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.

Unknowingly Made Millions

David Choe was unknown until last thursday. Suddenly he's all over media and fame. So what happened here ??  Here's the story. Mr.Choe is a graffiti artist from San Jose, California who was invited to paint art in the walls of FACEBOOK's first office. So ???. After work, then CEO Sean Parker offered Mr. Choe stock options or he can take his couple of thousand dollars payment and leave. At that time Mr.Choe thought FACEBOOK itself is a stupid idea.

Its way back in 2005, at that time even Mark Zuckerberg himself wouldn't be sure what FACEBOOK will turn into. Somehow Mr.Choe agreed to pick the stock options of 0.25% shares of FACEBOOK. He kept that with himself and never sold that, probably forgot about it. Today with the lauch of FACEBOOK IPO in stock market, he's worth roughly 200 Million Dollars. Same thing happened when Infosys got listed, it made many overnight millionaires in India.

It doesn't matter Mr.Choe is a millionaire or not, here's his wonderful art of President Obama. Enjoy !!

Rugs to Riches

Rugs are used to decorate floors, dictate a fashion statement or bring color and aesthetics to a room. Here are some of the extremely creative cool rugs which you can buy.

First one shown here is an exaggerated postage stamp rug. They officially got authorization from queen's office to get this exotic print on a carpet. The wool used is authentic Newzealand wool which is hand crafted in Kathmandu, Nepal. These extremely skilled artists were able to bring 3D effect to the rug which is absolutely awesome. There are various dimensions you can choose from stamprugs.

Here's one more fantastic creation of an icon on a carpet. These are found on modernrugs. They also have a beautiful collection of many floral, figures and icons rugs on their website. Pretty cool site to go through.

Both these companies are in United Kingdom. So you need to get somebody coming from there or pay a handsome shipping and handling charges. 

Gold Biscuit

A French designer Jean Paul Gaultier who was famous for his haute couture is brought into limelight for a totally different reason. He might be famous in the fashion world of Elle, Pierre Cardin likes but was unknown to common man. But this display of unusual talent of putting an amazing design into gold biscuits made him world famous and also into Forbes list of best designers.

Jean never received any formal training in fashion design but used to sent his creations to design houses in his early days. Soon enough was noticed by the best design houses in the world. Although his cross-dressing-type line of clothes weren't made for daily usage, his tailoring skills were acknowledged. He was picked into The House of Pierre Cardin and later to manage their boutique in Manilla.

During this economic turbulence people from different investment firms and hedge funds are considering gold as the only safe bet and gold prices are soaring to new heights. This can be a diverse addition to your investment portfolio. This limited edition design of one-ounce gold biscuits with his sailor flag trade mark on it is available in US through a precious metal dealer ( Dillion Gage Metals - 800-527-7034 ) in New York. 

Mullaperiyar - Kochouseph Way

This is an old story, not a story, a real piece of life. My mom's family is a renowned family from "Guruvayoor" called "Chemmanoor". They are one of the traditional families from that area mostly business oriented. And my mom's eldest sister (Valiyamma) was married at the age of 16 which was common in their generation. She was married to "Chittilappilly" family from "Parappur", a region near "Guruvayoor". They were landlords and stingy rich. They used to have acres of land cultivating paddy and other crops. To irrigate them they used these big motor pump sets.

At times these pump sets used to have some issues and guess who used to come to fix their pump sets those days, Kochouseph. He was in his teens and used to make money through his part time business of fixing pump sets. From there he started a small revolution in kerala manufacturing V-GUARD irrigation motors, Voltage Stabilizers now into garments, resorts ( veega-land , wonderla ) and many of such trades under the brand umbrella V-GUARD.

But the beauty is that he always found an optimized way of doing any business legit and churn profit from that. These characteristics and hard work always led him from success to success. He is a philanthropist, member of kidney foundation and also may be one and only one of its kind who donated his kidney as an example of practicing what he's preaching, which ignited many youths to follow him and help fellow human beings.

That's not the topic here, when Kerala and Tamilnadu State Governments are scrambling for decisions and show who's having control, Kochouseph came up with a master plan which is very much doable and has the support from leading architects. State estimates it would cost 800-1000 crores to fix this dam, Kochouseph is predicting it can be fixed with 55 crores. And as usual he's donating 10% of that cost and technical support to fix the problem which otherwise effect 35 million people.

Wish if he can become the chief minister of Kerala, God's Own Country will be in real. Small video from a press conference.

Indian Designers

Architecture & Design used to be westerner's forte, but time after time Indians are showing their talent here too. These days animation movies, advertisements even the 5 second ballads for these advertisements are given to us. Its not because we are cheaper economically but we are proving that we can be effective in those spaces too. While my short stint in IISc Bangalore, I came to know IISc also have a design school called CPDM. And every year this school hatch 100's of highly talented designers into product designing.

I came to know this very cute design of a shelf by one of the student, Arun Francis. His project on sensational design was small project but got attention from world class designers. Its a single string design, but it will get you looking at it. He is an artist basically and also designed an electric guitar from scratch.

Don't forget to see his other works too here.