Category: Business

MaKey MaKey, easy easy!

Playing piano with bananas, or would you rather play walking up and down the stairs? Playing Mario Bros with your old Play-Doh leftovers? Controlling your games with water?

Sounds fun! And what’s more, it’s possible and even quite easy thanks to MaKey MaKey, a spin-off founded by some MIT Media Lab students.

MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything inbetween

Check it out, it’s actually pretty awesome:

PS you still have one week left if you want to help fund MaKey MaKey.

Eat, tweet and make money

How about this one? You are going out for lunch and decide to have a quick burger or a healthy salad. You end up at 4food in New York where you can create your own personal menu from hundreds of ingredients (the combination of ingredients makes it possible to compose up to 200.000.000 different menus). You order your personal menu, eat your lunch and if you are satisfied with the combination, you give it a name and you share your own personal menu to your friends and followers on Twitter, Facebook or Foursquare.

4food: Eat, tweet and make money

“4food, de-junking fast food“

And now the really smart part: if someone else comes in to 4food and orders your menu, you get a 25 cent credit for your next lunch. So the more popular your menu creation, the more lunches you can have for free…

“You are what they eat!“

Now that smartphones are becoming more and more mainstream, we can see new initiatives like this pop up every day. They tap into the possibilities of mobile internet access combined with geolocation services, and we must admit some very good ideas have already seen daylight. I personally like this one a lot because of the viral effect and the fact that the target group of young professionals looking for a healthy and fast lunch intersects exactly with the early adapters of mobile technology (They all own iPhones, don’t they? And their friend too…).

Great initiative in my humble opinion, hope 4food will make it work…

To end, the complete 4food story:

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A Data-driven Look at the Realtime Web Ecosystem

At Web 2.0 Expo SF Hilary Mason, lead scientist at URL shortener bit.ly, did an excellent presentation on the Realtime Web Ecosystem:

“I attempted to highlight some of the interesting facets of the bit.ly data set…”

I was surprised about the amount of data available to bit.ly and how it can be used. The examples all seem light and funny, but I’m convinced the people at bit.ly can derive a lot of insights from their data sets (just like the people at Twitter…). Maybe this should (or will) become the golden business model to monetize their services.

Here are Hilary’s slides:

And here is the video:

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Towering Aspirations of Growth and Excellence

Today I stumbled upon a Manifesto by one of the most inspiring people I have ever had the honor of attending one of his seminars: Tom Peters.

In this Enterprise Manifesto, Tom talks about what an enterprise could or should be:

“An emotional, vital, innovative, joyful, creative, entrepreneurial endeavor that maximizes individuals’ growth and elicits maximum concerted human potential in the wholehearted service of others.”

(Examine this definition one word at the time!)

And about what an organisation is (no more, no less):

“An Organization Is “People Serving People.” (Period!)”

Not really new insights one might say, but the consequences of these insights should be translated into your company’s strategy, and that’s a big deal apparently. Who else than Tom would suggest you to love your competitors, to help them?

And you know, I think he’s right…

Take ten minutes of your valuable time and read the Enterprise Manifesto yourself. You won’t regret it, I promise.