A Lesson in Innovation – Why did the Segway Fail? The Segway PT is a two-wheeled, self-balancing battery electric vehicle invented by Dean Kamen.
It was launched in 2001 in a blizzard of publicity. Yet it has failed to gain significant market acceptance and is now something of a curiosity. In this article Paul Sloane takes a look at what lessons to be learned from the failure. The product is very clever. It works well. Expectations were too high. Most successful innovations involve some degree of iteration, experimentation, openness and collaboration. By Paul Sloane About the author Paul Sloane held senior positions at IBM, Ashton-Tate, MathSoft and Monactive. The New Yorker Cover Department’s Greatest Rejects. Françoise Mouly, The New Yorker’s art editor since 1993, doesn’t have normal relationships with the artists who draw the magazine’s covers.
“Think of me as your priest,” she told one of them. Mouly, who cofounded the avant-garde comics anthology RAW with her husband, Art Spiegelman, asks the artists she works with—Barry Blitt, Christoph Niemann, Ana Juan, R. Crumb—not to hold back anything in their cover sketches. If that means the occasional pedophilia gag or Holocaust joke finds its way to her desk, she’s fine with that. Tasteless humor and failed setups are an essential part of the process. Until recently, you would have had to visit Mouly’s office on the 20th floor of the Condé Nast building to see the rejected covers she keeps pinned to a wall. Barry Blitt's illustration mocking terrorism fears was never used; the reference to Diet Coke and Mentos—a (very) low-level explosive combination—was deemed too obscure.
What’s the process of deciding on a cover every week? It depends. The Lively Morgue. Video: Five-Year-Old Girl Provides Insight on Popular Logos. If the cute voice of the 5-year-old doing the voiceover on the video doesn’t make you smile, then certainly her opinions on popular logos will—either because of her lack of knowledge of some brands and obvious indoctrination from others.
Adam Ladd, a graphic designer from Cincinnati, sat down with his 5-year-old daughter, Faith, and showed her more than two dozen logos, recording her reactions to them with a Phil Wickham song, aptly titled Eden, playing in the background. Faith obviously has no clue about some of them, and thus describes them as a typical 5-year-old might, comparing them to a marble, a shooting star or a parade elephant (sorry, Republican Party, you have your work cut out on this little one). Others, though, Faith knows quite well. She quickly points out the Disney logo (no surprise here) and equates the McDonald’s logo to a “‘M’ made out of fries.”
She knows Starbucks is coffee and correctly names the company associated with the famous Swoosh. Why Interior Designers Matter. Who Knew. 5 crazy Lego inventions that actually work. Image credit: bdesham ( By Jacob Bolm, Tecca We've seen some pretty awesome Lego creations in the past, including a Volkswagen van, Angry Birds, and even the heart of the Large Hadron Collider.
But what about Lego inventions that actually work? Here are some of our favorite, fully functional Lego creations. Twin-lens camera This nifty Lego camera was designed and built by the talented and clever photographer Carl-Frederic Salicath. Robotic Lego arm Engineering student Max Shepherd created this amazing, fully articulating robotic arm. Image credit: linmtheu ( DIY computer case This fully functional computer case was built entirely out of Lego parts. 3D milling machine 3D printing is one of the coolest new technologies.
Lego brick sorting factory Lego tinkerer Chris Shepherd built this extremely impressive Lego sorting machine entirely out of Lego NXT hardware. Maybe she's born with it - maybe she's Fotoshopped.