<< December 07, 2006 >>

Report from Innovation Playground – Autowell!

As I mentioned earlier, last week I was in The Hague attending Growth Talk and Innovation Playground, two events put on by my pal and Dutch Webby Ambassador Jake Blok.

Innovation Playground is a neat concept. Jake brings together a diverse range of people – business leaders, students, designers, and entrepreneurs, among others, and has them work together in small groups with an overall goal of creating 100 new business concepts by the end of the day which he'll eventually publish back out to the attendees and to the world at large.

So why is it called a playground? Well, to facilitate new ideas, Jake also invites people to demo what he calls inspiration sources: new ideas, products and innovations that can serve as inspiration for the day, and indeed, this mix of attendee participation and inspiration demonstration is exactly that, an innovation playground.

One inspiration source I found particularly fun was Autowell, a GSM car alarm system with a hi-tech intelligent remote control device that uses mobile GSM communication networks to transmit alarm signals to and from your car. Basically, if your car gets stolen you can track and locate it, of course, but also do a range of things like turning the car's electricity off to really thwart that would-be thief.

But of all these features, here is the one I liked the most:

The car owner can frighten the burglar away by speaking to him and take further actions

For me, the value in this feature is really more emotional. In addition to tracking the theif, I can also give him a piece of my mind. Talk about closure, right?


Posted by dmd on December 7, 2006 09:19 PM