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Creative Use of Materials | World's Coolest Offices When you walk into the Los Angeles offices of Thornton Tomessti, an international engineering company, it's hard not to notice the floating reception desk situated in front of a bright green mural bearing the company's name. Upon further inspection, the mural actually pays homage to the company's line of business: the bright green dots are actually safety caps for steel rebar. The clients were "keen on celebrating the creativity and ingenuity that 'good' structural engineering offers," notes Koning Eizenberg, the architecture firm behind the space. Certainly, the choice of color matters for your office, but perhaps more importantly (and interestingly), color can be used as a device to tell a story. No one likes to work in a noisy office. While the monochromatic fabric offers a legitimate function for the office, it also delivers a powerful design aesthetic. Here's one way to explain Missing Link's office: "A riot of color and carefully orchestrated chaos."

Top New York Based Venture Capitalists You Should Know Chris Dixon, Founder Collective The Co-founder of Site Advisor (acquired by McAfee) and Hunch (acquired by eBay) is quickly showing New York what our tech scene needs: successes. While we don’t have an east coast Paypal who’s founders have spun off organizations like Founders Fund, Linkedin, Tesla and SpaceX, we do have Chris Dixon. This Techcrunch contributor has invested his own money and Founder Collective’s, in companies like Skype, Invite Media, ScanScout, OMGPOP, BillShrink, SeatGeek, Posterous and About.me. Dixon blogs at and is active with his Twitter followers. Roger Ehrenberg, IA Ventures Short for Information Arbitrage, IA has a focus on digital media and fintech. David Pakman, Venrock As New York as it comes, the name Venrock is a compound of “venture” and “Rockefeller”. Stuart Ellman and Jim Robinson IV, RRE Ventures Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures Josh Kusher, Thrive Capital Eric Hippeu, Lerer Ventures Ken and Ben Lerer Howard Morgan, First Round Capital

Is getting a verified certificate on Coursera worth it? World's Coolest Offices: Best Use of Nature For the first major renovation to the Chamber of Commerce and Industry office in Ljubljana, Slovenia, the government contacted a local architecture and design firm, Sadar + Vuga. When the work ended, a new façade adorned the building—a tangle of crisscrossing green beams covering tall glass windows. Inside the building, a dull green light shrouds the upper floor, which is enveloped by the screens. The effect feels like walking inside a fibrous plant. (Continued) Long troughs brimming with tropical plants hang from ceilings, and as the plans grow, their vines and flowers stretch toward the ground. Thinkgarden, a "creative business lounge" and meeting space in Milan, Italy, is based on the idea that nature promotes creativity. Even if a worker is sitting at a Thinkgarden desk, nature is never far away. Trails of leaves extend across the walls of the Sugamo Shunkin Bank's Tokiwadai branch. Ever notice how a fallen leaf may be pockmarked with holes? Lunch break!

NYC Real Estate Startup RealDirect Adds Map Search And Compatibility Rankings RealDirect.com was built around a compelling proposition for home sellers — instead of paying the 6 percent broker fee, let RealDirect handle the listings and offer advice from agents, while only paying $395 a month or a 1 or 2 percent commission (depending on the level of services). Now, however, the site is also trying to be useful for home buyers. Specifically, instead of expecting buyers to find the listings through various real estate databases, RealDirect is launching its own map-based interface. It’s pretty straightforward — you enter things like the neighborhoods you want to look at, the maximum price, and the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, then you get a map with all the houses that fit your criteria. You can also draw a lasso around the area that you want to search in and browse data about different neighborhoods. “Every single buyer makes some sort of compromise,” says co-founder and CEO Doug Perlson puts it. For now, RealDirect is limited to Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Home Design: 20 Creative Ways To Maximize Limited Living Space We’d all like to have a place to call our own, a spot in the world where we can say, "I am king of this spot". But space – or the lack of it – is fast becoming an issue, particularly in major cities. If you don’t intend to have the traditional home design, the kind you fill up with creative or futuristic furniture, and fantasy-themed bedrooms, then perhaps these unconventional home designs may give you new ideas. Ingenius architects and pretty talented interior designers have turned spaces, apartments & lofts as small as 240 square feet into compact yet cozy homes. Recommended Reading: 25 Creative Bookshelf Designs You Have Got To See Living Cube. 29 Square Meters Project. Suspended Bedroom. Wooden Box Home. Bed Under Stairs. Tim Seggerman Loft. Small Box House. Warehouse Loft. San Diego Cadres. Slope House. Maxim Zhukov Loft. The Cube Project. Protohaus. Puzzle Loft. Zimmerman Garden Pavillion. Videos For your Inspiration Some creations are better depicted through video.

Made In New York Digital Map Creative & Modern Office Designs Around the World Gone are the days when offices were typically cubicle, surrounded by white walls and lit by white fluorescent lights. Thanks to corporate giants like Google and Pixar that have demonstrated tremendous success despite their unconventional workplaces, more people are embracing the idea that creative work environment helps stimulate minds and inspire innovation. From simply ditching the crisp white walls for graphical wallpapers to a total overhaul of the office layout, we are all trying to break the mold and introduce a unique working environment to the team, and hopefully inspire some genius ideas along the way. So if you are trying to inject some personality into the place you spend your daily 9-5, how about getting some cue from the creative giants themselves? Google (Zurich, Switzerland) Facebook (Palo Alto, California, USA) Skype (Tallin, Estonia) Digg (San Francisco, USA) Twitter (San Francisco, USA) Swatch (Zurich, Switzerland) General Motors (Detroit, USA) Other Companies Creative Office

Official Website: Press Room April 25, 2013 Time Inc. today unveiled its third annual list of the 10 NYC Startups to Watch for 2013. The ten ventures will be recognized at Time Inc.’s Internet Week cocktail event on Wednesday, May 22nd. Each Spring, editors from Time Inc. brands, including TIME, FORTUNE, CNNMoney.com, PEOPLE, Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly, and InStyle, comb New York's technology scene to discover the ten most promising startups of the past year. This year's diverse list spotlights New York City-based companies with the most potential to transform areas from shopping, personal health and dating to customer service, social media, and data analysis. “Each year, the temperature of NYC’s start-up scene seems to get turned up another five degrees, with 2013 yielding by far the largest number and widest spectrum of companies for our judging committee to consider,” says Time Inc. The honorees will be feted at what has become one of the flagship events of Internet Week New York.

Selgas Cano Architecture Office May 6th, 2009 This is the office of the Selgas Cano architects in Madrid, I guess it’s not downtown Madrid. They definitely have a different perspective on their surroundings. found at Arch Daily Kleiner Perkins Closes On $525 Million For Its 15th Venture Fund, ‘KPCB 15′ Silicon Valley venture capital stalwart Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers is announcing this evening that it has closed on a $525 million round for its fifteenth venture fund, dubbed ‘KPCB 15.’ The fund will be headed up by 10 managing members: Mike Abbott, Chi-Hua Chien, Amol Deshpande, John Doerr, Bing Gordon, Wen Hsieh, Randy Komisar, Matt Murphy, Beth Seidenberg, and Ted Schlein. Longtime Kleiner Perkins investment partners Brook Byers, Ray Lane and Bill Joy are all notably off the list, which appears to confirm earlier reports that they will be declining their participation in future funds as part of a gradual general change in the partnership structure at the firm. Kleiner Perkins says it will focus the fund toward making investments in early-stage digital consumer and enterprise, green technology, and life sciences companies. $525 million is certainly big, but it’s not outsized given Kleiner Perkins’ history and the larger environment.