Open up your mind and say, ahh...

I am not much of a fan of Will.i.am ‘s music. He’s the guy behind the Black Eyed Peas and several other bits of dance magic. I appreciate that he hits his target perfectly. I’m just not his audience. But I now respect the man immensely.

Thanks to this article in Fortune, I’ve come to realize just how bright a lad he is. He’s not only doing great work in marketing his own products and services, but he’s helping corporate America figure out some of their challenges as well. What’s most interesting to me, however, is that what he’s doing is coming to the picnic with ideas.

Most times, when someone famous is brought in to help a company, they are usually used as a kind of proxy. So, when Michael Jackson did the big deal with Pepsi, he just kept on Michael Jacksoning, and there was some Pepsi logo stuff behind him. By comparison, Will.i.am brought the idea of Ekocycle to Coca Cola, and he fleshed out the entire vision. It’s his project that Coke totally understands and supports, because of how Will.i.am laid it all out.

That’s the lesson to us. You can offer to help or you can bring an idea of great value to your prospective client or customer. One will get you a little bit of business. The other will lead to partnerships of great value.

Cheers to you, Will. And thanks for getting that Britney song stuck in my head. Argh.

Smart phone users: what is the most frequently-used app on your device? For some people it might be a favorite game or music app, but for many others the answer would probably be Instagram or another photo app.
Since it was launched in late October of 2010, Instagram has exploded (not just in the number of members but the sheer amount of photos taken as well). As of March 2012, Instagram boasted more than 27 million users, a figure that has only grown since then.

Today’s infographic from socialnewsdaily.com goes over the history of the photograph, from its early beginnings to the staple of our society that it is today. The first permanent photo was taken in 1826. It was definitely an accomplishment, but it was in black and white, it was grainy, and it required an 8-hour exposure. Fast-forward to today and there are 26 photos uploaded on Instagram every second of the day. That’s quite a leap!

The extreme availability of cameras and smart phones today has boosted the amount of photos used not just in social media, but for artistic purposes as well. Photoshop is still the preferred method among photographers to alter and edit photographs, but photo-editing apps on phones are being used more and more for their convenience and readiness for immediate use.

For more info on the prominence of photos and Instagram today, refer to the infographic below and have a great week!

Data privacy officials in Germany have reopened a probe to look deeper at Facebook’s face recognition technology and determine if the social networking giant was collecting member photos without their knowledge.

In June, an investigation into Facebook’s database of pictures — led by data protection commissioner Johannes Casper in Hamburg, was suspended after he said he would give Facebook time to update its policies. After several attempts and no updates, Casper is now reopening the investigation according to The New York Times. He believes that Facebook has been illegally collecting face-recognition data about its members in order to populate its photo tag suggest feature.

However, Facebook told Mashable that the feature is in line with the protection laws in Europe.

“We believe that the photo tag suggest feature on Facebook is fully compliant with EU data protection laws,” a Facebook spokesperson told Mashable. “During our continuous dialogue with our supervisory authority in Europe, the Office of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, we agreed to develop a best practice solution to notify people on Facebook about photo tag suggest.”

Facebook’s facial-recognition software can sense who is in your pictures and make tagging suggestions. Rather than opting in to the feature, it is rolled out to all accounts and must be opted out if the user chooses to do so.

This was one of several features under scrutiny last year by data protection officials in Ireland. It underwent an audit to see if was legal to obtain this information. Facebook agreed to notify its users in Europe about the photo suggest feature.

Following Facebook’s acquisition of facial-recognition software company Face.com for an undisclosed amount of money in June, some users have expressed concern that the expansion of this type of technology on the social network could encroach on their privacy rights. Facebook hasn’t said what its future plans are for Face.com or its technology.

Image courtesy iStockphoto, youngvet

There’s something special about entrepreneurs whose startups take off and those whose stay small–starting with how they begin.

In studying successful entrepreneurs for my new book, Breakthrough Branding, I was struck by a series of contrarian habits that set them apart. Here are five contrarian lessons that I learned from them.

1. Think “small” rather than search for a “big idea.”

Contrary to everything we’ve heard about finding a “big idea,” there’s a fundamental paradox in business. Big ideas are small–simple, focused and different so they can occupy a specific niche and dominate their category. Kevin Systrom was building a location-based mobile business like FourSquare, but found that only one piece of it, the photo app, was different and had real traction with customers. So he focused on the photo app, named it Instagram, and became insta-rich. If you can’t write your business idea on the back of your business card or explain it to a ten-year old, you probably have a big, bad idea.

2. Use the start-up phase–the so-called Valley of Death–to take risks and experiment.

Rather than follow conventional wisdom and be cautious at the beginning, brand-building entrepreneurs use the “the Valley of Death” to experiment and tweak their fledgling idea. You can die in the valley, yet growth entrepreneurs realize this starting period is the most valuable time because you can create tremendous value out of practically nothing. When Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, he thought small and experimentally. He began with students at Harvard and tinkered and experimented with the site to create a different user experience and then started expanding.

3. Realize that when people say, “You’re starting what?” that you’re on to something.

Most people will tell you that you’re crazy when you present a fresh idea, so you have to be a contrarian to forge ahead anyone. You need to realize that you have a viable business idea when you find the “white space,” which is just a new need in the marketplace that no one is filling. In 1980, Fred Carl Jr was designing a new home kitchen and his wife, Margaret, wanted a heavy-duty range like her mother’s 1947 Chambers range. They weren’t made anymore so Carl looked into restaurant ranges; but they weren’t suitable for homes. So Carl decided to make one. All the major manufacturers told Carl that no one would want a commercial-style range for the home. Everyone thought he was crazy. That’s when Carl realized he had a good business idea, and named his range, Viking, because it was strong and enduring.

4. Listen to their heart and emotions as much as their intellect.

Successful entrepreneur want to make money, sure, but your goal has to be more than just making money. Finding your business idea is about finding your purpose. Your goal must be tied to your deeper story, your sense of destiny for yourself and your business. Innocent was launched by three Cambridge University graduates who quit their jobs in 1998. The small idea behind Innocent is authenticity, as their tagline says, “The fruit, the whole fruit, and nothing but the fruit.” Its brand personality is playful and interesting, and in the early days Innocent experimented with labels listing ingredients such as “banana, orange. and a lawnmower” that got them tremendous publicity. After a few years Innocent became the top smoothie brand in the United Kingdom and recently sold a stake to Coca Cola.

5. Create a new trend or category rather than fit into the market.

Growth entrepreneurs keep a pulse on what’s happening but don’t try to fit into the market–they try to appeal to where their customers are heading. They have what I call an “outside-in” orientation. They begin with the larger context–the outside–and work inward. After getting his MBA from Stanford, Joe Coulombe acquired a convenience store chain called Pronto Markets. In the mid 1960s he was intrigued with an article in Scientific American about how many baby boomers were going on to college. That article gave Coulombe his small idea. He speculated that those well-educated boomers would want a more sophisticated–but offbeat and fun–food-shopping experience. His name was Joe, so he decided to call his high concept grocery store Trader Joe’s.

These five lessons are simple but contrary to the way most business owners operate. They’re not obvious to many business owners because they are counterintuitive. That’s why they are so important.

Image: Flickr user Zorin Denu

They’re hot now but do mash-up apps have a future? We talk with Brandon Leonardo, cofounder of the Pinterest/ Instagram combo Pinstagram, to find out. We also pitch him a few of our ideas, including “Shazump,” “Spotifurious,” and “Angry Fruit Ninjas.” Let the investment cash flow!

Brandon Leonardo is one of the cocreators of Pinstagram, a “mash-up app” that combines features of… you guessed it. In essence, it takes the functionality of Instagram and splashes it in the elegant waterfall layout familiar to Pinterest fans. Pinstagram recently debuted its iPad app (and rose to be the No. 1 new and notable app in the Photo and Video category this week). Fast Company caught up with Leonardo to talk about the future of the mash-up app, and to pitch him a few ideas of our own.

FAST COMPANY: Tell me the origin story of Pinstagram.

BRANDON LEONARDO: Pek Pongpaet, his cofounder and I were having lunch on a Friday, joking around: “Pinterest is a huge company, and so is Instagram. What would happen if we just smashed them together?” We were just laughing about it. But then you could see the wheels starting to turn in Pek’s head. He brought it up a couple more times: “I think Pinstagram would be really cool,” and I kind of chuckled. The next morning at noon Pek called me and said, “You’re never gonna believe what I built. Look at your Dropbox.” By that time he had pretty much gotten the entire site designed. We went into hackathon mode, and by Sunday we were basically done with the initial version we launched with.

Are you in dialogue with Instagram or Pinterest? Aren’t you running afoul of laws here?

Pinterest’s waterfall layout was not invented by Pinterest. It’s a jQuery plug-in someone created a couple years ago and released it open-source. Pinterest gets credit for making it famous, but it’s not necessarily copyrightable. On the Instagram side, we’re using their public API. And it’s kind of a win-win: we’re sending them lots of likes, comments, and actions.

It seems like the sort of thing where either you get a cease-and-desist letter, or you get acquired.

No one has sent us a cease-and-desist letter. In fact we got coffee with a Pinterest engineer last week. The founder of Pinterest has actually used Pinstagram. On the Instagram side, no one’s contacted us.

You built an iPad app before an iPhone app. Why?

Instagram’s already on the iPhone. We’ll never be a better Instagram than Instagram. What we can do is build the best iPad viewer.

Let’s talk more about this idea of the app mash-up. How exactly do you splice the genes, and is there an island where you put your failed experiments?

You take the best pieces of each. The benefit to having a hackathon, is you have a severe focus on only what’s necessary. This is Pek’s and my third project together. The other ones are running, but this is the one that took off like crazy. But having an island sounds like a great idea. The island where source code goes is GitHub.

Do you think there will be more app mash-ups, more “Grey Albums” of the app world?

I think building products, period, is good. Any time you’re creating something and putting it out in to the world, you get a little bit closer to perfect. Nothing anyone has ever built has been perfect. But you keep improving on little things, and you get closer and closer. If you want to do a mash-up, you should do it.

Good. Because I want to pitch some mash-up apps to you.

Okay.

“DoodleJitter.” It’s a mash-up of Doodle Jump and Twitter. You can only play the game for 140 seconds or less.

That’s about how long I play DoodleJump right now.

How about a mixture of Shazam and Bump called “Shazump”? You use it to quickly exchange songs.

Do you want me to rate these?

Yeah, if you were a VC, how much money would you give me?

The music business is the worst business to be in, so I’d say no. Spotify is the only one I’ve really seen be successful.

OK, how about a mash-up of Spotify and Epicurious, called “Spotifurious.” You use it to stream unlimited food.

Could you use that in other parts of the world? I don’t think the U.S. needs more food.

“Angry Fruit Ninjas.” It’s just a much more violent version of Angry Birds.

Oh yeah… Absolutely. That sounds like a winner. That one I would give you the most money for. Throw some zombies in there, and in three years, you’ll be acquiring Zynga.

Photo: Mercedes

Researchers at Mercedes have found that a quick power nap may be the cure for drowsy driving, lower back pain and even low fuel economy.

Using data gleaned from Daimler’s TopFitTruck program, a study designed to create a healthy working environment for long haul truckers, Mercedes has found that power naps — known as “nickerchen” in German — are a key component of health and wellness on the road. So, under the banner of “Active Comfort,” a bevy of new technologies will soon debut on passenger cars to help drivers take a break and relax.

During the TopFitTruck study, Mercedes found that drivers who have not had a good night’s sleep drive more erratically and drive in a manner that wastes more fuel than their well-rested counterparts. In addition, drivers who feel tense behind the wheel have trouble making good decisions in stressful situations and over time tend to develop back problems.

Armed with that data, Mercedes is designing future generations of passenger cars with the same concern shown for long-haul truckers. A key component is encouraging power naps, 20 minutes of deep sleep while the car is safely pulled over. “The possibility of making effective use of ‘power napping’ for recuperation purposes will play a key role in the Active Comfort concept from Mercedes-Benz,” said the automaker.

On the TopFitTruck, power napping was encouraged by an audio system that can determine whether songs are relaxing or uptempo. During a power nap, the audio system can play soft music to lull the driver to sleep and then gently wake him or her up with more energetic tunes. The TopFitTruck also has an atomizer that dispenses a soothing orange scent when the driver is sleeping and an invigorating menthol scent when the driver is on the road. Should the driver want a more comfortable place to sleep, the seat reclines and raises and a cushion can be placed over the steering wheel for a lie-flat bed.

Additionally, the TopFitTruck included exercise equipment for use by the side of the road, encouraging the driver to maintain physical fitness. “The Mercedes-Benz becomes a personal coach,” said Jörn Petersen, Daimler’s head of human factors. By encouraging relaxation, comfort and fitness, the automaker is hoping to also improve driver performance — hopefully without the help of the creepy-looking spa ninjas in the photo.

It sounds outlandish for some of these technologies to make it into the cabin of a passenger vehicle, but Mercedes promises that Active Comfort will be inspired by the findings of the TopFitTruck. “Some of the ideas explored in this vehicle will soon feature on board series-production vehicles from Mercedes-Benz,” the automaker said.

If anything, we can definitely expect some improvements to the interiors of future vehicles. Mercedes found that uncomfortable seats and warm temperatures can decrease driver attentiveness and performance, so they’re promising to improve seat comfort and adjustability, insulate against noise and improve the flow of fresh, cool air — all in the name of safety, of course.

Google has never been a design-forward company, revolutionizing our lives through interface design. Instead, they’ve taken over the world building products with raw intellectual horsepower–brilliant artificial intelligence to fuel search, wise mapping systems to take us from point A to point B and clever cloud-syncing apps that allow us to collaborate on projects from around the globe. Google never had to be pretty. It’s always been smart.

Yesterday, Google officially revealed a project that will push them to their creative limits. It’s called Project Glass, and it’s a pair of glasses that layers digital information over the real world.

It’s your smartphone, right in your eyes. You can read text messages. You can take photos. You can listen to music (thanks to some built-in earbuds). You can even be told that the subway is closed as you walk up to it, and be redirected to your destination by foot.

It’s your smartphone, right in your eyes.

But maybe most notably, nothing about what Google has presented is an actual product yet, or considered close to finalized. “We wanted to let people know about what we’re doing, and what we hope to achieve with it,” a Google spokesperson told Co.Design, “But in terms of the graphics, the visuals, the hardware setup, there’s a lot of experimentation going on. And a lot of rapid prototyping on the team.”

The concept video Google has shared is meant to signify what the team feels “would be of most value to people,” and what they’re closest to actualizing. Now that this concept is public, Google will be entering what they called the “feedback gathering phase,” in which they’re looking for the community to chime in on what they want to see (and don’t want to see) in a fully realized product.

So where does this leave us for now? What Google has shown is promising, but their design challenges are clear:

There’s a reason that video glasses haven’t taken off yet (and by that, I don’t mean augmented reality glasses like Google’s, but something more like Vuzix). And, for lack of a better term, we’ll call it The Segway Problem. Technology can be a symbol of your future-forwardness, or it can be the exact opposite: a sign of the future’s ridiculousness. The Segway flopped in part for its cost and in part for the fact that humanity isn’t quite that lazy, but there was a deeper, visceral reaction to the core of the product that signified a silly future rather than an inspiring one. So far, the actual glasses Google is showing off aren’t inspiring. To succeed, Google will need to sell us on the either the stylishness, or the invisibility, of video glasses. And may we suggest copying the iPod in this approach? Make the technology as obscured on the user as possible…except for one trademark calling card (in the iPod’s case, white earbuds).

As inspiring as moments in Google’s concept video may be–and the photo-taking moment is an aha moment if I’ve ever seen one–it’s also stuffed with notification, none of which is fundamentally different from what we could be checking on our cellphones less intrusively. The functions that Google blocks will be as integral to the platform’s success as those that are enabled. Finding the perfect level of obtrusiveness within an omnipresent internet connection could be the largest challenge of human-device interaction the electronics industry has ever encountered. And as Google is paving new ground, they’re working outside their comfort zone: Google has no data to mine for how much notification is too much notification. If ever there’s been a product ripe for Google Labs field testing, it’s Project Glass.

People in the Valley used to talk all the time about finding “killer apps”–that is, the one, defining use of a technology that’ll spark its mass adoption. And no wonder: With technologies such as augmented reality and Project Glass, the possibilites seem to outstrip the actual need. As I suggested before, these glasses aren’t yet doing anything our phones can’t. So why do they need to be glasses?

A good counter-example is the iPad. Lots of people dismissed it when it first came out, saying, “Sure, it’s cool, but what does anyone need another computer for?” Well, it turns out, people didn’t need another computer so much as they wanted one–a computer that would make surfing the web from your bed or couch a lot less clunky and more fun. With Project Glass, I’m not sure that have have that use-case yet–that is, the perfect scenario where this just makes sense in people’s lives. There might be some set of features and interactions that makes it so, but these haven’t quite appeared just yet.

Where Project Glass is at now, what one spokesperson labeled “the feedback gathering phase” in our brief conversation today, is an tenuous spot to be in. Crowdsourcing can create great products, but when it comes to inventing something that no one has conceptualized before, we need bold visionaries, not naysaying internet whiners. Not just anyone can design a user interface. And I’d posit that almost no one can design a usable interface that will sit in our eyeballs 24/7. Crowdsourcing user feedback at the invisible level–the advanced A/B testing Google does when they test the color blue without us even knowing it–could be integral to fine tuning Project Glass at a number of levels. But at heart, they will need to present us with a most singular vision if they expect any of us to don a pair of glasses, not a mishmash of suggestions from the peanut gallery.

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The softest touches of design will define Project Glass’s future.

The little things, the softest touches of design, will define Project Glass’s future in the marketplace. Is the interface loud or quiet? Do we use vocal commands with some functions or all functions? Are notifications really in the center of the screen, or can they be repositioned? Will images be opaque or partially transparent? What will the glasses show when I sit at my computer or when I drive? All of these “how does it feel” components will matter even more than they do in a cellphone. But on top of all this, and maybe most importantly, we’ll need to know the one big reason that we’ll all want to wear our phones rather than keep them tucked away in our pockets. As of right now, I don’t think we’ve seen it.

Most of us interact with at least one Google product every day. Many of us use their products all day, every day. Whether or not you’ve been particularly inspired by their design, you can’t argue that their approach hasn’t worked well enough so far.

But it’s been a while since Google was the first to market in uncharted territory (and it begs the question, have they ever been, really?). Wearing a computer has the potential to redefine the human experience even more than PCs or smartphones did. WIth Project Glass, Google has the task of designing the interface of our lives, and I can’t imagine a greater challenge ahead of them.