Julia Novy-Hildesley of the Lemelson Foundation gives a nice talk here at 9mins 45 sec.

Lemelson is targeting populations where individuals earn <$2/ day.

She highlights projects with:
E+CO – Nonprofit, provided grant and loan. Launched 3 new solar entrepreneurs in Tanzania. 7 new entrepreneurs in 2010.

IDEAAS - in Brazil. Bringing solar home lighting system that worked in more affluent areas to the Amazon. Working in 8 villages with 120 families, all have paid loans on time. Reaching 2000 families by end of next year. Link to Lemelson page.

SELCO – Forprofit. Grant, loan and equity investment. New innovation center to complement existing technologies. Eg. solar headlamps for midwives and for women who were picking roses and tea leaves at night to get the highest price at market. Now reaching 30k people per year in India.

Envirofit – Nonprofit, provided grant. Working in South East Asia – Philippines. Motorcycle taxis emit more than the global feet of cars. A retrofit.

Emergence Bioenergy – For profit, loan and grant. Raised $1.2M in equity, launch in Bangladesh. Village-based power center, 3 entrepreneurs. Sell power to community.

We’ve been very busy here at Vestal the past few months. Today, we’re starting to see the fruits of our efforts with our first iPhone app: RubyRef!

RubyRef allows Ruby developers access to Ruby’s documentation on their iPhone, no internet connection needed. We’ve also included a few other features we’ve always wanted for code docs- an easy way to favorite the docs you look at the most, and a most-recently viewed pane.

If you’re interested in RubyRef our page for more details, or get the app from the iPhone store for just 99¢

RubyRef

RubyRef at the AppStore

Bill Gates demoed Xobni as part of his opening keynote at the Office Developers Conference in San Jose, California today.

Bill called Xobni “the next generation of social networking.” He credited Xobni as leveraging the data in email to help users better manage their relationships.

Vestal designed Xobni’s user interface several months ago, and it’s great to see our design up on the big screen…

Webcast (Thanks, Xobni )

Kogbox lets users create snippets – small scripts limited to 100 lines and 10 seconds of execution time. Write as many as you like, and combine your snippets with others’ to build simple web tools.

This new project is kind of like a Wikipedia for code… but active code, not code examples. I’ve often come up with ideas for small tools or functions which don’t quite merit an entire website, and which could be easily incorporated into other projects. Kogbox (as its name implies) allows users to create small snippets which all work together to accomplish larger tasks. It’s also a kind of sandbox for experimentation.

You don’t have to take my word for it, take a look at the Kogbox website »

For now it’s invitation only. Contact me for an account.

ARMSFLOW is a data visualization which displays arms transactions globally between 1950 and 2006. It was created with data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

ARMSFLOW includes 14,619 arms transactions (each is a sum of 1 year’s exports) and 228 government entities.

Visit ARMSFLOW

Victor Kaonga points us to Dr. Cedrick Ngalande, a Malawian, who has built a prototype power source made specifically for Africa. It generates power using sugar and yeast for up to 8 hours at a time.

Link »

The design, above, displays company size (by market capitalization) as relative “tread” size; that is, General Electric and Google are large companies. Color (green,yellow,red) corresponds to climate performance, as does the size of the typeface. Therefore Starbucks, which is a relatively small company, is shown in large text size and with a green colored tread. We did 2 shirts each in 2 color schemes.

The intention is not for users to derive hard numbers from this, but the meaning behind the shirt makes for a good talking point and is a quick way to look up climate performance without looking like a dense table of data. We also wanted to make a shirt which people would want to wear. We’re getting a pile of these on top of our fee so we can strut around wearing our own design.

Happy Usability Day everyone! That’s right: Nov 8th is World Usability Day.

At the Vestal Blog, we try to present you with interesting and useful information every day. Let us know how we’re doing! Please send us your feedback at blog@vestaldesign.com. And do the world a favor today: be useful!

The multimedia/photography project revolves around a miniature
facsimile of burned-out, grafitti covered 1980s New York City, which
Peter built from model railroad supplies. It touches on themes of
architectural vernacular, teenage suburban fantasy/urban poseurdom,
and uncanny juxtapositions of scale and era.

Additional photos are available at Peter’s website.

Photos

Exhibition

Have you ever wanted to move things with just your thoughts? Well ‘sci-fi’ isn’t too far away. Brainloop, a media project created by the Aksioma Institute for Contemporary Art in Ljubljana, is turning brainwaves into movement, in this case through a program like Google Earth. Simply by thinking about moving your right hand, you can transmit a non-muscular signal to the ‘Brain Computer Interface’ unit and elicit a response from the program, such as zooming in, allowing you to travel the world literally without lifting a finger.

Aside from just being cool, this could have some very real applications for the physically disabled. While this might not replace Helper Monkeys anytime soon, it’s a step towards creating a different medium for people to communicate and turn thoughts into actions.

Link to Brainloop

Video: