http://nilsnet.com Good ideas, and how to turn good ideas into great products Fri, 08 Aug 2008 20:22:03 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en An amazing set of pictures from this year's Tour de France. 2008 Tour de France - The Big Picture - Boston.com http://nilsnet.com/2008/08/the-big-picture-shows-us-the-tour-as-it-never-looks-on-tv/ I had what I believe is a common experience last week, when I decided to "go green" and replaced the incandescent bulb in my bedside lamp with a compact fluorescent (CFL). Suddenly, my bedroom had that look that you used to get with old black-and-white TV sets, a blueish cast ... http://nilsnet.com/2008/07/which-cfl-should-you-buy-to-replace-your-incandescent-lightbulbs/ This kind of article just burns my shorts. I believe in my heart that it is just completely wrong. Solar energy cost may rival other forms soon, study says - SiliconValley.com. Solar energy will cost the same as power produced by coal, natural gas and nuclear plants in about a ... http://nilsnet.com/2008/06/this-solar-energy-analysis-is-too-simplistic-like-most-are/ Serious innovation from BMW - BMW GINA Light Visionary Model revealed - Autoblog a car with a fabric skin. From the video: ...what do we need the skin of the car for anyway? ... the aspects of crash and stiffness and ride handling can be entirely without the skin..." Folding doors that ... http://nilsnet.com/2008/06/bmw-gina-is-way-outside-the-box/ ...Edison changed the image of the sole inventor by converting innovation to a process with recognized steps practiced by a team of inventors working together... Definitely an inspiring opening ... http://nilsnet.com/2008/06/a-good-summary-of-innovation-management/ Just saw this link on the 37Signals blog for the Business Innovation Factory community. They have a new interview with Jason Fried of 37Signals and many other interesting articles, interviews, and posts on innovation, innovators, and innovation strategies. http://nilsnet.com/2008/06/business-innovation-factory-community/ About six years ago I went to a conference on the future of IT. One of speakers said "If you aren't planning now for storage to be essentially free, and processing power to be essentially free, and bandwidth to be essentially free, then you're not planning." By the standards of six ... http://nilsnet.com/2008/05/what-would-you-automate-with-human-like-pattern-matching/ Haven't you asked yourself the question "If I followed the advice of all the business books - really took the advice instead of just reading the books and thinking 'hmmmm' - what are the chances my business would be successful?" Whenever I read a business book, such as one of ... http://nilsnet.com/2008/05/what-are-the-real-success-factors-for-entrepreneurial-startups/ I've been spending some time the last few days reviewing the contents of the Catalyze community. Tom Humbarger has done a great job of shepherding this social site for people involved in requirements, business analysis, and user experience design - the people who are responsible for products being good. There ... http://nilsnet.com/2008/05/catalyze-a-community-for-product-managers-and-business-analysts/ In his recent talk at the Web 2.0 conference, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody Clay Shirky provides (and expands on) an extremely interesting metric for a unit of human creative time expenditure, the Wikipedia: ...television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put ... http://nilsnet.com/2008/04/which-is-it-ginger-or-mary/