Tag Archives: Technology

Apr 8 2019

LEGO leaps into the Future with Branded 3D Printing Technology

A few years ago LEGO was worried about look alike competitors and their impact on business. Today on the eve of their centenary, they have once again taken the world by storm with LEGO branded 3D printers and filament recyclers.

Now children (and not so young children) can enjoy printing their own blocks from LEGO designs and when they are bored with them, or they fade or get broken, they put them in the filament recycler and create new ones again. The zero waste concept has earned LEGO global recognition for helping to reduce mountains of plastic waste.

Setting up the LEGO 3D Printing Education Trust through the LEGO Foundation, LEGO has so far donated 3D printers to over 1,000 schools in 23 countries, to both high and low deciles, together with training courses on Computer Aided Design, 3D printing and modeling, and new venture business training.

They have set up a global cloud based design business where designers can earn royalties whenever people purchase their LEGO 3D designs.

Next year the most successful designers will travel with their parents, courtesy of LEGO, to their HQ in Billund, Denmark, for the inaugural LEGO 3D Printing design competition, where they will celebrate the most successful designs by age group. The top student designers will also be offered university scholarships to continue their education in related fields such as CAD, programming, 3D printing, chemistry, engineering and design.

Innovation head of LEGO, Magnus Blokker said that the company had recognised that despite the almost 100 year success of the company, which was founded in 1932, it was time for the company to reinvent itself and what better way to do it than engage their own fans and customers in the design and marketing of the product.

Board Manager Bau Isovernow said that the company is very excited to be reinvigorating the company and supporting the zero waste movement. The next step is going to be the development of their own whey based, biodegradable filament, so that any ‘blocks’ that are not recycled can simply be composted as they come from cow based milk waste. In fact they are good for the soil rather than a contributor to pollution.

 

 

 

Mar 31 2019

I Love my Driverless Hotel Showroom

People on a PlaneBack in the day I when I first used to sell scanning systems to supermarkets. I’d hop on a plane and fly somewhere like Napier, get into a rental car and then drive to visit all the large owner operated supermarkets between there and New Plymouth. It would take me around 3 days. A lot of that time was spent driving or waiting to see the owner.

What a difference to the hotelpod I use today. When they came out in 2025, everyone thought it was a load of hype. Who would bother?

So now I leave the night before. I take my guitar, a demo system that the engineers put in before sending it on to me, and settle in to relax on the drive down in the executive sized hybrid pod. It arrives in Napier during the night and when I wake up at 6AM, it has already docked into the hotel proper, so I can have a nice hot shower and catch up on the news on the 75″ TV.

I go down to the restaurant and enjoy a fresh flat white with my buffet breakfast, go back to my room and make sure everything is back in the pod before it un-docks and takes me to my first supermarket call.

Instead of waiting in the queue of sales people and merchandisers, I have a wander around the store and look at how things are working, chat with a few of the staff and then head back to the pod, for a one-on-one with the owner operator, who is curious to see the pod and the new 3D scanning system I’ve brought with me to show him.

He’s curious about my travel mode, so I take him for a drive along the freeway, building my relationship with him over a coffee. I probably should get a commission from the manufacturer because I think he’s deciding to buy one himself to replace the old Winnebago, which was great in its day, but pretty tiring as a way of having a holiday.

We have a good discussion about his aged stock, the concept of putting people on checkouts as a novel way of building a relationship with customers again and I soon take my leave.

As I hop back in the pod at 9AM, heading for my second call of the day, I record a video proposal for my prospect I have just visited, with stats based on how I can improve his stock using 4D heat maps of the product groups I believe have a lot of upside; and a presentation of the ROI I believe the system will deliver with 18 months.

The pod advises me that there has been an accident ahead, a serious one between a Level 4 and an old school car that has left the road closed. It recommends that I switch the order of my visits, so I have my Virtual Assistant shuffle my meetings with my clients’ Va and she confirms that my next call is now 90 minutes away. I relax and catch up on some email Yep still that dreaded Inbox, as I head to my next stop.

On Friday night, the pod drops me back home at around 7 PM. 10 years earlier, that’s the time I would have been waiting on my luggage at the airport, having seen the still heavily congested traffic on the motorway from the air and it would have been more like home at 9PM tired and frazzled. I unload my kit and the guitar (I wrote a new song on the way home called Blues in an Airconditioned Pod), and greet the family, probably feeling more relaxed and refreshed than they are. The pod heads back to the office where they will remove the scanning demo kit and release it for housekeeping to ready it for the next happy traveller.

Jan 24 2019

Autonomous Car Graveyard

Well it started at some university in the Midwest as an Orientation Week prank but then it grew legs and for a week, cities all over the US came close to grinding still. The idea was simple. Whenever they had an autonomous car behind them, drivers would slow down to a crawl.

With so many people doing it, the autonomous cars couldn’t overtake and cities ground to a halt. People waited for their driverless Uber and Lyft cars, that arrived an hour late. People who had sent their cars home to park waited seemingly forever to get their ride home. By the end of the week many people were lining up for public transport that couldn’t cope with the dramatic increase in demand and even with reduced traffic the roads were still reduced to a procession. The only thing missing was the marching band leading the cortege.

Mayors threatened to change bylaws to make it illegal to drive slow and asked universities to reign in their students, but by then everyone who loved driving or had a prankish sense of humor joined in and the freeways and arterials crawled like a funeral procession, flashing their lights and beeping their horns.

After a week or so the novelty wore off and life returned to normal. Many a tale was told around the bar table about the personal impacts while they waited for their cars to come an pick them up.

Jul 15 2018

I’m getting an eInk Tattoo

I was inspired by this technology way back in 17 and thought it would be great to be able to express myself. You only have so much skin right. You get a tattoo on and it’s there forever.

I still like my existing tatts, don’t get me wrong. They’re on my legs so they don’t impact on people judging me because of my ink, but I always wanted something I could change whenever I liked and I wanted color.

Now I can control my tatts with my phone. I stopped wearing watches back around 2012, but I always felt awkward looking at my phone when I’m in a meeting with someone, it felt disrespectful, so soon I’m going to have a watch face just above my wrist, that appears and disappears on command and I can still change the watch face any time I like.

watchesI used to buy digital watches so that I could have a different watch face every day. I bought a few from AliExpress that interfaced to my phone, but I couldn’t be bothered charging them every few days and most of the features like the Facebook and Twitter interface or controlling the phone camera were just gimmicks. The killer app for a watch is still telling the time.

I love the steps feature for Strava and now that they have included navigation to the tattoo interface, that’s really cool. I have this goal of always walking on different streets every day, so with this new tattoo I can change the clock to a step and distance counter as well as having it point in the direction I have to turn at the next street and guide me back to where I parked the car.

It’s funny really, this all goes back to the postcard collection I inherited from my Opa. I had a frame in my office and every day I had a different postcard in the frame. My collection had enough for me to have a different picture every day for a few years. So now with the new electronic tattoo I will have a different tattoo on my arm every day too, it can fit the mood I’m in and I don’t have to cover my body or pay lots of money for new art.

 

Jan 24 2013

Health Problems Caused by Augmented Reality Glasses Over Usage

ARGOS (Augmented Reality Glasses Overuse Syndrome) has recently been identified by the Mental health Research Centre  in the USA. People are being bombarded with constant data being displayed on their glasses and the subsequent dopamine overload is having serious consequences on the health of many users of this technology.

Dr Louis Hatmaker, a social scientist with the New Zealand founded Imersia AR, a sister company to the well known Imersia Tourism Limited said from their Auckland AR Lab that this was not unexpected given the huge volume of big data available and was in fact one of the reasons that Imersia developed its Calm Tech, to ensure that people’s eyes and brains were not bombarded with information overload.

Hatmaker said “What we didn’t anticipate in the early 2010’s was the Dopamine factor. Effectively people found the use of AR glasses extremely enjoyable.  The ability to control the glasses just by looking at them and getting a wealth of information, everything from facial recognition and identifying information about every building, business you could see was overwhelming. In a similar way to playing computer games (which of course hundreds of thousands of people now do using AR glasses sic) every time a result was presented on the lens, the user got a squirt of dopamine from their brains as a reward. Dopamine is like a natural opiate and makes you feel good. The user feels excited and becomes addicted to the use of the glasses. When they are not wearing them, they become bored and listless, affecting their relationships with other people and their ability to concentrate. We are particularly concerned with children and teenagers whose brains are still developing.”

Imersia has developed technologies to reduce the amount of information delivered through AR Glasses by making information contextually relevant and personalised. Effectively you get the information you want, when you want it, but you don’t get all the spurious information that has no relevance to you, even if it might be interesting.

Who will the future leaders be? perhaps Sight?