Impact Lab – Page 1145 – A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience

Breakthrough Thinking, Great New Product, Great Videos, New Inventions, People Making a Difference

GiraDora – a foot-powered washing machine that will change millions of lives

July 25, 2012

GiraDora – a foot-powered washing machine.

Two design students named Alex Cabunoc and Ji A You traveled from their homes in Los Angeles to Cerro Verde, a 30,000 person slum outside of Lima about a year ago. As students in the celebrated Design Matters program at Art Center College of Design, which focuses on social innovation, they had come to Cerro Verde as part of a special studio called Safe Agua Peru. Their goal? Develop a commercial product that alleviates issues related to water poverty, targeted at people who earn between $4 and $10 a day. (Video)

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Analysis, Big Problems, Crazy Stuff, Culture, Globalism, government, New Discoveries, New Viewpoints

Grope and Pillage TSA infographic

July 25, 2012

Here’s a frightening yet informative graphic by Tony Shin, et al. of Criminal Justice Degree about Transportation Security Administration excesses and oversights. (The full infographic can be viewed after the jump.)

The TSA has been around for the last decade and I’ve never read a positive news article about them. It isn’t that I’m avoiding these articles, its that there just aren’t any. Try it yourself: go to Google News and search for TSA. Some of the most recent articles are titled ‘TSA body scanners’ apparent flaw’ and ‘TSA pats down toddler in wheelchair’. Just a few weeks ago the new full body scanners were proved to be practically useless. This isn’t the first time the TSA has missed the boat either…

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Analysis, Business, Internet, Science & Technology News

The dark side of open data

July 24, 2012

Tom Slee published “Seeing Like a Geek” a few days ago. It is a thoughtful article on the dark side of open data. He starts with the story of a Dalit community in India, whose land was transferred to a group of higher cast Mudaliars through bureaucratic manipulation under the guise of standardizing and digitizing property records. While this sounds like a good idea, it gave a wealthier, more powerful group a chance to erase older, traditional records that hadn’t been properly codified. One effect of passing laws requiring standardized, digital data is to marginalize all data that can’t be standardized or digitized, and to marginalize the people who don’t control the process of standardization.

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Analysis, Business, Internet, Latest Trend

83% of ecommerce in India is from online travel sales

July 24, 2012

Online buyers in India will spend nearly five times more on travel than on retail purchases in 2012.

India’s ecommerce is rising quickly as consumers turn to the web for products and services, but more than 80% of the country’s online sales come from travel purchases. Online buyers in India spend nearly five times more on leisure and unmanaged business travel than they spend on retail purchases.

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Analysis, Internet, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

List of things replaced by smartphones

July 24, 2012

The more we replace with our phones, the fewer consumer electronics we have to keep updated, and the less cluttered our lives can become.

We can easily get caught up in what’s new in smartphones, from novel applications of near field communication to their potential as detectors of environmental pollutants. But it’s also useful to occasionally look back on what they’ve granted us already. A recent survey in the UK found 4 in 10 smartphone users said their phone was “more important for accessing the Internet than any other device.”

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

Why online videos are the future of marketing

July 24, 2012

Online video will soon dominate your time spent on the web.

Chances are that in the past three years that you have watched an online video. Almost every site on the internet that you visit has a video displayed in some form. Video viewership has skyrocketed and there are no signs of it slowing down.

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Analysis, Business, Latest Trend

The end of China’s manufacturing dominance

July 24, 2012

Chinese workers go about their chores at a textile factory.

The real estate and infrastructure bubbles are a great concern in China. But these challenges are short term that China may be able to spend its way out of. The real threat to China’s economy is bigger and longer term: its manufacturing bubble.

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Analysis, government, Latest Trend

Number of people with U.S. government security clearances tops 4.8 million

July 23, 2012

The number of clearances rose in 2011 by about 3% to 4.86 million.

As of October 1, 2011 a new reported record of 4.8 million people held security clearances for access to classified information, according to a new intelligence community report to Congress.

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Analysis, Big Problems, government, Science & Technology News

Drone GPS hacking fears raised by Congress

July 23, 2012

Congress now has second thoughts on safety after pushing FAA to allow UAVs.

In a House Homeland Security oversight subcommittee hearing members of Congress raised concerns over the potential security risks posed by jamming and electronic hijacking of unmanned aerial systems, and the potential use of drones by terrorists.

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

49% of middle-class workers will be poor in retirement

July 23, 2012

To maintain living standards into old age we need roughly 20 times our annual income in financial wealth.

In 2010, 75 percent of Americans nearing retirement age had less than $30,000 in their retirement accounts. Downward mobility in retirement is a looming reality for both middle and higher-income workers. Forty-nine percent of middle-class workers will be poor or near poor in retirement, living on a food budget of about $5 a day.

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Analysis, Business, Latest Trend

Freemium is coming to an end

July 23, 2012

Dropbox, Evernote and RememberTheMilk do not make a case for freemium. And these three easily available examples do not make indisputable evidence against freemium. But these three quotes reflect a return to the roots of marketing — starting with customer needs, choosing the needs you want to serve and getting your fair share of the value created.

“We are now seeing the end of the freemium model — signing up users for free and trying to upsell,” said Christian Vanek, CEO of the Boulder-based SurveyGizmo, in a recent phone conversation.
“6.5 million unique users is not all that it’s cracked up to be. I don’t want hits. I want revenue. I want a real business,” said Matt Wensing, founder and CEO of Stormpulse, in an interview with Mixergy.
“Make a product people want to pay for,” said Marco Arment, founder of Instapaper, in a Planet Money interview.

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Analysis, Health & Fitness, New Discoveries, Science & Technology News

Approach to blood pressure control may need to change as we get older

July 23, 2012

What is right for controlling blood pressure in a 50-year-old might not work for a frail 80-year-old.

Unless you are a frail older person controlling high blood pressure is a good thing. Then it might be harmful. That’s the surprising finding of a study of more than 2,000 seniors published online in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

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