I’ll start with a quick book review.
For a long time I resisted The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo because it seemed to be everywhere and a bit over-hyped. A friend passed her copy on to me recently and I just finished it. It’s worth the read. The hype is mostly right. This is just plain murder mystery family dynasty journalistic detective work fun. Two more in the series and then I’m in trouble (because the books were all published posthumously and aside from outlines for more they’re all he wrote).
A few weeks ago MAYA held an “iPad Challenge” in which the MAYAn community was challenged to come up with fun accessories that we could design, build, test, package, and be ready to deploy, starting 24-48 hours before the launch of the iPad.
The judges received over 40 submissions and the winning entries won an iPad for their efforts. Of course to get the iPad they had to actually take their idea to fruition (yes that meant a long and sleep deprived night filled with cutting, sewing, clicking, mousing, wiring, coding, testing, and eating cold pizza) and then go out and stand in line to get their iPads and of course show off their newly made wonders.
We are now ready to share with the world (ok, yes we actually already premiered these and handed out a few to new iPad owners at our local Apple store’s iPad Launch event but nobody else really got a chance to see the madness) the first of the new MAYAn iPad accessories.
Introducing the MAYA Sprocket app and the Sprocket Pocket accessory!
And of course with all MAYAmake projects, we made a How-to film for those industrious makers out there. Be sure to watch the whole thing to see if you can find the Easter Egg (well it was Easter weekend).
Special thanks to all who submitted entries and in particular to Steve Spencer, Amy Ferchak, Greg Gibilisco, and Jeff Senn for diving deep and building something amazing in such a short time!
Nomadic Research Labs pointed the way to our humble efforts at bike silliness.
I will point out that this was an interesting experiment in another way. We built the “How-to” film and posted it but hadn’t promoted it in any way, 2 days ago. We kinda thought it’d be fine out there by its lonely ol’ self until we got around to the Friday Links and started talking about it. But to our surprise it got picked up by Engadget (who had some fun and photoshopped in some Sprocket dancers) and then Gizmodo, Wired, and Fast Company followed suit. At this point there are now over 40,000 views (yes 2 days, no promotional activity, and 40,000 impressions for something that was essentially a little bit of Friday afternoon fun). I can only imagine that it was a very slow news day.
The Economist has posted some of the session from the recent Ideas Economy conference and if you’ve got about 45 minutes and want to hear a lively discussion about design thinking and the hybrid problem solver (or really just want to stare longingly into my eyes), watch it.
We also had the chance to partner with the Economist on a session at the conference called Innovation Court where teams of attendees and speakers and journalists got together to try to imagine what the Economist would put on their cover in 2014. I’ll probably do an article about the experience at some point but in the meantime the setup and finale have been posted in this video.
I explained a bit about the idea of this session in my last post.
The teams did a great job and in fact one of them (the team that pitched that education was the killer platform for the future) has actually continued the conversation after the conference and are so excited they’ve started thinking about how to make their vision come true.
Probably my favorite interview from the conference was with Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull. If you have anything to do with leading a company or making amazing things or cultivating a culture of creativity, you want to watch this very rare and in-depth talk.
—————Top Five—————
1. Heart hacking is probably the tip of the iceberg, I’m not even going to go down the path of exploring what this would mean to bad people… organ terrorism?
2. About three weeks ago I picked up one of the prototype newspaper of the future called the San Francisco Panorama which is just a stunning example of what happens when you re-imagine something that we’ve all taken for granted. Then this weekend I heard a great interview with Dave Eggers on NPR. Worth listening to when you get a chance (and by the way the NPR app on the iPad is pure gold).
3. Little robo-dog, kinda sad when it dies at the end of each run… and spooky. Related? Towel folding robot just seems to love looking at the towel’s drape and pattern.
4. Energy platform, google style… getting closer…
——————The Rest—————-
Manybills visualizes the bills in congress.
Which of course will ultimately lead to some sort of revenge scenario whereby the pixels attack.
Power walking, yes even the sidewalks will have computers.
Note to self: Do not grab the wire.
Not convinced this is a real commercial, but nicely done.
Because these shoes were apparently not made for walking.