Automotive technology has come a long way in recent decades, but are we about to see cars that can drive by themselves on the road? Chris Bryant, Frankfurt correspondent, visits Continental, the German car parts and technology company, to find out.
The Global Fuel Economy Initiative is addressing the following issue:
“The average fuel economy (L/100 km) of new cars in OECD countries could be improved 30% by 2020 and 50% by 2030 at low or negative cost taking into account fuel savings”.
If you could reduce your fuel consumption by 30% today simply by changing the way you drive, would you?
Smart vehicle: the car tells me about something that I don’t see before I see it with my own eyes.
Can a car fanatic not upgrade a car?
Art that made me smile.
Article - WEARABLE TECH GADGETS PUT USERS BACK IN THE PHYSICAL WORLD
Article - imWATCHING YOU: GOOGLE GLASS AND THE iWATCH, A BRIEF ON WEARABLE TECHNOLOGY
Why iWatch And Google Glass Could Make Smartphones Dumb
Will Apple’s iWatch introduce the age of wearable technology?
MYO - Gesture Control, unleash your inner Jedi
Pinterest Collection
This week I decided to go to an ‘official’ school event. Every Thursday there is a ‘Venture Network’ event where 3 startups (from IE, IE alumni, or elsewhere) pitch their ideas. Plus, you get free beer!
This week, one of those pitches involved HR, health plans, and gamification of wellness plans. To reduce the healthcare fees companies pay for their employees, some companies have set up wellness plans to incentivize their employees to be more active (sports, eat healthier, etc). The justification for such programs are healthier employees are more productive employees that miss less days of work. In practice, some of these programs actually pay employees to participate and keep up with these wellness programs. Despite efforts, employee engagement in these programs is about 30%.
The ‘Race Lifestyle’ (http://racelifestyle.com) aims to increase employee engagement by adding peer pressure and game elements to wellness programs. Teams of employees compete against other teams and each employee is accountable to teammates in keeping up with their part of the wellness program.
Don’t know if your company is large enough or at the stage where they would consider such wellness initiatives, but the problem that the Race Lifestyle is trying to address seems universal: how to keep and maintain employee engagement to a given task.
Some links related to ‘Gamification of wellness’
The question
Imagine your city is setting up a new startup incubator, a place for foster new business ideas and nurture innovative businesses. What name are you going to give this place?
I am a fan of data and decided to go about this problem the data way, analyzing the names of other startup incubators. This is something I did not long ago for a restaurant app for Echo-Online GmbH while developing an algorithm to deduce the cuisine of a restaurant and discovered that the names of more than 1200 restaurants were made with 771 different words. As a source dataset for startup incubator names I used a list prepared by Casey Allen with Google maps of tech-only accelerator programs. This list has 163 startup incubators and their names use 239 unique words (343 words in total). Finally, I concentrated on the top ten most frequent words found in tech startup incubator names and looked for derivatives of them to produce a final list of top ten. Here you have it:
Which word to pick? I would pick ‘Lab’, that is my pick. It implies experimentation, learning, and adaptation all of which are things that books like The Lean Startup and Getting to Plan B mention as important during the business building process. ‘Lab’ is now a design constraint.
It surprised me that the word business was not in the top ten since the objective of a startup incubator is to build a profitable business. The word ‘business’ occurred twice in 343 words.
The answer
