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Shared by Nick Well Done Chris!

That’s right : Shanghai’s got a new ‘ best bike ‘ in town thanks to the one and only Chris Trees.  If you didn’t see the post from Chinese New Year, which included photos of the original framework for the amazing tricycle, then check those out HERE.

The frame is custom designed by Chris Trees himself (an engineer from England), and was hand built here in Shanghai.  The body work was also designed by Chris, and hand crafted out of the finest bamboo China has to offer.

The tricycle features 4 disc brakes, 8 gears, and can hold 2 regular sized people – or maybe 3 smaller people.  There’s a windshield, a removable canopy, and the bike passed it’s rain test with flying colours.  Chris also plans on building a cargo version, so stay tuned for that.

Expect to see more news on this amazing tricycle soon, as Chris is slowly taking the next step to push this design into full factory production.  So if this interests you at all, contact us and we can put two and two together.  For now enjoy these photos I took while we were out test driving the trike on ...

The surprise hit of our Big Brother in Your Brain: Neuroscience & Marketing panel at SXSW was the world premiere of Brain Hop, a funny hip-hop video created by Neurofocus, and shown for the first time by our co-panelist, Neurofocus CEO Dr. A. K. Pradeep:I was watching the reactions on Twitter, and it seems like [...]

If you want to start a company and are working on new ideas, here’s how I’ve always done it and how I recommend you do it.  Be the opposite of secretive.  Create a Google spreadsheet where you list every idea you can think, even really half-baked ones.  Include ideas you hear about (make sure you keep track of who had which idea so you can credit them/include them later).

Then take the spreadsheet and show it to every smart person you can get a meeting with and walk through each idea.  Talk to VCs, entrepreneurs, potential customers, and people working at big companies in relevant industries. You’ll be surprised how much you’ll learn.  The odds that someone will hear an idea and go start a competitor are close to zero.  The odds you’ll learn which ideas are good and bad and how to improve them are very high.

Every conversation will contain some signal and some noise. Separating the two is tricky. Here are some broad rules of thumb I’ve developed for how to filter feedback based to the profession of the person giving it to you.

1) Employees at relevant big companies. These people are great at providing facts (“Google has ...

FYI: Real women don’t take hair styling techniques from old Billy Ray Cyrus album covers.

Iowa

I spoke with Damon Darlin of the NYT last week about housing and RE agents. He recalled the “It’s a great time to buy a home” nonsense spouted by Real estate agents and the NAR in 2005.

As it turns out, they were half right.

Darlin put together a good discussion on home prices and the cost of mortgages in the Sunday Business section. Here are my contributions:

“What they are really saying is that it is a good time to be involved in a transaction that generates a commission,” says Barry Ritholtz, C.E.O. and director of equity research at FusionIQ, a quantitative research firm. He’s also author of “The Big Picture,” an irreverent blog on markets.

If agents are always motivated to make a deal, buyers are often asking an impossible question: “Will the price of this house go up?”

Although the National Association of Realtors said for many years that home prices historically don’t fall, actually they do, and sometimes quite sharply. The housing market is complicated, and the future unknowable. Still, for clues to the overall direction of prices, Mr. Ritholtz advises buyers to look at three metrics: the ratio of median income to median home prices, which suggests ...

David points us to the Montague Bookmill. This is the bookstore of the future, because it’s not a business trying to maximize growth and ROI. No, it’s a place, an attitude, an approach to an afternoon. They don’t sell every book, they don’t even pretend to.

Just as vinyl records persist, an object of joy for some listeners and a profitable cottage business for some sellers, bookstores are going to become like gift stores. The goal isn’t a commodity transaction with maximum selection at minimum price, the goal is an experience worth seeking out and paying for.

We’re going to see more and more of these newly archaic industries turn into lifestyle businesses, which is what they used to be before Wall Street showed up.

[PS...US readers should change their clocks!)

This post is the first of three arguments presenting a perspective on what will be important and interesting in regards to identity and design the coming two to three years: Which is how identity and design transforms as the artificial barriers of technology disappears and people change their behaviors.

And how this affects the natural, constant and unstoppable evolution of what it takes to remain valuable as a company.

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Part one: Organic

“Digital” as a term is obsolete and unhelpful, because it invites us into a mindset where the technology defines the purpose of the product.

“Digital” is just a reference to a form of technology on which the surface is supported, equal to paper, plastic or metal.

“Digital” does not reference any specific use or motivation, such as; business card, packaging or book would in regards to paper technology. It only references some abilities in regards to its structural compound.

Why is it then that “digital” as a term – no matter how misleading it is, no matter how little insight and understanding it invites us to take with us into a process, stands as this ...

Gartner: 1 in 5 businesses will dump all IT assets as they move to cloud | Cloud Computing – InfoWorld In 2012, more than half (60 percent) of a new PCs' total greenhouse gas emissions will occur before the user first turns on the machine.

I saw a dandy presentation in Boulder by Steve Clouthier.

It had a strange structure. Steve began with one image and stayed with that image for the entire 40 minutes of his talk.

When he wanted to make specific points, he would drop down on to one of the sections of this image, and an entire world would open up.  Finished there, he would climb back up to the entire image.

Steve’s presentation was given as if from Google Maps.  He was working from 31,000 feet.  When he needed to give us a finer view of his topic, he would drop down into it.  And then return.  

What I liked about this was that it broke from the seriality of a Powerpoint presentation.  You know, the one that forces us to move from slide to slide…and away from the "big picture."  

Shared by Erin Joan Lamberty mpls AND exposed beams?! i die.

Name: Ana Location: Minneapolis, Minnesota

As we are about to leave this rental loft we thought that a way of giving back to the Apartment Therapy website, which has always been our first (and many times, only) stop for inspiration, would be to share pictures of our Minneapolis home with the readers.

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