Value Innovation:: The Kano Model

Innovation is consistently delivering exceptional value to the most important customer in the value chain.

The Kano Model is a survey process that allows you to categorize customer solutions and needs according to the level of excitement created in the customer. The Kano model asks customers to rate their level of excitement when a feature of the solution is present and when the feature is not present. The gap in excitement allows the feature to be classified as a “must have”, “delighter” or something in between. This process can also be used on customer needs statements, but the Outcome Driven Innovation is more robust and yields more comprehensive results, therefore, the Innovation EFA recommends using Kano only for concept testing.

Steps to applying the Kano Model:

–Inputs to the Kano model
–Constructing a Kano Survey
–Analyzing Survey Data
–Kano Classification
Part 1 – Using the Kano Matrix
Part 2 – Determining Overall Classification
–Opportunities for Segmentation
–Four Block Analysis


In other words, the Kano Model is a helpful tool for the Idea Generation/Evaluation.

New Air Conditioning Revolution?

It´s interesting to follow the recent post that I wrote, and to know that there are new interesting ways to "up date" or renovate our air conditioning and cooling systems. As the previous post we were talking about new materials for "Creating" Cooling, at this link we can take a look to other way to do this. It is similar to how photovoltaic cells work,

Just Take a Look.

http://www.tetech.com/FAQ-Technical-Information.html#1

New cooling idea

As we wrote in a 2008 post, we can innovate over a new technology to deliver comfort and cooling capacity using "new ideas" for this. Please read the next article.

Your refrigerator’s humming, electricity-guzzling cooling system could soon be a lot smaller, quieter and more economical thanks to an exotic metal alloy discovered by an international collaboration working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)’s Center for Neutron Research (NCNR).

The alloy may prove to be a long-sought material that will permit magnetic cooling instead of the gas-compression systems used for home refrigeration and air conditioning. The magnetic cooling technique, though used for decades in science and industry, has yet to find application in the home because of technical and environmental hurdles—but the NIST collaboration may have overcome them.

Magnetic cooling relies on materials called magnetocalorics, which heat up when exposed to a powerful magnetic field. After they cool off by radiating this heat away, the magnetic field is removed, and their temperature drops again, this time dramatically. The effect can be used in a classic refrigeration cycle, and scientists have attained temperatures of nearly absolute zero this way. Two factors have kept magnetic cooling out of the consumer market: most magnetocalorics that function at close to room temperature require both the prohibitively expensive rare metal gadolinium and arsenic, a deadly toxin.

But conventional gas-compression refrigerators have their own drawbacks. They commonly use hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), greenhouse gases that can contribute to climate change if they escape into the atmosphere. In addition, it is becoming increasingly difficult to improve traditional refrigeration. “The efficiency of the gas cycle has pretty much maxed out,” said Jeff Lynn of NCNR. “The idea is to replace that cycle with something else.”

The alloy the team has found—a mixture of manganese, iron, phosphorus and germanium—is not merely the first near-room-temperature magnetocaloric to contain neither gadolinium nor arsenic—rendering it both safer and cheaper—but also it has such strong magnetocaloric properties that a system based on it could rival gas compression in efficiency.

Working alongside (and inspired by) visiting scientists from the Beijing University of Technology, the team used NIST’s neutron diffraction equipment to analyze the novel alloy. They found that when exposed to a magnetic field, the newfound material’s crystal structure completely changes, which explains its exceptional performance.“Understanding how to fine-tune this change in crystal structure may allow us to get our alloy’s efficiency even higher,” says NIST crystallographer Qing Huang. “We are still playing with the composition, and if we can get it to magnetize uniformly, we may be able to further improve the efficiency.”

Members of the collaboration include scientists from NIST, Beijing University of Technology, Princeton University and McGill University. Funding for the project was provided by NIST.

Creativity in crisis time

A German Campaign for the Sparkasse Bank, using the actual crisis time, it shows a strong insight message: Throwing your pennies to a fountain to ask for a wish. Do you copy? :” Wishes? Rather invest your money safely.

Now a days when we spoke about worldwide crisis, the opinions are very wide: invest, wait, to low expenses, discounts, strategies, etc. The point where every opinion converge is that 2009 woun´t be easy. Creativity will be helpful to pass this, using innovative ways to publish your “adds” or to communicate to your costumers, using furniture and media at lower money costs but at high “mind” costs. Take a look at what´s new, here I present these two brilliant ideas.

Got the big picture???

Invisibility it´s a real reality?

Numerous Sci-Fi movies we can watch people turning invisible like a magik trick.By now, cientists have discovered some materials which molecular structure make them possible to "turn" the light to pass bording an spheric object and it will not can be seen.These fibers are called "MetaMaterials", and they are capable to virtually make objects invisible to someone looking infront of them
This video is from a latin TV program (the video is in spanish), just take a look folks!

For Innovators, There Is Brainpower in Numbers

Despitethe enduring myth of the lone genius, innovation does not take place in isolation. Truly productive invention requires the meeting of minds from myriad perspectives, even if the innovators themselves don’t always realize it.

Keith Sawyer, a researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, calls this “group genius,” and in his book of the same name he introduces a scientific method called interaction analysis to the study of creativity. Through studying verbal cues, body language and incremental adjustments during team innovation efforts, Mr. Sawyer shows that what we experience as a flash of insight has actually percolated in social interaction for quite some time.
“Innovation today isn’t a sudden break with the past, a brilliant insight that one lone outsider pushes through to save the company,” he says. “Just the opposite: innovation today is a continuous process of small and constant change, and it’s built into the culture of successful companies.”
It’s a perspective shared broadly in corporate America. Ed Catmull, president of Pixar Animation Studios and Disney Animation Studios, describes what he calls “collective creativity” in a cover article in the September issue of Harvard Business Review. “Creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working together to solve a great many problems,” he writes. “Creativity must be present at every level of every artistic and technical part of the organization.”
So, we all should brainstorm our way through the day, right? Wrong. That classic tool introduced by Alex Osborn in 1948 has been proved in a number of studies over the last 20 years to be far less effective than generally believed. “He had it right in terms of group process,” says Drew Boyd, a businessman based in Cincinnati who blogs and speaks often about innovation. “But he had it wrong in terms of the method.”
Brainstorming, Mr. Boyd says, is the most overused and underperforming tool in business today. Traditionally, brainstorming revolves around the false premise that to get good ideas, a group must generate a large list from which to cherry-pick. But researchers have shown repeatedly that individuals working alone generate more ideas than groups acting in concert. Among the problems are these: Throwing in an idea for public consideration generates fear of failure, and workers looking to advance their own interests often keep their best ideas to themselves until a more opportune time.
Instead of identifying a problem and then seeking solutions, Mr. Boyd suggests turning the process around: break down successful products and processes into separate components, then study those parts to find other potential uses. This process of “systematic inventive thinking,” which evolved from the work of the Russian engineer and scientist Genrich Altschuller, creates “pre-inventive” ideas that then can be expanded into innovations.
Kapro Tools, working with an Israeli company called Systematic Inventive Thinking, used the method to create a new type of bubble level calibrated to help build gentle slopes to improve drainage. Previously, construction workers approximated the slope they wanted by placing a nail or other object under the edge of a standard level.
“Innovation is a team sport,” Mr. Boyd says. “There’s a dynamic that happens between people that produces results I just don’t see with an individual.”
Even Albert Einstein, society’s most common mental picture of genius, needed group input to hone his insights. According to “Einstein’s Mistakes” by Hans Ohanian, the great physicist’s derivation of the famous equation E=mc2 contained several errors; it wasn’t until 1911 that another scientist, Max von Laue, developed a full and correct proof.
“The best innovations occur when you have networks of people with diverse backgrounds gathering around a problem,” says Robert Fishkin, president and chief executive of Reframeit Inc., a Web 2.0 company that creates virtual space in a Web browser where users can share comments and highlights on any site. “We need to get better at collaborating in noncompetitive ways across company and organizational lines.”
THAT’S exactly what innovators at a dozen health care systems throughout the country had in mind nearly four years ago when they formed the Innovation Learning Network, says its director, Chris McCarthy. The problem, he says, is that there are so few health care innovators within each organization that introducing technologies and processes can be painstakingly slow. “We thought if we could get all these experienced folks together to push each other’s thinking continually, we’d all be better off,” he says.
What started as a grant-financed, one-year trial is now a member-financed permanent network, he says. The members bring in new technologies and experiment with them in a faux clinical setting in San Leandro, Calif.,. One of the first large-scale initiatives to arise from the network is KP MedRite, an effort at Kaiser Permanente’s 32 hospitals to ensure that nurses are not interrupted while dispensing medications. Other member health care systems have already begun to introduce the program at their sites.
By using the group’s knowledge and experience, Kaiser Permanente accomplished in less than a year what would have required roughly two years to do without the network, Mr. McCarthy says. “It was a huge jump-start for us,” he says. “The group effort allows us to move much more quickly and become successful much faster.”

This article was extracted form the NY Times.

e-volve !

I thought people would simply use the service to buy and sell things, but what they really enjoyed was meeting other people. (Pierre Omidyar, Founder, eBay).

Searching … Searching… reads the message at the bottom of my screen. It seems emblematic of the state of the world. Everywhere I turn, I find people who want to know what the internet really means for their future and what they must do to succeed.

Internet is a revolutionary technology that cannot be ignored or avoided. New economic and organizational forces stemming from the rise of the Internet affect more than just those people and companies whose work centers around the World Wide Web. These forces have an impact on workplaces of all kinds, reaching non-computer users as well as avid techies. The Internet has the potential to transform every economic and social institution, from business to education to health care to government.

“ A must-read for all who care about the future”

People and organizations at every stage of internet sophistication face the same burning question: How should they change in order to succeed in a digital world?

Renowned thinker and business trailblazer Rosabeth Moss Kanter says answers will be found not in cyberspace but on the ground, where real people connect, collaborate, and form thriving human communities. In this eye-opening book, Kanter explores what she calls “e-culture” – a new wat of living and working that will transform every aspect of today´s organizations.

Kanter argues that networks of relationships, not just new technologies, permit speed and seamlessness, encourage creativity and collaboration, and release energy and brainpower – the “soul” of e-business. And every organization – from dotcoms to dotcom-enablers (technology and service providers) to wannadots (traditional companies struggling to embrace the Web) – must lead to build and foster them.

Based on a landmark project with a rare on-site access, over 300 interviews, and 785 company global survey, Evolve! Provides a hands on blueprint for adopting the core principles of e-cultrue: treat strategy as improvisational theater; nurture networks of partners; reconstruct organizations as online and offline “communities”; and attract and retain top talent.

With colorful and memorable stories, Kanter illuminates vast differences between older, more conservative companies and aggressive, born-digital dotcoms. She takes us deep inside evolving organizations – including IBM, eBay, Reuters, Sun Microsystems, Razorfish, Abuzz, barnesandnoble.com, Williams-Sonoma, and pioneering public schools – to provide best practices from e-culture pacesetters and cautionary lessons from internet laggards. Defining the skills leaders need to master change, she reveals how dotcoms and dotcomenablers can grow fast while crafting a great culture, and how wannadots can benefit by becoming Web-enabled.

For anyone who wants to realize the potential and avoid the pitfalls od the Internet Age, this pathbreaking book identifies and analyzes the emergence of e-culture – and provide a lively, rool-up-your-sleeves guide to profiting from tomorrow.

Mind Mapping: Your Thoughts On Paper

If you’re a “thought leader” or an “idea generator,” you are probably familiar with the problems surrounding the generation and control of ideas.

Ideas generation can’t be effectively organized with Post-it notes or legal pads. Sure, you can write all of your brain sparks on Post-its but it’s hard to share them or get input from others to help you organize and prioritize things. Most flowcharting software requires 6 hours of computer science just to understand the menus. Aside from the learning curve, they also are not cheap.

Fortunately, there are some affordable (even free) tools you can install on your computer that can help you think the way you like to think and still organize and share those ideas. These are called mind mappers. Mind maps let you arrange things intuitively based on your individual classification method, which, with “idea generators,” often is non-linear in nature. Some ideas don’t make sense on their own so here’s a chance to organize things based on the way you think rather than the way some software thinks is best for you. These can usually be either concept-based or structure hierarchically.

Mind mappers to try out:
FreeMind
Pimki
Buzan’s Mind Map
OpenMind (integrates with MS Office)
SmartDraw
WikkaWiki (a wiki with a native mind mapper)

Looking for the perfect Battery !

This is an exctract of the article published in the economist.

WHEN General Motors (GM) launched the EV1, a sleek electric vehicle, with much fanfare in 1996, it was supposed to herald a revolution: the start of the modern mass-production of electric cars. At the heart of the two-seater sat a massive 533kg lead-acid battery, providing the EV1 with a range of about 110km (70 miles). Many people who leased the car were enthusiastic, but its limited range, and the fact that it took many hours to recharge, among other reasons, convinced GM and other carmakers that had launched all-electric models to abandon their efforts a few years later.

Yet today about a dozen firms are once again developing all-electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles capable of running on batteries for short trips (and, in the case of plug-in hybrids, firing up an internal-combustion engine for longer trips). Toyota's popular Prius hybrid, by contrast, can travel less than a mile on battery power alone. Tesla Motors of San Carlos, California, recently delivered its first Roadster, an all-electric two-seater with a 450kg battery pack and a range of 350km (220 miles) between charges. And both Toyota and GM hope to start selling plug-in hybrids as soon as 2010.

So what has changed? Aside from growing concern about climate change and a surge in the oil price, the big difference is that battery technology is getting a lot better. Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, which helped to make the mobile-phone revolution possible in the past decade, are now expected to power the increasing electrification of the car. “They are clearly the next step,” says Mary Ann Wright, the boss of Johnson Controls-Saft Advanced Power Solutions, a joint venture that recently opened a factory in France to produce lithium-ion batteries for hybrid vehicles.

According to Menahem Anderman, a consultant based in California who specialises in the automotive-battery market, more money is being spent on research into lithium-ion batteries than all other battery chemistries combined. A big market awaits the firms that manage to adapt lithium-ion batteries for cars. Between now and 2015, Dr Anderman estimates, the worldwide market for hybrid-vehicle batteries will more than triple, to $2.3 billion. Lithium-ion batteries, the first of which should appear in hybrid cars in 2009, could make up as much as half of that, he predicts.

Compared with other types of rechargeable-battery chemistry, the lithium-ion approach has many advantages. Besides being light, it does not suffer from any memory effect, which is the loss in capacity when a battery is recharged without being fully depleted. Once in mass production, large-scale lithium-ion technology is expected to become cheaper than its closest rival, the nickel-metal-hydride battery, which is found in the Prius and most other hybrid cars.

Still, the success of the lithium-ion battery is not assured. Its biggest weakness is probably its tendency to become unstable if it is overheated, overcharged or punctured. In 2006 Sony, a Japanese electronics giant, had to recall several million laptop batteries because of a manufacturing defect that caused some batteries to burst into flames. A faulty car battery which contains many times more stored energy could trigger a huge explosion—something no car company could afford. Performance, durability and tight costs for cars are also much more stringent than for small electronic devices. So the quest is under way for the refinements and improvements that will bring lithium-ion batteries up to scratch—and lead to their presence in millions of cars.

Alessandro Volta, an Italian physicist, invented the first battery in 1800. Since then a lot of new types have been developed, though all are based on the same principle: they exploit chemical reactions between different materials to store and deliver electrical energy.

Back to battery basics

A battery is made up of one or more cells. Each cell consists of a negative electrode and a positive electrode kept apart by a separator soaked in a conductive electrolyte that allows ions, but not electrons, to travel between them. When a battery is connected to a load, a chemical reaction begins. As positively charged ions travel from the negative to the positive electrode through the electrolyte, a proportional number of negatively charged electrons must make the same journey through an external circuit, resulting in an electric current that does useful work.

Some batteries are based on an underlying chemical reaction that can be reversed. Such rechargeable batteries have an advantage, because they can be restored to their charged state by reversing the direction of the current flow that occurred during discharging. They can thus be reused hundreds or thousands of times. According to Joe Iorillo, an analyst at the Freedonia Group, rechargeable batteries make up almost two-thirds of the world's $56 billion battery market. Four different chemical reactions dominate the industry—each of which has pros and cons when it comes to utility, durability, cost, safety and performance.

The first rechargeable battery, the lead-acid battery, was invented in 1859 by Gaston Planté, a French physicist. The electrification of Europe and America in the late 19th century sparked the use of storage batteries for telegraphy, portable electric-lighting systems and back-up power. But the biggest market was probably electric cars. At the turn of the century battery-powered vehicles were a common sight on city streets, because they were quiet and did not emit any noxious fumes. But electric cars could not compete on range. In 1912 the electric self-starter, which replaced cranking by hand, meant that cars with internal-combustion engines left electric cars in the dust.

Nickel-cadmium cells came along around 1900 and were used in situations where more power was needed. As with lead-acid batteries, nickel-cadmium cells had a tendency to produce gases while in use, especially when being overcharged. In the late 1940s Georg Neumann, a German engineer, succeeded in fine-tuning the battery's chemistry to avoid this problem, making a sealed version possible. It started to become more widely available in the 1960s, powering devices such as electric razors and toothbrushes.

For most of the 20th century lead-acid and nickel-cadmium cells dominated the rechargeable-battery market, and both are still in use today. Although they cannot store as much energy for a given weight or volume as newer technologies, they can be extremely cost-effective. Small lead-acid battery packs provide short bursts of power to starter motors in virtually all cars; they are also used in large back-up power systems, and make up about half of the worldwide rechargeable-battery market. Nickel-cadmium batteries are used to provide emergency back-up power on planes and trains.

Time to change the batteries

In the past two decades two new rechargeable-battery types made their commercial debuts. Storing about twice as much energy as a lead-acid battery for a given weight, the nickel-metal-hydride battery appeared on the market in 1989. For much of the 1990s it was the battery of choice for powering portable electronic devices, displacing nickel-cadmium batteries in many applications. Toyota picked nickel-metal-hydride batteries for the new hybrid petrol-electric car it launched in 1997, the Prius.

Nickel-metal-hydride batteries evolved from the nickel-hydrogen batteries used to power satellites. Such batteries are expensive and bulky, since they require high-pressure hydrogen-storage tanks, but they offer high energy-density and last a long time, which makes them well suited for use in space. Nickel-metal-hydride batteries emerged as researchers looked for ways to store hydrogen in a more convenient form: within a hydrogen-absorbing metal alloy. Eventually Stanford Ovshinsky, an American inventor, and his company, now known as ECD Ovonics, succeeded in creating metal-hydride alloys with a disordered structure that improved performance.

Adapting the nickel-metal-hydride battery to the automotive environment was no small feat, since the way batteries have to work in hybrid cars is very different from the way they work in portable devices. Batteries in laptops and mobile phones are engineered to be discharged over the course of several hours or days, and they only need to last a couple of years. Hybrid-car batteries, on the other hand, are expected to work for eight to ten years and must endure hundreds of thousands of partial charge and discharge cycles as they absorb energy from regenerative braking or supply short bursts of power to aid in acceleration.

Lithium-ion batteries evolved from non-rechargeable lithium batteries, such as those used in watches and hearing aids. One reason lithium is particularly suitable for batteries is that it is the lightest metal, which means a lithium battery of a given weight can store more energy than one based on another metal (such as lead or nickel). Early rechargeable lithium batteries used pure lithium metal as the negative-electrode material, and an “intercalation” compound—a material with a lattice structure that could absorb lithium ions—as the positive electrode.

The problem with this design was that during recharging, the metallic lithium reformed unevenly at the negative electrode, creating spiky structures called “dendrites” that are unstable and reactive, and can pierce the separator and cause an explosion. So today's rechargeable lithium-ion batteries do not contain lithium in metallic form. Instead they use materials with lattice structures for both positive and negative electrodes. As the battery discharges, the lithium ions swim from the negative-electrode lattice to the positive one; during recharging, they swim back again. This to-and-fro approach is called a “rocking chair” design.

The first commercial lithium-ion battery, launched by Sony in 1991, was a rocking-chair design that used cobalt oxide for the positive electrode, and graphite (carbon) for the negative one. In the early 1990s, such batteries had an energy density of about 100 watt-hours per litre. Since then engineers have worked out ways to squeeze more than twice as much energy into a battery of the same size, in particular by reducing the width of the separator and increasing the amount of active electrode materials.

The high energy-density of lithium-ion batteries makes them the best technology for portable devices. According to Christophe Pillot of Avicenne Développement, a market-research firm based in Paris, they account for 70% of the $7 billion market for portable, rechargeable batteries. But not all lithium-ion batteries are alike. The host structures that accept lithium ions can be made using a variety of materials, explains Venkat Srinivasan, a scientist at America's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The combination of materials determines the characteristics of the battery, including its energy and power density, safety, longevity and cost. Because of this flexibility, researchers hope to develop new electrode materials that can increase the energy density of lithium-ion batteries by a factor of two or more in the future.

Hooked on lithium

The batteries commonly used in today's mobile phones and laptops still use cobalt oxide as the positive electrode. Such batteries are also starting to appear in cars, such as Tesla's Roadster. But since cobalt oxide is so reactive and costly, most experts deem it unsuitable for widespread use in hybrid or electric vehicles.

So researchers are trying other approaches. Some firms, such as Compact Power, based in Troy, Michigan, are developing batteries in which the cobalt is replaced by manganese, a material that is less expensive and more stable at high temperatures. Unfortunately, batteries with manganese-based electrodes store slightly less energy than cobalt-based ones, and also tend to have a shorter life, as manganese starts to dissolve into the electrolyte. But blending manganese with other elements, such as nickel and cobalt, can reduce these problems, says Michael Thackeray, a senior scientist at America's Argonne National Laboratory who holds several patents in this area.

In 1997 John Goodenough and his colleagues at the University of Texas published a paper in which they suggested using a new material for the positive electrode: iron phosphate. It promised to be cheaper, safer and more environmentally friendly than cobalt oxide. There were just two problems: it had a lower energy-density than cobalt oxide and suffered from low conductivity, limiting the rate at which energy could be delivered and stored by the battery. So when Yet-Ming Chiang of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues published a paper in 2002 in which they claimed to have dramatically boosted the material's conductivity by doping it with aluminium, niobium and zirconium, other researchers were impressed—though the exact mechanism that causes the increase in performance has since become the subject of a heated debate.

Dr Chiang's team published another paper in 2004 in which they described a way to increase performance further. Using iron-phosphate particles less than 100 nanometres across—about 100 times smaller than usual—increases the surface area of the electrode and improves the battery's ability to store and deliver energy. But again, the exact mechanism involved is somewhat controversial.

The iron-phosphate technology is being commercialised by several companies, including A123 Systems, co-founded by Dr Chiang, and Phostech Lithium, a Canadian firm that has been granted exclusive rights to manufacture and sell the material based on Dr Goodenough's patents. At the moment the two rivals are competing in the market, but their fate may be decided in court, since they are fighting a patent-infringement battle.

The quest for the perfect battery

Johnson Controls and Saft, which launched a joint venture in 2006, are taking a different approach, in which the positive electrode is made using a nickel-cobalt-aluminium-oxide. John Searle, the company's boss, says batteries made using its approach can last about 15 years. In 2007 Saft announced that Daimler had selected its batteries for use in a hybrid Mercedes saloon, due to go on sale in 2009. Other materials being investigated for use in future lithium-ion batteries include tin alloys and silicon.

At this point, it is hard to say which lithium-ion variation will prevail. Toyota, which is pursuing its own battery development with Matsushita, will not say which chemistry it favours. GM is also hedging its bets. The company is testing battery packs from both A123 Systems and Compact Power for the Chevy Volt (pictured), a forthcoming plug-in hybrid that will have an all-electric range of 40 miles and a small internal-combustion engine to recharge its battery when necessary. To ensure that the Volt's battery can always supply enough power and meet its targeted 10-year life-span, it will be kept between 30% and 80% charged at all times, says Roland Matthe of GM's energy-storage systems group.

GM hopes to start mass-production of the Volt in late 2010. That is ambitious, since the Volt's viability is dependent on the availability of a suitable battery technology. “It's either going to be a tremendous victory, or a terrible defeat,” says James George, a battery expert based in New Hampshire who has followed the industry for 45 years.

“We've still got a long way to go in terms of getting the ultimate battery,” says Dr Thackeray. Compared with computer chips, which have doubled in performance roughly every two years for decades, batteries have improved very slowly over their 200-year history. But high oil prices and concern over climate change mean there is now more of an incentive than ever for researchers to join the quest for better battery technologies. “It's going to be a journey”, says Ms Wright, “where we're going to be using the gas engine less and less.”

Marketing on the Beach... Stamping the Sand??

Stamping the sand.

It is a marketing art, innovativa, high impact and unique (almost in Chile).
Daily when the sun rise, any beach that you chose, will wake up with ads in the sand. It is impossible avoid to see it! There are more than 2.500 impresions for every 300 meters of sand beach. There will no space in the sand without your ad!

These pictures where taken in La Serena city (Chile), and they are a real test.

The Chilean company who offer this kind of ads is ANEPCO.

Fabric Protection From Sun!

Another idea we were thinking in our "labs" was a product to protect our curtain and back yard furniture from sunlight and the weather conditions. Unfortunately SunArmor already has developed it.


Fabrics fade in both direct and indirect sunlight, from sunlight passing through windows and onto interior surfaces. Scientists agree that long term exposure to solar radiation should be limited in order to prevent damaging fabrics, upholstery and other surfaces both inside and outside the home.

After redecorating your home its time to protect your fabric and upholstery investment from harmful sun rays. SunArmor Ultra Violet Protection a unique product sprayed directly onto your fabric can stop the damaging ultra violet rays from fading your fabrics and causing them to lose their original colors.

Current architectural trends and improvements in energy conserving glass have lead to homes with larger windows, high number of windows, clearer glass, and open interior spaces inundated with natural light. While beautiful and relaxing, ordinary clear window glass allows 80-90% of the sun’s UV radiation, the most damaging type of sun radiation, to enter. For many years, collectors of high end artwork have used expensive ‘conservation glass’ to block UV rays from damaging their art.

This is a pricey and in Damage caused to Fabrics Clearly the most evident and visible damaged caused to interior fabrics is the fading of the colors seen over time. The color changes are often dramatic especially when brighter, and more ‘eco friendly’ fabrics are used, as the reduction in color saturation due to bleaching is more harmful to brighter colors and the non-solvent based nature of the dyes used in eco-friendly fabrics. In addition to the quickly fading colors on couches, carpets, pillows, and other upholstery, additional material damage including cracking and tensile strength reduction causing fabric to be brittle and break or tear easily. By using a spray open product such as SunArmor Ultra Violet Protection, both the structural fabric damage and the color fading can be prevented on various types of fabrics.

Direct Sunlight and Ultraviolet Damage– Indoors Extensive research prepared by the US Library of Congress to protect the original copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence showed that while blocking all the ultraviolet radiation portion of the solar spectrum does not eliminate damage caused by fading, it does slow down the rate of the fading and other damage by about three.

Current methods of protection include: Methods of protection - Physical blocking of light o Heavy curtains to prevent ultra violet and visible light from entering a room o Sheets or other light colored fabrics draped over furniture - Window glass treatment o Conservation glass o UV films to stop UV rays from entering the room - Fabric treatment o Spray on treatment such as SunArmor Ultra Violet Protection (www.gogonco.com) SunArmor Ultra Violet Protection is a unique coating sprayed directly onto fabrics and uses advanced technology to fight Sun Damage and Fading on fabrics such as upholstery, area rugs, carpet, drapes, covered outdoor furniture, auto upholstery, boat upholstery, and any fabric-like surface receiving harmful sun exposure. Works to dissipate both UVA and UVB rays by absorbing the UV radiation and dissipate the energy as low level heat. A simple application will prevent sun damage for 4-6 months in direct sunlight indoors, 3-4 months in direct sunlight outdoors, and 6-8 weeks for extreme desert conditions.

SunArmor Ultra Violet Protection will not change the color, texture, or feel of your fabrics. The product offers a cost effective method to prevent high quality and delicate fabric from sun damage and fading. To provide additional water and stain damage, SunArmor UV Protection must be sealed with SunArmor™ Water & Stain Protection.

Wired Magazine: Top Technology Breakthroughs of 2008

The economy may be tanking, but innovation is alive and well.

When it came to products, incremental improvements were the name of the game this year. Phones got faster (iPhone 3G anyone?), notebooks turned into netbooks and pocket cameras went from recording standard-definition video to HD.

But the world's corporate and academic R&D labs were busy laying the foundations of some amazing future technologies in 2008. They produced concepts such as silicon chips you can swallow for personalized medicine from the inside out and a fourth fundamental element in electronic circuitry. And engineers cranked out a few less groundbreaking — but no less important — inventions, like a space-age swimsuit to help Michael Phelps slice through the water faster than a river otter on a jet ski.

Here's our countdown of what rocked our world in 2008 — and what will change yours in 2009 and beyond.

Minerals Flotation Process Optimization

Building PCA Models for Fault Detection in an Industrial

Rougher Flotation Circuit.

Luis G. Bergh and Felipe Niada.

Automation and Supervision Center for Mineral Industry, CASIM.

Chemical Engineering Department, Santa Maria University, Valparaiso, Chile.

ABSTRACT

On line fault detection, for instrumentation and process operation, has become important part of industrial programs leading to improve process operation and therefore product quality over time. Today, great amount of process variables are routinely collected at high frequency by Distributed Control Systems (DCS). Also, many variables, mainly related to the quality of a product, such as the concentrate grade and process recovery in the flotation processes are infrequently available. High problem dimensionality, highly correlated process input variables, rather low signal/noise ratios and missing data are some of the main difficulties found in modeling the process for monitoring and diagnosis purposes. Multivariate statistical projection methods, such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA), have been proposed to effectively deal with these situations. In this work, an industrial rougher flotation circuit is operated under distributed control of froth depth, and chemical reactive dosages, to experimentally collect operation data at steady state, to build a PCA model. The rougher circuit is formed by 5 banks with an array of 2-3-3-3-3 cells of 3000 ft3. Each bank has a froth depth measurement and control and a Metso camera to send froth surface images to be processed. Feed, final concentrate and final tailings are obtained by on stream analysis, using Courier system from Outokumpu. Feed flow rate and its characteristics are also measured. The dosage of chemical reactive are measured and controlled as a ratiowith feed tonnage. The image processing system from Metso produces almost 30 variables characterizing the flotation froth. Some years ago, several studies were conducted to correlate these froth characteristics with concentrate grade. The results were most of the time inconsistent and no industrial application using the full set of information provided by cameras is known until today. Froth velocity is commonly used to modify the set point of froth depth controllers. The hypothesis that froth characteristics captured by image analysis correspond to the so called top of froth, and that the grade on the froth is not homogeneous, but distributed along the depth, will lead to the conclusion that better models can be found only if feed characteristics, chemical reagent dosages and cell operating conditions (froth depth and sometimes air flow rate) are included in the data. However, in one bank more than fifty variables are involved now, posing difficulties to obtain representative models. Therefore, the use of multivariate statistical projection methods is the appropriate tool to model the correlation existing in the data. In this work, the first part of building alternative PCA models is discussed.

CONCLUSIONS.

Flotation control quality is strongly depending on the accuracy of measurements and estimations. The flotation process is complex and it is a real challenge to decide which variables are to be changed in order to drive back the process to a normal operation. The application of multivariate statistical methods, and particularly PCA, is a powerful tool to build linear models containing the essential of the process phenomena with the minimum number of latent variables. The application of PCA models to monitoring flotation cells, based on the combination of froth characteristics and operating variables has been demonstrated.

These PCA models can be effectively used as part of a supervisory control strategy, especially when control decisions are infrequently made.

Details That Mark

Edward Lorenz, meteorologist and founding mathematician of the theory of the chaos, based part of his thought on the “butterfly effect”, originating of an old Chinese proverb: “the fluttering of the wings of a butterfly can be felt to the other side of the world”. Edward got to say that the fluttering of a butterfly in Brazil could bring a storm in Taiwan. The theory of the chaos says that in certain natural systems, small changes in the initial conditions lead to enormous discrepancies in the results.


Steve Jobs, president of Mac, in the speech to the graduate students at Stanford comments facts of its life that at some time were only details that did not seem to be important for their life. But these details deeply marked the differences that made of Mac a computer of graph and design of cult. That detail: handwriting classes when he was university student in Stanford.


On the other hand is Randy Pausch, ex- professor of computer science of Carnegie Mellon, his dream always was to work in Disney like Imagineer. When fulfilling its dream, that was during one sabbatical year, developed system called Alice to teach computer animations to students in a entertained and didactic way. Alice has been a full success, which is being implemented in several computer science centers at global level.


However, if we extrapolated those small details that mark differences in the organizations, we would create excellence organizations. Following this approach we would try to locate our company more near our clients, with this many companies have created systems of points, surveys, e-mails, contests or other systems to maintain near its clients. What directly falls to the communication between the company and the client. The problem is when the personnel (own or outsourcing) represent the company between this delicate and important communicational relation. If we own a call center or direct attention to the client, the people who are in this “face to face”, reflects the situation or the spirit of the company. Of this grapnel anchor great companies as McDonald´s owns a training of attention to the client, in who the personnel must be in favor always tidy, smiling, kind and amiable with the client, on the other hand if we observed restaurant and the young delay in arriving or does not take care of the client amiably, which happens in the major of the cases, generates in the client a terrible experience and probably it does not return to go to that premises. This type of details really marks to the difference between the success and the failure of a company.


Soon for all the clients and consumers, who always we are in some minute, everything is transformed in the experience of purchase and the importance of this experience expanding it to the post-sales one or to the experience even opening the packing of iPhone, similar to open a collection article. In other words, more than an exceptional product or a fabulous packing, we must focus our post-sales organization, products and in the details focused to the experience of our clients. From this form we will be able to obtain happy clients, with which we will be able to interact like organization approaching us the success based on the effect of the small details that mark differences.

Innovative Christmas Tree

Merry Christmas Folks!!!

We wish you the best for all of you. I we want to present to you some great idea for an innovative Christmas tree, which can be used as a marketing innovative idea for a beer brand.

As you can see, the tree was made with beer bottles and the star with bottle covers. It looks great!