David Lidsky's Blog, page 4812

The Secret to Funny or Die's Success: Celebrities, Product Placement, and Above All Else, Funny

Swearing kids and boobie jokes may be the secret to the success of their videos, admitted Funny or Die's CEO Dick Glover and creative director Andrew Steele at SXSW this past weekend, but the smart business model behind them may hold a few secrets to the future of entertainment. 

Originally launched as a "hot or not" video site for comedy in 2007, Funny or Die has grown into a multi-media, cross-platform comedy hub with a thriving Web
portal and production company--the HBO series, Funny or...

Today in Most Innovative Companies

Daily news of note from our Most Innovative Companies, including Cisco, Spotify, Microsoft, and HP.

Cisco: It seems every tech-company CEO has raced to the blogosphere to respond to the FCC's National Broadband Plan. Cisco chair John Chambers isn't far behind Google's Eric Schmidt (who recently compared the initiative to the 1960s space race) and others in voicing strong support for the plan. "If the U.S. military ranked 17th in the world, you can bet that as a nation we would make...

U.S. State Department Cozies Up to Crowd-sourcing and Infographics, With Opinion Space

Can infographics help generate ideas for government--and make us into better citizens?

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That dizzying infographic you see above isn't some interaction designer's master's thesis. It's actually on the U.S. State Department's Web site: Opinion Space, launched on Monday, attempts to gather up thousands of people's opinions on foreign policy, graph them relative to each other, and spur dialogue about the issues.

The infographic was created by Berkeley's Center for New Media, a think tank that's...

Screw Monetization! It's All About Ethonomics at SXSW

SXSW Interactive this year was all about ethonomics, or social media for social change. "How do we create a future we want to live in?" Danah Boyd asked in her keynote on "Privacy and Publicity in the Digital Age," based on her career's worth of astute investigations into young people's use of social media. She asked important questions about how changing norms of privacy (such as the Google Buzz "privacy fail") might affect an undocumented immigrant, a gay member of the military, or a...

This Is What a Solar Roadway Looks Like

Would you feel safe driving on electric glass? A startup called Solar Roadways is betting on it. Armed with $100,000 from the U.S Department of Transportation, the company set off on a quest to produce the Solar Road Panel, an energy-generating device made from solar cells and glass that is intended to replace asphalt on roads. And now, just over 6 months after getting the DOT cash, Solar Roadways has a fancy prototype to show off.

Each Solar Road Panel features a weatherproof, translucent...

Visualizing the Upswing

Earlier this year, FastCompany.com started tracking bright spots in the ailing economy with a series of infographics. Here's a look at some of the most revealing findings we visualized. Feeling hopeful yet?

Infographic of the Day: "The Age of Crap"

As blogs proliferate, does their usefulness decline?

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Blogger Brian Cray has a bone to pick with all you other bloggers out there, and to illustrate his problem, he created the graph above. As he explains:

Everyday I see more crap clogging my Twitter stream and delicious
iGoogle boxes. "Top 10 things widgets for your Web site." "5,000 ways to
do __________ in jQuery." Well, it all wasn't crap at one time. At one
time it was somebody's hard original work. But after the 50th article...

A Video Game for Landmine Avoidance

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Hey, kids! Worried that you'll be blown up by landmines left over from past wars? Landmine Lookout can help. The video game, designed by researchers at Michigan State University, is designed to teach Cambodian children how to avoid landmines in the civil war-torn country.

Why a video game? Simple: It's hard to get little kids to pay attention to Powerpoint presentations. Instead, Landmine Lookout makes landmine avoidance fun. In the game, each player has to navigate through a maze filled...

BYD Cuts Back on Electric Car Ambitions

BYD is a strange company. The Chinese automaker has $250 million from Warren Buffett and a partnership with Daimler to build a four-door electric sedan, but as of yet it hasn't produced an EV of its own. Now it looks like BYD's ambitions of leading the EV revolution have been destroyed as the company announces that it won't mass-produce EVs at all unless a test run of 100 electric taxis in Shenzhen is successful.

To recap BYD's dramatic EV backstory: The company said that it put a plug-in...

Longer Lines at Starbucks a Sign of Better Days?

How deeply a container ship cuts through the water just off of a port. A priest's homilies invoking the unemployed. The line at Starbucks.

Even a casual reader of The Upswing knows that we are fairly obsessed with uncommon economic indicators. So imagine how psyched we were to come across this piece about just that, which aired on the Seattle and Tacoma NPR affiliate KPLU yesterday.

The story begins with a reporter asking 1,200 residents of Oregon, Washington and Idaho to complete the same...