Recent years have seen a flourishing of organizations that gather people with common interests participate in do-it-yourself activities

In a reaction to the digital age, creative people are finding ways to build community in the real world to share knowledge, projects, and ideas. People are looking to the Internet to find outlets for active creativity, rather than merely passive entertainment or consumption.

Cases

The Make Lounge

North London’s Make Lounge brings arts and crafts into the 21st century. One-off workshops are delivered in a branded “drop-in” environment, attracting those looking to dabble in activities such as millinery, jewelery making, or knitting.

The School of Life

Located close to some of London’s top universities, The School of Life makes adult education accessible and cool. Opened in September 2008, the space features a shop that sells books, art, courses, vacation packages, and consultancy to those seeking intellectual adventure. Beneath the shop is an underground classroom that hosts regular courses across five central themes - work, play, family, politics and love.





Maker Fair

Dubbed “Woodstock for inventors,” Maker Fair is a two-day event for people who love to make things themselves. Everything from arts and crafts to engineering and science, sustainable design, food, and music are represented. The event is no small job for organizers Make Magazine and Crafts Magazine: the last Maker Fair attracted 65,000 people.

Trend Impact
Although the Internet may provide us with instant, free information, we still thrive on real-world human interactions. Creative people are going online to connect people with common offline interests.

Here's something I saw on Inhabitat today that looks extremely interesting - the World House Project:

"The Evolution of Home

The WHP is a multi-year, collaborative initiative led by the Institute without Boundaries (IwB) that will explore the evolution of shelter and plan for the next generation of holistic housing design. The project will build on the research concepts of IwB’s inaugural project, Massive Change, using the same method of interdisciplinary design innovation.

The home is the intersection between the individual and society. On one end of the spectrum, urban sprawl and monster houses consume huge amounts of energy and pollute the atmosphere. On the other, over a billion people live in urban slums or in the streets without shelter.

The ambition of the World House Project (WHP) is to generate a system that achieves a balance between these extremes, and operates on the principles of sustainability, universality, technological responsiveness and balance, so that we may create dwellings that promote the long-term health of nature and human cultures."

They're benchmarking homes from around the world, old and new, studying them to gain an understanding of important implications of "climate, culture and terrain." The team, international and interdisciplinary in nature, will examine housing in the framework of twelve core elements of housing design and work to "create dwellings that are grounded in the principles of ecological design and that promote the long-term health of natural and human economies." The twelve core elements are: identity, social, communication, spatial, constructional, air handling, energy, water, waste, food, mobility, and finance. That's a very compelling list, indeed.

Here are a few images from the World House Project scrapbook on Flickr that I really like:






I've always imagined that homes could (and should) be built in this way!

It will be very interesting to see what comes out of this project. I'll be looking forward to watching it.

Image credits - World House Project Flickr photo album

it won’t take you long to figure out that dolan geiman’s chicago place isn’t what we typically feature in our sneak peeks. but looking through his images and reading through his descriptions felt like i was unlocking a treasure chest full of great stories and memories into the world of dolan geiman. it’s funny to think about where everything we own comes from and the stories behind it. and it’s very clear from dolan’s work how his surroundings inspire him. be sure to click here for more full-sized images, with complete descriptions, and you can find more of his work here (psst…there’s a sale!) and his blog here with all sorts of fun stuff he has in the works. [thanks dolan and ali!] -anne

[Above: This is the area I refer to as “the waiting room”.  This is where my pal Chris Nightengale, fashion photographer extraordinaire, does some of his shoots. The mint colored chest of drawers is entirely metal and was a gift from my friend Denny, who always has been a wonderful inspiration in my life. He lugged this heavy thing to me when I was down on my luck and living in an unheated rat-hole apartment in Virginia. Now it looks a little better, as does my luck.  I found the globe in a dumpster in Charleston, South Caroline, and the artwork, Jazz Atlas (2008), is one of my collage constructions made from magazines I found in old farm houses. [Photo credit: David Schalliol]

Yours truly at work. . . This is the Art Machine. There is a long story behind the Art Machine, but essentially I made this out of old doors and found objects from a soon-to-be-demolished house I was living in when I first moved to Chicago.  Hockshop refers to the name of my previous studio and gallery in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. Under the moniker Hockshop, the Art Machine debuted in Chicago during a yacht-based art show organized by Bridge Magazine (now called Bridge Art Fair, they produce expositions in London, Miami, New York, and elsewhere). The top of the Art Machine is an old canvas tent that my granddad used when hunting in Canada and which I screenprinted with various images. The little squares of metal on the front are hand-cut signs I grabbed in a scrap yard in Stuarts Draft, Virginia. The little Panel Paintings, on the wall behind the Art Machine, are the staple of my art business. I make about 1000 of these things a year, out of recycled wood, recycled paint, and water-based silkscreen ink.  This is my carnival area, I like to say, because the combination of the Art Machine and the Panel Paintings presents a nice sideshow feel. [Photo credit: David Schalliol]

This is a cabin-like installation just inside the front entrance of my studio.  I created this out of salvaged wood, found billboards, and old signs I’ve found along the road driving to and from art fairs. The raw wood slats were given to me by my pals over at Circa Ceramics who were using them as shelving. I found the deer head while exploring an abandoned barn in Ohio. I saw one of the antlers sticking out of the floorboards. The rusted milk can was used by my dad when he milked cows as a kid. The old glass bottles adorning my bottle tree surfaced outside my warehouse building when the City dug up the cobblestone street in preparation for resurfacing the road. The green bucket is full of shotgun shells I gathered from a shooting range in southern Illinois. The buoys have been collected from various coastal towns including Key West, Cape Cod, and New Orleans. I grabbed the screen door from an abandoned general store in Virginia, and I bought the lentil above the door at a yard sale here in Chicago for only five dollars. I’ve started collecting green and greenish-blue boxes from abandoned warehouses here in Chicago. [Photo credit: David Schalliol]

This is the back side of the entryway installation.  This is where I feel most like a mad scientist. And yes, in case you’re wondering, there is a whiskey flask in the bottom drawer. I found the chair in an old farm house in North Carolina and screenprinted the back and seat myself. The desk was left in the basement of my last apartment and could kill an elephant if it fell on it. I had to use a truck jack and three retired football players to transport the desk when we moved into this space. The framed oil painting on the floor was hanging in my grandma’s den when I was a kid. She was trying to throw it out when I intercepted it.  The red dolly in the corner I bartered from an old (semi) drunk barber for two six-packs of Old Style beer. I think he got the better deal, but at least it looks cool. I snagged the green metal hanging light from a warehouse here in Chicago. Above my desk is one of my inspiration clotheslines. I’ve found this is the best way for me to display various ideas and my notes to myself. The little white paintbrush holder sitting on my desk with the face on it is a ceramic mug made by my pal Ed Brownlee. Ed is about two pints away from being mistaken for a criminal, but he’s a damn good artist and has an enormous heart. [Photo credit: David Schalliol]

Our building has a green roof, which Ali helped plant, and this is where the plants were stored before they were given the outdoor penthouse suite. The equipment featured in the photo is one of our landlord’s lathes; he collects old, industrial machinery amongst other things.

This is my little shrine to Johnny Cash. On the day Johnny Cash passed away, I was getting ready for an opening at Unit B Gallery, formerly in Chicago and now in Austin. The work I was showing was loaded with connotations of death and resurrection and was called the Tombsigns of St Emmeline. The synchronicity of the event was really overwhelming and would have seemed spooky, except that I seem to attract energy like that and I am open to it. The week before I was eating pizza in St Louis and some kid was skateboarding nearby with a boom box and he was playing Johnny Cash’s last recording. When I asked him about it, he said he didn’t know it was Johnny Cash, and that he had just found the tape under a tree and liked the sound. I found the whiskey jug on the bottle tree in the dirt behind the warehouse. The butterflies are screenprinted on wood and were part of a spring window display for a local shoe store . . . I use one corner of the studio for staging photos, both for Etsy and for print brochures. The mantel was a gift from a T-shirt printer (48 Industries) in the building, a fellow scavenger. [Photo credit: David Schalliol]

Stuff I love: plastic dice, old painted nail, orange train ticket to California (1898), list of numbers in Spanish, green feed tag, hand-drawn family album for collage, Virginia text from a high school Math book cover. [Photo credit: David Schalliol]

In this entryway installation close-up, the fresh eggs (fresh eyes) sign was a studio warming gift passed on to me from my buddy, artist Michael Merck, who grabbed it from a little Mexican street cart.  I found the paintbrush hanging on a hook in a bathroom of a warehouse I was occupying while living in Virginia. It’s the only paintbrush I own that’s never been used for painting.  Below the brush is a catfish sinker I bought when I went fishing in Kentucky last year.  The rooster painting, Dirt Road Series IX, is one of my own, silkscreen and acrylic on recycled wood available here. He’s a good pet and doesn’t eat food or make any noise.  He just sits there lookin’ pretty. The books to the left of the rooster are my sketchbooks.  I use old books for my sketchbooks, pasting ideas and collage materials into the existing pages, instead of buying new white-paged, sterile sketchbooks. I think it’s important to be surrounded by many different textures, so I started collecting the softballs over the past four or five years. Almost every time I make a trip down to a river, I find softballs stuck in leftover flood debris and so I started saving them in this locker room bin. If you like metal baskets like this one, you can find some here. The blue oar is a mystery. I found it one night in the middle of the road while I was driving through West Virginia. The strange part was that one end of the oar was tied to a tennis shoe.  I kept the oar; the shoe didn’t fit, so I left it. Above the fresh eggs (fresh eyes) sign is a wooden gun I made from a piece of billboard I found in Indiana and then adorned with little metal objects from an old trade school parking lot. Finally, the rooster painting is sitting on an old hen crate, used by my granddad to take chickens to market. Ali won’t let me get chickens yet, but I’m working on it. [Photo credit: Kara Elliott-Ortega]

Included in this shot are an Ed Brownlee mug (paintbrush holder), comic book collage materials, old picture frames found in a barn in Kentucky, a bluebird collage in progress, and a couple print proofs. Used paint cans, thrift store mugs, and Quaker Oats bins are used to hold brushes, pens, and markers.[Photo credit: Kara Elliott-Ortega]

Photography by Jonathan Cruz Photography

Finley Residence

Architecture & Interiors by: Avroko
Location: New York, USA
Specialty: Restaurants, Hotels, Residential, Convept Development, Furniture
Project Highlights: Sapa, Quality Meats, European Union, Park Avenue Summer
Interior Photography: Avroko



Park Avenue Summer

The idea of making walls by stacking bags of sand or earth has been around for at least a century. Originally sand bags were used for flood control and military bunkers because they are easy to transport to where they need to be used, fast to assemble, inexpensive, and effective at their task of warding off both water and bullets.

At first natural materials such as burlap were used to manufacture the bags; more recently woven polypropylene has become the preferred material because of its superior strength. The burlap will actually last a bit longer if subjected to sunlight, but it will eventually rot if left damp, whereas polypropylene is unaffected by moisture.

Because of this history of military and flood control, the use of sandbags has generally been associated with the construction of temporary structures or barriers. Using sandbags to actually build houses or permanent structures has been a relatively recent innovation.

It was an Iranian-born architect named Nader Khalili who has popularized the notion of building permanent structures with bags filled with earthen materials. Actually his first concept was to fill the bags with moon dust! Attending a 1984 NASA symposium for brainstorming ways to build shelters on the moon, Khalili coupled the old sandbag idea with the ancient adobe dome and arch construction methods from his homeland in the Middle East. He realized that bags filled with lunar “dirt” could be stacked into domes or vaults to provide shelter.

Khalili came up with a further refinement on this building concept on Earth: for a more permanent, shock-resistant structure, why not place strands of barbed wire between the courses of bags, thus unifying the shell into a more monolithic structure?

At first Khalili was filling his experimental bags with desert sand, but then he evolved his idea of “superadobe,” where bags or long tubes of polypropylene bag material would be filled with a moistened adobe soil that would dry into large adobe blocks. In this case the original bag material was merely the initial form and would not necessarily be an integral part of the eventual structure.

Soon after these first experiments, Khalili began publicizing his work through newspaper and magazine articles and conducting workshops and seminars on the techniques that he was perfecting. Many people who read about his work, visited his compound in Hesperia, California, or studied with him there, decided to go ahead with their own experiments with his ideas.

Among these “early adopters” were Joe Kennedy, Paulina Wojciechowska, Kaki Hunter and Doni Kiffmeyer, Akio Inoue, and Kelly Hart. I believe that it was Joe Kennedy who coined the more general term “earthbag” to suggest that the bag could contain a variety of earthen materials.

Paulina Wojciechowska was the first to write an entire book on the topic of earthbag building: Building with Earth: A Guide to Flexible-Form Earthbag Construction was published in 2001. This featured some of her early experiments done at Khalili’s CalEarth, along with several other case histories.

Akio Inoue, from Tenri University in Japan, has done extensive experimentation with earthbag construction, both on the campus of the University and in India and Africa where many other domes have been built for assistance programs.

Kaki Hunter and Doni Kiffmeyer (a couple) became enamored with earthbag construction after studying with Khalili, and worked on a variety of projects, both for themselves and for clients. In 2004 they wrote and got published another book, Earthbag Building: the Tools, Tricks and Techniques, based on their particular experience.

Kelly Hart (the author of this article) first began experimenting with earthbag building in 1997, after being exposed to the concept while producing his video program, A Sampler of Alternative Homes: Approaching Sustainable Architecture. He later documented his experience in actually building his own home in another program titled Building with Bags: How We Made Our Experimental Earthbag/Papercrete Home. Both of these programs are now available as DVD’s.

In the meantime, Nader Khalili was continuing the promotion of his “Superadobe” technique and eventually decided to patent the idea, which he obtained in the U. S. in 1999, using very general terms that cover using bags made of any material being filled with virtually any material, and combining these with barbed wired between the courses. While having made many public statements that this concept was his gift to humanity, he obviously wanted to capitalize on the potential economic reward.

Many of us who had been engaged in promoting earthbag building on our own were contacted by Khalili and asked to enter into contracts with him in order to continue our work. It didn’t take much research to discover that his patent could easily be disqualified because he had been publicizing his techniques through various media for at least four years before he even applied for his patent. Patent law clearly states that such publicity occurring prior to one year before the patent application would disqualify it for consideration.

So now the door is wide open for anyone to take this concept and run with it, and more people are doing so all the time, all over the world. While Khalili (and most of his students) have focused primarily on using the bags to form large adobe blocks, others have tried filling the bags with a variety of other materials, such as crushed volcanic rock, crushed coral, non-adobe soils, gravel, and rice hulls.

Earthbag building is unique among all other building technologies in that it can be either insulation or thermal mass, depending on what the bags are filled with. This is a very important distinction, because these characteristics of a wall greatly influence how comfortable, economical, and ecological any given system will be.

Safety is of prime concern with all building technologies, and much experimentation and testing has been done to establish guidelines for many ways of building. Khalili has established a relationship with the building department in Hesperia, California where CalEarth is located, an area where earthquakes are naturally a great danger. In 1993 live-load tests to simulate seismic, snow and wind loads were performed on a number of domed earthbag structures at CalEarth and these exceeded code requirements by 200%.

In 1995 dynamic and static load tests were performed on several prototypes for a planned Hesperia Museum and Nature Center to be constructed using Khalili’s Superadobe concepts with both dome and vault shapes. All of these tests exceeded ICBO and City of Hesperia requirements.

In 2006, at the request of Dr. Owen Geiger of the Geiger Research Institute of Sustainable Building, the Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point conducted several controlled and computer-monitored tests to determine the ability of polypropylene earthbags filled with sand, local soil, and rubble to withstand vertical loads. Their written report concluded that “overall, the earthbags show promise as a low cost building alternative. Very cheap, and easy to construct, they have proven durable under loads that will be seen in a single story residential home. More testing should prove the reliability and usefulness of earthbags.”

Despite the success of these tests, earthbag building concepts have yet to be incorporated into the International Residential Building Code. Obviously more enlightened acceptance of the demonstrated viability of earthbag building needs to occur!

It is difficult to know how many residences and other earthbag structures have been made at this point, probably hundreds if not thousands. Many of us have been promoting the technique for use as emergency shelters, and certainly some have been built for this reason. It is easy for folks to accept this way of building temporary shelters because it fits the historical model of sandbag use.

But many of us have also built substantial homes using earthbags, and in the process realized how truly versatile and sustainable the technique is. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of these earthbag homes are still standing long after their conventional counterparts built contemporaneously have disintegrated.

P.S. Doesn’t Michelle make the best model?!

at night, light shines through the exterior patterned blocks of the 'patchwork pavilion'

'patchwork pavilion' is a temporary art gallery designed by DOMO arquitetos associados. the structure was
originally built for the casa cor 2008, an exhibition for home textiles in brazil. the name of the pavilion is fitting,
as the exterior is constructed from a random combination of four different pre-cast concrete blocks whose
patterns have been inspired by embroidery pieces that originate in the northeast part of the country.
these concrete blocks were largely used in early modernist buildings in brazil, because of their ability to ventilate
and allow light to pass through the patterns, as well as for their low-cost and shape.


the four different patterned tiles create a graphic patchwork effect




'cave house'

DOMO arquitetos associados' 'cave house', was originally designed for a competition called 'luxury for all'
which explores the idea of luxury living which considers our sensorial experience with buildings and objects,
with an approach to sustainability. the structure aims to continue the flow of nature through the cave-like space.

DOMO arquitetos associados: http://www.domo.arq.br

Books are very important to me. I'm one of those people who would rather sit at home reading than go to a party. I get lost in stories, and read coffee table books over and over again, scanning pictures repeatedly to glean every last detail. Books are good friends. They deserve good homes.

The Maison de Verre in Paris (via NY Times via rolu|dsgn). This house is absolutely brilliant.



The Upcher house by Bates Masi Architects (via DO Research). Beautiful.



Mill Valley Straw Bale Residence by Arkin Tilt Architects - the entire main inner wall is one great bookshelf and art gallery.

"I happen to think anthropology is a brilliant background for looking at finance, firstly, you're trained to look at how societies or cultures operate holistically, so you look at how all the bits move together. And most people in the City don't do that. They are so specialised, so busy, that they just look at their own little silos. And one of the reasons we got into the mess we are in is because they were all so busy looking at their own little bit that they totally failed to understand how it interacted with the rest of society.

Gillian Tett- Assistant Editor- Financial Times


Posted by Ed Cotton

the university of exeter has selected wilkinson eyre architects to build their forum project. the new building
will be the centrepiece of the school’s streatham campus. the studio’s proposal works with the site’s
natural features of their hilly campus by creating a green corridor connecting the interior to the exterior.
the structure’s main feature is an undulating gridshell roof, which covers the new students spaces and
orthogonal buildings. wilkinson eyre architects’ director, stafford critchlow said, ‘our proposals seek to
create a new arrival point for the university. the sequence of spaces relate closely to the campus
landscape, establishing a new architectural language which is less about placing objects within this
landscape and more about an organic response to it.’ design work will begin immediately, with completion
anticipated by 2012.

http://www.wilkinsoneyre.com

in honor of in the kitchen with fridays, i wanted to post this beautiful minimalist tray and bowl ($118-$132) from desu design. i love the way that they’re sculptural and beautifully made, but really let the food (or whatever they’re holding) shine. click here for more info and to shop.

ps: stay tuned for a special friday sneak peek at 12…

in the tradition of friday’s on d*s i decided to add a recipe to the mix for today’s DIY project. i love goat cheese. i could eat so much of it’s sick. last fall i spent some time researching different tart recipes after i got these cute little “mini-tins” as a gift. i finally settled on trying goat cheese with pear and loved them. these are so easy + they have the advantage of looking like they’re not. they satisfy the sweet & savory thing that i tend to crave. bring them with you to holiday parties and blow those chip & dippers out of the water.

what you will need: (makes 20)

mini baking tins (a mini muffin pan or the like will work)
2 pears
10 oz. goat cheese @ room temperature
1/2 tbsp sugar
dash of cinnamon
1 package puff pastry sheets (in the frozen foods aisle @ the grocery store)

1) preheat oven to 400.

2) roll out 1 puff pastry to a 20 x 20 inch square with a rolling pin,
and cut into 2 x 2 inch squares. grease your tins so the pastry does
not stick. press squares into tins and trim off the excess.

3) chop the pears finely with the skins on. (this adds a little color
to the tarts). stir pears, sugar & cinnamon up. you will probably have
a bit of the pear mixture leftover.

4) spoon and press down 1/2 tbsp of goat cheese onto the bottom of the
pastry and add 1 tbsp of pear mixture on top.

5) bake at 400 for 25 minutes. the edges should be golden brown.

6) take out of oven and let cool for 10 minutes. you will be able to
pop them out if you properly greased your tins. enjoy. i like to serve
them with a nice glass of white wine. yum.

‘creative exchange’ is a new shared workspace complex designed by 5th studio in cambridge, england.
the project was publicly funded and designed for the area’s creative workers and innovators. the building
is designed as a studio not an office, with enough room for 14 different companies. the ground floor is
adaptable, making it suitable for meetings, exhibits and other events. the first and second floors house
the private workspaces. the architects left wide common areas on these floors to encourage cross
pollination. above all this is a ‘working garden’ to further encourage interaction. the building design was
also designed for optimal sustainability, using exposed concrete for thermal mass, natural ventilation
and cooling systems and large windows for minimal need for artificial lighting.

http://www.5thstudio.co.uk

park royal proposal by 5th studio









photography by tim soar

Florian Weiss (no linking possible due to 100% flash on their end :-( over from our friends at PARK just dropped me a note sharing some closer information about the upcoming Design Management forum to be held (again) in Cologne in November this year. Chances are that you might meet me there physically as well ;-)

Interestingly the topic of Service Design (no link to the Wikipedia entry here as it seems to be reasonably promoting KISD and their stakeholders in the topic) seems to follow some sort of pig cycle as from my perspective it makes its way to the top 3 topics every now and then. Funnily enough my very own doctoral thesis that I’ve started back in 1998 dealt with Service Design and I’ve been investigating the mechanisms (usability) as well as benefits (usefulness) from investing into proper Web Based Service Design.

Needless to say that after the collapse of the Internet Bubble in early 200 nobody (in my specific case one insurance and a bank that funded my research at that time) was interested any longer in the topic so I’ve dropped it later on … In any case a quick Google search suggests that the topic is still up-to-date ;-)

After all a good (academic) resource to surf after is ‘Designing for Services‘ a project led by Lucy Kimbell in late 2006/2007. In contrast to other similar initiatives that are poorly documented this one shared insights and stuff via a blog and I greatly appreciate this!

—– snip —–

5th Design Management Forum at 07th & 08th November 2008 in Cologne

For businesses the customer satisfaction is a permanent challenge, because the wishes and demands of people grow continuously with the technical progress. Companies that pro-actively identify the interests of their customers open up new and profitable opportunities if they develop performance and service offerings that create good and pleasant experiences for the customer. Systematic and strategic management of service design helps the business to gain competitive advantages and to conquer new markets. Experts from the economy, who have gone new and innovative ways in the conception and design of experience worlds and services, present their knowledge and experience at the 5th Design Management Forum for further discussion.

This year lecturers from Germanwings (DE), Molecular (US), Aliagroup (UK & IN), Isobar (UK), Deutsche Bank (DE) and McDonald’s (DE) will provide corporate insights and present innovative approaches to Service Design Management.

Further information and application: http://www.design-management-forum.org

—– snip —–

MTV or Music Television built its brand celebrating the new art form of the early 80s, the music video. It gave the music industry just what it needed, the eyeballs of a young generation to promote its product which it made a buck a disc for.

Fast forward several decades to the emergence of MySpace as THE music brand and you see a radically different notion of the role of music. Music is given away and streamed, the value of this is to provide exposure and shared advertising revenue for bands and record companies. The money is not made in the music, but in the merchandise and concert ticket revenue.

As Techcrunch told us in October.

"But today the labels have all but given up on DRM, and users can now play virtually any song ever recorded on demand for free. MySpace has created the first ecosystem that has a shot of producing sustainable revenue streams for artists based on advertising, merchandise and concert sales.

If it works, the next step is the fall of per-stream fees and download fees. Instead labels will see music consumption for what it really is - free marketing. Labels will compete to encourage song downloads and streams to move those songs up the charts, attracting premium advertisers, merchandise sales and sold out concerts."

What's interesting to see here is the role music has played as a glue to generate revenue for media companies, but the context of that revenue generation has changed over time.

It seems that MTV has lost its way as a brand with television no longer being the dominant media of the youth generation, music video dying as a form and the network shifting focus away from music to regular television shows.

Apple became the next brand to exploit and dominate the music channel with iTunes and the iPod, but the software was always just there to sell the high margin hardware. iTunes has now being panned by the critics for not keeping up with the times and Apple has a few other heavyweight players including Nokia trying to take a big share of the hardware business.

Another player is MySpace, who came out of the gate in October with a relaunched music service that achieved incredible traction. Just a few DAYS after launch, the brand streamed one billion songs.

At the recent Web 2.0 conference there was all kinds of speculation about the potential for an MP3 player to be launched by MySpace.

However, this isn't really the game anymore.MySpace's core competence is all about community and from day one its community has been focused on music. This is something that can't easily be copied and Apple, Nokia and Sony will struggle to make this happen. The story here is not about an iPod rival from MySpace, but instead the arrival of MySpace as a formidable media player in the new world of music.

Posted by Ed Cotton

The Freewheelin story.

Bike sharing was a hit when launched in Paris in 2007. It was cheap, convenient and eco-friendly. End of story? Not so fast. A U.S. health insurer changed the game and wrote a new story. Humana promotes its business agenda - lower health care costs - through a state-of-the-art bike sharing program tested during the 2008 U.S. political party conventions in Denver and St. Paul.

Freewheelin promotes its social and business agenda through communication - made possible by wireless/mobile and social networking technology. When you ride a Feewheelin bike, wireless networks track your mileage and calories burned. Social networking tools help individuals track their personal successes and, by calculating reduced carbon emmisions, their contributions to the shared health and wellness of their community and the planet.

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