Could Luton turn out to be the UK’s first Silicon Town?
Everyone’s looking for the UK’s next startup hotspot, but they might not be looking in the right place more…
Is video content heading for the holodeck?
It's time to ask whether recent technological advances should make us revisit some long-abandoned dreams about interactive content more…
The contest for your living room gathers Steam
Apple TV, Google TV and let’s not forget Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft or Sony. Here at the iij, our money is on someone else. more…
Neurologist pivots to schoolteacher, then to teaching teachers neuroscience
She was seeing a 5 to 10x spike in teacher referrals for students with epilepsy, ADHD and OCD symptoms: mysteriously, those symptoms failed to show up outside the classroom. Did they come from changes to teaching methods? What she found made her switch careers, twice more…
Top guitar innovation videos of 2012
Yes, you’ll find some pretty lame excuses for also including some (admittedly awesome) clips which are sometimes more about exceptional inspiration than innovation more…
The Achilles’ Heel of 3D Printing
Why additive manufacturing isn’t expected to take over large scale industrial production any time soon more…
Car healthcare arrangements? Incredibly better than our own
From the ‘innovation priorities in serious need of attention’ department more…
MOOCs, cheap smartphones and dire poverty: about to flip the planet?
Moore’s Law is rapidly putting the entire third world online. This fact, combined with MOOCs, may just turn the rest of the world upside down more…
It’s official: Apple has windows, Microsoft doesn’t
Microsoft has ditched the window metaphor in order to make its OS feel like a mobile app, but Apple’s desktops, tablets and phones all still use a window metaphor more…
Will ‘talking to the camera’ continue to leave us mesmerised?
Video journalism may need to break the (TV) habit of a lifetime more…
Cultural literacy education theory humbled by games culture
A fashionable return to 19th century teaching methods is being challenged by astonishing findings on the impact of online games culture upon 'hopeless' struggling learners more…
Mel Brooks Producers as a model for lean startups
Founders having an innovative idea, a fruitful search for a solution, generous early investors: what could possibly go wrong? more…
Rescuing serious journalism by productively reducing it to mindless fun
Few news editors would claim that they are not an endangered species, so even the most whimsical-sounding ideas are no longer quite so easily dismissed as being irrelevant or unnecessary more…
Instead of just scalable startups, a scalable startup ecosystem
‘Adopt lean startup methodologies’ is seen by many as the best advice to give startups, but how do we know if this advice is making a substantial positive contribution to the wider economy? more…
Batteries and 3D printer included
Because giving away a free 3D printer with every big ticket hardware sale could ultimately cut support costs more…
The MOOCs are coming! The MOOCs are coming!
The educational world, terrified by Massive Open Online Courses, is putting on a brave, smiling face and joining in, because it sees them as unstoppable and hopes it can somehow survive and even benefit from them more…
12 Robotics projects, all successfully funded using KickStarter
There are hundreds of other robot-themed projects on Kickstarter, I've just left out out the books or films about robots, as well as most art, education, hobby and toy projects more…
Startup mentoring: is there something missing?
The list of services that an officially accredited UK mentor is NOT allowed to provide just boggles the mind more…
Post-Genomics: Wikipedia says no
There is no Wikipedia article on this subject at the time of writing, but it is now a well established field which cries out for a much wider public understanding more…
Science shows that self-discipline taxes the soul
We wisely use our 'self-restraint muscle' to get things done, but research shows that even exercising it just a little bit can turn the most robust of minds into momentary marshmallow more…
Coming soon to a learning experience near you: metacognitive strategies
Counter-intuitive way of reducing unnecessary pressure on students? Stop telling them how easy it's going to be. more…
Nine 3D printer startups have been funded on KickStarter
Hardware crowdfunding successes from under a thousand to well over half a million dollars more…
New Bond Thriller, With Social Impact
Don’t let the impenetrable jargon put you off. Social Impact Bonds, which bring “only paying for success” to public funding for privately-run social projects, are genuinely innovative. But will they make a real difference? more…
Can biodegradability square the econanotech circle?
Can we mitigate risk whilst pursuing benefit to humanity? more…
Microfluidics: micro, because biotech isn’t just nano
Two important new introductory talks about the background and latest developments in ‘lab on a chip’ technology more…
Steam-powered 3D printer anyone?
19th century-style Steampunk innovation more…
What happens when government goes ‘Third Platform’?
We’re told endlessly how ‘running everything from the cloud’ shreds costs for startups, so does this mean that even government could be run cheaply, if they do this too? more…
Why are we so bad at teaching struggling learners online?
What makes a struggling online learner struggle? more…
10M die every year, just begging for better diagnostics
Cheaply improving diagnosis in the developing world has an impact which is simply staggering. There’s a vast backlog of breakthrough science and technology waiting to be applied more…
Building systems that can solve tougher problems
To achieve this, a system (involving people and machines) should be constructed so that it can ultimately, in some relevant ways, become ‘smarter’ than any of its individual (human) participants more…
Pivoteer skills
What makes people good at pivoting? 21 things which, if you can’t do them well, will probably keep your career in the world of innovative startups short and disappointing more…
Meta-ideation: ideation about ideation
What new things should a growth-hungry economy be doing about coming up with new ideas? more…
Nomination For the 2012 Infinitely Improbable Pivot Award
And you thought AirBnB’s Chesky’s early switch into repackaging breakfast cereals which he eventually had to eat in order to survive would clinch it? Nope. Not improbable enough. more…
Gamification isn’t enough: we’re missing something big here
Using the dynamics of games as a way of improving engagement in such things as work, marketing and education shows great promise, but something relevant that gamers do is being ignored more…
Fixing the ‘unsolved problem shortage’ that holds back potential startup founders
Shortages of easily-tackled unsolved problems are a first world problem: elsewhere, countless established ‘solutions’ are just unaffordable, each one a gift to any problem-seeking would-be entrepreneur more…
What if a time-travelling, pre-Apple Jobs & Wozniak applied to Y Combinator without a startup idea?
What kind of problem would YC have suggested for these prospective startup founders to work on? more…
Codecademy horror? 40 years of research into computer learning ignored
The 'teach yourself to program' site is just not equipped to have an intelligent conversation about any problems you’re having as you go along. What impact is this having on the dropout rate? more…
When (media) worlds collide
This video reveals something shocking about Old Media: they are doing more new media stuff than any New Media operation: Why? They have much greater resources and they're scared more…
Is blaming PowerPoint really just “shooting the messenger”?
It turns out that claims of causing “Death by PowerPoint” may conceal a far more pernicious offense: our unpardonable ignorance of how human attention actually works more…
Major debate video: Is ‘who we are’ more than just brain-wiring?
Which side are you on? Are you a 'connectomist' who believes that once we fully map the connections in the brain, all it's secrets will be revealed? Or are you 'connectome-quizzical' and looking for a wider range of perspectives before taking up a position? more…
1.8 million regular listeners to a US science and philosophy radio show?
Is the BBC’s long-established domination of ‘serious’ talk radio finally seeing a serious challenge? more…
Video: talk brings you up to date on just about every major field in genomics
A roller-coaster 'how we got to where we are today' tour by the US government's Director of Research, starting with a look back to the point eleven years ago when the momentous results of the Human Genome Project were made public for the first time more…
Humanoid, moi? We’re all Stepford wives now
It’s 1996: students experiment with being cyborgs. That strange circuitry covering one eye? People imagine they’re disabled, offer them chairs. Nowadays you’d need to pry our ubiquitous connections to the borg collective (er, sorry: 'cloud') out of our cold, dead hands. So are we there yet? more…
Love: the most important thing about startup founder matching
What will hold startup founders together through those ‘sense of impending doom’ moments? The fact that the business idea is great? Y Combinator’s Paul Graham thinks not: the relationship between founders has to be more important than the venture. more…
Metagamification in marketing: just an integration thing?
If gamification is about ‘applying the art of games design to things other than games’, marketing metagamification takes what games designers do when they 'go beyond the boundaries of a defined game’ and apply THAT to branded social apps more…
20 Percent Time 2.0
We pay your wages, but the IP rights for anything you create in your 20% time are 100% yours more…
Did Eric Schmidt really invent The Pivot before Eric Ries?
Google's Schmidt talked about 'morphing' a project, but watching this Marissa Mayer video today, as she describes her boss's suggestion three years before Ries's, although the idea and the approach are different, the outcomes feel uncannily similar more…
Award for the most confusing little word in the startup vocabulary: Vest
A serious attempt to clarify some of the things which make vest and vesting a bit mind-bending for startups more…
Startup re-acceleration: that boomerang thang?
Startup accelerators, returning alumni: Why? more…
How to detox bewildering tutorials
A strategy for recovering your confidence and fixing the problem when struggling with confusing course material more…
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