News today is that Ikea “has teamed up with Marriott International to develop a chain of hotels in the same affordable, compact, and stylish vein as the furniture store”. Also happening in Europe, Ford is announcing a car sharing service in Germany.

Increasingly, interactions between brands and clients are not limited to the controlled atmosphere of stores. They happen in many other places, via friends, at work, through countless channels. It becomes strategic for companies to get involved in this “outside world”, and influence those experience clients and prospects will get with the products.

There is also a lot of value in seeing products in situation, gathering feedback on current and future usages in the process. Just like some CEOs like to take customer service calls every once in a while, the hotels will make the boundaries that separate product makers and product users disappear.

^{Fans have already explored a new business for IKEA: clothing!}

What we have here is a mix of lab (co-creation, feedback on products), showcase, and service. It is like R&D mixed with marketing mixed with a business that generates money.

And this is where it becomes interesting. Are we witnessing the birth of R&D 2.0, which instead of being a cost center generates money? Are services the missing piece, the one that makes co-creation profitable? It looks like it, and this is a very key development, one that could completely change the way research and development is approached by companies around the world.

This is a forward thinking move by Ikea and Ford, one that will surely be replicated in the near future. Now the challenge is to make sure clients don’t notice the fact that the average IKEA’s bed planned obsolescence is kicking in after only a few years…

For a long time I have been trying to bridge the gap between my generation and seniors. I organized grandma dinners (the idea was replicated in Canada thanks to CBC coverage), interviewed retirees on their usage of new technologies (part 1, part 2), and now the next step will be a training on computers and social media I will host this September with the help of the Hospice Général, a Geneva based social institution.

The sessions will happen on Sept 19-20 and Sept 26-27 at La nouvelle Roseraie, a vacation house where the average age is 85 years old.

I look forward to see how the older citizens react to new technologies, the outlook they will have on things I take for granted like iPads, google, or wikipedia. I expect a lot of learning for both sides, a fulfilling and humbling experience. I would like to incorporate  external speakers into the program, so if you would be interested in sharing your experience with seniors don’t hesitate to contact me!

The Lift team has produced a short video summarizing Lift13. Check it out if you want to feel the vibe of the latest edition of Switzerland’s best innovation conference.

This post is also an excuse to test the newest release of SublimeVideo [disclaimer: I am an advisor to Jilion, Sublime's parent company], the web’s best HTML5 video player now allowing for pixel perfect customized players across platforms, from IE6 to Android phones.

A couple of new technologies will save screens from greasy fingers. No need to touch with eyeSight‘s fingertip tracking technology and the leap motion.

Just like when mobile phones created hordes of people seemingly talking to themselves in the street, expect a new generation of weird behaviors coming once gesticulating in front of a screen becomes a good way to control your computer.

I wonder if one day we will be able to talk to our machines in sign language, and turn that into text. Would be very useful for people with disabilities.

There is a lot of ground to cover before being able to print your iphones at home. But 3D printing is really raising big questions, none bigger than the intellectual property of objects.

Just like the music industry lost its power (and business model) once it lost the capacity to lock its content into objects (tapes, CDs, etc), makers will be challenged as circulating objects will be as easy as passing a file from one printer to the other.

Before long, many of us will be able to print physical objects as easily as we once burned DVDs. And just as the Internet made trading MP3 music files and ripped movies a breeze, downloading 3D images to print on your shiny new MakerBot printer will be as easy as torrenting “The Hurt Locker.”

Last week, HBO sent a cease-and-desist letter to Fernando Sosa asking him to stop selling a 3D printed iPhone dock he modeled after the Iron Throne chair from the popular HBO TV series Game of Thrones.  Even though Sosa designed the dock himself in Autodesk Maya, HBO owns the rights to the show, its characters, and apparently the inanimate objects that appear onscreen.

Link (via 3D printing)

If you have kids about to choose what to study, direct them to law. There will be a lot of work in the coming decades ;)

[I am hosting the 8th TechnoArk conference, see you in Sierre on January 25!]

The 8th TechnoArk Conference, to be held in Sierre on 25 January 2013, will take as its theme:

Better personal management of energy – the next stage in the Internet revolution? Towards an Internet of energy

During the last 30 years, the Internet has brought profound changes in our behaviour and our relationship with information. These changes have occurred even more rapidly since 2007, when the release of the iPhone and the subsequent emergence of information mobility enabled people to create, exchange and obtain information anytime, anywhere.

In parallel with this, a revolution on a similar scale is taking place in the world of energy, with the advent of “smart grids”, intelligent networks that use information technology to optimise the production, distribution and consumption of electricity.

• What impact will these networks have on our society?
• How will customers behave when, armed with their smartphones, they can track their consumption and costs in real time?
• Which actors in the world of energy will emerge from this revolution strengthened, and which ones will be weakened?
• Is an Internet of energy that would make our behaviour transparent the solution to the looming energy crisis?

These are the questions which the 8th TechnoArk conference will raise, giving an overview of specific situations present and future. The event will host some of the most famous specialists in the field, including Justin Segall (founder of Simple Energy), Michael Hsieh (University of California at Berkeley) and the Swiss entrepreneur Michael Dupertuis, founder of the startup Geroco.

It seems a technology becomes legit when the US army starts to invest in it. Well, 3D printing, your time has come to shine to ”enable soldiers to quickly and cheaply produce spare parts for their weapons and equipment”. Just like there used to be soldiers dedicated to carrying communication equipment, we will soon have poor souls carrying 3D printers.

“Parts for [sensitive equipment like GPS or drones] break frequently, and many of them are produced overseas, so there’s a long lead time for replacement parts. [...] Instead of needing a massive manufacturing logistics chain, a device that generates replacement parts is now small and light enough to be easily carried in a backpack or on a truck.” [...]

The 3D printers are now being rolled out to the frontline in shipping containers that act as mobile production labs. The first of the $2.8m labs, which contains 3D printers and CNC machines to make parts from aluminium, plastic and steel, was sent to Afghanistan in July this year. While there are no plans to print weapons from scratch, the labs could produce spare parts to repair them, according to Pete Newell, head of the US army’s Rapid Equipping Force.

Link

The day weapons can be printed is coming sooner rather than later (a 3D printed gun was already successfully fired), and then we will be hit again by an old truth: “technology is a double edged sword”.

Data was the edge Obama’s team had on Romney. It was so strategic they would only talk about it “on the condition that the information not be published until after the winner was declared”.

Using a centralized database fed from hundreds of sources, Obama’s data scientist were able to gather an unprecedented knowledge on what was really happening on the field, understand what makes people pledge money, resubscribe to a newsletter, or send an invitation to vote via Facebook. Some of the initiatives described are quite impressive, a mix of science and ingenuity that every politician must be dreaming of (while very few will be able to actually make it happen).

Data is profoundly changing the way everything works, because it can be obtained in realtime, and allows daily refocus into better directions. Measure, understand, act. That’s the formula the best organizations will apply in the future.

A large portion of the cash raised online came through an intricate, metric-driven e-mail campaign in which dozens of fundraising appeals went out each day. Here again, data collection and analysis were paramount. Many of the e-mails sent to supporters were just tests, with different subject lines, senders and messages. Inside the campaign, there were office pools on which combination would raise the most money, and often the pools got it wrong. Michelle Obama’s e-mails performed best in the spring, and at times, campaign boss Messina performed better than Vice President Joe Biden. In many cases, the top performers raised 10 times as much money for the campaign as the underperformers.

Chicago discovered that people who signed up for the campaign’s Quick Donate program, which allowed repeat giving online or via text message without having to re-enter credit-card information, gave about four times as much as other donors. So the program was expanded and incentivized. By the end of October, Quick Donate had become a big part of the campaign’s messaging to supporters, and first-time donors were offered a free bumper sticker to sign up. [...]

“We ran the election 66,000 times every night,” said a senior official, describing the computer simulations the campaign ran to figure out Obama’s odds of winning each swing state. “And every morning we got the spit-out — here are your chances of winning these states. And that is how we allocated resources.”

Link

Man divorces his wife for getting him to marry her under false pretenses. She had $100k of plastic surgery, never told her husband, but he found out when she gave birth to an ’incredibly ugly’ baby.

Mr Feng said he took issue with his wife’s looks only after the couple’s daughter was born. He was shocked by the child’s appearance, calling her ‘incredibly ugly’ and saying she looked like neither one of her parents.

Mr Feng was so outraged that he initially accused his wife of cheating. Faced with the accusation, his wife admitted to spending around £62,000 on plastic surgery which had altered her appearance drastically.

She had the work done before she met her husband and never told him about it after they met. Mr Feng filed for divorce saying his wife had deceived him and convinced him to marry her under false pretenses.

The judge agreed with him and awarded him the damages.

Link

I will refrain from commenting on the sad human side of the story (poor kid really), but this makes me wonder if there could be such a thing as DNA surgery? Could science come up with a way to adapt your genes to your new face after you had a procedure? I know selection is possible, but could ovums be manipulated to reflect the mother’s new face?

Sounds like a completely crazy idea, pushing a lot of ethical boundaries. But apparently we live in a world where such a need exists, so I wouldn’t be too surprised if it happens…

How do you separate your line of denims from the rest of the pack in the 21st century? By combining them with beauty products. Meet the anticellulite jeans, probably one of marketing’s most impressive achievement in a while. These will sell like hotcakes.

In the spring of 2013, Wrangler is launching a line called “Denim Spa Therapy for Legs.”  The spa component consists of anticellulite and moisturizing elements infused into denim [...].  With the added components of vitamin E, amino acids, and antioxidants,claims their denim reduces cellulite and stretch marks while increasing collagen production.  Gsus says its aloe vera component protects the skin from environmental pollutants, thus preventing premature aging.

Link