Why I take sketch breaks instead of internet surfing

It is interesting to see that more and more people have started to paint - maybe the purpose is not always to find new ideas - the purpose may also be that painting is forcing you to take a break form the computer. It is somewhat relaxing.

"Compared to the things I used to do on breaks, like surfing the web or secretly playing a iOS game, sketching has a defined end point. Once you put the pen down, nothing jumps up on my monitor or flashes on my desk to tempt me to resume. By doing something nontechnical, it’s very unlikely the break will stretch on for too long because once I’m done doodling, I’m not thinking about it at all. The inverse is also true, once I’m doodling my mind couldn’t be farther from my daily work, which is more therapeutic than getting caught up in any digital distraction."

Source: Glen Elkins

Connection with Idea Overload:

• Paint And Write To Find New Ideas

Stop Ridiculing Ideas

James Cunningham has written an interesting blog-post about the tendency of many people to ridiculing new ideas other people have rather than encourage people to go through with their new ideas. He says:

"No idea is brilliant. No idea perfect from the offset. I can’t imagine any of the great inventions started off as grand as they are today. It takes development, it takes work for an idea to become something which isn’t stupid, which is actually useful. However if you are told you are stupid from the offset, it’s far too easy to agree and shake off the idea."

This is one of the reasons Jonathan Ive - the designer of many Apple products - moved from the UK to the US. He felt unable to fully create freely within the UK and it was once he moved to the US, he felt his creativity could blossom.

Source: James Cunningham

Connection with Idea Overload:

• No-One Knows If The Idea Is Good Or Not

Jonathan Ive on Steve Jobs and new ideas

Jonathan Ive, the designer of many Apple products, gave a talk in memory of Steve Jobs. One topic of the talk was about new ideas:

"Steve used to say to me -- and he used to say this a lot -- "Hey Jony, here's a dopey idea." 

And sometimes they were. Really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room and they left us both completely silent. Bold, crazy, magnificent ideas. Or quiet simple ones, which in their subtlety, their detail, they were utterly profound. 

And just as Steve loved ideas, and loved making stuff, he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence. You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished."

Connection with Idea Overload:

• No-One Knows If The Idea Is Good Or Not

The Free Store

Everything in the Long Beach Free Store is for free, but the customers are encouraged to bring something with them to replace what they took for free. The store wants to encourage the value of sharing and community building. In the store, you can find everything from housewares to clothes to furniture. The people working in the store are doing it for free.

Go and visit them here: Long Beach Free Store

Source: CBS Los Angeles

Connection with Idea Overload:

• Remove something

Matt Ridley: When ideas have sex

At TEDGlobal 2010, author Matt Ridley shows how, throughout history, the engine of human progress has been the meeting and mating of ideas to make new ideas. It's not important how clever individuals are, he says; what really matters is how smart the collective brain is.

Connection with Idea Overload:

• Combine old ideas

The next big thing: The E-Cat

A couple of scientists in Italy have developed a new source of energy: The E-Cat. If this device works it can change the world. Today, the world is dependent on energy and the E-Cat promises to produce more energy than any other device.

The scientists promises that the product will be available in a couple of months. They had agreements with Greece and the U.S. but the agreements failed.

Source: Ny Teknik

Paul Graham: Where to start a startup

Paul Graham from Y Combinator has written an article about where to start a startup. Many startups fail and go out of business - but why do so many startups survive in areas such as Silicon Valley? Paul Graham suggests two reasons:

1. Silicon Valley is a place where startups are the cool thing to do - in other areas people treat you as if you are unemployed if you have a startup
2. You can meet a lot of people who can help you in Silicon Valley - it is easier to find the connections you need to succeed and people who can help you

Source: paulgraham.com

Connection with Idea Overload:

• Be part of a network of ideas

Two new finished ideas

Two new ideas have been added to the finished idea section:

1. The 4-hour-web-browser inspired by the book "The Four Hour Workweek." A web browser that limits the number of pages you can view each day to save time. Do you really need to visit Facebook 5 times each day? If you try to visit Facebook 2 times the web browser says No! 
2.  A car door that opens upwards like the Lamborghini AND sideways like a normal car AND backwards like a bus. If you are on a tight parking lot you want the doors to open upwards, but if you are in a garage you want the doors to open sideways because of the low roof.

Go and check the rest of the finished ideas by clicking here

Sell what you throw away

From the book Built from scratch:

"Look at the stuff that is in here, Jeff," he said. He pointed to imperfect lumber that had been culled out of the bins, broken bags of concrete, and other items (thrown away into the garbage). Ron believed - rightly - that we could reduce the regular retail price on these items, put them on the sales floor, and give customers at least an opportunity to purchase something that was damaged but might take care of their needs. And, of course, The Home Depot would make a little money. 

Connection with Idea Overload:

•  Do you or your organization have any garbage that you throw away that you can use?

How to create a game in 3 minutes

This is how the company Twisted Pixels Games came up with the idea behind The Gunstringer.

Two members of the company, Josh Bear and Mike Wilford, had a meeting with the Microsoft employee Cherie Lutz at a restaurant. Twisted Pixels Games wanted to pitch a new game idea they had, the only problem was that they did not have a working idea yet. They had unfortunately realized too late that the original idea they had developed did not work with the Xbox feature Kinect.

Cherie Lutz said: "I'm going to go to the restroom, but when I get back I really want to hear this new idea." This meant that Josh Bear and Mike Wilford had to come up with a new idea in about 3 minutes. This is how they did it:

• First they recalled that they had read somewhere about a marionette Mario game as in the famous game character Mario. They could obviously not create another Mario clone. But this was the basic idea.
• They started to look frantically around the restaurant just trying to think of ideas. They saw a painting of a skeleton cowboy and said: "Skeleton cowboy that needs to get revenge on...""

When Cherie Lutz came back they said: "Yeah, Cherie, so, we've had this idea for a long time, umm, a marionette, and you use your hands like this, and you're a skeleton cowboy." Microsoft loved the idea and the game The Gunstringer was born.

This is the skeleton they saw. Source: Joystiq

Source: Joystiq

Connection with Idea Overload:

• Combine old ideas
• Find Inspiration from something random

Innovation In The World Today Is Between "Dire Straits And Dead"

The people at the Tech-site TechCrunch currently have an event called Disrupt. The event features many different new companies and different speakers.
Yesterday, they invited Peter Thiel and Max Levchin to talk about innovation. Peter Thiel and Max Levchin are famous for creating the company PayPal. Peter Thiel later invested in Facebook and Max Levchin created Slite which he sold to Google.
The theme of their talk at TechCrunch was that innovation in the world today is actually “between dire straights and dead”. They want to wake up the average American, to the depressing state of deep innovation in the USA. But this is also a global problem - not just an American one.
The problem is that companies are solving small problems, creating features, and few are addressing the world-changing, hard problems. Examples of past world-changing problems are flying to the moon or inventing the first car.

“What’s desperately needed in our society is companies that represent genuine progress, not just frantic change from one fashion to another”

Source: TechCrunch

Is this the next big thing?

This new vehicle - which is similar to a Segway - is being developed by Ryno Motors. It is almost finished and they are going to begin selling it early 2012. The price of one vehicle is $4200 which I believe is lower than the price of a Segway. I think this is one of those new ideas that could be the next big thing. The problem with the Segway was the size and the price. This thing is both smaller and cheaper. The product is a combination of the old ideas:

• Segway
• Motorcycle

Connection with Idea Overload:

• Combine old ideas

Companies are rewarding failures

A new trend seems to be to reward employees that try and fail. These companies want their employees to be more creative and to not follow the old rules. Big organizations often like to follow perfectionist regimes like Six Sigma and Total Quality Management, entire systems devoted to eliminating error from the organization. But some errors may be a good thing:

• Alexander Graham Bell was trying to invent a hearing aid when he invented the telephone 
• Christopher Columbus discovered America when trying to sail to India 
• The Caesar salad was invented because the chef was forced to make something out of the ingredients he had 
• Alexander Fleming discovered the medical virtues of penicillin when the mold accidentally infiltrated a sample he had left by an open window

Connection with Idea Overload:

• Some ideas are mistakes