers. That's something that driving safety campaigners, worried about drivers falling asleep at the wheel, may welcome. And the roadside cafe industry may also like the idea.

With all the competing designs for an EV charger port, it's also possible that mats like this could have a "universal charger" element. Because they don't demand a physical connection to the car, they could be designed to be automatically configurable to suit different cars' electrical needs. That's looking into the far future. For now Nissan is perhaps the first among many to come to market with this tech.

There's just one drawback to inductive charging. It's wasteful. Due to the immutable laws of physics, there's some energy lost as part of the process, and it may be as much as 20%. That slighlty blots the eco-footprint of an EV, as the original energy has to be produced somehow, which comes at an evironmental and fiscal cost. But since when has laziness prevented humans from choosing convenience over conscience?

Chat about this news with Kit Eaton on Twitter and Fast Company too.

influx_studio: algae green loop
by: Designboom - Weblog, 2011-12-05 17:59:00 UTC

utilizing the natural CO2 absorbing capabilities of algae, the project explores ways of urban decarbonization by integrating loops of bioreactors with chicago's marina city towers.

read more

gmp architekten: eco-park in qingdao
by: Designboom - Weblog, 2011-12-06 20:00:00 UTC

positioned between the mountain ranges and the yellow sea, this ten square kilometer masterplan is powered with renewable energy sources including water and wind power, geothermal energy and an emphasis upon solar energy.

read more

Count steps in style with the InView Pedometer
by: The Design blog, 2011-12-06 21:46:03 UTC
Sahil Khurana:

Matthew Emeott has designed a pedometer product for Reebok, which has been christened the InView Pedometer. The product has a round shape and is very handy. Counting steps is a great way to track one’s fitness routine and there are a lot of products available all across the globe, which promise to calculate each and every step we take. Most of them are not pleasant to look at and don’t even feel good to touch. The InView Pedometer is not only nice to look at but also feels soothing when touched just like a massage or a skipping stone.

The product makes good use of 3 axis digital accelerometer, which is same as the one present in an iPhone. This digital accelerometer is responsible for sensing movement of a person who is using the pedometer. InView comes fitted with a software, which will intelligently distinguish between an acceptable and non acceptable movement. It has a thickness of 18mm and is 50mm round, which makes it easy to hold in a hand and take around without feeling much weight.

InView Pedometer can be clipped near the waist while walking or running, which will make it possible for a user to keep away the display from prying eyes. The display has been conveniently positioned at the edge of InView, hence the information can be easily read by looking towards the waist. A buyer will get the flexibility to choose it from three colors: teal, white and black. So, never miss counting a step in a stylish way with the InView Pedometer around.

dirk vander kooij: endless saloon table + rocking chair
by: Designboom - Weblog, 2011-12-05 11:41:00 UTC

the table and chair are formed from melted refrigerator, poured in a continuous line by a robot resulting in the newest editions to the designer's 'endless' series of furniture.

read more

The Case For Girls: A Mock Ad Aims To Become A Legitimate Campaign With Global Impact
by: fast company, 2011-12-05 12:01:00 UTC

Digital agency AKQA created a mock ad campaign to support baby girls in China. Their idea was so powerful, the team created a website, video, and a mobilizing worldwide event around their concept: "You Are."

Digital ad agency AKQA crafted a stunning ad campaign for Fast Company's Dec./Jan. issue. Their "Case for Girls" concept featured a Chinese woman wearing a shade of crimson lipstick and a pairing of Chinese characters that translate into: "You Are."

Their creative concept was so comprehensive, the agency now envisions a real-life potential for their idea, with a campaign that would include a pledge to wear red lipstick during International Women's Day, March 12, 2012.

The link to their just-launched website is here. The Flash-based website, available in Mandarin and English, is one scrolling page that highlights facts about women’s health and gender inequality in China and around the world that leads to a call to action to mobilize and unite women on International Women’s Day on March 12, 2012.

They've also crafted a video, which, as the agency describes it, "references the sparse style of Chinese brush strokes and ink paintings, the video introduces the idea called Ni Shi, meaning “you are." It's a gorgeous must-watch video--a stunning call to action.

[video_twistage 1]