2012 – Page 39 – Impact Lab

Breakthrough Thinking, Entertainment, Great New Product, Historical Perspectives, New Inventions, New Viewpoints, People Making a Difference

Granny designs carrying solution for iPad

July 19, 2012

The Kickstarter video that helped kick things off.

The Original Leather Handle for iPad was created on a whim, first out of a file folder and later out of leather.

Inventor Cate Vincent, one of the exhibitors at the 2012 DaVinci Inventor Showcase, is no stranger to the inventor realm. In fact, this is her 15th startup! Innovation and creativity course through her veins on every level. Recently she took some time to answer a few questions about how a granny could create a solution for an iPad, the dilemma of naming her product and how Apple actually created her product market for her…

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Analysis, Business, Economy, People Making a Difference

Two views on a post-employment economy

July 19, 2012

Post-employment economy

Will a post-employment economy actually suck or will it wallow in awesomeness? DaVinci Institute founder, Thomas Frey and the Atlantic’s Conor Sen offer two different views on the post-employment economy.

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Analysis, Brain, Business, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

Work skills you will need to survive in the future

July 19, 2012

As employees chart their route to the top of the “Conceptual Age”, it’s important to know the skills that companies are looking for.

IBM’s 2010 Global CEO Study cited “creativity” as the most important leadership quality for the future when “global knowledge” was once essential for leaders. This is one of many signals that the business world is evolving out of the “Information Age,” where left-brain technical skills, knowledge and expertise were king.

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Analysis, Big Problems, Economy, Latest Trend, Money Talk

35% of laid-off workers have raided their retirement savings

July 19, 2012

Many workers who have lost their jobs have defaulted on 401(k) loans.

The number of displaced workers has risen dramatically since the start of the Great Recession, and this year a third of them had to raid retirement savings to make ends meet.

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Analysis, Business, Entertainment, Internet, Latest Trend, New Inventions, Science & Technology News

Is Kickstarter a crowdfunding platform or just another form of entertainment?

July 19, 2012

The fact that OUYA raised so much money so fast speaks more to our fantasies than the market reality.

OUYA is the latest Kickstarter darling. It is “a new kind of video game console” that connects to your HDTV like an XBox but allows anyone to publish games like the Android Marketplace. The company behind the device raised their $1 million target in eight hours, and have reached $5 million with more than three weeks left in their campaign. Proponents of Kickstarter’s populist commercialism see OUYA as an unmitigated success.

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Education, Internet, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

A dozen big-name universities join Coursera to offer free online classes

July 19, 2012

In the last week, more universities signed on with Coursera.

Free online courses from prestigious universities were a rarity a few months ago. Now, they are the cause for announcements every few weeks, as a field suddenly studded with big-name colleges and competing software platforms evolves with astonishing speed.

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Breakthrough Thinking, Health & Fitness, Medical Breakthrough, New Discoveries, People Making a Difference, Science & Technology News

Oxygen injections could save lives when when patients can’t breathe

July 19, 2012

Oxygenating blood with microparticles.

Patients who can’t breathe need oxygen quickly to avoid cardiac arrest and brain injury is a big problem. Unfortunately, attempts in the early 1900s to intravenously supply this essential gas failed to oxygenate the blood and often caused dangerous air bubbles. Current treatments, such as blood substitutes, breathing masks, and tubes, aren’t always effective as well since they still rely on the lungs to function or require time to properly administer.

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Analysis, Architecture, Robots, Science & Technology News

Swarms of robots could bring buildings to life

July 18, 2012

The more of these robots we have in our homes, the more intelligent they could be.

What does it take for a building to be considered smart? Add some lights that turn themselves off when nobody is around or install an “intelligent” air conditioning system to regulate the ambient temperature and you’re well on your way. But compared to the living buildings proposed by Akira Mita, today’s smart buildings are the architectural equivalent of single-celled organisms.

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Analysis, Health & Fitness, Science & Technology News

The obstacles faced by transformative technologies in medicine

July 18, 2012

A smart-phone add-on enables at-home diagnosis of ear infections.

There is a post on The Health Care Blog written by Eric Topol where he looks to a future enabled by emerging technology: “Just as the little mobile wireless devices radically transformed our day-to-day lives, so will such devices have a seismic impact on the future of health care. It’s already taking off at a pace that parallels the explosion of another unanticipated digital force — social networks.

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Analysis, Business, Health & Fitness

If you don’t get enough sleep you can’t do your job

July 18, 2012

The average American only gets between six and six and a half hours of sleep a night.

Tony Schwartz, president and CEO of The Energy Project and the author of Be Excellent at Anything met Kevin Crain, a Managing Director at Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, one morning at a conference and Kevin was feeling tired, as he did most days.

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Analysis, Education, Internet, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

More colleges taking online education to a new level

July 18, 2012

Coursera will offer 100 or more free massive open online courses.

There is a shift in online learning that is reshaping higher education. Coursera, a year-old company founded by two Stanford University computer scientists, will announce that a dozen major research universities are joining the venture. In the fall, Coursera will offer 100 or more free massive open online courses, or MOOCs, that are expected to draw millions of students and adult learners globally.

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Analysis, Business, People Making a Difference, Science & Technology News

The trouble with content: Jeff Jarvis

July 18, 2012

Jeff Jarvis

Earlier this week, Jeff Jarvis, speaker and consultant for media companies, got to speak about speaking with the speakers of the National Speakers Association in Indianapolis.

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