David Lidsky's Blog, page 4670

Fast Company Mobile: Now Image-Enhanced - http://m.fastcompany.com

Samsung is predicting a 50% increase in smartphone sales this year, and now we know why: Fast Company's mobile site has been enhanced to include all the eye-popping inline photos, illustrations, and infographics you see every day on the Web site. Give it a whirl on your OLED-screened geniusphone today by visiting: http://m.fastcompany.com

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Paging All Designers: 15 Icons for Healthier Hospital Signs

Hospitals are complicated spaces that must be navigated by people of all different ages, abilities, and backgrounds. Fifteen new symbols designed by students help explain new health care services, from nutrition counseling to MRI-PET scans.

Ypulse Youth Marketing Mashup

Can you tweet like a tween? Text faster than a sixth grader? Chances are you're biting their virtual dust. Three-quarters of all kids in the U.S. have their own cell phones by age 12, and today's average teen sends more than 3,000 text messages a month. "Kids have been the chief information officers of their households for at least a decade," says Dan Coates, president of Youth Pulse and organizer of the San Francisco event aimed at reaching this coveted consumer base -- and through them...

Meguru Japanese Electric Vehicle Is Made Out of Bamboo and Wood Pulp Paper

We've seen bamboo bikes and biodiesel-powered bamboo taxis, but this EV is the first we've seen that makes use of the fast-growing plant. Meguru, a rickshaw-like EV developed by Japanese companies Yodogawa and Kinki Knives Industries, features an iron body coated in lacquer, a fan-shaped paper door, and bamboo flooring.

Meguru doesn't exactly look highway-ready, but that's not the point--the Japanese culture-inspired touches are meant to attract customers in more "traditional" towns like...

Sustainability Faceoff: Microsoft vs. Apple

The battle between Microsoft and Apple is practically legendary in the technology industry. Both companies offer strong products that appeal to different types of customers--Macs are traditionally geared toward design-focused users, for example--but they also differ greatly in the sustainability arena. Author R. Paul Herman teases out these differences in the new book The HIP Investor. We do the same here.

Microsoft excels in the sustainability arena, with concrete goals including a plan to...

The Canned Lion Awards

As the ad industry debates plagiarism -- and prepares to congratulate itself at this year's Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival -- we unveil our nominees for the most egregious copycat ads, parallel thinking, and poorly conceived homages. Go to fastcompany.com/ripoff to vote for your least favorites.

Copycat ad of the yearonline survey

News Corp.'s Other Murdoch: How Dare the British Library Charge for Its Digital Newspaper Archive!

Please feel free to file this in the C.E.Oh-no-he-di'nt folder: News Corp.'s James Murdoch has publicly slapped plans by the British Library, one of the most venerable libraries in the world, for digitizing its newspaper archive.

For those of you over on the other side of the pond, or otherwise not in the know, the British Library is the U.K.'s official national library. It's been around in various forms for around a century, and since 1911 it has been the legal national deposit...

HUD Announces the End of Urban Sprawl as We Know It, New Urbanists Feel Fine

"It's time the federal government stopped encouraging sprawl," Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Shaun Donovan declared this morning before the Congress for the New Urbanism.

He'd announced moments before that the department would fund $3 billion worth of projects this year alone, and they'd henceforth use "location efficiency" (based on transportation access, residential density, and so on) to score grant applications. They'll also use the criteria of LEED-ND, the brainchild of...

McG and Tero Ojanperä on Entertainment's 5th Screen: Your Environment

No one wants to watch The Godfather Trilogy on a cellphone screen. Yet there is no arguing that the way content is viewed and distributed is changing more rapidly than the entertainment industry can keep up with. More than that, it's changing the way we, the audience, experiences entertainment. For Tero Ojanperä, executive vice president of Nokia, that means "you will be living the story when you are walking around...interacting with your environment."

But what does that mean for content...

Cato Institute Uses Google Maps to Show Botched SWAT Raids

The Cato Institute has put together something it calls a Raid Map, using Google Maps to show all the paramilitary raids done by government agencies that haven't quite worked out the way they should have. Or, as the Cato Institute puts it, "botched."

The different colored pins signify different ways each raid went wrong, from the deaths of officers and innocents, through mistaken identity, to overuse of force, and you can isolate the data by state, year and type of cock-up, should you so...