Parents and Families
Startup America and Startup Weekend Merge to Create UP Global
The partnership combines Startup America’s visibility (and money) with Startup Weekend’s on-the-ground, grass roots movement.
Startup America Partnership, the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit created by AOL co-founder Steve Case to boost entrepreneurship, is merging with Startup Weekend, the 54-hour networking and pitching marathon, to create a new organization to connect and support entrepreneurs around the world.
“Our hope is that we can create a global startup ecosystem,” says Scott Case, CEO of Startup America Partnership. The new entity, which will be known as UP Global, will allow Startup America to expand its mission and purview beyond its initial focus--both geographically and temporally. While the organization was launched as a three-year project to jumpstart startup activity and deepen entrepreneurial connections in 30 regions across the U.S., UP Global will combine Startup Weekend’s more siloed events in 400 cities in more than 100 countries.
How Mitch Hurwitz Revived “Arrested Development” On Netflix, And Why The Show Belongs There
The creator of "Arrested Development" watched for years as his brilliant-but-cancelled show grew in esteem. Now he’s revived the series--in the medium best suited for it. Mitch Hurwitz reveals the incredible story of how the new episodes were made, and why putting them out on Netflix is a gift to the fans.
Corporate America owes Netflix some gratitude. Sort of. At midnight on Memorial Day eve, the video-streaming platform will unveil 15 new episodes of the rabidly beloved sitcom, Arrested Development, after a seven-year drought. If most employees didn’t have the day off, productivity might plummet, due to mass-marathoning. Unfortunately for those companies, creator Mitch Hurwitz designed the show to keep fans busy for the long haul--an extended period of house arrest that Netflix both supports and welcomes.
Mitchell HurwitzSome television series serve as mere background; audiovisual wallpaper viewers can take in while attending to real life or the internet. Arrested Development is more of a playground. Watching the deeply layered sitcom is an immersive experience, impossible to fully enjoy in just one visit. Not enough fans stopped by each week, though, when Arrested aired on Fox ten years ago. The show was shut down in its third season. But new waves of viewers discovered it on DVD and rallied online--demanding more episodes, a movie, something. Only after the show began streaming on Netflix, however, did their ardor crystallize and become impossible to ignore. If Arrested Development DVDs were season passes to the playground, having the entire series to stream was like moving the playground into one’s home.
Amazon Is Building A Biosphere For Its Employees
Who needs a boring office park when you have a 65,000-square-foot glass dome?
If you’ve ever dreamed of working in a lush, greenery-filled dome, consider moving to Seattle. That’s where Amazon is a building a biosphere (made out of three intersecting domes) alongside a new skyscraper project. Plans for the 65,000 square foot structure, unveiled earlier this month, call for a general temperature range of 68 to 72 degrees and plants from high-elevation climates (that’s the "montane ecologies" below) that can thrive in the weather.
From Amazon’s planning document:
Mailbox, The Innovative, Inbox-Taming Email App, Comes To The iPad
Mailbox brings its swipe-based brand of inbox nirvana to Apple’s tablets.
To see just how badly people want a better way to deal with their email, all you have to do is look back a few months to the launch of Mailbox, the clever iPhone client that emphasizes triage over full-on engagement. In the weeks after its debut, nearly a million users put their name down on the app’s waiting list--yes, that’s a waiting list…for an iPhone app--to see if novel features like swipe-based sorting and email snooze could bring a measure of sanity to their inbox routines. Judging by the sterling App Store ratings from some 30,000 users, for many, it seems to have done the trick.
Though Mailbox was designed as a smartphone-first experience, Gentry Underwood, the IDEO alum behind the app, has been clear from the start that his team’s ultimate aim was to bring a better approach to email to all platforms. Today, they’re taking the first step in that direction with the Mailbox iPad app.
The Perks And Perils Of Launching A Massively Successful Startup
Before you ever "Liked" a single thing on Facebook, Lane Merrifield was busy building Club Penguin into a hugely popular social site for kids, which Disney snapped up for $350 million. With his new venture he's trying to develop a healthier work, life balance. Trying.
Before Twitter grew wings and Facebook went public, Lane Merrifield was figuring out how to create a safe social networking destination for kids. Club Penguin launched with a flood of traffic in 2005.
Lane MerrifieldHis big idea? Recognizing early on that the Internet is an inherently social place.
How To Talk Like A Most Creative Person
At the center of every great project--whether Google Maps, a podcast, or Nashville--lies a conversation. Just ask Daniel Graf, Connie Britton, and Marc Maron, three of this year's Most Creative People in business.
Combing through our Most Creative People of the year list, you can see that technologists, performers, and interviewers all have a masterful command of conversation--here are three examples of how they do it, and what it means for work, innovation, and, of course, creativity.
Daniel Graf: Director of Google Maps for MobileIf you remember, Apple booted Google's Maps from iOS last year, ushering in the dark age of Apple Maps. This made Google do redo their own iOS app--one that kicked Apple's ass on its own turf. Daniel Graf led that team, one which followed Google's new imperative to make beautiful, functional products--and make the best maps experience ever created. As he tells us, a daily conversation was critical to the process:
“Nashville” Creator Callie Khouri On The Art Of The Creative Crossover
Khouri, No. 80 on Fast Company’s Most Creative People In Business 2013 list, won an Oscar for Thelma & Louise. Now she’s getting a crash course in the TV business. Here, on the eve of the season finale of her first ever small-screen show, are some of the things she has learned.
You could say Callie Khouri’s career has come full circle. But you’d only be kind of right. The native Texan waited tables for a time in Nashville in the '70s and '80s. Then she went on to write the Academy Award-winning screenplay Thelma & Louise, plus a host of other successful features. In 2012, she created her first television show, Nashville, and now she splits her time between L.A. and Music City. The landscape there was familiar. The material, the language, the pace, and the rigor of television was not.
For more on global leaders in technology, design, media, music, movies, marketing, television, and sports, see Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People In Business 2013 report. Read more with Callie Khouri here.Ben Blacker, No. 83 on our Most Creative People 2013 list and host of the Nerdist Writers Panel (and cocreator of The Thrilling Adventure Hour) spoke with Khouri about what it was like to go from successful feature writing to creating a television show. She let him in on her creative process and some behind-the-scenes insight into how she makes the critically acclaimed Nashville (whose season finale is tonight) feel so cinematic, yet so real.
A Design Collective Creates Its Own Economy In El Salvador
The Carrot Concept is bringing Salvadorian design to international markets.
The short list of global design destinations includes obvious places, such as Sweden and Italy. Soon, thanks to the efforts of a grassroots movement, the tiny Central American country of El Salvador could make that list as well.
The Carrot Concept launched this year, during New York Design Week, but the project actually began in 2007, when El Salvador ran its first furniture and design exhibition. The show, Contempo, went well. It garnered press and attention for local designers, but, problematically, it presented more one-hit wonders than it did a viable industry. In need of something that could win serious international attention, the designers, architects, and entrepreneurs involved, along with Bernhardt Design (the furniture company based out of North Carolina), placed their bets on a different model: intensive collaboration.
This Robot Will Be Your Perfectly Precise Bartender
The Makr Shakr can make any drink you want--and even cut a lemon. Put a tie and a vest on it, and you won’t even be able to tell the difference between it and your local mixologist.
At the Milan Design Week, furniture usually take center stage. But lucky for booze-loving attendees this year, the fair’s definition of "design" is broad enough to include cocktails, made at, perhaps, the world’s most technologically advanced bar.
Called the MakrShakr, the project is a collaboration between MIT Senseable City Lab and Carlo Ratti Associati, an Italian architecture firm. Mustachioed mixologists have been replaced by a team of theree robots, capable of making millions and millions--or, to get mathematical, a googol (that’s 1 followed by 100 zeroes)--of drink recipes, created on the spot by the bar’s patrons. "Makr Shakr aims to show the 'Third Industrial Revolution’ paradigm through the simple process design-make-enjoy, and in just the time needed to prepare a new cocktail," explains the project website.
15 Artists Celebrate 150 Years Of The London Underground
Four key stations showcase the Tube-inspired posters of contemporary artists.
When London’s Metropolitan Railway made its debut way back in 1863, the steam-powered trains offered a novel way of navigating the city. Now, over a billion locals and tourists depend on the Tube to efficiently (as possible) take them between the network’s 250 stations.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the subterranean system, and in an effort to celebrate and make commutes a bit more visually engaging, Art on the Underground has commissioned 15 contemporary creatives to contribute poster-sized works for a limited-edition series. The select group represents an interesting mix of local and international talent (and some big names, including Lawrence Weiner and Gillian Wearing), who were given an open-ended brief: “They were each given a brief to create an image which celebrates the Tube and will be a lasting visual legacy for its 150th year,” Rebecca Heald, curator for Art on the Underground, tells Co.Design.
Take A Breathtaking Trip Around The World In 15 Minutes
This NASA video shows a satellite pass over a huge swath of land, from Russia to South Africa, in stunning detail. Cue up some soaring music and sit back and enjoy.
NASA’s Landsat satellites have provided incomparable views of Earthen landscapes since the 1970s. In February, the newest satellite to join the family, called the Landsat Data Continuity Mission, took flight, and thanks to its new imaging technology, the Operational Land Imager, the images of land-masses are more detailed than ever.
A recently released video of a fly-over of a swath of land 185 kilometers wide and 9,000 kilometers long--extending from Russia to South Africa and passing over land almost the entire way--is a testament to the power of the new imaging technology. In this 15 minute video, sped up from the 20 minutes it took the satellite to photograph, the image resolution is high enough that viewers can make out "urban centers, farms, forests and other land uses."
“Tweet & Shoot” Makes The Internet A Trainer For A Tennis Star
Lob one at tennis star Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in the name of training for the French Open.
Social media has allowed fans to send messages of support to pro athletes before (see Nike Chalkbot). Now, in preparation for the French Open, you can use Twitter to launch tennis balls at France’s top contender, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga.
Fans can visit the dedicated Tweet & Shoot site, log in with Twitter, and decide where to place a ball on a virtual court. Shots are hashtagged and tweeted, and come with a personal message, if desired. The tweets trigger an on-court robot to shoot a nonvirtual ball at Tsonga.
These Are Some Of The 68 Million People McDonald’s Serves Every Day
A photographer found himself people watching at McDonald’s and came away with a Supersize photo essay.
Americans on average consume nearly 30 pounds of French fries a year. Fried spuds don’t make a meal on their own: We also eat about three hamburgers a week, averaging 156 burgers per person a year (that’s more than 48 billion meaty hockey pucks). And many Americans they get their fast-food fix--about 1 billion pounds of beef and 3.4 billion potatoes--at, you guessed it, McDonald’s.
McDonald’s remains a cultural institution, but it’s also increasingly the target of our collective frustration with all sorts of things. Any mention of the Golden Arches on major media outlets or in well-meaning documentaries is followed by spools of data linking Big Macs to rising obesity levels and greenhouse gases, among other damaging effects. As photographer Nolan Conway puts it, “McDonald’s makes itself a pretty easy target for attacks from the media and from artists.”
"Nashville" Creator Callie Khouri On Disrupting Her Creative Process
Khouri, No. 80 on Fast Company's Most Creative People In Business 2013 list, won an Oscar for Thelma & Louise. Now she's getting a crash course in the TV business. Here, on the eve of the season finale of her first ever small-screen show, are some of the things she has learned.
You could say Callie Khouri's career has come full circle. But you'd only be kind of right. The native Texan waited tables for a time in Nashville in the '70s and '80s. Then she went on to write the Academy Award-winning screenplay Thelma & Louise, plus a host of other successful features. In 2012, she created her first television show, Nashville, and now she splits her time between L.A. and Music City. The landscape there was familiar. The material, the language, the pace, and the rigor of television was not.
Callie KhouriBen Blacker, No. 83 on our Most Creative People 2013 list and host of the Nerdist Writers Panel (and cocreator of The Thrilling Adventure Hour) spoke with Khouri about what it was like to go from successful feature writing to creating a television show. She let him in on her creative process and some behind-the-scenes insight into how she makes the critically acclaimed Nashville (whose season finale is tonight) feel so cinematic, yet so real.
Why Energy-Sucking Data Centers Are Not The Future Of The Cloud
Wasteful, expensive, and overbuilt, major data centers are an inelegant solution to remote storage--not to mention risky, in the eggs-in-one-basket sense. The secret to achieving "indestructable data" with minimal energy costs may lie in the way nature has distributed our own DNA. A small company called Space Monkey, raising money now on Kickstarter, thinks they have created the digital equivalent.
Anyone who has tried to swear off local storage can tell you that it's expensive--not to mention impractical. Offline availability is sketchy even with robust products like Dropbox, and the cost of storing a terabyte of data can approach thousands of dollars a year. By comparison, auxiliary hard drives from stores like Best Buy get cheaper and more capacious every month. Space Monkey is a startup built by two former Mozy engineers who think they might have an answer to the cloud conundrum: give their users an auxiliary drive with redundant copies of other users' data, much the way nature gives every organism in a species a copy of its own genetic information. We talked to Utah-based Founders Clint Gordon-Carroll and Alen Peacock about creating a truly distributed network of "indestructible" information.
Why Energy-Sucking Data Centers Are Not The Future Of The Cloud
Anyone who has tried to swear off local storage can tell you that it's expensive--not to mention impractical. Offline availability is sketchy even with robust products like Dropbox, and the cost of storing a terabyte of data can approach thousands of dollars a year. By comparison, auxiliary hard drives from stores like Best Buy get cheaper and more capacious every month. Space Monkey is a startup built by two former Mozy engineers who think they might have an answer to the cloud conundrum: give their users an auxiliary drive with redundant copies of other users' data, much the way nature gives every organism in a species a copy of its own genetic information. We talked to Utah-based Founders Clint Gordon-Carroll and Alen Peacock about creating a truly distributed network of "indestructible" information.
What's the problem you're solving?
Braun Reissues A Dieter Rams Design Classic: The ET 66 Calculator
The classic adding machine--inspiration for the iPhone calculator app--can be yours again.
It’s no secret that many of Apple’s products over the last decade have been deeply indebted to the designs of Dieter Rams. Less known, perhaps, is the fact that many of Apple’s apps have borrowed from the master, too. In some cases, like the much-maligned podcast app that lifted its look from the Braun TG 60 tape recorder, the results were unwieldy, to say the least. But in the case of the ET 66 calculator--the inspiration for the iPhone calculator app--the digital facsimile proved just as functional as the plastic product that inspired it.
The classic adding machine, designed by Rams and his longtime design partner Dietrich Lubs, was first released in 1987. It launched a raft of imitators over the years, essentially establishing our collective understanding of a pocket calculator’s perfect form. Its round, convex buttons invited fingers, and its clever use of color distinguished functions from numbers, with the all-important equals button jumping out with a high-contrast, black-on-yellow scheme. A sturdy, hard-plastic slip case has ensured that many original units have survived to this day.
Want To Stop Being Fat? Cook
The only way to control what goes in your body is to make it yourself.
Fat. Sugar. Salt. Carbs. When seeking explanations for why Americans’ health has spun out of control over the past few decades, we tend to single out individual parts of the nutritional landscape for blame. But, as the New York Times' health blogger Jane E. Brody points out, the problem is "multifaceted" and will require systemic change to solve. While the average number of calories consumed per day has grown by more than 20% since 1970, that consumption increase is fueled by an across the board jump in the amount of not just sugar, but fats, oils, cereals, and flour that people are eating.
So where are all these calories coming from? If there’s any one culprit for the obesity epidemic in the U.S., perhaps we ought to point a finger at the overarching trend responsible for Americans eating more: the increasing popularity of eating food we didn’t prepare ourselves.
A Skyscraper-Style Treehouse With Soaring Mountain Views
The Tower House, designed by GLUCK+ Architects, reflects back the forest canopy.
Architects like wordplay. It’s a fun and effective way to condense the main thesis behind a project without resorting to archi-speak. It’s also a good bit of marketing. A simple subversion like “horizontal skyscraper” immediately makes a potentially interesting (or uninteresting) project that much more compelling. Another example: the Tower House.
Designed by GLUCK+ architects, the Tower House looks exactly like it sounds--that is, it takes the form of a skyscraper and shrinks it down to the scale of a house. The four-story-high-building is configured to resemble Lego blocks, an analogy that extends to the house’s bright yellow and green color scheme. A vertical bar, the “tower,” is bisected at its summit by a wide horizontal volume, which appears to conquer gravity with the most minimal of supports.
A Web Series For Kids Aims To Be The “Elmo for Engineering”
Limor Fried created "Circuit Playground" in order to get young kids interested in hacking and making--REALLY young.
It’s hard to beat classic episodes of Sesame Street for timeless, near-universal educational appeal, but engineer and Adafruit Industries founder Limor Fried still saw an unmet need in the educational-video space. "We looked around and didn’t see an 'Elmo for engineering’ or a kid’s show that celebrated science and engineering," she tells Co.Design. "Every kid seems to have a cell phone or a tablet, but they know more about SpongeBob than how a LED works on the device or TV they’re watching, and we wanted to change that." So she and her team at Adafruit created Circuit Playground, a Youtube series that combines chirpy puppets with hackery know-how. Here’s the first episode, "A is for Ampere":
"If I had to describe what we’re going for," Fried says, "I would say we’d like to be 'Sesame Street meets Mr. Rogers meets Connections meets Peewee’s Playhouse meets Bill Nye.'" That’s pretty ambitious for a low-budget in-house production, but like those hit series, Circuit Playground does emphasize physical demonstrations and puppetry--a rather refreshing approach in a web-video landscape otherwise filled with flat motion graphics. As a design strategy for the show, it makes sense: How are you going to ever convince kids to get up the gumption to take apart a clock radio if your show takes place in an entirely virtual, antiseptic world where there’s no dirt, no breakage, no heft to anything?
