GigaOM » Dyson

James Dyson, maverick inventor funds a product incubator

Om Malik — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 20:17:54 +0000

James Dyson, the British inventor behind the iconic Dyson line of vacuum cleaners is giving $8 million to London’s Royal College of Art for an incubator, Fast Company magazine reports. The RCA design and engineering graduates will incubate 40 new products. Dyson, believes that with all the obsession on code and digital, there is need for physical inventions. Some of the products being worked on at the incubator include LooWatt (a waterless toilet system that generates biogas in developing communities) and a retractable room divider for hospital wards, KwickScreen.

Dyson tells Fast Company’s Co.Design:

“Talented young minds want to be the next Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page. But with the world abuzz with digital, we are losing sight of real engineering. Hardware is profitable. Don’t be fooled, Apple’s success as a technology company is built on hardware. The current fixation with digital is misplaced. Long-term it is unlikely to generate jobs, growth, and exports. Instead, we need to encourage more young engineers to commercialize their technologies.”

First of all, I think it is a great idea. There are so many product categories that are in need of reinvention and re-imagination, as the consumers of today are very different from the consumers of say, 25 years ago. How we use physical objects today is very different.

Dyson’s bet on a physical products incubator comes at a time when digital and physical are getting increasingly closer. The rise of devices such as Nest shows that physical objects of tomorrow will need to embrace software, connectivity and services.

PS: We will be discussing the role of design in shaping our connected future with folks such as Ev Williams (Twitter co-founder), Tony Fadell (Nest co-founder) and others at our RoadMap conference on November 5th in San Francisco.

Electric Car Roundup: Dyson Vacuums, ZENNs Come Home & Brits Plug In

Craig Rubens — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:37:00 +0000

What do the maker of Dyson vacuums, the U.S. presidential candidates, and the UK and Canadian governments have in common? They’re all jumping onto the electric car bandwagon this week. Here’s the latest electric car news, so you know who’s saying what about getting off of oil and putting plugs on our cars.

James Dyson, maker of the futuristic Dyson vacuum, wants to make electric cars suck less, according to The Independent. Engineers at Dyson’s headquarters have reportedly made a lightweight electric motor based on their vacuums and hand dryers. While a spokesperson has since said the company isn’t actively pursuing electric vehicles, Dyson himself told the Independent he’s optimistic about electric cars and thinks they will outnumber combustion engine cars within a decade.
There are a growing number of EVs available today, but for crash safety reasons they are often limited to low speeds and aren’t allowed on many roads. But Canadian electric automaker ZENN Motor could finally see its cars being driven on its home turf. The Québec Ministry of Transportation has announced a three-year pilot project allowing low-speed vehicles on roads with speed limits up to 50 km/h. Now ZENN is marketing itself to get Québecers into its cars.

The British government will publish its renewable energy strategy this week, which will include a proposal for electric and hydrogen fuel cell-powered cars in the UK, The Observer reports. Due out Thursday, the report is part of a £100 billion (about $197 billion) plan to reduce Britain’s carbon emissions, but while it’s not clear what it will mean for EVs in Britain, it could pave the way for startups to test their vehicles on the Isles.
Felix Kramer, plug-in electric vehicle (PHEV) guru and founder of CalCars, offers his two cents on the issue of PHEVs in this presidential campaign. Kramer’s glad to see that plug-ins are becoming a major campaign issue because he thinks it sends the message to automakers that not matter who wins, PHEVs will have support from Washington. Still, he worries that McCain’s battery prize and Obama’s cleantech fund give the impression that more research needs to be done before we can electrify our cars. “We hope the call for improved batteries doesn’t obscure the reality that today’s batteries are good enough for Version 1.0 PHEVs…As for the power grid, there are many reasons to modernize and improve it, but plug-in cars don’t have to wait for that.”

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PasswordMaker: Strong Passwords at your Fingertips

Mike Gunderloy — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:00:00 +0000

Everyone knows by now that you should use a unique password for every web site that requires one, and that those passwords should be tough to guess. But managing all of those passwords is tough, and it gets tougher if you’re a roaming web worker who might need account access from anywhere, across a variety of operating systems and browsers. PasswordMaker offers a unique way to solve this problem, by letting you remember a single password and generating all of the others for you.

PasswordMaker takes advantage of the power of a one-way algorithm to do this: a mathematical formula that always yields the same output when presented with the same input, but which is prohibitively hard to run in reverse. In the case of PasswordMaker, the inputs are your master password (a single strong password that, hopefully, you won’t write down anywhere) and the URL of the site you’re visiting (or any other text you choose). Given these inputs, PasswordMaker will generate the same password every time – and then it can copy it to the clipboard or auto-populate a login form for you.The big attraction of PasswordMaker is that you’re not tied to a database of passwords stored on a single computer (or, worse, on the web somewhere). If you’re at a new computer, just install the software, remember your master password, and all of your other passwords are right there for you, waiting to be regenerated on demand.

Even better, the basic algorithm of PasswordMaker (which is open source, a good thing if you want to verify that the software isn’t doing anything nefarious with the information that you enter) has been ported to a variety of environments. You can use it as a Firefox addin (I tested in Firefox 3, and it works fine), an Opera widget, a Windows desktop or command-line application, a Yahoo! widget, mobile and web editions, or a Mac widget. This makes passwords much more portable than any competing solution that I know.

PasswordMaker isn’t perfect for everyone. It lacks the advanced identity-management features of an application like 1Password. But for the web worker who wants to move to strong passwords, it’s an excellent choice.

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RescueTime tracks your application and site usage for free

Kevin C. Tofel — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 21:30:36 +0000

Earlier today we covered how to keep your computing data safe and secure on a USB thumb-drive, so it’s only fair to cover the opposite end of the spectrum for the fully transparent folks. RescueTime is a free service currently in beta that tracks your application and browser data; the goal here is to get an idea of what apps and sites you’re using the most. Using that information you can presumably get a handle on how much time isn’t being used efficiently during your computing day. Not that those online poker sites are a waste or anything. Why just last night I hung in a tourney for a personal best of over five hours straight. Oops…Anyway, RescueTime looks like a nice productivity tool; you’ll need to install a small tracking application on your PC or Mac and then it takes care of the rest. It doesn’t matter how long you have an application or window up and running; RescueTime is smart enough to only track the time when a program or site has focus, giving you a truer sense of where you’re wasting that time. Or where I’m wasting time. In my defense, I did draw my first Royal Flush… that should count for something.(via Business Hacks)

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Vid-Biz: ON Networks, Distribution, WGA

Chris Albrecht — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 18:03:03 +0000

ON Networks and SXSW Team Up for Web Series Awards; Greenlight Awards to recognize the best original and episodic web entertainment; winner gets $10,000 and distribution deal from ON. (TVWeek)

Digital Distribution Challenges Audience Researchers; it’s harder to tally how many people actually watch when content is syndicated over a number of platforms and sites. (MediaWeek)

WGA Talks to Resume Nov. 26; faint glimmer of optimism as agents, guild officials, studio heads and producers work behind the scenes to help the two sides negotiate productively. (The Wall Street Journal)

Backchannelmedia Receives Additional $3M; latest infusion expands the digital ad serving and response capture services provider’s first round to nearly $10 million. (release)

AOL Launches Video Ticker Ads; graphic banner inserted into the stream without obstructing the viewing experience. (MediaPost)

HDTVs and DTVs to Be Sold Cheap; retailers expected to slash prices on the TV sets for traditional “Black Friday,” yet despite more HD channel options, people buying them primarily to watch DVDs. (Variety)

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Sprint Treo 650 in 2 Weeks

Om Malik — Sat, 13 Nov 2004 20:33:43 +0000

It seems like Treo 650 from Sprint is going to ship within two weeks if you order it from their website. I have learnt that AT&T is going to be making a similar announcement within a couple of days as well. Sprint, has apparently cornered all the Treo 650s that were made. I just wonder what’s going to happen with the Q4 results for PalmOne. They will be struggling to make their numbers.

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