Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Countless fashion magazines and websites tantalize readers with promises of flawless beauty: Get the pout of a supermodel! The doe eyes of a starlet! The abs of a pop singer! Here’s what we’d look like if we actually took our beauty cues from the glossies:

Twenty-four-year-old German designer Meike Harde collaged masks out of the eyes and mouths of various celebrities and models she found online. These “correspond to the current ideal of beauty,” she says. “When put on, however, they cause contortions of the face. This is meant to show that artificially produced beauty is not always beautiful.”

Sounds like someone’s been studying her Cindy Sherman! Harde developed Too Beautiful To Be True for an exhibit in Saarbruecken. At the opening, she invited visitors to strap on masks and mill around as they would at any other event. Needless to say, this produced “many unsettled reactions during the evening.”

Images courtesy of Meike Harde

With 71% of New Orleans schoolchildren attending charter schools, the atmosphere is ripe for testing new educational ideas. Enter 4.0 Schools, a nonprofit incubator that helps turn teachers into entrepreneurs.

UNITED STATES
OF INNOVATION

New Ideas, New Markets, New Insights

All around the country, Americans are dreaming big. Their boldest ideas are changing their communities–and having a ripple effect throughout the world.

CLICK HERE to see how innovation takes many forms

Seventy-one percent of New Orleans’s schoolchildren attend charter schools, a legacy of Katrina. While charters’ performance as measured by student test scores both nationwide and in the city has been mixed, they undeniably increase the local appetite for trying new educational ideas. “If you’re an edtech entrepreneur who wants to pilot an idea, you have the most efficient and smartest market in the country here,” says Matt Candler, CEO of 4.0 Schools. That’s because instead of a centralized bureaucracy, there are more than 40 schools making independent decisions on both hiring and procurement. Organizations like KIPP, Teach for America, and the Gates Foundation have established beachheads, drawing top teachers and fresh blood from all over the country. These are intersecting with a nascent startup scene dubbed “Silicon Bayou” to produce a hothouse of ideas to change education: for-profit and non-profit, from school redesigns to apps, often from younger, female entrepreneurs.

As Silicon Valley capital becomes increasingly interested in education—witness ur-angel investor Jason Calcanis holding his first ever LAUNCH event focusing on education, and Benchmark making its biggest ever seed investment in startup university Minerva—it’s a fair bet that a surprising number of successful companies will come from the Big Easy. “This is a place where you can do entrepreneurship AND do some amazing things for kids who really need it,” says Candler, who knows a bit about both. He opened schools all over the country for KIPP, did similar work for Joel Klein in New York City, and founded New Schools New Orleans, a program for aspiring school leaders.

Unique in the country, 4.0 Schools is a nonprofit incubator founded in December of 2010 that runs four-day intensives, book clubs, unconferences and other programs to turn teachers and others with a passion for education into for-profit or nonprofit entrepreneurs with solutions. In February, four participants went up to Startup Weekend – Edu in New York City, where they swept first, second, and third place in the competition. The winners were Jess Bialecki’s Classroom Blueprint, a social network for teachers to compare classroom design ideas; Aliya Bhatia’s Dash, a mobile app that helps teachers keep in touch with parents; and Chapman Snowden’s Kinobi, which uses the Microsoft Kinect to help train teachers in classroom management.

The role of teachers in improving schools is a subject of surprising controversy. The reform agenda popularized by high-profile chancellors like Joel Klein in NYC and Michelle Rhee in DC has been criticized for  scapegoating, sanctioning, and making it easier to fire teachers. Others might argue that being with kids in the classroom is more than a full-time job without asking teachers to wear the entrepreneur hat. Candler and others in New Orleans look to teachers as an undertapped resource for school transformation.

“As they were racing to catch a plane, because they had to teach the next day, VCs were chasing them out the door,” says Candler. “This is our vision of success: to encourage classroom teachers who work their butts off already so that they believe in themselves and investors think they can have an impact.”

Candler has a more roundabout connection to the current star of the local edtech startup scene. Jen Medbery is a TFA alum with a CS degree from Columbia who originally came to New Orleans to teach at a New Schools New Orleans startup. Her application, Kickboard, is a dashboard that aims to help teachers make better use of data on students’ performance and behavior–information that’s now scattered in gradebooks and post-it notes. They’re marketing directly to teachers who are turning around and convincing their colleagues and entire schools to adopt the platform—it’s now in use in 11 states. “”As we head into the summer and the start of our second sales cycle we’re on track to double our national customer base of schools,” says Medbery. “We’ve taken this not only as evidence of the demand for a product like Kickboard, but of the eagerness of teachers and school leaders to adopt a more analytical approach to teaching and learning.”

Image: Orange Line Media via ShutterStock

Despite a cheeky promotional claim that profitability is “not something we think about,” Punch has a grand vision of becoming a lucrative tablet publishing platform. But first, a quiz: hedge fund or organic farm?

David Bennahum is the CEO of Punch, a news and entertainment app that launched last week for the iPad. Pulling up Punch on your iPad brings shelves filled with various items; tapping on these loads miniature in-app apps that feature topical, interactive content. (Want to dress a digital Rick Santorum doll? You came to the right place.) Fast Company spoke with Bennahum about Punch’s antecedents–including the historical British satire publication of the same name–as well as its future; Punch has a grand vision of becoming a publishing platform. Despite the claims made around the 0:45 mark in Punch’s self-satirizing promo video (below), the company very much has thought about profitability–perhaps more deeply than most iPad publishers.

The tagline for Punch is “Make Fun.” How does that motto inform the core of Punch?

The idea emerged between Punch founding editor, Radar magazine founder Maer Roshan and myself about two years ago. Both of us, I think, first of all, appreciate the commercial value of satire and comedy as a way into journalism and the news. Secondly we felt the emergence of the tablet was creating a hunger for topical original content that could only exist on a tablet and nowhere else. We had a sense even back then that it was going to be a huge success as a consumer product, and that there would be a limit to how much aggregation and recycling of existing media the tablet consumer would want to get.

What about tablets creates a hunger for original content?

The tablet is the first multipurpose digital device whose only function is the consumption of digital media. The reason you buy an iPad is to consume digital media. If you think you’re gonna use it to do word processing, you’ll be dissatisfied. Why buy a tablet? To be entertained. The tablet is truly its own medium, and with any new form of media, in the first days people will repurpose existing products: Theater was repurposed in the early days of film, and radio was repurposed in the early days of TV. Within a short period of time, it becomes obvious that there’s a bigger opportunity to create original content for the medium. That’s where we are now: Two years after the first iPad hit the market, we’re at a pivot point where there are enough people with a real appetite for original entertainment.

In one sense, Punch is an app; in another, it’s a platform for other, tiny, in-app apps.

Eight months ago we faced a decision: Would the mini-apps be their own apps, which we’d submit to Apple every time? That might take several weeks to deploy. Our CTO Daniel Wyszynski built this fairly unique piece of technology. We had a problem to solve: How do you create an experience that’s native to the tablet and keeps up with the metabolism of popular culture, without having to code all the time? Dan’s a visionary for understanding that opportunity and for building a platform where you can change content in real time.

You launched with 10 mini-apps, including one game where users try to tell the difference between the names of hedge funds or organic farms, and a paper-dolling game where you get to dress Rick Santorum. How often will you reuse these templates, and how often will you roll out entirely new ones?

We’re figuring out what can be franchised as recurring things. Do you want paper dolls as a recurring template, and if so, what should the frequency be? Maybe only once every couple of months, or six times per year. At the same time, the system is extendable. However, every time you add more capability, you have to do an app update, and you don’t want to push too many updates, because people don’t update apps all the time, and there’d be a disconnect where chunks of the audience can’t consume the new content. We finally have the ability to get feedback now, so we need to listen for the next month or so, talk to our audience, and do some research.

Conceiving of your app as a platform allows you to monetize in ways beyond most publishing ventures. What are all your various potential revenue streams?

There are three in the near-term. The first is revenue from people placing sponsored items on the Culture Shelf Punch’s home screen. That’s traditional advertizing, and it’s important. For items to appear on the Culture Shelf, there would be some issue of tone and fit with Punch, like with any magazine. The second is what we call premium upgrades–something where we are able to give a taste of some content, and from there, you can purchase more.

So you would have an in-mini-app purchase?

Exactly. The third revenue stream is in the licensing of the platform, where a publisher would pay us a licensing fee to have the right to use the system, plus some additional revenue based on performance. These would be white-label versions, independent from our own shelves–a turnkey solution for others to release their own apps on the App Store.

And the fourth revenue stream?

The fourth potential revenue stream is the idea that you could subscribe to Punch down the road for some amount of money. That’s a little farther out: We won’t be able to understand the audience’s appetite until we’ve been operating for a little while.

Were you inspired by the legendary British satirical publication, Punch, or is the naming a coincidence?

There’s a reference there. When we had the notion of doing a satirical entertainment app for tablets, the question of naming came up. Appreciating what Punch did in the 19th century in terms of inventing the political cartoon, we thought, “Hey, we’re at the precipice of something equally new, the tablet, and we have to talk about reinventing things like the political cartoon.” Our item called “12 Angry Men” top image reinvents what a cartoon looks like. So there’s some intentional DNA with the Punch name. Also, “punch” suggests what you do with your hands–striking something. You don’t punch the iPad, but you are hitting it with your finger. So the name evokes a gesture. Other inspirations were the original Spy magazine, and things like The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live, as well as Mad Magazine.

What’s the main lesson you hope others draw from this venture?

We’re hoping people realize, first, that there’s something called iPad-native media, and Punch is an example. And second, that it’s a problem to produce this stuff–it’s unusually difficult to create topical content on the iPad–and it shouldn’t be. Programming is detail-oriented, and requires a lot of keystrokes. But it’s a problem that’s been solved in other media; on the web, it’s solved by platforms like WordPress, for example. When browsers first came out, people had to hand-stitch everything; there were no platforms. Because we needed to solve a problem internally, we created the nucleus of a fairly extendable platform ourselves.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

For more from the Fast Talk interview series, click here. Know someone who’d make a good Fast Talk subject? Mention it to David Zax.

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Images: Punch, Wikipedia, Flickr user TheGiantVermin

The traditional grid calendar is a domestic device. It works well enough for scheduling weekly errands because Thursdays always fall in the same place. Time, on a hectic family scale, is less about long-term goals than short-term events.

The Linear Calendar, by Marke Johnson of The Made Shop, looks at time differently. It splits each month as its own line, placing twelve legible timelines into a year (a year that you always see), and it staggers each month to line up with the proper days of the week. Rather than focus on a month to the scale of the week, it focuses on a year to the scale of the month.

In doing so, it becomes a tool for shaping the big picture, from the long term goals that disappear one notch at a time, to the trip you’ve been saving for that occurs six months from now.

“My older brother and I used to talk about the idea that it can be harmful to think of time as circular or cyclical (i.e. repeating days, weeks, years) as opposed to linear, because for us it tended to encourage a sort of complacency in thinking: ‘Well, this week wasn’t so great, but another one just like it is coming up,’” Johnson tells Co.Design. “But when we reminded ourselves to think of time with a linear instead of circular metaphor, each day or span of time felt a bit more precious, fleeting, and important to use well.”

If you think about it, the typical year-long calendar is useless. It’s really just the product of shrinking down each gridded month onto a single page. You can figure out which day the 18th falls on in four months, but you can’t make notations or mark events. It’s a product that’s simultaneously too small and too bulky to be of any use. “They’re also pretty ugly,” Johnson adds.

Meanwhile, the Linear Calendar is extremely practical. Rather than sacrificing real estate to a grid of boxes that doesn’t scale, it builds in a more open white space to make notations. It’s an elegant, year-long template for all of your scribbles. And should you be interested in owning a 2012 Linear Calendar of your own, they’re available in 24″ x 18″ limited-edition letterpress for $15.

Buy it here.

Hat tip: bltd