Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have developed carbon nanotube membranes that could significantly reduce the cost of purifying water from the ocean. The technology could be crucial in alleviating imminent fresh water shortages.
[via MIT Technology Review]
I’m intrigued by the success of infomercials as a vehicle to sell products. Infomercials are a $256 billion-per-year industry (including its business-to-business component), according to the Electronic Retailing Association. The fame and success of the Foreman Grill, numerous exercise machines etc. etc. is clear.
The reason? The infomercial and the entertaining theatrics of the man behind it.
WMJ entrepreneurial idea of the day: what about an e-commerce emporium, where via video blogs people sell one or two products a day. It would be like a daily cool hunting site meets digg meets YouTube meets the infomercial. The best sellers would rise to the top of the listings, and there would be a daily top ten listing of sellers. It would be Internet-enabled democratization of the infomercial and seems like something YouTube.com could do to generate revenue, or an interesting opportunity for eBay.
When JetBlue Airways hired David Rockwell to design the interior experience of its new terminal at JFK, Rockport partnered with Broadway choreographer Jerry Mitchell to assist in imagining airport foot and vehicle traffic as a choreography challenge, and designing an efficient experience accordingly.
A choreographer may not be a typical participant in an architectural design process, but Rockwell likes unusual collaborations; he enlisted Todd Oldham, the fashion designer, to help develop the color scheme for the Kodak Theater in Hollywood and had the underground cartoonist Gary Panter working with him on a Disney cruise ship project.
The terminal is expected to open in 2008.
The 7 star, uber-luxurious Burj Al Arab Hotel in Dubai is known for going the extra mile to delight guests. The Hotel converted its heliport into the world’s highest tennis court for Andre Agassi and Roger Federer, who were in Dubai for the Dubai Duty Free Men’s Open.
A robot designed to crawl through the human gut by mimicking the wriggling motion of an undersea worm has been developed by European scientists. It could one day help doctors diagnose disease by carrying tiny cameras through patients’ bodies.
For a video of an early prototype, click here. [via new scientist]
UCSB scientists have been making nanomaterials using a method inspired by a marine sponge. The sponge creates intricate lattices of glass as it grows. The first applications could be ways to make materials for more powerful batteries and highly efficient solar cells at a lower price.
[via futurismic]
[UPDATE (7-18-06): The Business Innovation Insider has a great roundup of Biomimicry activity, as linked to by IFTF Blog. ]
This week, I received a beta invitation for MOOLA.com. You start with a free penny, and if you can double it 30 times by playing simple, two-player games, you will win over $10 million. Nearly 700K has been won to date. You are automatically matched against players competing at the same level, and although the games you can select now are limited (a ro sham bo game and a gold rush bidding game — they will be adding more over time), the play is quick, and marginally exciting. You can cash out anytime for real money, as you can on Deal or No Deal or Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Moola is free to play, ad supported entertainment, and is another promising baby step in the sphere of Internet-enabled gameshow democratization.
I believe there’s a big opportunity here to create an immersive , interactive gaming experience like Everquest, but compress the experience from a 50 hour/week time commitment to an easily accessible quick and episodic gaming experience that appeals to the casual gamer, and offers the potential to win real money. Personal WMJ trivia: In second grade, I wanted to be a gameshow host, and I designed a gameshow concept, a card game, which featured an elaborate set with a glass elevator to access various levels.
Silicon Valley may soon have to be renamed DIAMOND VALLEY and diamonds may soon be so common you can put up on the soles of your shoes.
Scientists have made great strides growing diamonds in labs that outshine even the rarest De Beer’s rocks, through a process of chemical vapor desposition, which grows diamond crystals one carbon at a time. In addition to the ramifications for the jewelry industry, using CVD, scientists will be able (by somewhere around 2011) to cheaply mass-produce diamond semiconductors that are hundreds of times as powerful as their silicon counterparts.
For a slide show of the process, click here [Popular Science].
3pointD’s (great blog I just discovered) Mark Wallace is experimenting with blogging from within Second Life. You can now point SL’s mozilla browser to any website, and the tools necessary to build really robust Web-enabled applications in SL are beginning to appear.
[via Make]
This morning, I attended a Churchill Club breakfast meeting with Hossein Eslambolchi, author, 2020 Vision: Business Transformation through Tecnology Innovation. Mr. Eslambochi, the former CTO of ATT, is an entrepreneur and high-tech adviser and holds over 700 worldwide patents.
10: Next-generation speech recognition (natural language understanding). Speech recognition technology is progressing 10x faster than Moore’s Law. There will be an automation of what you want, when you want it via speech.
9: Knowledge Mining. Mining has transitioned from pure data to information mining, and will transition again to knowledge mining, which will open the door to new services, including improved security. Data is currently doubling every 3 years, and in ten years, will double every 11 seconds.
8: Open Source components will dominate at the edge of the network. Open source software will be a big part of this and will win over propriety software.
7: Broadband will be ubiquitous. By 2015, there will be 1/2 billion broadband users worldwide. In addition, we will go to having 3 mb/sec capability to 40 mb/ sec by end of the decade and 1.2 gb/sec by 2020. Between 2010-2013 Moore’s Law will end, and nano-computers will rise.
6: E-collaboration - peer-to-peer applications will dominate the workplace. There will be a revolution of multi-input-output middleware.
5: Sensory Networks: Prediction: The VIN will be replaced with an IP address and you will be able to tune your car while driving to the office. RFID is important but not sufficient.
4: Wireless Internet access proliferates. Universal fiber access is cost-prohibitive, and WIFI and WIMAX will co-exist. By the end of 2008, there will be 2 billion mobile phones worldwide, and 75 million LAN hot spots.
3: Personal Networks will be free and common.
2: Security will have to be better addressed - security vulnerabilities result in $25 Billion loss. Much could be accomplished through simply writing better software code. Fishing / Farming attacks have increased 30X in the past 12 months.
1: Internet / Emerging networks ready for a sextuple play: 1, voice, 2, video, 3, wireless, 4, gaming, 5, sensory networks, 6, data
The Blind Cow Restaurant in Zurich, Switzerland is a 60-seat restaurant that is booked months in advance, and offers an entirely innovative and unique dining experience: you dine in complete darkness. There are no candles, flashlights etc. and you are waited on by mostly visually handicapped staff.
To listen to the story on NPR, click here.
Other “dark” dining and bar destinations are also in Paris (Dans le Noir), Melbourne and Cologne.
[thanks, Joyce Wycoff]
