Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Video: Japan Gets Vending Machine 2.0 With See-Through Full HD Display, Facial Recognition
Maker Sanden says the machine’s display can produce text, pictures or animations in HD quality.
The company commands a 30% global market share for vending machines and is also active in the US, meaning this prototype could also make its way over to North America one day.
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Friday, December 23, 2011
Thursday, December 22, 2011
02 pursuit motorcycle
MELBOURNE — Last month industrial designer Dean Benstead unveiled the 02 Pursuit — a prototype for a motorcycle fueled not by gas or electricity, but by compressed air.
Based on the geometry of a 250cc motocrosser, the O2 Pursuit prototype uses the breakthrough engine technology developed by Angelo Di Pietro of Engineair.
Benstead, a recent graduate of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), has harnessed the power that exists in the air tanks to mechanically drive the vehicle.
According to Benstead, testing of the motorcycle showed close to a quarter of an hour running time with stops at around 25-45 km/h. During stationary testing, Benstead’s team timed the speed off the back wheel, registering over 100 km/h. Preliminary testing of the prototype was limited to an indoors factory environment on a circular track.
“The bike is running a standard scuba tank which runs air compressed up to 200 bar, with further developments, we would be looking at running a tank at 400 bar with increased capacity to also increase the range,” he said.
The innovation was the result of Benstead’s final-year design research into the future of motorcycles, looking at air as a genuine alternative to petrol and electricity.
“Air was the starting point back in 2010, but I continued to explore this for the prototype because of its low-tech nature,” Benstead said. “A solar panel and a compressor now becomes your refinery and without huge battery packs to dispose of, we now have a low-cost to free powered bike with minimum impact on the environment.”
The project began mid last year at the RMIT Ecomoto, the only motorcycle-specific design studio in Australia. Led by RMIT Lecturer and Acting Program Director Simon Curtis, Benstead’s super motard bike project won him the Product Design – Automotive and Transport award at the 2010 Melbourne Design Awards.
The air engine developed by Engineair is still yet to be commercialized. The motor used in the 02 Pursuit was one of five prototypes in the world.
Benstead, recently named in Melbourne’s Top 100 most influential people, is currently working with Australia’s Engineair on a new design that can bring the technology to the market.
02 Pursuit specs:
Top Speed: >100 km/h
Weight: <100kg
Engine: ‘Di Pietro’ 9 chamber air engine
Engine Weight: 10kg
Material: Aluminiumhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
Development: Melbourne
http://www.engineair.com.au/
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Brad Burnham Explains Why SOPA Must Be Stopped
The Congressional Judiciary committee is debating a bill today called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) which nobody in the Internet industry wants to see passed. Not surprisingly, the bill was written by lobbyists for the music and movie industries, who are frustrated by their inability to go after foreign sites filled with pirated material. The piracy problem is real, but the proposed solutions in the form of this bill and the Senate’s corresponding Protect-IP Act (PIPA) will create more problems than they solve.
Brad Burnham, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures, came into the TCTV studio in New York City to explain why SOPA is misguided and how it threatens to break the internet. There are many problems with SOPA, but some of the main ones are that it transfers liability for copyright infringement onto second parties like search engines, social networks, blogs, and all sorts of websites. It provides for DNS blocking much in the same way that China’s great firewall blocks foreign sites it does not want its citizens to see, raising a serious censorship issue since it would not take a court order to block these sites (although it is more complicated than a simple takedown notice).
But more than anything, the bill would inject a level of uncertainty into the internet which could chill the willingness of VCs like Burnham to invest as freely as they have and for founders to start internet companies in the first place. The internet is one of the few sources of job creation in the U.S. economy right now. We don’t need laws that will stifle it.
If you want to learn more about SOPA, read this excellent overview by Mike Masnick at TechDirt. Call your Congress person or let them know that you work for the internet.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Seth Godin on curiosity
These people are the 'curious'. Here is the reason they count. They are the ones who wake others around them from stupor. They are the ones who talk to the masses in the middle who are stuck
Seth Godin Wants You to Decide!
Student Leaders Workshop designed to introduce the next generation of leaders to social entrepreneurship and the concept of patient capital.
Friday, December 16, 2011
Field Notes ♥ Busy Beaver
We’ve been both fans and customers of the Busy Beaver Button Co. since forever. They’ve made buttons for Pinsetter, for Field Notes, and for a lot of our personal projects, too. So when Michele said, “Would you want to go over and film with them?” we were immediately out the door. We hung out in their office for a couple of hours, talking to founder Christen Carter, and put together this short doc, hopefully capturing a little of the greatness that is Busy Beaver (and along the way, showing how a Field Notes button gets made).
Fused I Say, Fused!
Field Notes: Making of Balsam Fir from Coudal Partners on Vimeo.
The inside covers and interior pages of the Balsam Fir notebooks were offset-printed in “Wet Bark Black” at Envision Graphics in Bloomingdale IL, then the covers were sent to Diecrafters in historic Cicero, IL for hot foil stamping. This is FIELD NOTES’ first foray into foil stamping, and the process is shown in the video above. The press is a Kluge EHE 14×22, manufactured by Brandtjen & Kluge in St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin. Hot foil stamping is fairly similar to letterpress printing (as seen in our Raven’s Wing video) but instead of ink, colored or metallic foil (or holograms!) are fused onto the paper with a heated die, In this case, a snow-white matte non-metallic ‘foil’ was used, rolls of the material can be seen mounted above the printer. Each roll was aligned to a specific print position on the sheet to minimize wasted foil. The finished covers went back to Bloomingdale to be cut, assembled, bound, trimmed, round-cornered, belly-banded, and shrink-wrapped, and they’ll be in your hands soon!
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