Open up your mind and say, ahh...

The result is a network of air data, built from very specific niches. Culturally, AirWaves plays to the skepticism of the Chinese of “faceless data.”

Mnemo-Amsterdam
Cross a fitness band, a social network, and a friendship bracelet. What you get is Mnemo. It’s a means to record memories–audio, video, and the friends you’re with–through a simple interaction with your wristband. And it can be personalized, much like a friendship bracelet, with colored string.

You’ll still need a phone for many functions (like snagging videos), but physical gestures drive the interface. For instance, by linking two bracelets, friends can create multiple perspectives of the same moment.

CompassGo-Milan
Even in the age of GPS, to explore cities today, Frog points out our tendency to “pre-Google” our destinations. What’s lost? The feelings of spontaneity and exploration.

CompassGo chooses a simple category (like culture, food or relaxation), displays that category with an icon, then points you the way to your next adventure.

Hello World DIY-Seattle
How do you get tweenage girls interested in technology? Sew it into their clothing. This is a kit of “accessible Arduino projects” that are wearable without programming skills.

Icho-Munich
This navigation aid for the vision-impaired not only enhances perception through sonar proximity sensors, but it uses a combination of GPS, accelerometers, and haptic feedback to lead its user through an urban environment. Imagine a museum audiotour that you can hear and feel.

Kinetik-San Francisco
Kinetik is basically a backup battery for your phone. Its twist?

You wear Kinetic through your life while it harnesses your natural kinetic energy. Fitness becomes a “tangible reward”–and with a bit of extra battery power, you won’t have to worry about your phone running out of juice during an extended adventure.

A companion app builds a network of location-based energy patterns. I imagine it’d be a lot of fun to see the wattage produced at a mass sporting event like a marathon.

MTA Relay-New York
Relay is a band to help navigate New York’s transit system. Its three strands hide dynamic displays, which will glow with the colors of nearby lines and transfers, while providing up-to-date scheduling information.

Over time, the band actually learns your commuting patterns. The only catch? It would rely heavily on underground infrastructure, like RFID or other radio technology, to keep the band in the know beneath layers of asphalt and concrete.

Tree Voice-Austin
What if trees could talk? That’s sort of the idea behind Tree Voice, a wearable for nature.

Its sensors collect data on the environment like noise, temperature, and pollution. And it “sparks” to life with motion sensors and a display for passersby.

Together, these tree bands form a giant network of environmental data that can reveal more about our neighborhoods. Frog imagines a new wave of data to influence everything from government policy to where you buy your next house. To me, it’s a digital equivalent to the networked heart trees in Game of Thrones.

Cheap chemical pesticides are expert at wiping out millions of insects with a few hundreds dollars worth of chemicals. Yet as the health and environmental costs of pesticides mounts, and resistance against pesticides is on the rise after decades of chemical warfare in the fields, the equation is looking a little different.

Hence renewed interest in biopesticides. Harnessing the armory nature has given to bacteria, fungi, and even other plants allows researchers to redirect the sophisticated strategies species have evolved over millions of years to protect crops in the field.

An estimated 80% of the treated insects died within one to three weeks.

Fungi, in particular, have proven to be agricultural mercenaries. Applied at the right time, with the right treatment, fungal spores can cut down armies of insects–such as the application of “Green Muscle” over 10,000 hectares in Tanzania in 2009. Trillions of specialized fugal cells called “conidia” from the fungus Metarhizium anisopliae, were sprayed in solution of mineral oil to weaken the locusts devouring crops in East and Southern Africa. An estimated 80% of the treated insects died within one to three weeks. Other animals were unharmed. And the biopesticide (developed through a public-private partnership among governments and aid donors) continued working: the fungus infected new locusts until the population crashed (compared to the repeated applications required by chemical pesticides).

Still, the problem is one of costs. Biopesticides may be cheaper overall, but the cost the farmer sees is the price on the bottle. There, chemicals have an edge: the Green Muscle application cost $17 per hectare compared to $12 for conventional chemicals. Much of the cost was in the production of the fungal spores themselves.

Now researchers have discovered a technique to radically change that equation. A new approach developed by U.S. Department of Agriculture scientists brews the biopesticide with “liquid culture fermentation,” versus conventional methods using expensive nitrogen source (typically derived from agricultural commodities like milk casein at $6 pound). The fermentation can use less expensive sources such as soybean flour or cottonseed meal at 30 to 50 cents a pound to produce the fungus.

The next step is commercialization. In the case of the Green Muscle, “most of the project’s impact is still to be felt,” reports the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. More than 10 years after developing a useful product, the project will likely take another decade or more to become widely adopted. “This is because the eventual level of sales of Green Muscle depends on the correction of the market failure whereby the human and environmental health costs of spraying chemical pesticides are not charged to the purchaser,” says the report. Or perhaps just a cheaper product.

So you have a foosball table at work. And an in-house masseuse. And maybe even an ironic conversation pit. But do you have a chair shaped like a molecular model? An art installation made of guitar pedals? How about a nonsensical shade over your desk that says, “If this shade is down I’m not who you think I am”? You do not. But David Byrne does, and for those reasons, his office is cooler than yours.

Brooklyn-based Gil Inoue snapped photographs of the Talking Head-turned-bike evangelist at his expansive, whimsy-drenched office in an old sweatshop in Soho, New York, recently for the Brazilian magazine TRIP. Inoue spent a few hours there, photographing the space and Byrne himself. Originally, Inoue wanted to shoot Byrne riding a vintage penny-farthing on the cobblestone streets of Soho, but they decided against it. “It was too dangerous,” Inoue says. He snapped this instead:

Byrne is one of those polymaths who has remained remarkably innovative into the early evening of his life, excelling in everything from art to music to writing. Now we get a glimpse of the environment that fuels all that creativity.

Note to self: Buy a penny-farthing.

For an extended tour of Byrne’s office, narrated by Byrne himself, go here.

Most iPhone peripherals aim low. They make the case a bit more durable or add a better speaker. They marginally improve a pretty darn good product.

The full Lapka sensor suite, along with its abstract viewing mode. A steel probe checks for nitrates, which are commonly used in chemical fertilizers.

But Lapka is something totally different. It’s an appcessory billed as a “personal environment monitor,” and through its collection of four peripherals, Lapka gathers analog measures of humidity/temperature, radiation, electromagnetic frequencies (EMF) and organicity (whether or not a food is truly organic). And it does so beautifully, with a mix of plastic and wood components–aesthetics that were considered down to the circuit boards, which will also match in white.

“Since this is a healthcare and environmental product, we used organic materials like wood and ivory-like plastic, it will look better with time… it’ll become your very own, personal talisman,” says Creative Director Vadik Marmeladov. “Our aim was to build an native iPhone accessory–not a design copy attempt. All our designs, usage simplicity, attention to detail and quality are based on Apple philosophy and mood, so we don’t have to copy iPhone’s shiny body to fit its aesthetics.”

Each peripheral obviously works a bit differently. The most compelling–the organicity device–uses a steel probe to check for nitrate concentration, which are commonly used in non-organic fertilizers. But the cleverness comes in how Lapka shares this information with the user. A parts per million measurement would make no sense to the average person, just like few of us have any understanding of acceptable radiation levels.

Sensors from left to right, top to bottom: EMF, Radiation, Humidity/Temp, Organicity.

In turn, the UI (which we’re currently unable to test) approaches each measurement at two levels. The first is a simple “is this acceptable” style measurement screen, which can contextualize worries like EMF based upon your predicted environmental exposure, or weather by typical temperatures in your area that time of year.

“For example, you can measure radiation on the plane and little bit higher level will be okay, because app knows that you’re won’t stay there for 24 hours and that higher radiation is common for the planes,” Marmeladov writes. “But with the same level of radiation in your kid’s bedroom it will alarm you and give you explanation to motivate your further actions. So, people don’t have to rely on their knowledge about radiation anymore to protect their family and themselves.”

This environmental snapshot can then be sent to friends.

The second way Lapka visualizes information entirely abstract. Marmeladov likens the experience to an Ambilight television, as onscreen particles accelerate in a red pool as the environment becomes less safe. This environmental snapshot can then be sent to friends, who can view it without purchasing the system. Of course, not having seen the effect in person, it certainly sounds a bit strange. But then again, how else but abstraction are we going to visualize these absurdly tiny details like radiation and nitrates?

As of now, Lapka is in prototype stage, ramping up for mass production soon. (We’ll see if these sensors can really do what they promise.) The collection of four peripherals should be available this December for roughly $220. And following that, Lapka’s team will likely chase all other peripherals, like an allergen sensor, glucometer, blood pressure monitor, oscilloscope, vehicle diagnostics device and fitness tracker. Your iPhone may soon resemble a centipede.

Dieter Rams is best-known for his work at Braun–where he revolutionized the design of electronics–and his indelible influence on Apple’s Jony Ive. But he has had a decisive hand in another, much smaller company: Vitsœ, a British manufacturer that has been producing Rams’s modular shelving system for 50 years. To mark his 80th birthday, the German master has allowed Vitsœ to release the transcript of the speech he delivered in New York in 1976, in which he articulates his ethos of user-centered design and some of his famous 10 commandments. In 2012, they feel as if they were written yesterday. Enjoy–Ed.

Here’s the historic speech in its entirety:

Ladies and gentlemen, design is a popular subject today. No wonder because, in the face of increasing competition, design is often the only product differentiation that is truly discernible to the buyer.

The introduction of good design is needed for a company to be successful. However, our definition of success may be different to yours. Striving for good design is of social importance, as it means, amongst other things, absolutely avoiding waste.

Unwavering emphasis on functionality

The ideas behind my work as a designer have to match with a company’s objectives. This principle applies to my work not only at Braun but also at Vitsœ. I have been working for these two companies for about 20 years and–I like to point out–only for these two companies.

I am convinced that design–at least in the terms I understand it–cannot be performed by someone outside the company. I am absolutely convinced that this is true if products are designed as part of a larger system, like we do at Vitsœ.

In 1957 I began to develop a storage system that formed the basis of the company Vitsœ, which was founded in 1959. Thus the ideology behind my design is engrained within the company.

Ladies and gentlemen, design is a popular subject today. No wonder because, in the face of increasing competition, design is often the only product differentiation that is truly discernible to the buyer.

Rams’s famed shelving system for Vitsœ. Good design is of social importance, as it means absolutely avoiding waste.

I am convinced that a well-thought-out design is decisive to the quality of a product. A poorly designed product is not only uglier than a well-designed one but it is of less value and use. Worst of all it might be intrusive. The development and changes that we have initiated with our work at Vitsœ are, I believe, positive for the development of good design as a whole.

The introduction of good design is needed for a company to be successful. However, our definition of success may be different to yours. Striving for good design is of social importance as it means, amongst other things, absolutely avoiding waste.

What is good design? Product design is the total configuration of a product: its form, color, material, and construction. The product must serve its intended purpose efficiently.

A designer who wants to achieve good design must not regard himself as an artist who, according to taste and aesthetics, is merely dressing up products with a last-minute garment. The designer must be the gestaltingenieur or creative engineer. They synthesize the completed product from the various elements that make up its design. Their work is largely rational, meaning that aesthetic decisions are justified by an understanding of the product’s purpose.

I am convinced that people have an interest in what we are doing at Vitsœ since our products are useful; I expect they also appreciate the aesthetic that follows. These qualities are the result of progressive and intelligent problem solving. Functionality must be at the center of good design.

You cannot understand good design if you do not understand people.

A product must be functional in itself but it also must function as part of a wider system: the home. Vitsœ’s 606 Universal Shelving System is successful due to its high functionality and its ability to adapt to any environment. Vitsœ’s furniture does not shout; it performs its function in relative anonymity alongside furniture from any designer and in homes from any era. We make the effort to produce products like this for the intelligent and responsible users–not consumers–who consciously select products that they can really use. Good design must be able to coexist.

You cannot understand good design if you do not understand people; design is made for people. It must be ergonomically correct, meaning it must harmonize with a human being’s strengths, dimensions, senses, and understanding.

Vitsœ’s direct contact with its customers has led to a deep understanding of people. Over the years, our understanding of how you use a shelf or an armchair has increased. We have educated and diligent people worldwide who understand how to plan systems in configurations that our customers may not necessarily have thought of at the beginning.

Order and proportion: Only orderliness makes a product useful

All objects that are to be used must be subject to a clear order. The remarkable order of design at Vitsœ has the purpose of communicating the function of the object to the user. The design of a Vitsœ product clearly points out its purpose and its use–and facilitates them. The order of the elements–their arrangement, their shape, their size, and their color–is based on a thoroughly planned system. This system is the language of Vitsœ design.

The majority of products try to impress us with their magnificence or miniscule size.

But this order is not self-serving; and I would not call it ideology because it is a practical necessity. For design to be understood by everyone–which good design should strive to do–it should be as simple as possible. Design at Vitsœ brings all individual elements into proportion. An often-cited feature of the Vitsœ collection is its balance, its harmony, its belonging together. All structures, components, and finishes coexist as a well-balanced and harmonious design that gives it usability.

The majority of products that we encounter in our day-to-day lives scream for attention or try to impress us with their magnificence or miniscule size. These objects try to dictate our relationships with them. Good design creates powerful long-lasting relationships with products as good design creates objects with balanced proportions; at Vitsœ we go further by trying to create objects in balanced proportion with people.

Good design means to me: as little design as possible

To use design to impress, to polish things up, to make them chic, is no design at all. This is packaging. When we concentrate on the essential elements in design, when we omit all superfluous elements, we find forms become: quiet, comfortable, understandable and, most importantly, long lasting.

Vitsœ products are in constant evolution. We do not limit our products to the manufacturing technologies available at the time of their design. Built into the language of Vitsœ products is adaptability–adaptability for the user in the home and adaptability in design and manufacture.
We are constantly looking for new and better technical solutions for our products. As technology and production processes are always advancing, innovations are not only possible but they are necessary for a product to continue to be considered good design.

We have experienced that people are more willing than ever to change their lifestyles; that they accept innovative solutions–not fake ones–and are able to rid themselves of old and cemented habits with our products. They expect such innovative solutions, particularly from Vitsœ.

***

Ladies and gentlemen, our environment is changing rapidly. How will these changes affect our design concepts? Can design that claims longer-range validity be reactive to current circumstances or must it be proactive for the future?

In a room where the proportions are noticed we feel better and we think differently. A neglected and uncared-for landscape will have a different effect on our lives than one that is natural and orderly. There is a lot of work to do on the topic of our physical surroundings affecting our psychological functions. This is the work we do at Vitsœ.

People are more willing than ever to accept innovative solutions. Not fake ones.

But Vitsœ only makes furniture today. There are larger questions that we need to answer about our urban environment and how it affects us as individuals and as a society. What effects do electricity pylons, skyscrapers, highways, street lighting and car parks, for example, have on our psyche and relationships? We know that the residents of anonymous concrete blocks can become depressed as a result of their surroundings. But who is researching these things systematically? Who takes all of this really seriously?

I imagine our current situation will cause future generations to shudder at the thoughtlessness in the way in which we today fill our homes, our cities, and our landscape with a chaos of assorted junk. What a fatalistic apathy we have towards the effect of such things. What atrocities we have to tolerate. Yet we are only half aware of them.

This complex situation is increasing and possibly irreversible: there are no discrete actions anymore. Everything interacts and is dependent on other things; we must think more thoroughly about what we are doing, how we are doing it and why we are doing it.

Indeed, the collapse of the entire system may be impending.

I have spoken of our surroundings but let us look at the wider environment: the world we live in. There is an increasing and irreversible shortage of natural resources: raw materials, energy, food, and land. This must compel us to rationalize, especially in design. The times of thoughtless design, which can only flourish in times of thoughtless production for thoughtless consumption, are over. We cannot afford any more thoughtlessness.

The complexity of systems and shortage of natural resources should compel a change of individual attitudes and attitudes as a society. We learn as individuals and we learn as a group. We are beginning to understand the changes that we are only just seeing. We must take notice with increasing soberness and, hopefully, with growing alertness and rationalism.

Ladies and gentlemen, if we at Vitsœ have contributed towards intelligent, responsible design and a higher quality of objects, I believe we owe our thanks to a great degree to the unselfish enthusiasm and the always-consequent attitude of one man: Niels Vitsœ. At the same time, thanks to all the members of staff, who sense that they have done a little more than just produce another short-lived consumer product.

Good design is a reality!

Via FastCoDesign: http://www.fastcodesign.com/

There are an estimated 1,000 vacant buildings in the Netherlands. For a small country, that number is massive and has sparked debate among Dutch architects for years. In fact, the country’s contribution to the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale was a massive model of the thousands of empty buildings that dot the country’s landscapes. “Why is there so much unused architecture in the Netherlands?” asked the curators.

When Rotterdam- and Paris-based firm Ooze accepted a commission to build an addition to a suburban Rotterdam home in 2009, they hoped to address the debate animating their peers. Their client’s existing home, which was built in the early 20th century and added to in 1991 and 2003, was a Frankenstein of styles and structures. What would have horrified many architects struck Ooze’s partners as an opportunity: to utilize pre-existing architecture, while pushing forward their goals as contemporary architects.

Strict limits on the footprint of Ooze’s expansion meant they were forced to consider unusual paths toward increasing the home’s square footage. Instead of building up a new structure, the addition wraps around the load-bearing members of the original house, increasing the home’s volume while controlling the footprint. The new volumes sit atop the old home like a faceted hat.

Ooze’s client, Gaby, was concerned with preserving what she called the “soul” of the original patchworked house. The language of the addition–prefab timber faced with stained black panels and sedum green roofs–is a deliberate mashup of Dutch farmhouse vernacular and new generative techniques. But the architects claim the folded structure is anything but formal. “It’s not an object,” writes photographer Jeroen Musch. “It’s a collection of very comfortable spaces.”

The addition is sweetly unapologetic for its alien appearance, as if it alighted on the site after taking a shine to the pre-existing home. “We’re convinced that reclaiming the past is a form of discovery,” say Ooze principals Eva Pfannes and Sylvain Hartenberg, “away from the tabula rasa, towards a more sustainable way of enriching our environment.

STANFORD, California — Ferrari President and Chairman Luca di Montezemolo sat down with Apple’s CEO Tim Cook for an exclusive meeting of the minds earlier this week. The Ferrari chief, in the San Francisco Bay Area for the season opener of Stanford University’s View From the Top lecture series, gleaned insight from Steve Jobs’ successor and found shared values between the two brands.

Speaking to the assembled masses of students at Stanford, di Montezemolo honed in on each company’s core tenets, saying “attention to the brand, exclusivity, attention to the people, attention to the environment” and control from a central location are fundamental to each company’s success and continued growth.

Di Montezemolo drew a parallel between himself and Jobs’ role in Apple’s renaissance. The Ferrari president and former chairman of FIAT S.p.A took the reigns of the ailing supercar manufacturer in 1991, helping to reestablish the marque in Formula One racing and position Ferrari as a leader in automotive performance and technology.

During his meeting with Cook, di Montezemolo came away with a few insights into Apple’s methods and goals, specifically the company’s focus on simplicity, design and “a passion for product.”

Di Montezemolo went on to praise the management style and leadership at Apple, including its employees’ commitment to producing world-class products and the continued inspiration that Jobs instilled in its workers.

“When you’ve got a leader in a company like Steve Jobs, people have big respect and big gratitude for what he’s done.”

“When you’ve got a leader in a company like Steve Jobs,” di Montezemolo said during his talk, “people have big respect and big gratitude for what he’s done.”

The talk was primarily aimed at Stanford’s MBA students, with di Montezemolo espousing his own management style and what it takes to succeed on the world stage.

“Vision is something crucial for your people.” di Montezemolo said. “Give them clear goals, clear priorities and give everyone the possibility to grow up internally.”

He also took the opportunity to throw a few barbs towards Ferrari’s competition from Germany, admitting that, “Porsche, after Ferrari, is the best car,” but while “they’re perfect, they’re like a freezer. Cold. I prefer the red technology; the hot technology.”

Technological advancements were an underlying thread during di Montezemolo’s talk, with the Ferrari head citing the automaker’s push towards maximum performance and maximum efficiency, not just for outright speed, but in his words, “emotional driving.”

In an interview with WIRED, the Ferrari president touted the advances the automaker has made with its Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems (KERS), specifically the hybrid V12 drivetrain shown at this week’s Beijing Motor Show and destined to power its next mid-engine, flagship supercar later this year.

When asked about the possibility of moving beyond hybrid technology and into fully electric vehicles, di Montezemolo shakes his head and simply answers, “No.”

“To do electric you need big batteries,” di Montezemolo says, citing both weight and technological concerns. “I believe a lot in the hybrid. I want to build cars that have performance and can travel far. I want to drive from here to New York if I want.” But he concedes that smaller cars for inner-city travel are better suited to electrification and that the Chevrolet Volt – with its plug-in hybrid drivetrain and range-extending engine – is a solid concept.

“I’m not here to sell. I’m here to let you dream.”

He also admits that Ferrari is looking at the possibility of a plug-in hybrid, but for now a KERS-based hybrid system is what the automaker will be focusing on for the foreseeable future.

However, what Ferrari isn’t considering is an SUV – a competitor to the recently revealed Lamborghini Urus.

“Ferrari has to remain a dream and has to remain a car with very innovative technology,” according to di Montezemolo, who chuckles when he says, “It must remain a hedonistic car.”

“Because we have Maserati in our group, they can do as they do,” he says, referring to the forthcoming Kubang SUV from Ferrari’s corporate sibling and its planned launch next year. “I want to maintain our identity,” and di Montezemolo maintains an SUV would dilute the brand.

Towards the end of his address, Ferrari’s president recognized he was speaking to future customers, joking that he’d happily show them one of the 458 Italias parked outside. But after pulling off his tie during the Q&A session, di Montezemolo concedes to a round of applause that, “I’m not here to sell. I’m here to let you dream.”

If you want to be charismatic, your mind can’t wander while you’re one-on-one with a customer or colleague. Here’s a simple one-minute exercise to help you focus.

Charismatic behavior can be broken down into three core elements: presence, power, and warmth. These elements depend both on our conscious behaviors and on factors we don’t consciously control. People pick up on messages we often don’t even realize we’re sending through small changes in our body language.

In order to be charismatic, we need to choose mental states that make our body language, words, and behaviors flow together and express the three core elements of charisma. And presence is the foundation for everything else.

Have you ever felt, in the middle of a conversation, as if only half of your mind were present while the other half was busy doing something else? Do you think the other person noticed? If you’re not fully present in an interaction, there’s a good chance that your eyes will glaze over or that your facial reactions will be a split-second delayed. Since the mind can read facial expressions in as little as 17 milliseconds, the person you’re speaking with will likely notice even the tiniest delays in your reactions.

We may think that we can fake presence. We may think that we can fake listening. But we’re wrong. When we’re not fully present in an interaction, people will see it. Our body language sends a clear message that other people read and react to, at least on a subconscious level.

Not only can the lack of presence be visible, it can also be perceived as inauthentic, which has even worse consequences. When you’re perceived as disingenuous, it’s virtually impossible to generate trust, rapport, or loyalty. And it’s impossible to be charismatic.

Luckily, presence is a learnable skill that can be improved with practice and patience. Being present means simply having a moment-to-moment awareness of what’s happening. It means paying attention to what’s going on rather than being caught up in your own thoughts.

Now that you know the cost of lacking presence, try this exercise to test yourself and learn three simple techniques to boost your charisma in personal interactions.

First, find a reasonably quiet place where you can close your eyes (whether standing or sitting).
Set a timer for one minute. Close your eyes and focus on one of the following three things: the sounds around you, your breathing, or the sensations in your toes.

1. Scan your environment for sound. As a meditation teacher told me, “Imagine that your ears are satellite dishes, passively and objectively registering sounds.”
2. Focus on your breath and the sensations it creates in your nostrils or stomach. Pay attention to one breath at a time, but try to notice everything about this one breath. Imagine that your breath is someone you want to give your full attention to.
3. Focus your attention on the sensations in your toes. This forces your mind to sweep through your body, helping you to get into the physical sensations of the moment.

Did you find your mind constantly wandering even though you were trying your best to be present? As you’ve noticed, staying fully present isn’t always easy. There are two main reasons for this.

First, our brains are wired to pay attention to novel stimuli, whether they be sights, smells, or sounds. We’re wired to be distracted, to have our attention grabbed by any new stimulus: it could be important! It could eat us! This tendency was key to our ancestors’ survival. Imagine two tribesmen hunting through the plains, searching the horizon for signs of the antelope that could feed their family. Something flickers in the distance. The tribesman whose attention wasn’t immediately caught? He’s not our ancestor.

The second reason is that our society encourages distraction. The constant influx of stimulation we receive worsens our natural tendencies. This can eventually lead us into a state of continuous partial attention, in which we never give our full attention to any single thing. We’re always partially distracted.

So if you often find it hard to be fully present, don’t beat yourself up. Presence is hard for almost all of us. A study coauthored by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert estimated that nearly half of the average person’s time was spent “mind wandering.”

The good news is that even a minor increase in your capacity for presence can have a major effect on those around you. Because so few of us are ever fully present, if you can manage even a few moments of full presence from time to time, you’ll make quite an impact.

The very next time you’re in a conversation, try to regularly check whether your mind is fully engaged or whether it is wandering elsewhere (including preparing your next sentence). Aim to bring yourself back to the present moment as often as you can by focusing on your breath or your toes for just a second, and then get back to focusing on the other person.

One of my clients, after trying this exercise for the first time, reported: “I found myself relaxing, smiling, and others suddenly noticed me and smiled back without my saying a word.”

Don’t be discouraged if you feel that you didn’t fully succeed in the one-minute exercise above. You actually did gain a charisma boost simply by practicing presence. And because you’ve already gained the mindset shift (awareness of the importance of presence and the cost of the lack of it), you’re already ahead of the game.

Image: Flickr user Paul Alegria

One of YouSendIt’s three founders was fired. Another pleaded guilty to a federal charge involving a cyberattack he launched on YouSendIt. Somehow, third cofounder Ranjith Kumaran walked away from the disaster with a new set of leadership lessons.

Startups and investors call me when they’re having founding team issues. It’s no surprise given the health of the two founding teams in which I’ve been a part.

Founding Team 1.0: Khalid Shaikh, Amir Shaikh, and I started YouSendIt in 2004. I stayed on and built the company for 6.5 years and am still on the board. The business had $39 million in revenue in 2011. Amir was fired by the board and Khalid is awaiting sentencing for launching a denial of service attack against YouSendIt.com.

Founding Team 2.0: Mehdi Ait Oufkir and I started PunchTab in 2011. Barely a year in the market, PunchTab powers 6000+ loyalty programs and already has large paying customers with a growing sales pipeline. We raised our seed round off of a PowerPoint, launched our first product in three months, and had multiple inbound term sheets for a $5.2 millionSeries A financing (with early YouSendIt investors participating) that was closed within six months.

I was part of a brutal founding team trainwreck at my first company. Here’s what I learned and did differently the second time.

1. Titles are meaningless but expectation setting is crucial.

All of our YouSendIt business cards read “cofounder” until the fateful day a well-meaning angel investor asked “Who’s the CEO here?” We then did the title thing for fundraising optics, a mutually agreed upon, really bad idea.

What we should have agreed on were roles and expectations before the company was formed. Mehdi and I had that talk concerning PunchTab when we sat down for the very first time. Sort this out with everyone who is early at the company, otherwise you’ll waste a lot of time dancing around the issues.

2. Oddball terms from either side will hurt everyone.

We received one Series A term sheet at YouSendIt. The terms were standard and there wasn’t a lot of back and forth about valuation. PunchTab received multiple term sheets. And still both sides combed through every detail to make sure that we don’t spook anyone in the company already or people we will work with in the future.

It’s a small ecosystem, and the last thing you want is to start a new partnership explaining away old surprises.

3. Let the attorneys work on documents while you work on trust.

Many decisions we made for PunchTab’s seed financing were closed with a handshake. Gestures made on both sides included commitments such as, “just tell us how big the check needs to be,” “we won’t take any more investor meetings,” and “let’s make room for anyone else you want in.”

I knew most of the investors for years, but why deal with this? Because it’s the best way to make deals, and the best investors understand this. Pick cofounders and your broader team based on shared values. You have no idea how much overhead it saves.

4. Founding teams get screwed up every day.

Here are the top reasons I get called for advice by first-time founding teams and venture funds trying to help their founders:

-The guilt felt by one founder taking a leadership role (first among equals) after cranking on product for so long. I spent my 2010 Christmas holidays learning Python + Django (I’m an old PHP guy) so I can contribute to PunchTab’s products as well.

-The realization that you haven’t really worked with someone until you’ve started a company together. I’ve been in the valley for 11 years and can easily count the people I’d found a company with on one hand.

-The disaster scenario: a CEO change. Both the founder and the incoming hired gun have a lot of anxiety, as they should. We both put in the time to make it work at YouSendIt. The big takeaway: You’re not alone. Surround yourself with people who have seen it before and can talk you off the ledge.

5. Move on.

Still think you’ve got serious founding team issues? Advice I recently gave to early-stage teams struggling with each other or their investors: Learn to move on. Sometimes this stuff really can’t be fixed and it’s at least partly your fault, like it was mine for not doing a better job at the beginning.

In this environment there is demand for real founder DNA. If you think you’re the real deal you might be better served starting again, wiser and with a clean slate.  Now I’m a reluctant expert on building functional founding teams. I survived a founding team trainwreck that should have ended me, my first company, and in the process should have wasted millions of dollars of venture capital. But I beat the odds, and if you and your team are honest with yourselves, you can too.

Image: Flickr user Alexandra Guerson

If Terminator 2 taught us anything, it was that a properly timed thumbs-up can make us cry. Also, autonomous, self-shaping blobs are a must-have on our checklist for the future.

Think of these ‘smart pebbles’ as 3-D pixels.

Now, MIT professor Daniela Rus and student Kyle Gilpin are publishing a paper on building such a wonder goop. They tend to refer to the technology as a smart “sand,” and they imagine scenario in which you could drop a small model into a vat of the sand, and the sand could sense that model’s contours and create a 3-D version of the object from that information. So you could drop in a tiny cup, the sand would sense the cup’s negative space and then it would shape into a cup that was 10x (or much more) larger.

Right now, the team is focused on developing an algorithm to make their approach possible–a hyper-efficient language that’s simple enough for each grain of sand to understand without massive processing power. It’s only with this language that the idea could hope to scale.

“The beauty of encasing a prototype of the object to be formed with the smart material is that we drastically reduce the communication burden on the system so that we are prepared to scale-up the number of modules in the system,” Gilpin tells Co.Design. “If we used CAD or similar, we’d be forced to transmit a complete description of the shape to be formed to all of the modules. With 100 modules that’s okay, but somewhere on the way to a million, it becomes unreasonable. We don’t want to send a million messages, one for each module in the system, telling each whether it is a part of the shape we’re attempting to form or not.”

To test their math, the teams has developed a prototype of the sand. (Gilpin calls these larger pieces “pebbles.”) Each pebble is 10mm across and contains an independent processor along with magnets that enable the magical sticking trick. As cool as they may be, the resolution of this rapid manufacturing technology is really only as sharp as the building blocks are small. Think of them as 3-D pixels.

“Shrinking the hardware presents the biggest long-term challenge,” admits Gilpin. “As we shrink the modules, we’ll have to look for alternative connection mechanisms. One possibility is using electrostatic forces instead of magnetic ones. This would allow us to replace the relatively bulky electro-permanent magnets with much smaller electrodes.”

The researchers hold their prototype “smart pebbles.” You could build structures that can respond and adapt to their environment.

That said, the technology’s promise is massive. You could build structures that were far smarter than even our most advanced 3-D printed parts (even those that we’re using within the human body), that can respond and adapt to their environment. “In addition to duplication, I would see our modules used for sensing tasks in constrained spaces,” writes Gilpin. “Perhaps you could pour our modules down a pipe in order to both map the shape of the pipe while finding defects or cracks. The modules could potentially help reinforce those weak points…Because it can self-disassemble, perhaps it could be used as an intelligent scaffolding for bone, or even organ, regrowth. The system could sense and relay important information to doctors and then disassemble as the bone healed.”

Gilpin knows that the technology is a ways off, believing it to be closer to a 10-year vision than a five-year one. In other words, this self-assembling sand could be waiting for us right where 3-D printing leaves off.

Images by M. Scott Brauer/MIT