David Lidsky's Blog, page 4694

Southwest Lands in Two "Overpriced, Underserved" South Carolina Airports

Dave Ridley made good on his word.

Southwest's senior VP for marketing and revenue management said that the discount carrier chooses to add destinations based on whether a city's airport is "overpriced and underserved" and does not go shopping for tax breaks and other incentives. And that's just what Southwest is doing now that its announced service to two locations in South Carolina.

But Southwest can't seem to help pissing people off. Its move comes despite the froth whipped up by...

Stanford's Autonomous Car Learns to Slide Park

 When we last visited Stanford to take a look at the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Lab (VAIL) work on robotic vehicles, we had the chance to sit in the Junior 3 autonomous car while it slowly backed itself into a parking space. Count us out for a repeat performance with the original Junior autonomous car, which recently learned how to slide park--a process that involves putting itself into reverse, accelerating to 25 mph, quickly braking while simultaneously turning the wheel, and...

How a $2 Version of Microsoft Office 2010 Could Cost More Than $100, Eat Up New PC Memory

Calm yourselves, Microsoft Office fans--the new version for 2010 isn't due for launch until tomorrow. Until then you can amuse yourselves with info on how MS is manhandling, shoehorning, and maneuvering to make the launch a success.

Mary Jo Foley over at AllThingsD has managed to get the skinny on Office 2010 from an authorized reseller, meaning the info is coming from the horse's mouth. And while some of the MS marketing strategies are pretty typical for this sort of grand-scale global...

ABBA Fans Shed a Tear for Stockholm's New Photography Museum

A new contemporary photography museum will open in Stockholm this month, drawing tears from ABBA fans everywhere.

Later this month, Stockholm will unveil its first-ever photography museum. It'll spring from the shell of an early 20th-century pier building, a triumph of historic preservation in a city whose building stock dates back more than 700 years. It'll showcase the most famous photogs around (Annie Leibovitz, Joel-Peter Witkin, Lennart Nilsson), raising Stockholm's middling status in...

ZooBurst: Augmented Reality 3-D Pop-up Books for Students and Teachers

Pop-up books have gone digital at last--and you don't even need 3-D glasses. ZooBurst is
an augmented reality program that creates dynamic pop-up books on your computer screen using just a Webcam and an Internet connection. The project, created by Craig Kapp, was on display at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts
ITP showcase yesterday.

Choose one of the books on the Web site, then simply hold the ZooBurst tag (a black ZB box printed on a regular sheet of paper) in front of your Webcam. A...

Microsoft Predestination Can Predict Where You're Going

Think Google knows too much about your daily life? Better brace for Microsoft's Big Brother act--Predestination is MS's experimental program that collects driving data (urban driving data, traffic patterns, your own driving patterns, etc.) to create an in-car recommendation engine that gives dynamic advice on how to efficiently get to where the system thinks you're going.

Predestination has been under development for quite some time, as evidenced by this 2006 conference paper on the...

Zombie Blood Quenches Thirst, Boosts Energy, Turns Consumers Into Brain-dead Horde

When did energy drinks get weird? When they arrived on the scene, I swear they were straightforward sports products with zappy names. Now there's Zombie Blood. Seriously: Zombie Blood. But is it a real thing or a marketing ploy for a different product?

Apparently Zombie Brains is all about "4 grams of whey protein, caffeine and not even a trace of brains." Hmmm. What does it do to you? It "delivers up to four hours of energy," presumably in a human-digestible format, rather than stuff to...

Southwest Lands in Two "Overpriced, Underserved" South Carolina Airports

Dave Ridley made good on his word.

Southwest's senior vp for marketing and revenue management said that the discount carrier chooses to add destinations based on whether a city's airport is "overpriced and underserved" and does not go shopping for tax breaks and other incentives. And that's just what Southwest is doing now that its announced service to two locations in South Carolina.

But Southwest can't seem to help pissing people off. Its move comes despite the froth whipped up by...

Dell's Bamboo Packaging Is Now Compostable Too

Compostable packaging is shaping up to be the next big trend in sustainable product design. First SunChips rolled out the first 100% compostable chip bag earlier this year, and now Dell has announced that its bamboo packaging, used as cushioning in its laptops and certain netbooks, is officially compostable.

Dell began using the bamboo cushions last year as part of the company's plan to integrate sustainable packaging into its supply chain. "We previously used oil-based products like...

Biomimicry Challenge: IDEO Taps Octopi and Flamingos to Reorganize the USGBC

Our biomimicry challenge What Would You Ask Nature? drew dozens of real-world business problems submitted by companies from all over the world. We assigned three challenges to three firms and paired them each with a biologist. Each team is now reporting their bio-inspired solutions.

No matter how lofty their mission, most large organizations are not designed for agility, and therefore many have the same big issues that come with dispersed growth. The United States Green Building Council, who...