Friday 17 August 2007

The Mind Head Eye - on the future



It's the puntastic Friday afternoon infobinge, with a look at innovation from around the world. Leading thinkers, doers, makers and disrupters talk about earth meltingly big ideas and the future of futureness.

Enjoi.

Timothy Ferriss recommends you check email only once per week, don't read the newspaper and don’t save for retirement. These are only a few of the taboo recommendations found in Tim’s book, “The 4-Hour Work Week.”

Tom Arnold's Terrapass. "It's the $50 bumper sticker," says Tom. In a period when climate change could not be more critical, Terrapass provides a way for individuals to offset their car, flight, or home carbon emissions -- and to show it on a decal and bumper sticker. In this interview, Tom provides some interesting insight into the company, the carbon credit business, and the climate change milieu.

Michael Arlington, the founder of TechCrunch, when he visited the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Today his blog is the place on the web where you’re you’ll likely get the early news on major company shakeups, product announcements, and emerging ideas. Arrington started TechCrunch in 2005 to profile the latest and greatest in internet technology and startup companies. Download his talk here.

Chip Heath examines why ideas become memorable. It examines draws on psychology research to create a virtual "how-to" guide for anyone looking to introduce new concepts and products. Sticky ideas are the result of 6 key attributes: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions and stories (SUCCES). Download podcast here.

Sam Altman is the 22-year old co-founder of Loopt, a location-based social networking mobile application that allows users to see where their friends are. Sam gives a peek into the fascinating and incubative world of a Silicon Valley startup that's gaining a lot of momentum. Download here

Michael’s Raynor's first book (written with Clayton Christensen) The Innovator’s Solution was a Wall Street Journal and NY Times best-seller and won multiple awards.Michael’s current book The Strategy Paradox is covered in this interview. Additionally, Michael talks about Microsoft innovation, Google’s growth, and consulting firms. Download here

In an interview with Wired Magazine, Craig Newmark notes that Craigslist's corporate mantra, if any, is to "give people a break." In a recent discussion, ScribeMedia.org points out that, "Craigslist still has the power to confound old line-media moguls and possibly change the face of 'glo-calism'--local reach spread globally." Download podcast here.
Chris Larsen is the co-founder and CEO of Prosper.com, an online person-to-person lending marketplace that brings together traditionally inspired dynamics of lending between friends, family, and individuals, with the benefits and rigors of modern-day credit systems. Download here.

Ed Catmull is the co-founder and President of Pixar Animation Studio. He has made several patented advances in animation technology and is the driver behind many of Pixar’s 15 amazing Academy Awards. Among other technologies, Catmull is credited with being the father of “texture mapping” – the process by which a flat (two dimensional) image is mapped onto a moving 3D image. Download here.

Geoffrey Moore is a VC with Mohr Davidow Ventures, consultant and, most famously, the bestselling author of Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado and Dealing with Darwin. Podcast here.

Virgin Galactic is Richard Branson's effort to bring space travel to the masses (well, at least those masses that can fork over $200k for a ticket). Virgin Galactic CEO, Alex Tai, an experienced pilot and personal friend of Branson's, is responsible for figuring out how to put space tourists in zero gravity in a safe flight. Podcast here.

Philip Rosedale, Founder of Linden Labs and Second Life. Philip built his first computer in 4th grade, and started his first computer software company while still in high school. In '95 he developed FreeVue, a low-bitrate video conferencing system for Internet-connected PC's, which was eventually acquired by RealNetworks. He worked at RealNetworks for three years and eventually became the CTO. He decided to leave in 1999 and joined Accel Partners as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence. There he founded Linden Labs, a company which had the audacious goal to build an immersive 3-D virtual world for people to live and play in. That world became Second Life. Podcast here.

Mike Ramsay, Co-founder of TiVO. You can thank Mike for the fact that you haven't seen a TV commercial in six months. Mike left a cushy job at SGI to form TiVO, which revolutionized the way people watched TV by creating the first ever Digital Video Recorder. Podcast here.
David has been described as "the most sought-after design engineer this side of Thomas Edison” by the I.D. 40’s list of America’s leading design innovators. His current project is to start up the d school at stanford. Podcast here.

All of these links were taken from the iinnovation podcast site. Please visit it. It is absolutely amazing. For anyone who wants to rss feed from it, I think there's a link there, plus most of these links are available in video form, just in case you travel on the tube and need to periodically lip read what's being said.

Eric Schmidt - The Internet's Most Important Person


Google CEO, Eric Schmidt was recently voted the most important person on the internet. In this interview he talks about everyone's favourite mega-corp. Disruptive technologies and new technologies in targetted advertisements in very large systems. He believes there are enormous opportunities in the model of targetted advertising and with a trillion $USD every year being spent in untargetted advertisements, be believes it will be a very rich area for entrpenuers for many, many years. He also discusses the self censoring decision Google made in China, which allows the Chinese government to censor content.

Thursday 16 August 2007

Everything is miscelleneous. And beautiful.



A site that puts random photos together based on their colour. Simple idea and really quite lovely. Check it out here. via this funky little young creatives site

Polaroid movie

WNYC Radio Lab podcasts



Oh boy, these are good. Kevin Kelly cited these guys as one of this top three best podcasts on the internet. Broadly, the theme for the show is exploring interesting ideas such as how we perceive time, how the brain creates a sense of self and a neuroscientific look at morality but it's so much better. The sound design is fantastic, the topics outstanding, the guests are often luminaries such as Oliver Sacks and VS Ramachandran and the hokey, warm schitck of the presenters is so friendly I just want to hug my ears.
Season one
Season two
Season three

Irv Rosenfeld's HB 5470 Michigan Medical Marijuana Testimony



Thank you Ario for this inspiring video. Whatever your thoughts on this issue, this is still a remarkable speech.

Wednesday 15 August 2007

In our time BBC podcasts



The archive of BBC Radio 4 "In our time" podcasts are only available in streaming real audio, but they're well produced and full of great information. This archive is for science and this one is for culture. However, you can subscribe to the podcast here and enjoy all the new ones as they're uploaded. And a big thank you to the person who sent me this generous link. You saved us all from a fate worse than real audio.

New Coke Spot.



Comments? I am literally without speech.
In-cre-di-ble.

Sunday 12 August 2007

Qlipboard - Record your own slide shows



Cool little free application that lets you record your own voice onto a slide show. You can use it to release your frustrated inner creative, make essays, do homework or just the next mega-meme on you tube.

Check it out here.