Light Drive

Light Drive from Kim Pimmel on Vimeo.

Kaleidoscopic Cities

Work of David Thomas Smith.

Starry night in motion

This is probably what Van Gogh was imagining but was limited by his oils.

Plasma dynamo

I was wondering what they were doing biking by. Well, they’re putting in a new massive plasma dynamo at the UW physics department.

It’s essentially a container that can contain something no material could (directly) contain. That’s pretty neat.

Viscous flow

Such predictable behavior. That’s physics.

Steve

I actually just bought my first Mac (Macbook Air 13”) ever, I have been missing out for years on some great products that just feel so good to use, way beyond other products on the market. They are uniquely different. It takes something special to do make it so. Steve was that something.

Via Mint Digital.

Racing hacked toys in KC

A couple weeks ago I went on a little road trip to see the Kansas City Maker Faire. It was a blast. The intention was to do a customer development for my startup which I did do a bit of, but most of the time was spent something a little different: (minorly) assisting the Sector 67 team in the Power Racing Series competition of racing modified power wheels vehicles.

More photos here.

Startup in a day

Can you create a tech startup, with all the parts that involves including customer research, application development, company formation and pitch development (slidedeck below) given only 24 hours and a small team?

Yep. That’s exactly what the great team I was a member of did as part of the Startup Cafe at the Wisconsin Entrepreneurs’ Conference. From a kernel of a concept for an app to track what an alumni group is up to (like for an incubator program or similar) to a working application filling a real customer need (we did research with the event attendees) in such a compressed period of time was an interesting mix of high stress, little sleep while still being fun. It was only possible via the new-ish lean startup methodolgy, with the primary focus on moving fast, iterating quickly with customer involvement at the earlier possible stage.

Although initially conceived of as only a conference demonstration project due to the potential customer interest there is a chance of creating a viable business with further work.

Revenue to date: $42. (Someone passed around a hat after the demo.)

WIEC Startup Presentation

Drones, DIY-style

Here’s a great New York Times writeup of DIY Drones, a burgeoning community of people making unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs. It’s really impressive what they’ve done in such a short period, only being started in 2007 by Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine. It’s one of the fantastic business success stories of the growing Maker movement, clearing filling a need of people to make things easily in a collaborative way. It helps that UAVs and quadcopters are so cool.

Check out the video taken at the Autonomous Vehicle Competition with Chris. An autonomous dinosaur makes an appearance.

Tinkerer's rules

From Wondermark’s The Tinkerer’s Handbook.