5 December 2011

Innovation & Creative Sites Worth Visiting

Hi All, Just a few innovation & creative links I wanted to share with you:

www.kickstarter.com Use this site to obtain funding for a new idea. Check it out, a great concept. Used for consumer products, books, movies, poems, music, anything really. Inventors find funding through offering something to their funders (like a first edition or something).






www.quirky.com This is the website of a crowd sourcing product maker. The Quirky team seem to have a fantastic grasp on how to take everyday things and reinvent them in innovative ways. A better mousetrap? Probably in the works at Quirky. You can also get paid for your ideas and contribution to a product. The perfect solution for anyone not short on ideas but a bit fuzzy on the execution and low on time.


www.inventables.com This site boasts that it is the hardware store for innovators. I signed up for the email newsletter. Some of the new hardware items coming on to the market are pretty cool. I have no idea how to use them but it has been great to see what people are dreaming up.




www.inhabitat.com I have found this site to be a great resource for all things related to green or eco design. Some really great articles on urban farming for example.




www.appmakr.com This website is one of those "platforms" that helps users make simple apps for iPhone, Android and Windows. I tried a few and found this one to be pretty great for a number of reasons. The in built functionality they support is pretty good and does allow for a phone gap or HTML5 drop-in by you (i.e. full customization). The service is also free (with ads in your apps) but the ads don't look too bad and you can easily make an app without ads for an additional fee.


Some other great sites (just for some of the services they offer):

www.zite.com  If you have an iPad then you simply must get zite. When you do get it you can basically make you own magazine/newspaper (or rather, Zite will do that for you). This isn't your average RSS feed collector app but it has an algorithm inside to learn what you like and to give you more of it. I was blown away at how quickly Zite started delivering me exactly what I wanted on a daily basis - I was engrossed in every article. How many of us could pick up a magazine or newspaper and say that? Try it, you will be impressed.

www.docs.google.com I love google docs for hosting all kinds of files and sharing documents


www.dropbox.com Also a great cloud "soft-drive" for you to park documents and files, even photos. Has a great photo handler that will make a sharable gallery out of any photos you drop in the photo folder.


picasa.google.com Like google docs but for photos.


www.flikr.com The yahoo version of picasa


groups.google.com Now this is useful for a number of things. As a forum or "group discussion" (well, that is a forum isn't it?). One of the coolest things you can do with a google group is create group messaging by emailing one address. So step 1 - create your group, step 2 - add people and their emails to it, step 3 - you get a group email address. Anyone can now use that email address to contact everyone on the list. Good idea for sports teams, class coordinators, sales reps etc. I like this feature and even though you can do this manually on outlook and other email applications I think google groups is a winner for public events and community groups.

Thanks for reading, I hope you find some useful ideas & tools through these links.

Respectfully,
Pete

Five Ideas to Change the World: Issue 1
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3 December 2011

21 Thinking Cards

Hi All, I've been working on the 21 Thinking cards from the Five Ideas simple creative process. I thought these might be useful for "flipping" through during creative work.

Mostly, I had to keep referring to the list when I was using the prompts myself and I wanted to have them as cards, in a book or on my phone as flashcards or similar.

Here is a link to the "21 Thinking Cards" book. I was originally planning to make a kindle version but I wanted to be able to give it away for free so this is a PDF (approx 9MB, 65 pages). Feel free to download and distribute as much as you like.
This uses a publicly shared file uploaded by me to google docs. You could use dropbox.com, box.net, iCloud or a number of other cloud document services to do something similar with word documents, presentations, spreadsheets etc.

Here is a link to the "21 Thinking Cards" album. You can flip through the cards themselves.
This link uses a publicly shared photo album from Picasa (google). You could also use a service like dropbox.com or flikr.com to share photos and albums like this.

Let me know what you think.



A description of what a thinking card is.
Here are 2 of them as an example:

An example of the thinking cards

All 21 will be in a mini-book to be released shortly



I've also been working on an Android, iPhone and Windows mobile app for the thinking cards so you can scroll through them as prompts during brainstorming or ideas sessions. I've loaded the iPhone version on my 3GS right now for testing. So far managed to get:

  • A feed from the blog
  • A feed from Facebook
  • A scrollable album of the 21 Thinking cards.
It hasn't been as easy as it might sound but I should have it working by the time I fly to Australia on Tuesday. Here are some screenshots from the iPhone version. The Windows and Android apps are available for download at the top of the blog page on the left (.apk and .xap files). I could only test those ones in simulation so let me know if you have issues.
The news stream
access to the thinking cards book through the app
feeds from this blog

splash screen - love that picture
all the cards are in a flippable photo album  in the app
Well - add that to the the list of things learned this year.

Toni wants me to make an app called "iWidow", basically she thinks she is an iWidow and that I'm actually married to the MacBook, iPhone and iPad and not her some days. I just hope she knows that I am enjoying myself and that no gadgetry could ever compare to how much I love her :-)

Thanks for reading.
Pete

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1 December 2011

Augmented Reality and Open Source Farming

Hi All,
I've been working on a few of the concepts in book 2 which will largely be about agriculture. Some of the interesting topics (well, I think so) I've been thinking about include:


  • Open source farming (open source in terms of design of farming technologies and fertility)
  • Augmented reality farming and anomalies
  • Local food production and some practical projects



Augmented Reality Farming
In terms of Augmented reality farming let me explain. I vividly remember my year 8 agriculture teacher (yes, I went to a school that was also a farm) explaining that the holy grail of agriculture was to identify and explain positive anomalies in production and husbandry. Sounds a bit dull?

What he meant was that if you are walking through a paddock and notice that a certain area of crops grow better than the others then you should attempt to find out why and then use that knowledge. One simple example is a greener stretch of grasses in a dip of land (i.e. the dip gets more access to water than the areas around the dip) so the grass truly is greener on the other side so to speak. Of course we can get much more sophisticated than that.

I used the creative process that I outlined in book 1 to find new ideas - one of the ones that jumped out was a fusion of agriculture and emerging technology - maybe you can think of a way to use this better than me but I'll outline the basics.

Augmented reality tools would give a farmer or land husband the ability to overlay sensor data, previous crop imagery or some other information over his or her visual reality in an attempt to support finding positive anomalies (and potential ways to improve production or some other positive characteristics of husbandry).

Think of a set of glasses that could superimpose another image or computer generated image on top of reality. Perhaps refer to my earlier post on Augmented reality to get an overview.

From www.seeinginvideo.com. Example just shows a really basic example of what AR could do.
In terms of crop rotation, pest management, planning land development or any other number of actions, this could be a valuable tool that doesn't divorce the farmer from the land itself (i.e., it isn't "book farming", it is innately practical).

Some other examples:
Viewing the trends of an orchard (which ways are the trees growing, which way is best? why are they doing this? View this years tress with overlays of previous year, 2 years ago, 3 years ago etc, forecast next year?)

Viewing augmented reality rainfall patterns historically to support sensible planting or land development to manage run-off or other detrimental events. i.e., the see a model of where water will flow and how much can be accessed by each part of land.

Viewing augmented reality nutrient content (from sensors or static test equipment) over a plot of land to decide upon the best companion planting, best crops to plant or the needs of the land in terms of husbandry based on some future planting plan.

You can probably think of many more.

Open Source Farming
I'm still working with this idea but just imagine that a 4 hectare (40,000 square metre) farm could be found within a city. I know urban farming concepts are not new and I've been keenly reading up on some of the developments in cities around the world. Do a search for:


  • Urban farming, or
  • Window farming


Then you might get an idea of what I mean.

From just thinking.us. An example of an urban farm by design of new construction/development. I think we could have urban farming without changing a thing but of course, new development could contribute as well.

My concept relates to 4 facets of agriculture (I made that up, but these seem reasonable enough "facets"):

  • The land,
  • The labour,
  • The fertility, and
  • The market.
All of these things exist in a city and, in some cases, exist in more abundance or availability than they do in rural areas. An open source farm doesn't imply a free for all but it might imply that we could find some interesting models of production, consumption and value distribution by imagining a distributed farm within a city. In any case - if the economics are workable, perhaps you could even find a business idea in here somewhere.

I'll keep working on it - look for the result in book 2 (sometime next year?)

Thanks for reading.
Pete


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