David Lidsky's Blog, page 4853

Today in Most Innovative Companies

Daily new of note from our Most Innovative Companies, including Apple, Cisco, GE, and Netflix

Apple: Ever-on-display

David Blaine recently called Steve Jobs a true magician, explaining that he is "the ultimate

showman who keeps the audience excited the whole way leading up to the reveal." And it

looks like Blaine's comments might've gone to the Apple honcho's head, as the company is currently in the process of trademarking the name "Magic

Trackpad" with the U.S. Patent Office...

Pentagon Cuts Restrictions, Shows Love for Social Networking

A Department of Defense memo from Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynne outlines the Pentagon's new policies on the use of social networking services like Facebook and Twitter. To my surprise, it basically boils down to a total embrace of social networking, with just enough restrictions so we don't see tweets like "Headed to Kabul for surprise attack on taliban--don't tell @insurgency LOL."

Prior to this change, DoD policy was largely left up to individual commanders, and was mostly...

Fuel-Cell Powered BMW Bike Concept Revealed

It's fuel cell madness! First Bloom Energy revealed its much-hyped fuel cell-powered Bloom Energy Server earlier this week, and now a group of design students from the ISD of Valenciennes in France have unveiled a slick concept BMW motorcycle powered by a hydrogen fuel cell. The bike doesn't physically exist yet, but the students imagine that a lithium polymer battery will store electrical energy, while hydrogen can be stored in a 20 liter cryogenic tank where the engine would normally sit...

The Road to Recovery Runs Through the DOT

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While most jittery unemployment-stat watchers have been focused on a jobs-creation bill snaking its way through Congress, the Department of Transportation recently and somewhat quietly injected $1.5 billion into the economy in the form of funding for road, rail and other infrastructure work. The project has been dubbed the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery, or TIGER, plan. (And if ever there was a name that could use some positive PR, that's it.) TIGER should have a...

Radio Ga Ga: Sirius XM Once Again King of All (New Car) Media

What a difference a year makes. Last February, fresh from merging the country's two biggest satellite radio companies, Sirius XM was on the verge of departing for the big broadcasting network in the sky. Saddled with backbreaking debt and facing a crumbling car market (its largest source of new business), bankruptcy was a very real possibility.

Enter media macher John Malone on a white horse--Malone and his Liberty Media dropped a giant loan on the company in the form of a 40% stake. Soon the...

Indian Mobile Phone Sniffs Out Funny Money

We very rarely feature foreign cell phones in Fast Company, but that's because we're crashing iPhone snobs (that's a joke, albeit one with more than a half-truth about it.) But Indian firm Intex Technology's $100 cellphone has a software app on it that beggars belief.

As well as its unique triple-SIM slot, the IN5030 has an app that works as a counterfeit currency checker. The software currently only works on rupee notes, but I'd be interested to know the impact this cell might have on those...

Out of the Box Thinking: IKEA Storage Boxes Get Second Life as a Pop-Up Bar

Instead of dumping old storage boxes, why not give them a second life as alcohol-slinging pop-up shops? Designers Diogo Aguiar and Teresa Otto have provided an excellent blueprint for aspiring pop-up bar owners with their temporary bar, a modular white cube made out of 420 IKEA boxes.

The 15-foot-high bar was conceived of and constructed in a month for an architectural competition at Portugal's Universidade do Porto. An LED net behind the semi-translucent boxes lights up the structure...

Getting Hospitalized Should Be Like Flying First-Class

PriestmanGoode has a radical solution to how hospital wards should be designed.

PriestmanGoode, a London design house, has worked on everything from cell phones to speakers to first-class cabins for Swiss Airlines. But Britain's Design Council, hoping to see what serious design thinking might produce, asked them to work on something completely different: Hospital Wards.

PG has just released their proposal today, in a "healthcare manifesto." The central problems facing hospital design happen...

Pop-Up Design: No, It's not more Paper Art. It's a Museum.

Sam Aquillano and Derek Cascio launch a nomadic design museum in Boston.

The Boston Globe profiled Sam Aquillano and Derek Cascio, two young Boston designers (Aquillano for Bose, Cascio for Philips) who are starting a new design museum in the city. The catch: Design Museum Boston doesn't really exist. It's hard to build a brand-new museum these days, but easy to start a pop-up--hey, the recession's done something good--so that's what Aquillano and Cascio are doing, taking over unused...

Infographic of the Day: Visualizing News Stories, as a Huge Social Network

Slates News Dots features offers a new way of connecting the threads between the day's news.

Intuitively, we all know that big news topics relate to other big news topics--when you read about Google, you're likely also reading about Microsoft.

This new tool from Slate makes those connections a bit more concrete. News Dots automatically scans all of the articles from major publications, and then tags them using Calais, an automated tagging engine created by Thompson Reuters. When two stories...