Lo and Sons

Lo & Sons is a true success story in which a mother and 2 sons found a solution to a health challenge Helen Lo faced, and came up with intuitive designer bags. Lo was facing troubles with her back and apparently couldn't find light weight bags for travelling. She thought many other women might be facing same problem and did something daring.

She asked her 2 sons, Derek & Jan to quit their daytime jobs in advertising and product design to join her. They did and altogether started Lo & Sons in Dec 2010. Their first collection was sold within 3 months. Most of their sales are through online even-though they have small shops in Charlottesville and Chicago. 

The threesome work from 3 different locations. Jan take care of the procurement in Beijing & Hong-kong check everything before production. Derek share office in the Nilita office space in New York and Helen Lo work from Germany. They recently ran a show in NYC SoHo house entertaining select customers directly which are very important to them to get customer insights. They briefly meet and discuss in Derek's NYC apartment and next day back to airport to work on next season. Checkout their site Lo & Sons

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Creativity @ every level

While talking to one of my friend from NYC tech startup seen, he mentioned that the biggest challenge he face today is to find right people and letting them do things @ their best. Its not raising money that's tough, its not finding projects or clients. They are relatively easy while compared to finding people and retaining them.

Other point he made in that discussion is that most creative people are not in tech, they are in media and ad's industry. This add from IBM 's mainframe team boasts just that. Its the way you communicate to thousands of people without a speech but conveying thousands of words. IBM house a pretty good team for creating interfaces, but this is class apart. Who Says Elephants Can't Dance ?? !!

Invention of the decade - Eole Water Systems

The fastest depleting resource and the most wanted for the existence of human life on earth today is unquestionably clean water. Many parts of world is already feeling the crunch and just stretching into next possible resource to get them for existence. And in many developing nations drinking water provided is already contaminated and people use their own purification mechanisms to make it usable for household purposes. But the point is, there should be water at-least to purify it.

There are many companies providing waste water management systems, but its hard to believe they can make it 100% drinkable water because water can be maligned by various sources and there are many sources getting added daily. Water being lowest level of resource underground, when earth takes bath and wash all dirt on it, its pretty obvious that everything is getting logged into underground water. That make it even more dangerous.

Here's a company which came up with a best possible solution, not to clean the contaminated water but to make it from thin air. Yes, they are successful in it. Eole is a french company founded by Marc Parent. While he was living in Caribbean he found a way to extract water from air-conditioners for his daily usage. He put this idea to make water from moisture when he returned home. Water is collected through a heat exchanger and sent to a cleaning system which makes drinkable water.

Best part is this, its already making 62 ltrs/hr in Abu-Dhabi test site, which means 1488 ltrs/day. That's pretty amazing !! isn't it ?? And this entire system is mounted on a wind-mill which can even produce electricity. Now that's what we call True GREEN. Price is little bit high though, ball park of 600K USD, may be its still in consumption face. But someday somebody can mass produce this concept and save the world.

Fractal 23 bureau

Takeshi Miyakawa is originally from Japan. After a short stint in construction field he moved to Brooklyn New york where he started working for big kahunas in furniture design. Later he founded his own company and started designing beautiful furnitures which are functional too. This simple guy is very accomplished and did very interesting projects in NYC including the Monkey Bar in 2007. Fractal 23 bureau is one of his creation which got international attention.

Rodrigo & Gabriela

Just saw this beautiful creation by 2 great artists who were once up on a time RoCk StArS. Yes they are Rodrigo & Gabriela who started creating a sort of flamingo, Al Mariachi style songs all by guitars. They were part of same rock band and started playing this sort of music part-time.  Later seeing the interest in people they started picking songs by kinds of Led Zeppelin, Metallica etc and added their spanish flamingo style into them, creating this wonderful fusion.

Today they have their own albums and fan followings. They were fillers before for other bands during recess, but now entire rock-concert-goers are flocking to their shows. Seeing the fan following YAMAHA created special guitars for them with transducers and sound sensors, so that they can create that special experience to their fans and also make it sound so crisp and clear.

Interesting part is in this duo band lady is the percussionist and she does it with such an ease and involvement. While the guy could deliver that accurate tune without a vocalist, bass guitars and other crew. Its an amazing band rocking the world. A cute video of one of their classics Tamacum.

Wally Yachts = Luxury * Power

Wally Yachts - is based in Monaco, France owned by an Italian business man  Luca Bassani Antivari. Antivari wanted to buy a yacht of his specifications but couldn't find any in shipyards around the world. So he went ahead and built one. Need is the mother of invention right. Antivari re-invented entire yachts business, once upon a time a boring business to a thriving wanna be business plan. Wally was born in 1989.

From then he perfected his creations in powerboats called Wally 118 which is iconic for the company and often called as "Stealth in  the water" or "The Villain" among the YACHTS with perfect curves and luxury unimaginable. Its worlds priciest production yachts with a tag of 33 million dollars. But you know what, Wally is a beauty and a beast with power. 

NeST - Self Learning Thermostat

The founder&CEO of NeST, Tony Fadell was constructing his house and found that thermostats currently available in market are not helping to conserve energy and reduce power bills. Being an Apple Alum and groomed by design guru Steve Jobs himself, he jumped into designing a thermostat which is in line to Apple's design principles" Very easy to use, efficient and can be interfaced using multiple gadgets". Well the end product is NeST !!

Most programmable thermostat's are little tough to figure out and Tony found out that common people don't have time or expertise to do that. So he decided his thermostat should be ready out of the box and configured within 30mts. He made his thermostat as intuitive as possible by pulling a team of Apple engg's. The calculation shows that NeST helps to save about 30,000$ on average / home over 20 years. Also it learns about inhabitant behaviors and temperature settings on a regular day. Only thing you need to do is to set the temperature according to your needs for first few days and NeST will learn about you and keep adjusting to that. You can also set your home temperature via web or an iphone app. Read more about NeST here.

An Amazing Washing Machine

The Orbit, an awesome water-less/noiseless/soap-less washing machine concept from an Industrial Designer probably you never heard off, Elie Ahovi. Not only does it promise to shorten the monotonous task of cleaning your dress and gym socks, it could cut down water usage- a good idea since our house hold bills might triple in 30 years by using dry ice.

The Orbit cuts down on water usage by allowing dry ice to evaporate into gas and perform a pressurized blast to lift the dirt off your clothes. The chemical reaction between carbon dioxide in dry ice and grease in your clothes break down the particles of dirt, spinning them into oblivion. After the dry ice has scrubbed your laundry clean in a matter of minutes, the gas is sucked back up and returns to a solid state for future washes. The grime removed from your clothes is filtered through a tube which will have to manually be cleaned and maintained.

Nifty right ? Even cooler is the fact that your clothes won't spin but float. Thanks to a battery-filled ring at the machine's center. The magnetic field would make everything levitate. The drum becomes a electromagnet, which can be controlled automatically by electrical impulses. The issues then would be whether it would trip over by a small accidental push, or if the magnetic fields strong enough to keep the basket inside the whole time.

This design is made for Electrolux and would be available in market by 2030. By the time clean water would be one of the precious commodities for human kind. There are other amazing projects he's doing like Marine Drone to clean the plastic waste from sea water which are worth reading.

Notion Ink

Have you heard this name before, I guess not many. Its an Indian Tech start-up competing in most competitive market of andriod cell phones and tablets. Well as the story goes, this company is located in Bangalore founded by an IIT'ian, Rohan Surana. Fresh out of college and not much corporate experience to boast about, bunch of guys plunged into their pockets and started this company before any VC's even looked into their profile.

After 2 years into market even today this company didn't make much of a name in terms of profitability and product success, but they got an amazing design and lots of accolades to be proud off. Notion Ink Adam is the first tablet to get Pixel-Qi screen on it, that means the screen is transflective. You can use this tablet to read even in bright sunlight when other tablets become a mirror. This is the first tablet which got Tegra2 Processor, full HDMI port, USB2.0, Mini USB, Micros SD slot .. you name it, Adam got an interface. It also got the best stereo speakers you can ever think off on a tablet and the most striking feature, a swivel camera. Can you imagine a camera which rotates on a swivel for 185 degrees to capture front and rear videos. An amazing design from CPDM professor ( IISc product design school ).

What is so unique about this tablet is that, it has the largest developer following. Adam's customized code is open for developers through a forum Notion Ink Conclave. When Apple launched ipod, iphone and ipad app developers made lots of money. Same way when this product hits the peak, it will make lots of people and companies who make accessories rich. Notion Ink took android 2.2 and customized it for Adam, added lots of cool features to make it unique. As the vision goes they want this tablet to be replacing books and the design is made in a way that you can hold this tablet like a book with its 'curve'. It looks bulky but check dimensions its not too far.

What this company lacks are the same for any new startup. Poor marketing, poor customer support, not available in stores, shipping and handling, payment gateway and more importantly delayed at FCC approval because of poor electronic standards followed. But by all means they got a killer design, great support from fans and pretty good feedback from CES 2011. They need to be fast, accurate and careful they are rubbing shoulders with Motorola, Samsung, Apple, Acer, Toshiba & Asus. Notion Ink is still standing didn't weather like Joo-Joo. Wish luck for Adam !!

David's Learning Curve !!!

David, my eldest son went to India for a short break. So I decided to sent him to a play school there so that he can wind up little bit from this apartment life in New Jersey. Honestly saying because of David getting active almost all the time, we don't have a good reputation with our neighbors as their sleeps are disturbed and babies are disturbed from their sleep.

Anyways here are some videos Ben shot for me and I was surprised the change I see in him. Pretty funny videos.