Mustang V6 - Pony Package 

The Fundamental Shop

Here's a cute design from a German firm Fundamental Design. A cute corner shelf-cum-display stand where you display your costly artifacts and store some small pieces which you keep safely. Nice wooden block design. Check out here The Fundamental Shop

Its Simply Beautiful

If you are looking for furniture with royal touch, but couldn't find fine one's for a good price ( still considerably more than IKEA ), you just struck gold. Here's a small company from Austin, TX producing high quality furniture for much lower price than any famous furniture studios making it.

The problem was that, even if you are willing to you pay top dollars you don't find such a high quality furniture at one place. And the shop owners and mall owners adding their cut, the price is already sky rocketed. Still you have very limited choice, that's the worst part.

What's amazing about this company is, the amount of craftsmanship and details they put into each piece is really phenomenal. And its an order to make, that means they don't have cost of running a shop or maintaining inventory. They ship all across US and US only. And no returns please, so be sure what you want. See for yourself here.

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.