Breakthroughs and aggressive investments in Algal Biofuels

An organism that contributes to global warming, can also be used to make carbon-neutral fuels. This is why large companies like Exxon Mobil have invested $600 million over the next six years, on the development of algae-based biofuels. Algae is the main source of fossil fuels used in the industrial world today.

Algal biofuel companies are closing multi-million dollar contracts with the US government, who are committing almost $800 million in funding for advanced research on biofuels. Although each company has its own process of extracting biofuels from algae, issues on the efficiency and earth friendliness remains.

Full Article

Filed under: Innovation, Science , Science, Innovation, Energy Alternatives, Sustainability, Climate Change Solutions

Customers drive change

Akio Toyoda spoke in Michigan yesterday. We’ve been part of this process for 10 years now and can testify to how it works making products, services and companies better and more valuable.

From Automotive News:
In his keynote speech at the Management Briefing Seminars, Toyota Motor Corp. President Akio Toyoda challenged the auto industry to reinvent the automobile and told the gathered executives that they are not in charge of deciding how to to do it.

“All of us in this room might think we are driving change in our companies and in our industry,” Toyoda said. “But we are not.

“It is the customer who is driving change. And if we want to make something happen, we’d better listen and learn the customer’s habits.”

Doing so could allow the industry to discover “a need so big that it calls for a true breakthrough idea,” Toyoda said. “Something bigger than just worrying about how many cupholders our competitor has in their new model.”

‘Contribute to society’

Toyoda said his vision for Toyota follows that of his grandfather, Kiichiro Toyoda, who founded the company in 1937. His grandfather insisted that the automaker should “contribute to society through manufacturing cars,” Akio Toyoda said. That calls upon Toyota staffers “to aspire to a higher cause than just building cars and making money,” he said.

Toyoda admitted, though, that “the severe drop in the economy and auto market has created some of the most challenging times Toyota has ever faced.” Toyota posted its third-straight quarterly loss in the three months that ended June 30 and is on track for its second-straight fiscal year of operating losses.

Toyoda also noted that General Motors Co.’s decision to withdraw from the two automakers’ joint venture in Fremont, Calif., New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., “has created some extremely difficult issues for us to resolve.”

Full article

Filed under: Automotive , Automotive, Clients, Consumers, Future, Innovation, Partnerships

It’s official: BMW will launch electric car sub-brand

Automotive New reports:

BMW will launch a new class of environmentally friendly vehicles under its own brand, signaling that even premium automakers are ready to embrace electric vehicles as a mainstream product.

Without new concepts and technologies, certain carmakers “may no longer be in the market” soon after the advent of a raft of tax penalties and incentives designed to force the auto industry to go green, CEO Norbert Reithofer said.

BMW’s board decided to create a new sub-brand — similar to its “M” label for its high-performance cars — to label a new range of sustainable vehicles, Reithofer said on a conference call on Tuesday.

Full article

Filed under: Automotive, Innovation, Marketing , Automotive, Cars, Clients, Energy, Innovation

Free rental cars for flexible travelers

Rental companies often need to move cars from a to b and it’s safe to say that universally, people like free “anything”. This is where Transfercar steps in. The New Zealand company works with the car rental industry, posting lists of cars which they need transporting from a to b. Drivers can either check the website for availability, or enter preferential journeys and be notified by text when cars become available.

Although all journeys begin and end at a rental company’s specified location, the lure of free rental, often with free insurance, free ferry and sometimes even free fuel is enough to attract money savvy travelers to venture slightly off their planned routes.

The idea was born when Espen, one of the founders was working part time at Ace Rentals. He began to notice a trend in large amounts of money being spent on relocation of cars from one branch to another.

Transfercar are currently in the process of raising capital to expand their operation in Australia and the USA. Let’s hope they’re successful.

Check out their site

Filed under: Innovation, Marketing , Automotive, Consumers, ideas, Innovation, Lifestyle, Rental Car, Travel

More creative shops creating their own product rather than tout clients’ offering

With major advertisers cutting costs, creative shops are increasingly commercializing their own product ideas.

When Coca-Cola acquired Vitaminwater for $4.1 billion in 2007, it wasn’t for the breakthrough electrolyte-drink technology. It paid for breakthrough marketing, and that epiphany rippled through Adland. Why shouldn’t agencies launch their own brands rather than solely focus on other people’s prodcts? Consultancy PSFK recently invited FAST COMPANY writer Danielle Sacks to moderate a panel featuring four creative chiefs running what PSFK calls New Idea Agencies. In this edited transcript of the conversation, they explore what it’s like for ad people to go beyond branding into the messy world of product creation. Will what they learn improve advertising for the rest of us?

Full Article

Filed under: Innovation, Marketing , Advertising, Clients, Consumers, Design, ideas, Innovation, Marketing

Toyota’s Bill Reinert – tremendous commentary on future of Green Vehicles

From Automobile Magazine:

Bill Reinert, Toyota’s in-house energy guru and resident contrarian, looks like he’s just taken a whiff of a long-expired container of milk.

Reinert is serving on a future-of-the-car panel at a high-powered green-think conference sponsored by Fortune magazine and featuring heavyweights such as President Bill Clinton and Bill Ford. Although the symposium is being held in a button-down bastion of Orange County, the ambience is totally Silicon Valley, all iPhones and Aeron chairs, with lots of clever but undercapitalized tech entrepreneurs sniffing around for angel investors. At the moment, Shai Agassi, the charismatic founder of Better Place, is making a dynamic pitch for creating vast networks of battery-charging stations to support electric vehicles that will, he claims, be cheaper than the equivalent gasoline-powered cars. While executives from Ford, BMW, and Fisker Automotive listen with polite smiles, Reinert squirms in his seat, crosses and recrosses his legs, and generally behaves like a schoolkid who can’t wait for the bell to ring so he can escape for recess.

When it’s his turn to speak, Reinert bites his tongue. He mildly questions the viability of Agassi’s wildly improbable plan to create battery-swapping stations for the coming wave of EVs. He lobs a few gentle barbs in the direction of the ethanol lobby, which he privately regards with unalloyed scorn. He outlines his genuinely radical vision of a future where publicly owned and shared cars are used to complete urban mass-transit systems. But by and large, he’s on his best behavior, showing the benevolent public face of the world’s greenest car company. Until the mics are turned off.

“That’s the first law of Disney at work–wishing will make it so,” he mutters shortly after bolting out of the conference room and yanking off his tie. “Using ethanol for fuel is like electing the dumbest kid in school as class president. As for plug-in electrics, they’re just not plausible right now. Lithium-ion batteries are too expensive by at least an order of magnitude. They’re not energy-dense enough. And we generate a lot of our electricity from coal. I don’t think Shai is being disingenuous. I think he really believes what he’s saying. I see it all the time from those Palo Alto types. They think the whole world is like a computer company, and they’re always trying to recreate the dot-com economy. You see exactly the same mind-set with Tesla. It’s all going to work out. It worked out with eBay. It worked out with SAP. But transportation is a different world. I mean, Shai’s bragging about driving an electric RAV4 with a seventy-mile range. How many of your friends are going to buy that car?”

Full Article

Filed under: Automotive , Automotive, Cars, Consumer, Energy, Future, Gasoline, Innovation, Technology

Apple granted patent for sports sensors

Think Major League Baseball’s stats and live video iPhone app is cool? Imagine what Apple could do with technology it was granted a patent for this week: a network of sensors that deliver real-time velocity, impact, rotation and other data from sporting event participants to the web. Imagine your iPhone’s accelerometer placed inside a boxer’s glove, a snowboarder’s snow suit or a NASCAR driver’s car – with the information captured delivered to your iPhone or Apple TV while you watch the competition either in person or remotely.

Would you pay a premium for an event ticket that includes real time stats like that delivered to your iPhone? I would. Of course Apple is granted all kinds of patents all the time and only some of them amount to anything – but this one is very cool.

More

Filed under: Innovation, Science , Design, Future, Gadgets, ideas, Innovation, iphone, Mobile, Technology

Higher-performance plastic electronics

A new way of printing organic electronics is more reliable and yields higher performance.

It’s possible to print large, flexible arrays of cheap, plastic transistors to drive displays. But the performance of these organic electronics is still not consistent enough for commercial devices.

A new method for printing a wide variety of semiconducting organic compounds such as polymers is much more reliable–and on top of that, it improves the performance of a wide variety of these materials by a few orders of magnitude.

Full article

Filed under: Innovation, Science , Energy, Gadgets, Innovation, Science, Technology

Sharp Ultra-Thin solar panel for cell phones

First Sharp announced the development of the world’s first waterproof solar-powered cell phone, and now the company has done the world one better by developing the thinnest solar module for mobile devices ever. The LROCGO2 Solar Module measures just 0.8 mm thick–the width of eight human hairs.

The Solar Module’s polycrystalline solar cells only provides 300 mW of power, so the device won’t replace traditional batteries any time soon. But it can act as a supplement for emergency situations or any time when a traditional cell phone charger is MIA. And since the module is fitted onto cell phones in the manufacturing process,it eliminates the need to carry around extra emergency solar chargers.

Full article

Filed under: Innovation, Science , Design, Energy, Innovation, iphone, Research, Science, Technology

If Isaac Newton had had access to a supercomputer

From Scienceblogs:

…. he’d have had it watch apples fall and let it figure out what that meant. But the computer would have needed to run an algorithm developed by Cornell researchers that can derive natural laws from observed data.

The researchers have taught a computer to find regularities in the natural world that represent natural laws — without any prior scientific knowledge on the part of the computer. They have tested their method, or algorithm, on simple mechanical systems and believe it could be applied to more complex systems ranging from biology to cosmology and be useful in analyzing the mountains of data generated by modern experiments that use electronic data collection.

The research is described in the April 3 issue of the journal Science (Vol. 323, No. 5924) by Hod Lipson, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and graduate student Michael Schmidt, a specialist in computational biology.

Filed under: Innovation, Science , Innovation, Robots, Science, Technology