IKEA furniture with wireless chargers

Swedish furniture giant Ikea has incorporated induction-charging stations into products from its latest collection, which will allow users to wirelessly charge their smartphones.
Lamps, bedside tables and desks in Ikea's new collection each have an integrated pad that can charge portable electronic devices simply by placing them on top.

"Through research and home visits, we know that people hate cable mess," said Jeanette Skjelmose, Ikea business area manager for lighting and wireless charging."They worry about not finding the charger and running out of power," she continued. "Our new innovative solutions, which integrate wireless charging into home furnishings, will make life at home simpler."


Wireless charges – also known as induction charging – powers up mobile devices by using an electromagnetic field to transfer energy. When in contact, a magnetically charged coiled wire within the station induces a current in another coil located in the device, which can then use that energy to charge its own battery.


The charging pads in Ikea's furniture were developed by specialist technology company Qi. Devices with embedded Qi technology – which currently include models by Google Nexus, HTC, Samsung and Nokia – will already by compatible with the furniture products. For phones and tablets that aren't currently supported, such as the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy models, Ikea is also launching a range of covers to allow them to perform in the same way.


The devices automatically begin charging when placed on the flat circular pads, which are identified by a subtle cross on the top. These pads are integrated into the bases of simple lamps and the surface of small tables. Ikea is also releasing a stand-alone charging pad with three ports, for use in the office or family homes.

Another charging pad has been designed to fit into the brand's existing Micke and Stuva desks. The wireless charging range will be available at Ikea's UK stores and website from mid-April.

Ikea's head of design Marcus Engman spoke to Dezeen about the introduction of the products to the company's range in an exclusive interview earlier this month. "We don't want to go into electronics; we want to make the home smarter," he said. The move is just one of the changes Engman is introducing as part of his attempt to "bring the surprise back" to the brand.

Last month, Ikea debuted a range of cork and natural-fibre homeware products by designer Ilse Crawford, with more collaborations and capsule collections planned over the coming year.


via: www.dezeen.com

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The shoe that grows

The Shoe That Grows started when Founder and Executive Director Kenton Lee was living and working in Nairobi, Kenya in 2007. One day while walking to church, he noticed a little girl in a white dress next to him who had shoes that were way too small for her feet. That led to questions about why. And finally an idea: “Wouldn’t it be great if there was a shoe that could adjust and expand – so that kids always had a pair of shoes that fit?” And just like that The Shoe That Grows was born.

Over 2 billion people in the world suffer from soil-transmitted parasites and diseases. The Shoe That Grows is a better solution to help children protect their feet than just regular shoes, shoes that don’t fit, or no shoes at all. The Shoe That Grows adjusts five sizes and last five years – providing better protection and better health for children.

The Shoe That Grows is a patented design of an innovative shoe that adjusts and expands. It was developed in part by a shoe development company in the Northwest called Proof of Concept. The shoe comes in two sizes: Small and Large. Each shoe grows 5 sizes and lasts at least 5 years.



Small = Grows 5 sizes – Generally fits between the ages of 5 and 9 years of age
Large = Grows 5 sizes – Generally fits between the ages of 10 and 14 years of age

The Shoe is made with simple materials – leather, compressed rubber, and snaps. No mechanical parts of gears to break. Easy to clean. Easy to use.

One of the best parts of The Shoe That Grows is how easy it is to transport. It compresses into itself so that you can fit 50 pairs of the small size in a regular suitcase that weighs under 50 pounds. You can take 50 pairs of shoes in a suitcase on a plane!




via: www.theshoethatgrows.org

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AVAZ- Giving Voice to Children

Introducing ‘AVAZ’ – a product created by Invention Labs, Chennai. AVAZ provides a ‘voice’ to a non-verbal child with Cerebral Palsy, allowing him/her to communicate with friends, family and teachers. By enabling speech-impaired children to communicate easily, this device is helping them become much more independent.



An estimated 10 million people in India have speech impediments — those afflicted by autism, cerebral palsy, etc. — limiting not just their physical functioning but the core of all human engagement, communication. Yet, most autistic children are often bright, aware and equipped to learn and contribute effectively, if barriers to communication are stripped away. Autism, for instance, is a neural disorder impairing social and communication abilities significantly. Affected children or adults are often unable to string together complete sentences or express feelings and desires and moods openly. Those that can still take an inordinate amount of time to do so, making learning especially difficult.



Ajit Narayanan's Invention Labs partnered with Vidya Sagar (previously the Spastics Society of India) in Chennai to understand the needs and challenges of those with speech impediments. They also studied the available aids. Two key challenges emerged: cost and language. The devices available cost anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000, making them out of reach of anyone but the affluent. Second, they were available to English-speaking users only.

Narayanan and his team spent two years developing prototypes, working closely with students and teachers on a tablet-style device that they named Avaz, a portable, battery-operated gadget that constructs messages from rough muscle movements. Those messages are then converted into speech. The tablet is equipped with a touchscreen and sensors to detect body movements; these inputs then get converted into sentences, which the device speaks aloud. It uses a scanning technique to make these connections — the screen displays various options with a highlighter that moves between different options. When the highlighter is hovering on the option the child wishes to select, he or she can make the selection by making a strong muscle movement like shaking the head or touching the screen. Once the full sentence has been framed, it is converted into speech.





An engineer from IIT-Madras, Ajit Narayanan, 31, had worked with American Megatrends before returning to India where he founded Invention Labs and returned to a passion he had encountered while at his alma mater: developing communication devices for the disabled. With a Master’s in electrical engineering, he had already won a couple of prestigious prizes before Avaz, but the recognition for his work has propelled him into a select legion of innovators who have won the National Award for the Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities, along with MIT’s TR35 award for Innovator of the Year.



As Avaz gets widely adopted, thanks to its relatively accessible cost ( 25,000), feedback has poured in. Innovation Labs has also partnered with the Cerebral Palsy Institute of Kolkata and the Spastics Society of Karnataka. Educators have found Avaz most effective for autistic students — its customisable visual templates addressed a critical discovery during the development process: that autistic children respond much better to visual cues than spoken ones. Avaz’s true impact is not as a device as much as a technology that can alter the landscape of special needs education.

Narayanan has big plans for Avaz. There’s a software version available for those who don’t want the physical device but want to use its functionality on a PC. But the biggest and potentially most gamechanging innovation came with the development of the Avaz app for the iPad and Android, which promises to reinvent special needs education. Taking the genius of the app to devices the user may already own gives it great reach and accessibility.



via : www.rise.mahindra.com, www.thebetterindia.com

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Life Saving Dot- Jeevan Bindi

How The Simple Bindi Can Save Millions Of Lives

Anytime you happen to be in an Indian village and see the women there, one thing you will almost certainly notice on their forehead is a bindi, a small round dot which has several meanings in the Indian context, from religious to spiritual to even cosmetic.

But did you know that the same small bindi can serve as an iodine patch and provide the important mineral to millions of women in rural India, helping them lead healthier lives?

Lack of Iodine is now linked to several life threatening medical conditions including breast cancer, brain damage and several pregnancy-related complications. And in India, unfortunately, iodine deficiency is a grim reality due to the deficiency found in the subcontinent’s soil. Although iodine-fortified salt has been introduced in the country, an estimated 350 million people still do not use it.



Thanks to Singapore-based Grey Group, the bindi can now become much more than just a small dot. They have come up with an idea of the life saving dot, the “Jeevan Bindi”, that can address the widespread issue of iodine deficiency among rural Indian women.

“Millions of women in rural India suffer from life threatening diseases due to lack of iodine in their bodies. They are not even aware of it and don’t even use iodized salt. This idea can address the deficiency in a very simple and effective way,” says Prachi Pawar, President, Neelvasant Medical Foundation and Research Centre.



Though there are medical supplements to fill this deficiency but most women in Indian villages cannot afford it. Hence, the idea to convert bindis into iodine patches can be revolutionary. To test this idea and give it a shot, Grey Group’s not-for-profit arm Grey For Good partnered with Maharashtra-based NGO, Neelvasant Medical Foundation and Research Centre to develop an iodine patch bindi under the Talwar Bindi brand in March 2015.

The Talwar bindi has been distributed to several taluks in Maharshtra and Delhi along with tribal areas in Nepal. The team has received an overwhelming response with more and more women showing interest in the unique dot.





The bindi does not have any side effects or cause skin rashes and can be worn for many hours at a stretch. After the iodine of the bindi is absorbed by the body, it becomes a regular dot.

“We distributed the samples in the villages and got an response. It is just an idea right now. They were specially designed to test the success of such a product. So if someone wants to manufacture it, they can. The idea is out there in the market,” says Pawar.



via: www.thebetterindia.com

 

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Transformation of Airline Seating

106 years after the first airline formed, a company has finally made the middle seat halfway-pleasant.



If Thompson Aero Seating has its way, the days of cramming into the middle seat, engaging in the passive-aggressive skirmish for the armrests, will be long gone. The Northern Ireland seating manufacturer has transformed the infamous center seat into the prime place to park yourself for the duration of your flight, thanks to its staggered Cozy Suite design.



The design detail making the middle seat worth fighting over: an extra headrest. Soft headrests on each side of the chair allow the middle passenger to nap without the awkward chance of dozing onto a stranger’s shoulder. All chairs feature a retractable seat, allowing more space to slide by your neighbors without creating traffic in the aisle. Mix that with the chair’s hardback design—meaning you won’t be awoken with every sharp kick to the back of your seat—and a forward-sliding recline action that won’t invade anyone else’s space and you’ve got yourself an equation for a restful flight.

If productivity is your prerogative, the tray table has also been updated for better usability. The design allows it to fold twice, meaning you can use half of it for when you need a smaller workspace and the full tray when you’re looking to enjoy an in-flight meal or get some actual work done.

There’s an upside for the airlines, as well. These design tweaks make room for additional seats in the plane cabins. Sounds like a win all around.

via: www.travelandleisure.com

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Talking Window Display at Hiut Denim Co.

The Hiut Denim Co. makes jeans that are designed with modern details in mind, for example the coin pocket is redesigned to fit the latest iPhone every time a new one is released. All jeans are made from iconic denim mills from around the world. The Hiut Denim Co is the first jeans maker to incorporate a unique History Tag with each and every pair to make them a true Internet of Things product. So you can upload pictures of where you go and what you do in them. So one day when those jeans end up in a second store, their stories will go with them too.

The Hiut Denim Co’s customers are the creative community, people who appreciate the care, craft and detail in every pair.

To tell the story of the jeans they felt it was appropriate to “tech hack” a pair of jeans and
utilise the latest innovation – conductive ink.



To tell the story of the jeans they hacked a shop window, using Bare Conductive Paint to turn it into an interface for the story of Hiut Denim.



In the specialist jeans store Rivet & Hide, creative technology agency Knit utilised the window space to create an installation, which allows potential customers to hear the story of the brand and the product details as they interact with different parts of the product by touching the relevant icons on the outside of the window.

This is the first time that conductive ink has used through glass and as part of an in-store retail installation.

As customers walk past the store a sensor detects their proximity and a random audio sample using transducer speakers on the window encourages them to find out about the story about Hiut Jeans. For example, “Our town is making jeans again. Touch the window to find out more.”



The stylish icons which represent different parts of the brand story are painted onto the inside of the window using conductive ink, with wires on the inside of the window linking to the relevant parts of the product. Inside the pair of jeans includes various Arduino microcontroller units to control the audio samples and triggers.

The conductive ink is able to detect the change in the capacitance as the person touches the window icon, which in turn triggers the circuit to play the relevant audio sample. As well as audio, light bulbs are also triggered to switch on to create visual impact.



via wearknit.co.uk, video via Knit, photos via blog.atmel.com

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Google's internet balloons

Internet access is common in the developed world, but many in emerging markets are just now getting online. For Google, one of the most visited sites in the world, it’s a massive growth opportunity. And they aren’t going to wait for local governments or anyone else to build the necessary infrastructure.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported the firm plans to spend $1 to $3 billion to launch a fleet of internet satellites. The satellite network would initially include 180 small satellites and might later double that number.

The project is part of Google’s wider plan to provide internet access to remote areas using solar powered drones and high altitude balloons. They recently purchased drone company Titan Aerospace and launched Project Loon to experiment with a squadron of stratospheric, internet providing balloons steered by global trade winds.



Why is a software company so interested in building infrastructure? A Google representative explained to the WSJ, “Internet connectivity significantly improves people’s lives. Yet two thirds of the world have no access at all.”

The firm dominates search and operates the two most visited sites on the web (Google and YouTube). A healthy fraction of those billions may well choose Google’s products—if only they can gain access to them.

Project Loon balloons float in the stratosphere, twice as high as airplanes and the weather. In the stratosphere, there are many layers of wind, and each layer of wind varies in direction and speed. Loon balloons go where they’re needed by rising or descending into a layer of wind blowing in the desired direction of travel. By partnering with Telecommunications companies to share cellular spectrum Google has enabled people to connect to the balloon network directly from their phones and other LTE-enabled devices. The signal is then passed across the balloon network and back down to the global Internet on Earth.



A year after Project Loon became public, its leaders told Wired that Google should be able to provide LTE data connections “in one or several countries” within the next year.

The company hopes to grow a fleet of 300 to 400 balloons that can continuously circle the earth at an altitude twice as high as commercial planes, and stay up for 100 or more days. Already, the balloons have traveled more than a million and a half kilometers, and circled the world in as little as 22 days, which is a world record.

And they are delivering Internet speeds of 22 megabits per second to ground antennae and 5 Mbps to phones.



Video courtesy Project Loon.

Photo credit: Marty Melville/AFP/Getty Images

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SolTech Glass Roof Tiles

The glass roof tiles by SolTech System mark a revolutionary and award winning method of integrating solar energy into any building. Instead of traditional roof tiles made of concrete or clay, these tiles are made of glass, allowing the sun to shine through onto the absorbing surface underneath. According to Inhabitat, the energy generated is integrated with the building’s existing heating system or electrical grid. A major advantage of the SolTech System is that it does not need bright sunshine to work, which means that it also generates energy on a day with slight overcast.



The glass roof tiles allows the sun to shine through on to the special absorption fabric underneath that absorbs the sun’s rays. Beneath the absorption fabric, special beams form a column where the air is heated and circulated through a patented technology. The energy captured is then directed into the house and integrated with the house’s existing heating system. The system can be integrated with the house’s existing energy solution, both air based and water based.



The company’s official webpage has details about each of the four solutions available for this type of solar heating.

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Bringing forests to your doorstep

Shubhendu Sharma was a highly paid employee at Toyota Kirloskar Motors, Bangalore, when he volunteered to help botanist Akira Miyawaki turn the campus into a green zone. The young Indian engineer loved the idea so much that he returned home and launched Afforest, an end-to-end “forest” planting service for individuals and institutions.



Afforestt’s goal is to help people create sustainable gardens in their backyard. But unlike conventional gardens the plant species are selected after doing a soil survey and studying the endemic flora of the region. The density is kept as high as 3 to 5 saplings per square metre. Hence Afforestt’s gardens look more like natural forests, even if they only occupy 1000 square feet of land.

Sharma decided to try his hand at the Miyawaki technique after observing its success in regenerating forests from Thailand to the Amazon. He quickly realised that Afforestt would not work as a charity.

“I realized it can’t be done as a do-gooder activity. If I wanted it to succeed, I had to think it through and come up with a business plan, and a bunch of my friends helped me to set it up,” he says.

“The idea is to bring back the native forests. They are not only self-sustainable after a couple of years but also are maintenance-free. We want to create a scenario where plucking a fruit from a tree in the backyard will be easier than buying it from the market.”



How it works
Afforestt provides end-to-end services that include arrangement of labour, materials, equipment, tools and facilities required to execute an afforestation project using the Miyawaki Method. After the soil and biomass survey, 50 to 100 varieties of native species are planted. The last stage involves watering and weeding the area for next two years, after which the forest takes care of itself.

Sharma designs and formulates in what pattern, sequence and ratio the saplings should be planted for rapid growth. Having started on his own in 2011, he now has a team of six that works from Bangalore. Initial troubles with finding the market were solved to some extent when they received their first order from a German furniture maker to plant about 10,000 trees at Rs 150 per square foot. Since then, Afforestt has served 48 clients and planted 33 forests (over 54,000 trees) across 11 cities in India.

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Tinitell - a wrist phone for kids

Why do children need or are given access to a phone? The primary reason is so that the parents can stay in touch with their children. However, the child is more prone to losing or damaging a phone.

Tinitell is essentially a wristband, which allows the concerned parents to call and track their child since this wristband is basically a wearable phone and a GPS tracker. Tinitell will be one of the smallest commercial mobile phones that are available to the consumer market once it is launched. The wristband will work either via voice recognition or through the click of a button. The wristband doesn’t come with a delicate screen so the child need not take it off while playing. It is also splash proof and can withstand quick dips in water. It makes use of voice recognition so if a child was to say ‘mom’ or ‘dad’, the watch will dial the corresponding number and the child will be able to talk to them. Of course children will be able to manually search for contacts as well.

The wearable cell phone comes in four colours and has all the essential functions you’d need to make sure your child is safe.



Founder Mats Horn came up with the idea for Tinitell while cooking dinner with a friend who had a young son. The boy wanted to go outside and play but he didn’t have a cell phone. He’d lost a phone once before and the adults didn’t want to lend their expensive smartphones to a child. As they were busy in the kitchen and couldn’t accompany the boy, he had to stay indoors and play on an iPad.

Horn says this incident reminded him of how much he loved being outdoors as a kid. He decided to design a simple phone for kids so that parents could let them out and call them back easily. “Nothing advanced, just a nicely designed speaker and microphone to handle quick ‘hellos’ and ‘come heres’,” he explains.



The device just needs a GSM SIM card to be inserted into it before snapping it onto a child’s wrist like a bracelet. It has a single, large button and voice-recognition software so the wearer only has to push the button and speak the name of the person he or she wants to call. The tough waterproof material is suited to handle playground tumbles and other feisty behaviour.



Parents can control and monitor the device remotely from the Tinitell website (www.tinitell.com) or from their smartphones via the official app. They can also restrict outgoing and incoming calls to pre-set contacts and assign numbers that will be answered automatically without the child having to press the button. There’s a bonus safety feature too: an inbuilt GPS that communicates the wearer’s location.

Horn raised over $140,000 for the Tinitell project on Kickstarter and has started taking orders on the website, though the products will only be shipped in April 2015. A Tinitell “wristphone” currently costs $129. It works in most countries, including India.

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DosaMatic dosa maker

Eshwar Vikas , an engineering student from Chennai once visited Delhi and felt like having a dosa. He was shocked to enter a restaurant and find the staple southern snack priced at Rs 110. The student guessed this might be because dosas are prepared though a precise manual process and such expertise may be scarce in north India.

So along with his SRM College classmate Sudeep Sabat, third-year student Eshwar Vikas invented DosaMatic, an automatic dosa-making machine the size of a microwave oven. Their mission is to bring consistently crisp, delicious and inexpensive dosas to hotel tables everywhere.



“Dosas cost anywhere between Rs 25-50 in a place like Bangalore or Chennai or Hyderabad. But if you go to Delhi you might have to spend Rs 80-120 for the same thing. With a product like a burger, the cost remains the same no matter where you go. The cost for Indian food products are not standardised as they are handmade and have no automation,” says Vikas.

DosaMatic serves up one perfectly rolled dosa every minute. All you have to do is pour batter and oil and into its separate containers, select the thickness you want and press the start button. The mix is pumped onto the hot plate using Archimedes’ screw system, then smoothly spread and peeled off using the principle of a motorcycle’s side stand.



The boys didn’t just put their classroom knowledge to use but also got help from unexpected places. When stuck with the problem of how to make the motor spread batter evenly, they had discouraging responses from IIT professors who said it was impossible or too complicated to achieve. It was a small shopkeeper in Chennai who improvised the solution with a series of chains and gears.

Vikas and Sabat had pitched the DosaMatic idea at a startup contest in Chennai in 2012, where they were noticed by Indian Angel Network who offered to incubate and later invest in them. The duo launched their company Mukunda Foods that year and graduated from both the college and the incubator in 2013. The product’s growth was very fast because its inventors did the prototyping and manufacturing simultaneously. This saved them both time and money.



Thirty restaurants in Bangalore have bought and started using DosaMatics already. Vikas says the company has got many enquiries and confirmed orders from other places in India and abroad. With a price point between 1-1.5 lac, the founders claim it can provide Return on Investment in five months.

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The Drinkable Book - Water is Life

Each page of this 'Drinkable Book' is a water filter that removes deadly bacteria. DDB charity project purifies as it educates.

Drinking is fundamental.

With that thought in mind, DDB New York and Water Is Life have authored a Drinkable Book that not only educates at-risk populations on sanitation and hygiene, but also provides a means to purify contaminated water.

The pages are coated with microscopic particles of silver. When water passes through, more than 99 percent of harmful bacteria—like cholera, E. coli and typhoid—are destroyed, and the resulting liquid is safe to drink. Theresa Dankovich, a chemist, invented the paper. The text, printed in food-quality ink, provides basic safety information, such as reminders to keep trash and feces away from water supplies. The filter paper costs pennies to produce, and a single book can provide a person with drinkable water for up to four years.
DDB and Water Is Life have teamed up before on notable humanitarian efforts. These include an award-winning campaign that saw impoverished Haitians read actual tweets that people jokingly marked with the #FirstWorldProblems hashtag, and "Kenya Bucket List," which focused on what third-world kids hope to accomplish in their lives.



The Drinkable Book is a refreshingly creative (but practical) approach that marks a new chapter in combining communications with real-world action, a direction also championed by the Peruvian billboards that generate clean air and water.

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Innovation in Campaigning

Mission 272

Innovation has been the most defining feature of Narendra Modi’s 2014 Lok Sabha campaign. While often Innovation is attributed to the use of technology it must be said that Narendra Modi’s 2014 campaign innovated on multiple fronts beyond the use of technology.

Crowdsourcing

2014 can be described as India’s first open sourced election in many ways. Narendra Modi set the tone for this crowdsourcing when he first called for inputs for an upcoming speech via Facebook. In July last year, weeks after he was declared the BJP’s Campaign Committee chairman, Narendra Modi addressed a gathering of students at the Fergusson College, Pune. Ahead of the speech at Fergusson College, Narendra Modi sought inputs for his speech on Facebook.

The trend of crowdsourcing for the 2014 campaign was off to a start with thousands of comments pouring in. The next big speech that Narendra Modi sought crowdsourced inputs on Facebook was for his Hyderabad Rally in the first week of August 2013. Narendra Modi’s Hyderabad speech in many ways reflected the concerns and anxieties expressed by citizens of both regions when he issued the clarion call for a win-win solution to both regions with the slogan – “Jai Telangana, Jai Seemandhra”.

One of the most engaging Crowdsourced Campaigns during the 2014 race was the “Mere Sapno ka Bharat” initiative where Citizens were encouraged to record short videos on the India of their dreams. “Mere Sapno Ka Bharat” led by Smriti Irani went to college campuses across India and encouraged youth to share their ideas, the best of which made it to a Video Wall on the India272+ Platform.

Branding

From NaMo tea stalls to NaMo mobile phones, from saree shops to sweet shops and from neck-tags, stickers, caps to sun-shades on cars, brand NaMo was to be seen everywhere through the 2014 Campaign. While much of the Branding of Merchandise around the persona of Narendra Modi was an independent phenomena, there was conscious branding by the BJP of each of Narendra Modi’s rallies in a unique way to make an impact on voters.

The most impactful brand to emerge through the 2014 campaign, however, was the persona of the Chaiwallah almost entirely from independent efforts by ordinary street corner shops and vendors. Mani Shankar Aiyer’s Chaiwallah taunt and various intemperate remarks by assorted politicians from the SP and the JDU in UP and Bihar contributed tremendously to this groundswell of branding efforts taking various creative forms across India.

Chai pe Charcha

A remote Town Hall format was for the first time attempted during the 2014 Lok Sabha Campaign by the BJP with the introduction of the campaign innovation titled “Chai pe Charcha” . Across thousands of tea-stalls in India, a two way interactive digital experience was enabled through a combination of technologies – DTH, video conferencing and mobile broadband. Over a cup of tea, Narendra Modi interacted with people across India on issues such as agriculture and women empowerment. The Charchas were held across 4000 locations in 24 States in various rounds. Internationally, it was held across 50 locations in 15 countries. Almost 10 lakh people joined the Charchas.

Chai-pe-Charcha was a disruptive innovation during this campaign season in its ability to connect with a mass audience for an interactive dialogue without relying on mainstream media. It created a hybrid experience between the populist discourse of a mass rally and the deliberative discourse of a Town Hall while connecting audiences across India with Narendra Modi.

3D Holographic Rallies

The mega innovation during the 2014 Lok Sabha Campaign was the extensive use of 3D Holographic Projections to hold hundreds of simultaneous public meetings at venues across India. Narendra Modi is the pioneer in the use of 3D holography in election campaigning. He had used this technology during the 2012 Gujarat election. During the 2014 Campaign, Narendra Modi took the use of 3D holography to a whole new level with over 12 speeches delivered across 1,350 venues during the months of April and May 2014.

The 3D rallies were a mega hit as Narendra Modi himself wrote in his blog on the ecstatic response he received from voters across India.

"So many youngsters wrote to me on mail and social media ‘thanking’ me for coming to their village. People told our Karyakartas- we want to meet Modi ji on stage…such was the buzz these rallies generated."

3D Technology gave Narendra Modi the ability to transport both his persona and his message to hundreds of locations simultaneously thus reaching out to constituencies and cities/towns where he personally could not campaign despite his 46-day Bharat Vijay marathon.

A Digital Eco-system

Three digital Innovations that emerged from this ecosystem were game-changers during the campaign. The first was the creation of a single nationwide toll free number that could be used by BJP supporters across India to give a Missed Call or to send a SMS or a WhatsApp message as means to get involved the campaign. A further innovation in the use of SMS was NaMoNumber that gamified volunteering in a manner never envisioned before. The NaMoNumber was the number of pledges of support a Volunteer could solicit from voters in his or her constituency by getting them to SMS their EPIC (VoterID number). NaMoNumber thus not just helped solicit pledges of support but did so in an actionable manner that made “Get out the Vote” (GOTV) efforts real-time, targetted and efficient. Candidates in many constituencies benefitted from the use of NaMoNumber to get out the vote in a targeted manner at the booth level. A third innovation was the use of a nationwide toll number that allowed a wider audience to dial-in and listen to Narendra Modi’s speeches without being dependence on Internet Access or TV Coverage.

Together these digital innovations made a crucial difference to the campaign over the past eight months. This campaign will be remembered for path breaking innovation.

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Flipkart- Scale to Intelligence

Target knows you are pregnant. Homegrown e-commerce firm Flipkart wants to know if you are a doting father. That is, not in a creepy way, they say. At Flipkart, which hit $1 bn in gross merchandise value a full year before the target, all the talk is about building intelligence into its systems, i.e. going beyond scale. Last week at the company’s annual hack day held at the Indian Institute of Science, its CEO Sachin Bansal said that now its focus will shift “from scale to intelligence.”

Armed with data generated by over 14 million odd registered users on Flipkart, the idea is to know each user to such an extent that they end up being shown the most relevant products on the website.



“If we know that its a father who is on the site, and a doting father at that, we’d love to show him what he is looking for,” says Amod Malviya, the head of engineering at Flipkart.

The e-commerce firm’s growing mobile user base is also making it easier for the company to personalize the shopping experience. Each mobile phone has a unique fingerprint that can be mapped to a user.

“Increasingly, across industries, systems are becoming intelligent. Where systems learn the intent of the customer,” says Malviya. For instance, a user could be looking for Harry Potter, the movie, the game, or merchandise. “When my wife is searching, its probably the book. My son, is looking for the merchandise,” he says.

The company has also started setting up a data science team to play with such problems and come out with solutions that have a direct impact on sales. Some of the questions the team will ask are: How do you personalise for every single aspect of the shopping experience? What are the techniques useful in doing intelligent pricing? How does one plan inventory specific to the Indian context?

Flipkart is also experimenting with search techniques that go beyond simple semantic search. For instance, if someone is looking for a “red dress,” the shopping site wants to be able to show all red dresses, even if it hasn’t been textually tagged a “red dress.” This feature is currently being tested on the site.

Amazon and other global e-commerce players have already cracked personalization in a big way. E-commerce companies and brick and mortar stores go great lengths to understand their customers better by using different means. Some such practices, however, are not always well received. For instance, the practice of using browser cookies to track a user’s behavior, although one of the oldest trick in the book, doesn’t go very well with users who wish to have greater privacy on the Internet.

Right from data like the customer’s location, or the time of the day when he is using an app Flipkart is interested in every data point, “so long as customers privacy is not breached.”

Malviya says that the company is “maniacal” about customer’s privacy and data security.

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VENTiT pizza box designed in India

The world's smartest pizza box has been designed in India!

Here's a Mumbai businessman who dared to think within the box! Vinay Mehta has revolutionized the way hot take-out food will reach you. His solution: making sure the packaging has proper ventilation.

Tired of having too many soggy pizzas delivered to him, Vinay decided to do something about it. In 2006, with a pen knife, some cardboard and a long drive between Mumbai and Pune, he designed VENTiT, which has been judged as the world’s best pizza box. This concept has been the winner of India Star, Asia Star and World Star packaging awards.



Mehta’s container was accorded this honor recently by Scott Wiener, the New York-based pizza aficionado and author of a book called Viva La Pizza! The Art of the Pizza Box. Wiener should know. He has collected approximately 650 boxes from around the world since 2009 and is the Guinness World Record holder in this category. He said that of all the boxes he has seen, Mehta’s design is best suited to delivering steaming pizzas. “It’s smart because it doesn’t add any hardware, just rethinks the common construction of a box and rearranges it,” says Wiener.

The biggest challenge faced by take-out restaurants, experts say, is the poor ventilation of the packaging. Trapped steam condenses on the food, making it unappealing and dampening its aroma. Mehta was well placed to solve this problem. He has been dealing with corrugated cardboard boxes for 35 years. He owns a firm called Reproscan, which offers printing services to packaging firms, as also the advertising and publishing sector.

He realized that most pizza boxes are ineffective because they have holes on the side to release steam—but the heat is actually released from the top and bottom of the pies. 'The problem with the existing design is the lack of ventilation — steam generated in the box is trapped inside and condenses on the pizza, and compromising the freshness.” But what about the holes often found on one side of the box? ''They are useless, actually. The heat which renders home-delivered pizzas soggy and tasteless is released from the top and the bottom of the pizza, not the sides. The heat released from the crust, for instance, remains trapped,” says Mehta.

Mehta’s solution is simple. Cardboard, he explained consists of three layers: two flat surfaces and one ridged corrugated sheet in between. VENTiT boxes have holes in the two flat surfaces, but not in the middle layer. This permits steam to travel through the grooves in the middle corrugated layer, without getting trapped inside the box. More importantly, no additional material is required to manufacture the box.

To illustrate his point, Mehta inserts incense sticks inside VENTiT and another pizza box. In spite of the holes at the side, steam does escape through the regular pizza box, but when we turn to Mehta's box, we see spirals of smoke coming through. ''It isn't rocket science — any homemaker will tell you — you never seal chapattis immediately after they come off the gas. You wait for the heat to escape for it to stay fresh.”

“It’s the biggest challenge of pizza box designers to create something that retains heat without trapping steam while still staying inexpensive and I think this box has achieved just that!” said Wiener.

Here’s what the box promises to do:

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Mehta points to the smoke escaping his box and smiles. This delivery box design is not limited to pizza boxes alone — Mehta has created similar packaging for parathas, frankies and Indian dishes delivered in those tubs by restaurants.

Mehta's boxes are supplied across India and Dubai today (40 pizza brands use his boxes in Mumbai alone). Smokin' Joe's, Pizza Metro Pizza and Francesco's Pizzeria use VENTiT, too.

Mehta is planning to tie up with international partners to produce and distribute VENTiT boxes all over the world. It took him five years to obtain an initial patent and he started selling the box only in 2011. He now has patents in over 100 countries.

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Self-Expiring Medicine Packaging

For most of us, the blister packs our medicines come in are just temporary barriers to be scratched open with our fingernails or popped open like Chiclets. We usually don’t even pay attention to the tiny, vaguely printed expiration dates tattooed on the silver skin of our aspirin or cough medicine’s packaging; we take for granted that it’s in date.



Gautam Goel and Kanupriya Goel are a husband-and-wife doctor/designer team who were inspired to try to tackle the problem of expiring medicines after helping their grandparents clean out their medicine cabinets. "In their frail states, with such limited vision and dexterity, they found it extremely challenging to read the expiration dates printed in these tiny five-point fonts on their medicine strips." And even if they could read the expiration dates, they found it difficult to interpret medical information on a package that was written in English, a language that was not their native tongue.

Kanupriya Goel received the Red Dot award for this concept

The Goels realized this was a problem that was a lot bigger than their grandparents’ bathrooms. "Outside of the West, there is little awareness to the concept of a medicine becoming 'expired,'" say the Goels. "We’re not even just talking about the market shelf-life of a medicine strip here. It’s alarming how little the average person understands how quickly a medicine becomes dangerous for consumption."

The team’s design is informed by research of focused groups in India, like the elderly population, construction workers, slum dwellers, and kids between age 6-12. They realized that in many cases people were not aware of the concept of expiration of medicines. While in some cases the awareness of such a concept was limited, in many others the inability to find or read it on the packaging posed additional problems. The team found that in India medicinal strips had the expiration information stamped in one corner. In the event that these strips were sold as a single dose, the expiration information would be missing. In some cases it was observed the retailers sold expired medicines cheaper to earn a profit. The team sought out wanted a solution that could solve the problem, and raise awareness at all levels.

The Goels’ solution is very simple. Instead of simply printing the expiration date on a blister pack of medicine, which can be hard to read or which can wear off, why not coat the foil with a specially treated paper that changes color as it ages? That way, you could have medical packaging that starts out, say, blue, but turns red when it expires, or gets crossed out with a big "X." If you wanted to be even more dramatic, you could design packaging where the international grimoire of death and danger, the skull and crossbones, gradually appears when a medicine becomes unsafe for consumption.



The technology to create this kind of packaging isn’t out of reach: We’ve already seen ID badges and milk cartons that change color as they expire. Self-expiring medicine packaging seems like a natural fit. As with so many things in the world of big pharma, though, the obstacles in the way of realizing the Goels’ clever design don’t have anything to do with the tech, and definitely not the soundness of the idea.

"The truth is, this kind of packaging might never become a reality unless pharmaceutical companies can profitably pass off the additional cost of the packaging, however miniscule, to the patient," the Goels say. "An FDA mandate could be critical in getting this on shelves."

There could also be regulatory and legal challenges involved that could nix this idea in the bud. "The pharma world is über regulated, and liability lawyers hover around every corner," says Dermot Gildea, an expert on pharmaceutical regulation based in Dublin, Ireland. "In addition, the process to register a change in outer packaging, like the printed packs that a pharmacy might hand to a patient, is more stringently regulated than one might think." Even so, Gildea thinks the Goels might be onto something here. "If the inner pack’s appearance when the medicine is in date is similar to the current form, and the appearance only changes when the medicine expires, then I think this idea could be a winner."

Whether or not the Goels’ concept can clear regulatory, legal, and self-serving pharma industry hurdles is unknown. What is sure, though, is that we all could live in a world where no one has to guess whether a medicine is safe to take.

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