HowDo is an intriguing little startup. Based in Berlin, the company’s platform offers a very simple way to create instructional storyboards: you just take a series of photos with your phone, make a slideshow out of them with a voiceover, and post the result. It’s very much geared towards the maker movement although, as I noted last year, the same mechanism could also plausibly find an application in citizen journalism.

And now it’s on the web too. You can’t create HowDo guides on the desktop — that’s still an iOS app-only task — but you can now embed them in blogs or websites, or search through profiles from the browser. It was previously possible to view HowDo guides on the web, but only if someone had sent you a link, and even then the guides were in no way interactive.

In keeping with the original app, HowDo’s web player interface is quite simplistic: you can click forwards and backwards through the frames, and that’s it. It’s enough to do the job, though, and I can see it working well in the context of Tumblr or Pinterest embeds.

In terms of users, HowDo won’t say much beyond “tens of thousands”, though that’s fair enough – it’s targeted quite a specific market at launch, and iOS specificity is another limiting factor. An Android version is planned, but development hasn’t started yet. At least making the guides more easily viewable by those outside the HowDo community should help the platform grow.

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Here are my highly subjective highlights:

1: David Ortiz.

A (very fuzzy) David Ortiz at TechStars Demo Day.

There was a bona fide Big Papi moment on stage as the Red Sox superstar and overall Boston-superhero David Ortiz strode on stage to greet Fancred CEO Kash Razzaghi. This startup is building a “social platform” to connect sports aficionados with like-minded fans. Ortiz demanded that Rassaghi “get the Yankees off my cell phone.” (I dropped my phone but recovered in time to get one sub-par shot at left.)

Is there really room for a sports fan platform? Doubtful. But, hey, I’ve been wrong before. And did I mention DAVID ORTIZ???

2: A platform for sustainable, local food

I love the idea behind Freight Farms, which takes shipping crates and retrofits them with water, electricity,  internet access and LED lighting to convert them into compact hydroponic gardens.

The elegant idea is to “take the very structure that makes the global food supply chain possible and make it into a platform for producing local food,” said Brad McNamara, Freight Farms CEO.

Freight Farms CEO Brad McNamara.

They are remotely controlled and stackable which means they take up less real estate. Freight Farms has signed several customers including Katsiroubas Brothers,  a 100-year old Boston produce wholesaler, which is looking for ways to cut transport costs and offer more local product.

“There is nothing better than fresh local food, but the reality is food distribution is a long complicated supply chain — most goods travel 1,500 miles on average to get to your table,” said McNamara.

Freight Farm-grown crops require less water, no pesticides or herbicides. My question: Will their tomatoes taste like other hot-house tomatoes (i.e., like cardboard) or like an actual tomato? If it’s the latter, I’m totally sold.

3: DIY clothing design

In a nod to the burgeoning “maker movement” or do-it-yourself crowd, Mary Huang was to hand to talk up Constrvct, her startup that’s building service that lets you design 3-D clothing onscreen, tweak the size and styling with easy slidebar controls, preview your design on an onscreen mannequin and then make your clothes to order.

“Makers are underserved in the do-it-yourself market — they’re stuck at the same starting point as their grandmothers,” Huang said. Interest in home-designed clothes is rising thanks to Pinterest and Project Runway, she said, quoting a surprising stat: 3 million sewing machines sold last year, double the number from ten years ago.

4: Fixing manufacturing

LinkCycle says it can use its own data science — and existing data — to help manufacturing plants drastically cut their energy costs.

These facilities — many of them rust belt relics — are notorious for wasting energy and to remedy that many spend millions installing meters and hiring auditors to help. Most of that spending is also a waste, according to LinkCycle CEO Sahil Sahni.

“Why spend so much time gathering data when companies are already sitting on heaps of it?” he asked.

LinkCycle instead takes two existing data streams from the ERP systems already running these companies — electricity consumption and total production output. “We developed our own algorithms to take that data and use math — not meters — to save money without having to set foot in the plant,” he said.

Wow, that sounds so easy it makes you wonder why someone else hasn’t done it. Well except for that algorithm part anyway.

So, the new venue was fab but it suffered the same woe as past Techstars events — a lack of reliable connectivity. We soldiered through with personal hotspots and (finally) some intermittent Wifi connections but can’t one of these deep-pocketed sponsors finally figure out how to get reliable broadband into these events? (I’m  looking at you  Microsoft, Rackspace, Verizon and Softlayer.)

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Not true. Companies in old-line industries — little brand names like Goodyear, which reaped $21 billion in net sales last year;  Brown Brothers Harriman, the country’s oldest and largest private bank; Whirlpool, the appliance conglomerate behind the Whirlpool, Amana, Kitchen-Aid, Jenn-Air and Maytag brands; and the Mayo Clinic, the 150-year-old hospital to the stars – know a little something about innovation too. Or they probably wouldn’t still be around.

Executives at those companies tasked with keeping them stocked with new ideas for products and services were on hand in Boston Tuesday at an Imaginatik-sponsored event to talk about how they do what they do. Here were six things I learned.

1: Make innovation a priority and put someone in charge of it.

No, you don’t have to dub this person a Chief Innovation Officer (CINO), but you’ve got to give him or her access to the top and the authority to be heard across all business units. A couple speakers invoked the name of Louis Gerstner, the former IBM CEO credited with turning that company around.

When Gerstner came into IBM at the height of the dot.com boom, he wondered why IBM hadn’t come up with web servers or search engines. “When they looked inside IBM labs, it turns out it had but [those ideas] hadn’t been surfaced,” said James Euchner, VP of Global Innovation for Goodyear, Akron, Ohio.

And given the ratio of failures to successes in any business, innovators should be allowed to try things and fail, said Whirlpool’s Global Director of Innovation Moises Norena. Lessons learned from failures, after all, can be invaluable.

2: Think outside the box

Who could have predicted that a freezer manufacturer should also be in the garage organizer business? But that’s what Whirlpool figured out.

“If you want to sell appliances that go in the garage, you probably need to help [people] clean that garage out first,” said Moises Norena, global director of innovation for Whirlpool, Benton Harbor, Mich. And thus,  Whirlpool’s Gladiator Garageworks line of storage organizers was born.

New York-based Brown Brothers Harriman has done well in banking, where lending money has worked pretty much the same way for the last thousand years. “We don’t need to reinvent that wheel, but we always want new services for our clients,” said Philip Swisher, SVP of innovation for the 200-year-old private bank, which has $3 trillion in assets under custody.

Sure, $3 trillion is a lot, but BBH competitor State Street Bank is ten times bigger; so Swisher’s always on the lookout for new services.

He encourages all of the company’s 5,000 employees to pitch ideas and use Intuit’s Brainstorm cloud platform for global collaboration. “All employees have access — it has no permissions by design,” he said.

3: Research, research, research

When most people go to the doctor, they want to see the doctor — or that’s the conventional wisdom anyway. But in most cases, they don’t really need to see a doctor, said Lorna Ross, design manager and creative lead for the Mayo Clinic’s Center of Innovation in Rochester, Minn.

The center gathered a whole primary care team — nurses, pharmacists, a resident — to review patients every day and determine the best course of action for each. It turns out, that only 6 percent of those patients really needed a doctor. That’s admittedly a “controversial” finding for an organization that sees itself a patient care provider.  GigaOM’s Ki Mae Heussner recently detailed another medical practice with a similar holistic approach.

But, if you think about it, most people go to the doctor about a problem and if that problem can be addressed by a nurse, physician’s assistant, pharmacist, most patients are happy. Better evaluation of the patient up front can ease the primary care bottleneck and cut costs, Ross said.

4: Know how to deal with people, not just technology

It may sound creepy but successful innovators need to be social engineers. “You have to know your corporate culture to affect change,” said  BBH’s Swisher. “You can’t ‘train’ an executive, but you can ‘brief’ one. I wear a suit every day because if I showed up in jeans and spiky hair no one would take me seriously and I don’t want to provoke the immune response.”

BBH has remained private and has been remarkably stable since Brown Brothers merged with Harriman Brothers in 1931 — “we have an 80-year track record of no M&A,” Swisher said proudly. Initiating change in a way that doesn’t capsize that stable boat is his goal.

5: But technology is important too

Trends like the internet of Things (IoT) and the maker movement are of keen interest to both Whirlpool and Goodyear, for example. While Norena said he doesn’t see huge demand from customers wanting program their washing machines from their iPads, he does see other opportunities — Whirlpool already has a smartgrid effort, for example. But he is intrigued by the notion of forging a connection between the food you’re cooking and the device you use to cook it.

“What if you have a branded product you put in the microwave which reads the instructions — maybe it scans a code on the popcorn bag so it knows the size and type of corn and pops it optimally?” he asked.

Euchner said companies have to sort out business models associated with the information generated in the IoT scenario, not just on creating more data. “There needs to be enough value for everyone in the ecosystem,” he said.  For example, while tire sensors may be great for monitoring tire pressure and issuing alerts when the tires wear out. but who gets those alerts? The driver?  The car dealer? The manufacturer? If the alert goes to the auto dealership, the car may end up with non-Goodyear tires. Maybe not an earth shaker for the driver, but certainly not good for Goodyear.

6: Be creative but careful

It’s good to improve existing products, but be careful of messing with success.  Norena and I discussed the popular Kitchen-Aid countertop mixer (pictured above left.) I don’t use mine as much as I should be cause it’s big and heavy and dragging it out of the cupboard is a pain even though it does the job better and more uniformly than my dinky hand-held mixer. Norena agreed but said it would be foolhardy to mess with something with so iconic.

Mayo Clinic photo courtesy of  Flickr user -Tripp-

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3D printer at MIT Media Lab could construct a building.

New Gartner research shows that the price for “enterprise-class” 3-D printers is falling enough that more businesses can (and should) start experimenting with them. It estimates that by 2016, these big-boy 3-D printers will cost as little as $2,000. Industrial-grade printers now typically cost five times that much but there’s no reason to wait. Companies should start experimenting with the technology now, even if it’s with lower-cost desktop models, since there is minimal risk of capital or time.

In a statement, Gartner Research Director Pete Basiliere said:

“Businesses must continuously monitor advances to identify where improvements can be leveraged … We see 3D printing as a tool for empowerment, already enabling life-changing parts and products to be built in struggling countries, helping rebuild crisis-hit areas and leading to the democratization of manufacturing.”

Companies that jump in early can get a more realistic grasp of material costs and the time it takes to build parts and components, Gartner said.

To be sure, some affordable technology is already available, at least, to churn out small items. The Makerbot Replicator 2 desktop 3-D printer, which made a splash at SXSW, lists for $2,199. Makerbot is also working on a 3-D scanner to ease the measurement and digitization of what needs to be manufactured. Makerbot CEO Bre Pettis told GigaOM that the Makerbot Digitizer, due this fall, will give creators another way to move designs between the physical and digital worlds. If you want to replicate a physical item, you scan it into the system which digitizes it and builds a 3-D blueprint which can be fed into the printer.

MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito is a huge fan of 3-D printing. At a recent event broadcast by the BBC, Ito reiterated his enthusiasm for the technology which he says can make high-quality manufacturing a key part of the U.S. economy again and boost the “maker movement” overall. As 3-D printing gains traction, more manufacturing may come back to the U.S. Ito is also investing in the sector. He, along with Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, has invested in 3-D printing startup FormLabs.

In theory, the availability of inexpensive 3-D printers means that manufacturers can afford to make small lots of goods and then quickly change up their production lines to meet new demands. This technology has spawned a new class of hardware-oriented startups and efforts. With the time-and-cost savings 3-D printing can provide, “hardware really could be the new software.”

This story was updated at 7:30 a.m. PDT with additional information on the current price of industrial 3-D printers.

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This week in particular, at the SXSWedu ed tech conference in Austin, I happily geeked out in panels and conversations about data science, makerspaces, online learning and other movements angling to remake education. But, impressed as I was, I still found myself looking for more conversation and answers to questions about a few themes.

Much like the SXSW Interactive conference that’s just getting underway, SXSWedu is a choose-your-own adventure experience — there’s another option around every corner and you’re always wondering what you missed. It’s possible other participants got their fill on the following topics, but here’s a wish list of what I hope to hear more about in ed tech — in the year to come and in Austin in 2014.

Digital equity

Technology (especially mobile) is marching its way into communities across the country. But, obviously, that doesn’t mean penetration, quality and connectivity are evenly distributed. When I spoke with Edmodo’s VP of engineering Dimon Sicore a few weeks ago, he emphasized the need (and challenge) to develop for the lowest common denominator in schools because while some school districts might have the latest iPads and Macs, others are using outdated technology. In his keynote speech, Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement Jim Shelton cautioned the crowd to be mindful of the potential for technology to exacerbate the gap between kids in richer and poorer communities. And Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, in his speech, made the important point that uneven access to the Internet needs to be addressed. But, amid presentations from Silicon Valley startups and discussions about pilot programs with the Palo Alto Unified School District, I didn’t hear digital equity issues echoed widely throughout the conference. I wish I did.

Digital report cards for students

Data, data, data. Between presentations from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-backed inBloom and panels on personalized learning and analytics, it was a common refrain. But one of the most compelling ideas I heard all week was about a digital student report card that, like an electronic medical record, would give parents and students a digital record of academic progress. Stephen Coller, a senior program officer at the Gates Foundation, first raised it during a panel on the future of student data, making the point that education could follow health care’s lead when it comes to opening up access to data. But later in the week, I heard Dale Dougherty, founder of MAKE magazine and advocate for more hands-on learning in schools, draw a similar parallel between education and health data. If presented in a meaningful way, data could give parents an unprecedented window into their child’s learning and, while a digital report card seems like little more than idea now, I hope the concept takes off.

The Four C’s

STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) subjects get a lot of attention in education — and they should. We’ve all heard the reports about how U.S. students lag the world in those areas and how desperate businesses are for skilled workers. But real-world success doesn’t just come down to the mastery of those subjects, and technology is starting to play an interesting role in encouraging and tracking progress in “softer skills,” like the “four C’s”: creativity, collaboration, community and critical thinking. Scoot & Doodle, a social creativity site that blends the video conferencing capabilities of Skype with the playfulness of Draw Something, and school Makerspaces are starting to give students and teachers opportunities to exercise these skills. Class Dojo is another in-class tool that helps teachers promote and measure non-cognitive skills.  Startups and educators seem to be paying more attention to this area but it seems ripe for so much more.

More teacher involvement

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, 30 percent of this year’s 5,000 attendees came from higher ed, 30 percent were from K-12 education and 30 percent were business folks and policy wonks. But it didn’t feel that way to me (or to others at the event). Most of the people I ran into in lines or who stood up to ask questions during panels seemed to be more technologist than educator.

This could certainly be because I chose panels that attracted a non-educator audience. But even if the group was 60 percent educator, I’m sure many of those people were not the teachers who will be using this technology in the classroom. As I wrote earlier this week, it became increasingly clear to me during the week that the composition of the conference attendees, like the composition of the ed tech world in general, is varied. The technologists and the educators have different perspectives, different information contexts and different interests. I spoke with a few teachers at the conference (mostly local) but would love to see more at conferences like this and involved in online and offline communities in general.

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But the options are growing for curious would-be makers including a new box of the month service called For the Makers, a New York City startup founded by two former designers. The company, which just opened to the public in December after a private beta, offers a monthly collection of four craft and design projects that can be purchased for $29 a month. Users can make their own necklaces, accessories and baubles by following clear step-by-step directions, which can take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour to complete. The service delivers boxes anywhere in the U.S.

The emergence of companies like For the Makers highlights the growing interest in DIY box services, which help empower newbies to try their hand at different projects. Brit + Co., created by Path founder Dave Morin’s wife Brit, also puts out a DIY box and new food services like Blue Apron, Fresh Dish and Plated are getting first-time cooks into the kitchen. These services lower the bar for users by packaging all the materials into a box and letting them learn by following simple directions.

For the Makers came together a little over a year ago when friends and former Fashion Institute of Technology graduates Janet Crowther and Katie Covington looked at hatching a business together. Crowther was a design consultant for brands like Kate Spade, Fossil and Marc Jacobs while Covington designed jewelry collections for brands like Anthropologie and Target. The two, both DIYers themselves, realized that there’s a growing interest in users making their own stuff to express their tastes, but most people didn’t have the tools to get started.

For the Makers co-founders Katie Covington and Janet Crowther

So the pair started creating their own boxes by tapping their design inspirations. They are making thousands of boxes and have consistently sold out, including their latest December box.  The pair has also secured retail deals with Anthropologie, which is now offering its own For the Makers box to consumers and Gilt City, which is selling discounted For the Makers subscriptions to its users. The service has also gotten the attention of Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai, who is advising the company and whose girlfriend Mari Sheibley, former Foursquare lead designer, has also been providing design advice.

While box of the month clubs have become trendy, and garnered some negative coverage, Crowther and Covington believe they have a business that can last. The two are able to keep costs low because of their connections to local suppliers. They’re able to call upon their design experience to create things that people actually want to use and wear. And they’re finding that the service is spreading well by word of mouth, with both first-time crafted and experienced DIY makers.

“We’re taking people who are not necessarily crafters but people interested in curating what they’re wearing and we’re saying there’s no reason why you have to go Anthropologie and buy that. You can make it yourself,” said Covington.

For the Makers will have to prove it can build a sustaining business off its DIY boxes and services, which can be harder when you start to scale up. But I’d like to see this particular trend grow. From 3D printing and coding classes on the techie side to more services like Etsy and Shopify which are encouraging makers to become sellers, there’s more tools to help encourage the overall maker movement. Not everyone wants to make their own stuff, but the barriers are falling for those that do.

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Launched in public beta Wednesday, the Palo Alto-based startup was incubated at Khosla Ventures and has received $1 million in seed funding from the venture capital firm. In addition to being its lead investor, Vinod Khosla is a member of the company’s board.

Recognizing the rise of the digital economy and perhaps inspired by high-profile startup success stories, more people are looking for lessons in Python, Ruby and other languages of the Web.  And, plenty of startups, including Codecademy, Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity and Treehouse, are meeting that demand.

Sanjay Desai, one of LearnStreet’s founding members and EVP of products and marketing, is well aware that the company is entering a crowded space. But he said that, LearnStreet’s goal isn’t to be a place for those who want knowledge, but a hub for those who want to build something.  In a sense, he added, LearnStreet wants to do for coding what Instagram did for photography.

“We think about LearnStreet as equipping people with coding as a different tool to express themselves,” he said. “We think of this in terms of the Maker Movement – helping you hone a craft and let you express that craft.”

Getting started is very simple – similar to Codecademy, users can start learning to program without signing in. But Desai said they made an extra effort to support newbie coders with live chat and Twitter capabilities. On other platforms, he said, users drop off because learning to code is challenging and they can’t get quick assistance when they have questions. But LearnStreet instructors are available nearly 24-7, he said, to answer questions via email and Twitter. So far, the site offers about 30 lessons on JavaScript, Python and Ruby, which were all created in-house.

In addition to the courses, Desai said, LearnStreet provides a “Code Garage” that offers a range of kit-like projects (40 so far) that let students learn by doing and create their own games, calculators and other tools. Just like the Maker Movement has inspired people to manufacture their own tangible goods with 3-D printers, for example, he said LearnStreet hopes to enable them to make digital ones.

Considering the number of competitors it has in the learn-to-code space, LearnStreet certainly has its work cut out for it. But its Maker Movement-like messaging could certainly help attract new users who might not want to learn coding for professional reasons but are still interested in digital projects. And, the extra support it provides beginners – with Twitter and chat assistance – is definitely another selling point. But, as with other startups teaching programming online, success comes down to the quality of its classes and whether it can show that students are actually learning.

“The thinking here is that it’s trying to get you to a place where you can build something and get that sense of achievement that will inspire you to do more,” Desai said.

Image by graja via Shutterstock.

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