Air Tram! Revisited.

My posts about this “Wild Crazy Idea” have gotten some nice attention from some other blogs like these ones.
Inhabitat.com
sf.curbed.com

I’m stoked! But one of the most important reasons I posted this in the first place has been lost and I wanted to reassert it:

I know this is not a new idea. I know that in a lot of ways it isn’t even a very good idea. The images are not supposed to be literal – rather they are supposed to have some entertaining shock value to draw attention to this issue:

Extending a subway system is a good investment to provide more public transportation. BUT. I think we have to do better. We are facing a crisis and a lot of people believe that it is possible to build an effective public transportation system twice as quickly for half the cost of a subway. If that IS possible, can we afford not to build that system? Can we afford not to put a little brainpower into envisioning that system?

Subways are expensive and take a long time to build. We need to decrease car usage now, and need more than one new subway line every 15 years. For years, these kind of “Crazy ideas” have not just been ignored, but ridiculed. We have to stop being lazy and start putting some real effort into converting those “Crazy Ideas” into “Real Ideas”. Thinking begins now. Go.

For more details about the Air-Tram sketches, you can go here.

Pecha Kucha Presentation

Here’s my Pecha Kucha Presentation that I gave in San Francisco last Tuesday

Want to see more of my presentations? Hover over the video module and click on “more shows”

Video of my Social Content Browser Prototype

If you enjoy listening to music online, This is what you want.  Watch this.

And please comment or email me to tell me what you think. The market for this is hot, and i want to see some software in the making.

Social Content Browser coming soon

Great Pecha Kucha event tonight.  The prototype of the social content browser is coming tomorrow, stay tuned…

Energy Source Brainstorm: Green Energy is Long Tail Energy

I’m presenting at the next San Francisco Pecha Kucha on Tuesday! Come check it out.

Here are some slides brainstorming about Green Energy: The take home message is this: Think about condensed energy sources like Chemical (Oil) and Nuclear Energy compared to Fluid Dynamic Sources like Wind, Hydro, and Solar. These Green Energy Sources are the Long Tail of Energy: They aren’t particularly potent, but they are ubiquitous. We can learn a lot from WEB 2.0 about how to harness their potential. These slides won’t make much sense on their own, but soon ill post the Pecha Kucha video where I’ll lay it all out for ya.

Let Cars know you’re there without taking your hands off the breaks

So I was talking with the nice folks at Box Dog Bikes in the mission district, and Gabe P. raised a great point: The time when it’s most crucial to let cars know you’re there is often a time when you’ve got your hands on the breaks. You should be able to ring the bell without sacrificing your stopping time. Here’s a really mediocre sketch. Could you fully integrate a bell into the shifter breaks? That’d be pretty slick -