David Lidsky's Blog, page 4716

Pepsi's "Dream Machine" Gives Rewards for Recycling, Giant Check Comes Later

Gimmick or Genius?

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Forget
recycling bins. PepsiCo has a new bottle-tossing machine that purports to
save the world and give Americans what they want. And what what they
want, dear reader, is free stuff. At 150 Rite Aids across North
Carolina, ATM-like recycling kiosks emblazoned with Pepsi's logo
(natch), exchange empty cans and bottles for all sorts of goodies. It's like a gumball machine with a social conscience, and a whopping 3,000 of these will be installed in southern California by...

Innovation Uncensored: Infographics Uncensored

Not only did our Innovation Uncensored event feature the sharpest insights from global thinkers, there were stunning infographics, too! Here's the little version of those that ran on the big screens.

Maybe another way to describe Fast Company's recent Innovation Uncensored event would have been "Innovation Unbound." We wanted to show how the Web has opened up more of the entire globe to innovation. And we wanted to use our 2010 Most Innovative Companies as the study group. So that's what you...

Susan Wu, Cofounder and CEO of Ohai

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The Gamers

Susan Wu

Cofounder and CEO Ohai

The U.S. virtual goods market will jump 60% this year to $1.6 billion, and analysts estimate worldwide annual revenue could reach $10 billion -- the equivalent of Hollywood's 2009 box-office earnings. Founder of online-gaming firm Ohai Susan Wu knew that virtual goods (products that exist only online) made real money, and she went after the digital wares like a hot commodity. Yet this multi-billion-dollar industry is still a niche...

The Mighty Statistic: How to Make Numbers Stick

I want to tell you about a statistic that changed my life and afterwards give you some thoughts about making your own data more life-changing. The stat was authored by my colleague Charles Fishman at Fast Company in his piece on the bottled water industry.First let me give you some backstory: In San Francisco, the city water comes from Yosemite National Park. It's so clean that the EPA doesn't require San Francisco to filter it. And it's cheap: San Francisco city water costs about .0021...

Design Is Critical to Nike CEO Mark Parker's Strategy; How About Yours?

What's the difference between a CEO with a management background and one with a design DNA? Nike's president and CEO Mark Parker is the answer. He began his career as a designer inside the company, where he would often modify and customize shoes for himself (a practice he continues to this day). Creative innovation has been essential to his success, and he gives design a seat at the table "with senior management at the
company helping to shape strategy and direction for the company."

Mark...

What Will an Electric Vehicle-Ready Smart Grid Infrastructure Look Like?

It's 2020. You drive your plug-in hybrid electric car home at 6 p.m., plug it in, let it charge via the solar panels on your roof or the wind power coming from the grid, and you leave it charging until the morning. Sounds simple enough, right? It's not. Utilities have a long way to go before they're prepared for the impending onslaught of energy-sucking vehicles--and they might not all be ready in time.

One utility that thinks it will: Southern California Edison. The utility covers a...

HP Reported to Have Axed Its Windows 7-Based "Slate" Tablet

HP's Slate has received the most buzz of any so-called iPad competitor (keeping in mind the irony and/or painful realization that we're playing into Steve Jobs's hands, since the Slate was announced well before the iPad), but it had essentially a different philosophy. The iPad is a scaled-up smartphone; it runs a mobile operating system, complete with mobile apps (iPhone OS), as well as a mobile (albeit high-speed) processor (Apple A4, rumored to appear in the next iPhone). The HP Slate, on...

YouTube Redesigns Video Appearance, Looks Way Better Than Before

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Yesterday, YouTube launched a redesigned look for their video player, a much cleaner and more modern-looking interface. The big change is the shrunken and altered timeline, showing your chronological position in a video. Instead of a big red in-your-face bar, it's now a collapsible, thin line that only enlarges to allow for movement when you mouse over it. When you move your cursor away from the video, the controls seem to melt into the background--really they're just fading from gray to a...

Reel Roulette, the SFW Motion-Design Video Site

Spin-offs from ChatRoulette have been many, varied and, to the most part, a bunch of bollocks. ReelRoulette, however, is not. It's a very clever Web site that lets motion-video designers share their showreels with potential clients and agencies on the hunt for a creative with a particular talent or vision.

ReelRoulette was set up by a troika of guys, Joshua Schaible, Nick Campbell and Trevor Turk, who explains just how they got the idea here. The three of them were on a plane to SXSW last...

Deutsche Bank Converts Horrid '80s Towers Into Horrid '80s Eco-Towers

Deutsche Bank is set to become carbon neutral, starting with the world's first LEED Platinum retrofitted skyscrapers. Too bad they're so damn ugly.

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We've all heard the refrain: The greenest buildings are the ones that
already exist. But what if a building is so hideous, so bland, so
utterly devoid of beauty that, green or not, it's an affront to the
very conceit of architecture?

Deutsche Bank's Frankfurt
headquarters are just such a building. Actually, a pair of buildings,
two...