David Lidsky's Blog, page 4607

Meet Claire Bonilla, Microsoft's Disaster Response Maven

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Photograph by Annie Marie Musselman

Senior Director, Disaster Management, Microsoft
Redmond, Washington

Bonilla, 37, coordinates emergency communication solutions for stricken communities.

"In a time of disaster, you're often stuck starting with a damaged structure. We partner with NetHope, a nonprofit that brings satellite and wireless Internet connectivity to disaster sites, so we don't have to rely on the infrastructure in the area; our work can be done in the cloud, hosted at...

The Beauty of Fiber Optic Concrete, Yes, Fiber Optic Concrete

Architect Kengo Kuma experiments with a new type of concrete, with tantalizing possibilities and "Unknown Pleasures."

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Perhaps you've heard of translucent concrete? Well, it's got nothing on Luccon, which genius architect Kengo Kuma (whom we just covered) is using in a spellbinding installation titled Con/Fiber.

Luccon is made of fiber optic strands called Eska which are embedded in layers, into blocks of concrete, like a lasagna. While the blocks have the strength and weight of concrete, the...

How mGive Is Making Donations Mobile

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Photograph by Jamie Kripke

Founder, Mobile Accord
Denver

Eberhard, 32, started Mobile Accord to help not-for-profits organize their mobile efforts. Its mGive platform -- which launched with 10 seconds of TV time during the 2008 Super Bowl -- has helped collect $41 million for Haiti since January.

"When the earthquake hit Haiti, the U.S. State Department asked if we could set up a text donation program for the relief effort. We immediately contacted the Red Cross. Within a day, we had...

Team Coordination Is Key in Businesses

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Photograph by AFP/Getty Images

Dan Heath and Chip Heath explain why we tend to neglect coordination -- and suggest how to fix it.

At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the American men's 4x100 relay team was a strong medal contender. During the four previous Games, the American men had medaled every time. The qualifying heats in 2008 -- the first step on the road to gold -- should have been a cakewalk.

On the third leg of the race, the U.S.A.'s Darvis Patton was running neck and neck with a runner...

Zilch: Get What You Want for Nothing

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A Priceless Story: Zainab Salbi, founder of Women for Women, has raised money with the help of her own tale of surviving war. | Photographs by Rennio Maifredi

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Zero Experience, Tons of Drive: The not-for-profit Do Something tapped George Weiner and made him its CTO. | Photographs by Rennio Maifredi

How to profit by behaving like a not-for-profit.

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Adapted from Zilch: The Power of Zero

Recently, I was in a meeting at the offices of a ginormous global conglomerate. Eight of us sat around a big...

Prosthetic Flipper Turns Amputees Into Mermen

Swedish designer Richard Stark's Neptune concept could help amputees swim.

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The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced untold numbers of fit, otherwise able-bodied amputees, and among the many vexing problems this has presented, there's the simple matter of ergonomics: how to design prostheses for guys who are used to moving around all the time?

We've seen running legs galore -- recall Oscar Pistorius's pair, which naysayers said was too good -- and some waterproof limbs for swimming. But...

Study: CEOs Around the World Think Sustainability Is Critical

Sustainability is a global issue that is critical to the success of companies around the world. At least, that's what a new study from Accenture and the United Nations Global Compact tells us. The study, A New Era of Sustainability: UN Global Compact-Accenture CEO Study 2010, is based on findings from a survey of 766 CEOs around the world. The results are somewhat surprising: Despite the recent economic slump, executives are more committed to sustainability than ever.

According to the...

Work Smart: How To Avoid "The Busy Trap"

In an ideal world, you'd arrive at the office, sit down in front of a list called "things to accomplish today," and calmly work through each item until it was time to go home. But most of us can only dream of having that much control over the course of our day. In reality, the modern workday is a minefield of unexpected tasks, problems, and requests that blow up at completely unpredictable times, often, one right after the other. So instead of working our way through a prioritized task...

Cheap, Energy Efficient AMD Chips Hint at Desktop Supercomputing

AMD hasn't given up its fight in the CPU battle against rival Intel: It's now reaching for the next computing revolution--the cloud. A slew of new powerful but cheap AMD chips are out. They also prove desktop supercomputing is en route.

The new chips are part of the Opteron 4100 family, codenamed Lisbon, and they're pretty much chip-for-chip replacements for their predecessors, achieving the same power performance with a smaller hunger for power. It's a shift from what we're used to in a CPU...

Russian President Medvedev to Tour Silicon Valley With Jobs as Tour Guide

So, Dmitry Medvedev has hit California for a three-day tour. He's safe, since Jack Bauer is probably holed up with a caipirinha (caipirosky?) on a South American beach. (I could tell you where, but then I'd have to go dark and, without triangulation, courtesy of Chloe O'Brian, we'd be in serious schtuck.) Gubernator Schwartzenegger, who received him in San Francisco yesterday, just doesn't do that kind of stuff any more. But it's what Medvedev's doing later on today that's the interesting...