The Folha Seca, one of our boards developed in collaboration with Brazilian ecological company Fibra, was featured in last weekend’s Esporte Espetacular. We are still working to put the board on the market but it’s great to see our project getting this kind of attention. The snippet of the TV program can be seen online. It is great to see in the video, Bob Burnquist’s similar efforts to put an ecologic board on the market! way to go Bob, maybe we should do something together!
Mark your calendars if your are in Rio de Janeiro next Sunday, 25th of october. It’s the first screening of LookOut – Temporada na neve, at 9th Mostra Internacional de Filmes de Montanha.
LookOut shows the day-to-day experiences of 4 friends on a season of snowboarding in USA. It was filmed and edited by Marcello Cavalcanti, which collaborated in our ecosk8 project making some awesome videos of your tests (Film 1, Film 2).
Date: 25th October 2009
Time: 19 O’clock
Place: Cine Odeon, Centro
Tickets can be bought here LookOut Trailler Festival Trailler
The Whole festival Program can be found here Make sure not to loose it if you are in Rio!
There are several 3D CAD software packages available for designers today. Among them we can find mainly 3 kinds of 3D software, each one of which excels in a different way: Nurbs modelers whelp create amazing surface models and are widely used to create fast complex surfaces, Polygon-based modelers due to it’s shape morphing modeling process generate models that are perfect for film animations. Parametric modelers which excel in the technical realm due to it’s mathematical way of describing shape thus producing very exact geometries required in industrial processes. The most advanced open source modeler today is Blender, a polygon-based modeller, that unfortunately, can not be really used for technical product development.
Screenshot of FreeCAD
FreeCADis the first an opensource parametric modeler that I have seen with potential to shake things up in the world of product design. 3D Design software can be super expensive costing up to 20 or 30 thousand dollars for a license. Alibre Design , priced today at 398 Dollars is already a solid alternative to the more expensive packages like Catia, Solid Works or Pro/engineer. An open source alternative like FreeCAD, could, not only mean an immense cost reduction for innovation startups that can’t afford the kind of investment a CAD Package requires, but most importantly, shorten the road into a democratic file standard for the creative industry if widely adopted.
The battle for file standards is old, files created in Solidworks can be imported but not edited in Pro/engineer, Rhino files are not compatible with Catia models if you want to work further on it, and and and. I believe that a great deal of energy and time is lost, when moving between CAD systems, time that could be used to resolve creative problems, play video-game other discuss about life. The further development of an open-source parametric modeler like freeCAD could mean a big step towards a file standard available to all, because of it’s “openness”.
Imagine how companies would benefit from these developments, think of IBM and it’s widely support of the Linux OS, and how it helped reducing the costs of its servers. Anyone wanting to get involve with the developments go to the FreeCAD sourceforge page an contact the developers, I am sure they would love to hear from prospective users and eventual sponsors, letsevo!
What if the whole idea of innovation awards and design prizes could be turned up side down to a bottom up decision process? What if we could show our appreciation to the people that inspires us, giving them something to be proud of?
After writing about the Madmax Bike spotted in Lyon, I started thinking that it would be awesome if we would be able to give an award to everyone that inspires us.
The Inspiring Bastard Awards is born, at least as an experiment. And the first one to receive the award is the creator of the madmax bikethat made me think of this award in the first place. We don’t know his or her identity yet, but as soon as he or she gets in touch we will send an Inspiring Bastard T-shirt.
For this to be a true bottom up movement, I imagine to set up a dedicated page on the Letsevo website, with a form where anyone can suggest an Inspiring Bastard, and send them an Inspiring Bastard t-shirt. In the website, there would be a page for every inspiring bastard, their stories and an indication for the person who gave him/her the award.
Who do you think deserves to receive an Inspiring Bastard Award?
I heard a Chinese proverb one day that I believe being of key importance to Innovation. It goes like this:
“Those who think it can’t be done should not disturb those doing it”
The reason I want to share this at the blog is that when it comes to building stuff that ain’t there yet, when focusing on creating anything new, the chances are that you will meet lots of people saying that it can’t be done. Now because you can not control the actions of others, you got to believe in your instincts and in what you want to achieve. Ignoring gives you the power to focus on what needs to be done. It’s Ok to ignore and to go for it, the hard work will pay off at the end. But remember! In the end, once the big step was taken, you should always stop ignoring, and take every feedback as a learning. Every invention will profit from some fix here and there.
If you are a madmax kind of guy, this is the bike you should be riding. I love to bump into this kind of creations, it really inspires me. This bike is so awesome, I guess it was made from an old moped frame, adapted to bike….any clues on which model? If you know the owner of this bike call him up to get some more info for us, we all want to know.
I just finished the prototypes of our project’s open databases. From now on, each Letsevo project has an open database featuring the project’s most important open data. This database can be accessed by Letsevo developers right from each projects’ sidebar.
For some of our projects, this database will mean that data can be shared and tracked to empower project development and communication. In that way it will be possible for developers to keep track of the design stages and to interact with suggestions for possible changes and improvements in for of “Reviews”.
Letsevo wants it’s new open databases to empower real time product development features, that means: after we create, we upload the file to the platform, we get feedback through “Reviews”, we discuss and apply changes right at the “entry’s database page”, and evolve.
We will begin using it to share CAD files, DIY Instructions but my goal is to make the database support not only “dev files” but also Supplier Listings and Component Reviews.
The database first prototype is half way working (file previews are very buggy still…). João helped me test the first “review test” and it works ok…Thanks!
Feedback on the database is much appreciated. We hope this will be widely used!
