Showing posts with label innovation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label innovation. Show all posts

Thursday, January 29, 2015

The Space Billboard: Innovation or Pollution of the Earth's skies

SpaceBillboard, a supporter of innovative space research, is set to launch the world's first billboard in space in a milestone that marks the increasing importance of CubeSats in Space Exploration.

Researchers at KU Leuven University in Belgium came up with the novel idea of launching a real billboard into space to help fund their research on a new line up of NexGen satellites called CubeSats.

A CubeSat is small, about the size of a milk carton - and lightweight, which makes them cheaper to build and launch.

A CubeSat is the perfect answer for universities and start-ups to get involved in space research, one of the bedrock platforms for research on advanced technology solutions.

European Space Agency ESA and NASA in the US have active CubeSat programs that help drive the development and adoption of emerging technologies in support of new business solutions.

Tjorven Delabie, co-founder of SpaceBillboard said: "We are talking about an out-of-this-world project, that allows companies to bring their brand into space."

"The idea is catching on, and SpaceBillboard has already secured a number of contracts for companies to have their message on their own billboard in space."

The launch of the billboard is scheduled for the beginning of 2016, to be launched from Alcantara in Brazil.

Highest and fastest
The messages on the SpaceBillboard will be the highest and the fastest ever seen in the industry, flying at 27,400 kph at an altitude of 500 km.

The Billboard will orbit the Earth 15 times a day, becoming the first advertisements that literally bring their message around the world.

Although the billboard will not be visible from Earth, all messages will be continuously visible on the SpaceBillboard website as well as used in the customers' branding campaigns.

Marketing and Science
SpaceBillboard is a new kind of crowdfunding project where private and corporate donors help push space research forward. For companies, buying one or more of the 400 available squares on the billboard is a perfect opportunity to showcase their innovative spirit. At euro 2500 per square for the launch premiere, SpaceBillboard is a fantastic way to bring together experts from academia and industry to support the future of technology.

Personal Messages
Inspiring people about space research is an important part of SpaceBillboard's mission. Therefore, you can also put a personal message on the billboard yourself.

Sending a personal message into space costs euro 1/character. So far, many have already signed up to share their message, most of them are messages of love.

Into Space
Once the SpaceBillboard has been sold out, it will be put on the CubeSat. This satellite will also perform a valuable scientific mission.

The CubeSat will be deployed into a high inclination, low Earth orbit, and is expected to operate in orbit for up to ten years.

After that, the satellite will burn up in the atmosphere, ensuring that no space debris is left behind.

Saturday, July 28, 2012

The Airpiano 3D: Playing the piano in the air!



Credit to www.airpiano.de

The airpiano is an innovative MIDI and OSC controller. It allows the user to trigger invisible keys and faders in midair.

Touch-Free Interface

The airpiano is the first musical interface to introduce an intuitive and simple touch-free interaction. Most touch-free interfaces require users to stare at a display.

The user’s hand gestures in 3D space control elements on the screen. However, musicians and performers need to be able to play their instruments in a more free and intuitive way.

The airpiano’s keys and faders are therefore not on the screen, but above the airpiano surface. The performer knows the position of each controller in the air, so no display is needed, and the interaction becomes much more natural.

Discrete and Continuous Control

The airpiano is often compared with the Theremin. The Theremin is a wonderful instrument which is quite difficult to play. One reason for this is that it provides only continuous control.

The airpiano has a matrix of 24 discrete keys and 8 faders, which makes it much more simple to use.

Actually, the airpiano software makes the device so versatile that there is no real reason for a comparison.

These are completely different instruments.

Check out the airpiano features. User Experience Some people ask: why not just use a box with lots of buttons and shiny LEDs? What can I do with an airpiano that I can’t do with other controllers?

Well, we love all kinds of musical interfaces, and there are many wonderful and innovative alternative controllers out there.

However, we strongly believe that the airpiano introduces a new user experience, a magical and cool performance tool and an experimental instrument to explore.

The airpiano software allows setting the device in numerous ways and since there are no “rules” of how to play an airpiano, new creative ideas and playing techniques will come to life!

Friday, July 27, 2012

Recycle - A bicycle made of cardboard



If the weight of your bike frame is a chief concern, you can drop many thousands of dollars on a carbon fiber frame. Or you could talk to Izhar Gafni, an Isreali entrepreneur and rather obsessive tinkerer who has built a low-cost, good looking, functional and light road bike from cardboard.

We’ll let the well-produced video below tell the tale of the bike’s origin and development but first, consider the potential here to scale up production of such steeds.

Gafni figures the bike could be produced for about $12 in materials. That means the bike would retail for well under $100 — likely much closer to $50.

Sure, you can walk into a Walmart today and pick up a Huffy cruiser for $90. But that weighs about 45 pounds, compared to the featherweight cardboard bike.

As Inc.com notes, this could be a boon for companies that offer bikes as amenities, such as resorts. I also think it would make for great campus bikes for large corporations or warehouses.

For bike-sharing fleets, however, the cardboard might not be able to withstand the abuse that riders are sure to dish out.

Sunday, July 8, 2012

Recharging Vehicles: Japan demo shows electricity entering EV through tires

Electric vehicles' future continues to tease scientists to devise promising and practical ideas to keep these cars moving along the highways without having to pull over and wait for a battery recharge.

Solutions for the so called “charging and range problem” took yet another twist this month when a Japanese university team demonstrated how electricity can be transmitted to a pair of tires through a four-inch-thick block of concrete, the type of concrete used on some roads. 

The team took its demo to WTP (Wireless Technology Park) 2012, a trade show on wireless technologies, earlier this month in Yokohama.
 
Their solution is in the form of a wireless power prototype that can successfully transmit electricity through the concrete block. They consider the prototype as an early step to improve on, and that such an approach can be used one day to keep on the move.

Takashi Ohira, an electrical engineering professor at the Toyohashi University of Technology, who leads the team, has developed his electric field coupling system to supply a charge to a car through its . The goal is to enable power transmission as the vehicle’s tires travel along the road with suitable efficiency and power transfers.

In the demo, a metal plate was placed along with a four-inch layer of concrete, representing the road surface. Electricity between 50 and 60 watts was transmitted to actual-size automobile tires. The demo also showed a light bulb, attached between the two demo car tires, turning on.

The university team’s project is called EVER (Electric Vehicle on Electrified Roadway). The focus is research aimed at using wireless power transmission technologies based on electric field coupling for transmitting power to a running vehicle.

The July demo is the latest of similar past efforts by the researchers. Last year, Toyota Central R&D Labs and Ohira reported on their work to allow electric cars to drive unlimited distances on an electrified roadway.

They reported a system that similarly transmits electric power through steel belts inside the two tires and a metal plate in the road.

They presented their work at a workshop in Kyoto. To test how much energy would be lost as electricity traveled through the tire rubber, the researchers also set up a lab experiment with metal plates.

"Less than 20 percent of the transmitted power is dissipated in the circuit," said Ohira at that time. With enough power the system could run typical passenger cars, he added.

To make their present technology useful, the electric needs to be increased by 100 times. But, moving ahead, the group said that they are up to the task of meeting the project's challenges.

Friday, June 15, 2012

Do it yourself Rocket Builders 'Crazy Idea' - Just might work


Kristian von Bengtson and Peter Madsen and their efforts to launch themselves into space on a homemade rocket.

Von Bengtson, an aerospace scientist and former NASA contractor, and Madsen, an entrepreneur and aerospace engineer, founded their nonprofit, do-it-yourself space program, dubbed Copenhagen Suborbitals, after a 2008 chat on a 40-ton submarine Madsen had built in his spare time.

Since then they have enlisted 30 volunteer experts, conducted 50 static rocket-engine tests at their Copenhagen, Denmark, headquarters and launched the largest “amateur” rocket ever built, the 9.5-meter HEAT 1X Tycho Brahe, in June 2011.

Their ultimate goal is to launch a person about 100 kilometers miles above the Earth, considered the boundary of outer space.

“We have gone from having a crazy idea on a submarine to a smoothly run organization that builds rockets and spacecraft, and has experience with big launches,” von Bengtson said. “It feels like we have become a part of a new era in space.”

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Women, Aerospace and Innovation on This Week @ NASA - YouTube



NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden and Deputy Administrator Lori Garver helped announce a new series of Women@NASA during a Women's History Month event at George Washington University in Washington.

The Women, Aerospace, and Innovation event showcased new videos from the Women@NASA website highlighting the role of women in science, technology, engineering and math at the agency.

Check out the Women@NASA website. Also, NASA successfully conducted another drop test of the Orion crew vehicle's entry, descent and landing parachutes in preparation for its orbital flight test in 2014, engineers at the Stennis Space Center have moved a J-2X engine to the A-2 Test Stand in preparation for another round of testing, SpaceX completes a "Wet Dress Rehearsal" for its upcoming Falcon 9 demonstration flight to the International Space Station, NASA helps release "Angry Birds Space" and more!

Friday, March 9, 2012

Startram the Maglev train: Destination low earth orbit (LEO)

Getting into space is one of the harder tasks to be taken on by humanity.

The present cost of inserting a kilogram (2.2 lb) of cargo by rocket into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is about US$10,000.

A manned launch to LEO costs about $100,000 per kilogram of passenger (except in China) but who says we have to reach orbit by means of rocket propulsion alone?

Instead, imagine sitting back in a comfortable magnetic levitation (maglev) train and taking a train ride into orbit.

Dr George Maise invented the Startram orbital launch system along with Dr James Powell, who is one of the inventors of superconducting maglev - for which he won the 2002 Franklin Medal in engineering. Startram is in essence a superconducting maglev launch system.


The system would see a spacecraft magnetically levitated to avoid friction, while the same magnetic system is used to accelerate the spacecraft to orbital velocities, just under 9 km/sec (5.6 miles/s).

Maglev passenger trains have carried passengers at nearly 600 kilometers per hour (373 mph) - spacecraft have to be some 50 times faster, but the physics and much of the engineering is the same.

The scope of the project is challenging.

A launch system design for routine passenger flight into LEO should have rather low acceleration - perhaps about 3 g's maximum, which then requires 5 minutes of acceleration to reach LEO transfer velocities. In that period, the spacecraft will have traveled 1,000 miles (1,609 km).

The maglev track must be 1,000 miles in length - similar in size to maglev train tracks being considered for cross-country transportation.

Read more of this article here

Worlds smallest One-man Helicopter GEN H-4 - YouTube video



Meet 75-year-old Gennai Yanagisawa, who runs an electronics equipment company in Matsumoto, central Japan, has created a 75kg (165-pound) one-man aircraft which sets the world record for the smallest helicopter.

Saturday, December 31, 2011

Self-Balancing Electric Unicycle - YouTube



Stephan Boyer, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has created the world's first self-balancing electric unicycle. Designed like a mini Segway, it is fondly named "Bullet" by its inventor.

The cyclist has to adjust his position to avoid falling; needing to lean forward to accelerate and backward to slow down. However, Boyer has admitted it isn't quite so easy to ride the cycle, adding that even his unicycling friends struggled to come to grips with it. The principal problem seems to be that the unicycle veers to the right, at the slightest inclination.

Boyer stated, on his blog, it took him several hours to learn to ride in a straight line and several more to control his turns. Although the bike takes some getting used to, it does offer a top speed of 15 mph and can travel up to five miles on a single charge.

The unicycle also includes a panic button, designed to turn off the electric motor in case of an emergency.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Innovation: Why Culture Is Key - S+G

The elements that make up a truly innovative company are many: a focused innovation strategy, a winning overall business strategy, deep customer insight, great talent, and the right set of capabilities to achieve successful execution.

More important than any of the individual elements, however, is the role played by corporate culture, the organization’s self-sustaining patterns of behaving, feeling, thinking, and believing, in tying them all together.

Yet according to the results of this year’s Global Innovation 1000 study, only about half of all companies say their corporate culture robustly supports their innovation strategy.

Moreover, about the same proportion say their innovation strategy is inadequately aligned with their overall corporate strategy.

This disconnect, as the saying goes, is both a problem and an opportunity. Our data shows that companies with unsupportive cultures and poor strategic alignment significantly underperform their competitors.

Moreover, most executives understand what’s at stake and what matters, even if their companies don’t always seem to get it right.

Across the board, for example, respondents identified “superior product performance” and “superior product quality” as their top strategic goals.

They asserted that their two most important cultural attributes were “strong identification with the consumer/customer experience” and a “passion/pride in products.”

Read the full article here

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

NASA Selects Seven Firms To Provide Near-Space Flight Services

NASA has selected seven companies to integrate and fly technology payloads on commercial suborbital reusable platforms that carry payloads near the boundary of space.

As part of NASA’s Flight Opportunities Program, each successful vendor will receive an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract. 

These two-year contracts, worth a combined total of $10 million, will allow NASA to draw from a pool of commercial space companies to deliver payload integration and flight services. 

The flights will carry a variety of payloads to help meet the agency’s research and technology needs.

“Through this catalogue approach, NASA is moving toward the goal of making frequent, low-cost access to near-space available to a wide range of engineers, scientists and technologists,” said NASA Chief Technologist Bobby Braun at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

“The government’s ability to open the suborbital research frontier to a broad community of innovators will enable maturation of the new technologies and capabilities needed for NASA’s future missions in space.”
The selected companies are:
– Armadillo Aerospace, Heath, Texas
– Near Space Corp., Tillamook, Ore.
– Masten Space Systems, Mojave, Calif.
– Up Aerospace Inc., Highlands Ranch, Colo.
– Virgin Galactic, Mojave, Calif.
– Whittinghill Aerospace LLC, Camarillo, Calif.
– XCOR, Mojave, Calif.

NASA’s Office of the Chief Technologist is charged with maturing crosscutting technologies to flight readiness status for future space missions. Through these indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contracts, NASA intends to provide frequent flight opportunities for payloads on suborbital platforms.

The Flight Opportunities Program is managed at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif. For more information on the program, visit: http://flightopportunities.nasa.gov

For more information about NASA’s Office of the Chief Technologist, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/oct

Saturday, August 6, 2011

AdHoc Folding Canoe - YouTube video



Israeli designer Ori Levin has created a one-of-a-kind folding canoe called the Adhoc, that tips (no pun intended) the scales at just 4.1 kilograms, or 9 pounds.

The single-passenger Adhoc features a carbon fiber frame, and a hull made from aramid fabric, which is also used in racing sails. Custom-made locking mechanisms hold the telescoping longitudinal framework poles in place at the bow and stern, while a "parasol-like" center folding mechanism allows the boat to hold its shape in the middle.

Its single seat is a hammock-like fabric and webbing arrangement. The whole canoe can reportedly be stowed in a bag the size of a regular backpack, and assembled within about five minutes.

While there's no word on how stable or hydrodynamic the Adhoc is, as you can see below, it does at lease float with a passenger aboard.

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Curtain falling on 'Digital Decade'

While it got off to a rocky start with the overhyped Y2K bug and dotcom bubble, the era dubbed the "Digital Decade" by Microsoft's Bill Gates has turned out to be a dizzying period of innovation.

"It's been an amazingly vibrant decade for the Internet and for digital things in general," said John Abell, New York bureau chief of Wired magazine, which has chronicled the technological leaps and bounds of the past 10 years.

"People simply don't exist in a non-digital world at all," Abell told AFP. "Even grandmothers and Luddites all have tools and devices -- even if they don't realize they're using them -- which connect them to a digital world."

David Pogue, personal technology columnist for The New York Times, points to Apple's iPod, introduced in 2001, as among the most influential devices of the decade.

"It really revolutionized the way music is distributed and marketed," said Pogue, who also casts a vote for the Flip pocket camcorder from Pure Digital Technologies.

"In two years it has taken over one-third of the camcorder market and has killed the sales of tape camcorders," Pogue told AFP.

Pogue also gives a nod to the GPS navigational unit "which changes the way we drive and also has environmental considerations because millions of people spend less time driving around lost."

Touchscreen smartphones such as Apple's iPhone featuring thousands of applications are also high on Pogue's list.

"It's become a tiny pocket computer in a size and shape that no computer's ever been before -- and mobile and connected to the Internet all the time," said Pogue. "That's a revolutionary set of circumstances."

What's more, he added, "It's only two years old. The iPhone came out two years ago.

"Imagine what the iPhone and the Android phones and the Palm phones are going to look like in five years? They're going to be smaller, thinner, much better battery life, many more features, much faster."

"Right now we're looking at the Stone Age of these phones," Pogue said. "We think they're modern but they're not."

Another groundbreaking device high on the lists of technology analysts is Amazon's Kindle electronic reader, which made its appearance in 2007 and has spawned a host of rivals jostling for a share of the digital book market.

The past decade has, of course, also seen seismic shifts in the Web with the explosive growth of social networking sites, wireless connectivity and the rise of Internet-based cloud computing.

Web search and advertising giant Google has become "central to our lives," said Wired's Abell, branching out into "everything you can think of, from mail to documents to the telephone."

In the late 1990s, Pogue said, "creating a webpage took skill, talent, special software -- it was still only for the geeks."

The Internet has become accessible to all in the years since, giving birth to sites such as Wikipedia in 2001, MySpace in 2003, Facebook in 2004, YouTube in 2005 and Twitter in 2006.

"The beauty of Web 2.0 websites is that it makes it very easy," said Pogue. "Anybody can immediately just type, just type to present their point of view without having any special talent except having an opinion.

"What it does that's really amazing is it connects people who have similar interests, even very narrow interests, who would never meet each other," he said. "They would never be able to connect any other way."

Much of what has come to pass over the past 10 years was presaged by Gates when he gazed into a crystal ball in an October 2001 essay titled "Moving Into the Digital Decade."

"Wherever you are, you'll have the power to control who can contact you or access your information to live your life as openly or as privately as you wish," Gates wrote.

As for what the next decade holds, Pogue is not going there. "Anyone who tries to predict the future of technology usually looks like an idiot," he said.

Unless you're Bill Gates.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Computer Innovation: Go to hospital to see the future - New Scientist

Innovation: Go to hospital to see computing's future - New Scientist

Computer Innovation is our regular column that highlights emerging technological ideas and where they may lead.

If you want to know how people will interact with machines in the future, head for your nearest hospital.

That's the impression I got from a new report about the future of human-computer interaction from IT analysts Gartner, based in Stamford, Connecticut.

Gartner's now-classic chart, shown right, shows the rollercoaster of expectations ridden by new technologies: rocketing from obscurity to a peak of overblown hype, then falling into a "trough of disillusionment" before finally becoming mainstream as a tech's true worth is found.

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Thursday, August 13, 2009

Friday, August 7, 2009

NASA Reviving its 'Blue Sky' Think Tank

(C)

(Illustration: NASA/Pat Rawlings/SAIC)

NIAC has funded research into spacesuits that could be coated with proteins to generate electricity solely through the natural movement of the astronauts wearing them

NASA should revive its Institute for Advanced Concepts, a blue-skies idea mill that closed in 2007, says an expert panel – but it says the new incarnation should have its feet a little closer to the ground.

NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) was founded in 1998 to harvest innovative ideas for spaceflight and aeronautics from outside the NASA community.

It received $4 million a year, about 0.02 per cent of NASA's annual budget, and funded more than 100 futuristic spaceflight and aeronautics projects that no one else would touch. The projects included motion-sensitive spacesuits that generate their own power, techniques to construct buildings in space using radio waves, and spherical robots to explore Mars, among many others.

But in 2007, a combination of budget constraints and internal politics shut the organisation down. On Friday, a committee convened by the US National Research Council released a report suggesting that NASA bring back the think tank.

The committee, which included a mix of people from academia and industry, found that NIAC had been successful right up until its final days. "They were definitely living up to their contract at the time they were terminated," says committee co-chair Robert Braun, a professor of space technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Three NIAC-funded projects are now "on a path toward one day being a NASA mission", Braun says, including a prototype plasma rocket, an X-ray interferometer that is being considered for NASA's Black Hole Imager mission, and a "star shade", which could help existing space telescopes search for extrasolar planets.

Other projects have had unexpected medical spinoffs, like a skin-tight spacesuit that can help children with cerebral palsy walk. "By and large, the topics that they invested in were pushing the state of the art, were very advanced in terms of far-out thinking, and I'd say a decent percentage of them had the possibility of turning into something," Braun told New Scientist.