Spurring creativity...

Here is a great design for a multi-purpose container. It starts out its life as a water bottle, and turns into a toy. Great way to encourage people (in this case, children) to reuse the empty container.

Now you have two reasons to buy y-water! What a concept.

Lessons in out-of-the-box thinking

I recently saw this post on how to achieve what seems to be impossible, and the lessons learnt from it.

To summarize the lessons learnt:
- Don't assume
- Question habits
- Be creative
- Look for a better way
- Impossibilities often aren;t

"All children are born artists.

The problem is to remain one as we grow up" - Picasso.

Here is an excellant talk by Sir Ken Robinson on the importance of creativity in education. He says that creativity is as important as literacy. He talks about how we are educating people out of their creativity.

If you ever notice a little kid draw or paint, you will see the lack of self-doubt, judgement or fear of doing wrong. Sir Ken says "Kids are not afraid of being wrong. If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original".

Enjoy the thought provoking as well as humorous talk.

Future library

After writing the blog on Kindle, I was thinking up ideas on how to make eBooks an attractive proposition to the market. Here is an idea that popped into my head:

Imagine becoming a member of a new library, and the library issues a eBook Reader, say Kindle, instead of a library card. The library would have hooked up with a service provider who would have created a database of all the books that the library owns. The Kindle would be used as a library catalog. You would browse the library catalog at the comfort of your home, and pick a book to borrow. If that book is currently available, the system will allow you to download it into your Kindle. If the library owns only one copy of the book, this book would then be unavailable to anyone else. When the due data arrives, you let go of your copy of the book, releasing the license to the book to someone else.

With this idea, you don't need to go to a physical library. You can access all the books that a library and its associated libraries have to offer irrespective of geographical location.

Of course, this is still a dream until all the available books are available in digital versions, and all periodicals and publications are also digitized. But, the rate at which books and periodicals are being digitized, this could become reality in the very near future.

This brings up an interesting question:

Why should eBooks be treated as traditional paper books?

eBooks don't get torn, or wet, or age. It is just bits in computer memory. Distributing multiple copies of an eBook cost next to nothing. Sharing eBooks is as simple as emailing the bits over. So, a library could theoretically have millions of copies of every periodical/book. Wouldn't that be wonderful! No more need to 'place books on hold'.

"Hold your thought right there" the author in you says. How will I get paid for all my hard work? How will I be rewarded if my book is a blockbuster and millions of people read it? This is where we have to fall back on the physical book economics. The eBooks still need to be priced per copy sold/downloaded in order to reward the author/publisher. Or, this is where we need to break today's boundaries and come up with innovative ideas on satisfying both creators and consumers.

Are you Right-brained or Left-brained?

Here is an interesting test to figure it out, in case you already didn't know. Most of us have a dominant side of the brain and we fall into one of the two categories. Some people are closer to the border and it will be easy for them to switch from clockwise to counter clockwise, and vice versa. I for one, found it hard to switch directions.

Do you know which is your dominant eye? The dominant eye is the eye that directly looks at the object, and the other eye looks from a slight angle. This is what gives us depth perception. In some cases, it is useful to know this information.

An easy test you can perform to determine your dominant eye:
If you are sitting in a room, point at any object that is at least 10-12 ft away from you. Hold your arm still and close your left eye. If your finger is still pointing to the object, your dominant eye is the right eye. If not, it is your left eye. I discovered this when I started playing pool. If you do not use the dominant eye to aim the cue, you will miss your shot.