Finally. THE toilet for women

I don't know about any other country. But in Germany it is very common that women join each other on their visit at the toilet. I think this innovation will facilitate future conversations :-)
This are two toilets facing each other.

If you are interested in buyin one of these things: see the product page here.

Naps for life

I´m watching this awesome trend for quite a while. And now I thought I should comment on this a little. How cool would that be if every company had a napping area. For example equipped with some alarm clocks that are preconfigured for a 20 minute nap. Some scientists once figured out that such a short nap could increase your ability to concentrate by 35 per cent.
I´m not quite sure about the states, but in Germany that would be an huge cultural shift. The people prefer to pretend that they are fit and too busy to take a nap. I think thats a stupid opinion. Everybody has a bad night every once in a while. And thats not a weakness at all. But so far I couldn´t find any advocates over 30 in my current company.
A while ago i even saw inflatable napping units. You can basically just lock your office and calm down a little.
I can only hope that sometime these things are installed more broadly. Hopefully when i have to start working :-)

http://www.metronaps.com

Touchscreen replaces storefront

Ralph Lauren just installed a new shopping window at one of the stores.
It interacts with the potential costumer and transforms the Sunday shopping window walk in an actual buying situation.

What I like most about this neat thing is that it brings the people outside there houses again. You could certainly go on line and browse the Internet. But I think that people will realize pretty soon that they want to live in the real world combined with all the additional advantages from the virtual world. So this is a good development into that direction...
USA today article

The shown device looks awesome and you could assume that there will be
some applications in the consumer market where you can adopt this
technology.

But is it also possible to use it within an enterprise?
You can certainly picture this as a toy in the lobby of any automotive
or other producing company to play around with the products in a
simulated world.
But as an employee? Maybe to order something or do simple one / two
click actions. Honestly I cannot really imagine that you will be able
to master precise engineering tasks just with your hands.
But if you combine the capacity of the incredible zoom and the hands
as a control you could maybe have more fun searching in microfiche
archives.
I wonder if there are fun things you can add to an process driven
business application like SAP or any other ERP giant.
It would be cool if you would see your company as a big picture with
basic aggregated information and then zoom into a particular area of
interest to get more detailed numbers. Some tech-savvy CEOs would
appreciate that way of presenting information.in a way the
functionality is already there. There are data warehouses installed in
most of the companies. But to navigate through the data is a task that
most likely is reserved for specialists.
So the dream stays alive to have all information present and access
them at one single point. Even to zoom out to-a world view and see all
your suppliers, costumers and vendors etc... So the supply chain as a
whole, really visualized and not only on marketing slides like today.
The main point of improvement is an easy to handle navigation for
everybody who can actually see and interpret pictures.

The interface of the future?

Hi,

I know that the following has been around for a while. But nevertheless I quickly want to refer to this new way of interacting with computers.
I think that we'll see a lot of devices (not only the iPhone), that will try to get rid of anything additional needed to use the functionality.


Microsoft is even going one step further and already bringing an idea of a device to the market: read the article

Innovations seen by a German Student

Hi everybody,

this is my initial blog entry. Some real quick words about myself. I'm a German Student (which could possibly cause some English grammar or wording issues) and would like to seek for cool innovations and gather them on this blog.

Of course, like always these days.. participation is more than welcome.
Hopefully this blog will fill soon and we will all be able to dicuss the posted items.

Regards
bb (which kinda explains the triple b log ;-))