Anyone who has been on FaceBook for a while will know that one of the most successful app-game onthe giant social networking site has been Farmville. But as popular as Farmville has been, the reality today is that many people hardly know where the food they eat comes from.

This is especially so when you consider the growing transition from majority rural nations to majorityurban. The concept of how and where the food was grown and processed before it ended up on storeshelves seems far removed for the typical urban dweller. This knowledge gap and distant reality does not serve the best interests of the future of humanity as faras food security and eco-sustainable agriculture is concerned. The UK’s single largest farm land owner-administrator, the National Trust, has embarked on an experiment that seeks to change all that that.

Dubbed My-Farm.org.uk, it is an online project that seeks to enlighten people about farming and food production via a participatory approach that incorporates a real farm. Participants are engaged in all key decisions around the farm in Cambridgeshire, on Wimpole estate which is administered by UK’s NationalTrust.

At the core of each My-Farm.org.uk decision is the monthly voting. At the beginning of each month, theMy-Farm.org.uk community is asked a series of questions regarding the farm such as which crops toplant or what type of animals to keep. The questions are originated by a full time farm manager. There is also a community manager whoserves as the eyes and the ears of the participants on site. The community manager uses webcams, blogposts, photos and videos to keep users informed about the goings on.

A team of experts are on hand to provide project participants with any additional information they need to make their voting decision. The vote is then conducted and the winning option implemented on thefarm. The analysis and discussion before and after the voting is a powerful way of keeping participants fully engaged in the process. National Trust is targeting 10,000 participants for the Wimpole farm. If more people request to join beyond this number, National Trust will take that as a sign of the project’s viability and will create a new farm from the 250,000 hectares in the UK that are under its custody.

Each participant on My-Farm.org.uk is required to pay a 30 sterling pound subscription fee. All the income earned from the subscription fees is used in the project to finance staff costs and cover the expenses that must be incurred if the farm is to continue running. And it is on the number of subscriptions that the My-Farm.org.uk project will succeed or fail. Unless theproject can attract at least 6,500 subscriptions, the money raised will not be adequate to keep the farm running and will force National Trust to refund all subscribers.

Related articles

• FarmVille Comes to Life! Real Farm in UK Run By Internet Vote (video) (singularityhub.com)
• MyFarm takes “cow clicking” into the real world (gamification.co)
• FarmVille Comes to Life as MyFarm (weinterrupt.com)
• “National Trust’s MyFarm – Farmville Goes Real” and related posts (geeknewscentral.com)
• FarmVille Inspires Real Life Farming Experiment (mashable.com)

Bolefloor  has brought a new innovative way of looking at wooden flooring. They’ve managed to ally efficiency, design and sustainability by simply rethinking the aspect of traditional floorboards. This process seems simple but it’s always with simple things that innovation struggles. This Dutch company found a way to revolutionize how we can approach the us of wood for floors ( and later probably for other type of furniture).

It’s going against years and years of traditions and habits, things that we never think about as they seem to be a given. For flooring the given was and still is “Rectangular” you can go to a shop and find thousands of different type of squarish material but none just like bolefloor. The reason is simple it’s efficiency and the abundance of wooden ressources in the past. Logistically square is easy to transports and the waste created during the process wasn’t a real problem. And finally lack of technology was also a hurdle to change this process.

How did Bolefloor achieve this? Simply by inspiring themselves from nature and using technology to apply it to our needs. Bolefloor use complexe scanning and calculation  system of the raw wood cuts, mostly focused on the natural shape of the wood veins. Then they use this data to determine the most efficient way to cut the wood to minimize waste while making sure the peaces fit together. The trick to this is that each peace has it’s spot, its a huge jigsaw that fits perfectly together. They have made something that seems like it would have to be tailor made in to an industrial products that can be produced for the mass.

The Feel and Look of this flooring is amazing. Nature creates the deign and the technology brings it to your feet. These type of companies that manage to ally modern design products that fit a real need while being focused on sustainability are the real way forward in helping the society to actually act for the environment.

They also have the perfect moto: “Life is not a straight line”

Bolefloor Company Website

Wort documents, pdf or power point présentation is still how business share the most important information. Usually this is done by mail as an attachment file and you have to wait for a response to get some feedback.

Doocuments is trying to enhance this experience first of al by increasing the security of those documents. This is done by putting those documents online while providing the sender and recipients with secured authentication methods. Furthermore is enable you to recieve useful statistics on how the reader analyses your documents. This provide you key insight on what matters to the recipent and what catches his attention. I see it as an advanced BBM for full documents.

Doocuments is the new way to exchange VIP documents.

Why do we exchange VIP documents the same way we exchange the documents that are not VIP? There are as many uses of Doocuments as professionals or individuals all over the world. Find some examples below:

• A Sales rep – “I would love to know if the customer has read the proposal and if possible, know how he read it… has the customer gone to the price page directly?.”
• A contractor – “It will be interesting for me that what I highlight in every document automatically generates a summary, in order to quickly highlight the most outstanding things of each proposal.”
• The head of R&D – “It would be of vital importance that this document does not leave my company and is not even being accessed from outside our offices. It is Strictly confidential.”
• A public service – “We will publish public documents and we want to track and control their use by citizens.”
• A doctor – “Who can guarantee that the exchange of health information complies with the Data Protection Act and that I have no problems with medical records?”
• An attorney – Before sending a certified fax it would be nice to certify the receipt of a document via email and if possible certify its contents and get a digital evidence of any single access.

All the office software tools that we use today are very focused on creating great documents, but not on the documents’ exchange process or the reader’s concerns. These tools have always been designed to facilitate the work to the document author, but are not focused on the reader.

That’s the reason for Doocuments to exist. Doocuments covers all these areas.

Doocuments makes outbounding VIP documents or contents easy, secure and trustworthy.

1. A Doocuments user creates a new document with a traditional office software tool (ex. Microsoft Word). Before emailing this doc she considers that it is quite important, so she decides to send it using the Doocuments platform.

2. She connects to www.doocuments.com and selects the basic publication option, using the platform the same way as an email client. She writes the email recipient, the email title, uploads the attachment and selects some access properties, ex.: email me when the Doocument is forwarded, and do not allow to print page 6.

3. Doocuments then uploads the original doc and creates an internal format of the doc that will be resent to the recipient of the email.

4. The final recipient receives the email with a link to Doocuments and can start reading it like a .pdf into a browser.

Say goodbye to “not received” excuses, bounced emails, “who will see this document” concerns. With Doocuments, the safety mechanisms you need to protect you from data leaks will not be necessary.

A powerful pick-up tool for safely threading wires and cable through cavity walls.

In four steps:

This is the impressive pitch done by Sharon White in front of the 5 investors from Dragon’s Den BBC show.

What was she asking for:

1. She didn’t ask for too much money. £50,000
2. She didn’t overvalue her business, for reasons I’ve explained above.
3. She exuded charm and humility rather than arrogance, making her an attractive person to work with.
4. She had a simple but persuasive product demonstration.
5. She had a clear reason for being there, and a convincing answer to the question “why do you need the money?”
6. She had a solid grasp of her numbers (and the numbers themselves were fortunately solid).
7. She had accumulated clear evidence that there was a demand for her product.
8. She was honest in answering questions. At no point did it sound like she was stalling or hiding anything (even when she was asked which Dragons she most wanted to invest her).
9. She kept her cool when events in the den were out of her control (notably when the Dragons hit an odd standoff, each refusing to make the first offer.)
10. She negotiated to the end.. and didn’t accept Duncan and James’s first offer as their last.

Moreover we are at the middle of a financial crisis and people, once again, realize the necessity for control and risk assesments. This means that in finance, like in any kind of projects, people will want to know the risks they really are taking. Private investors, banks, insurancesm they all suffered a lot and will keep on suffering during this crisis. Their risk aversion profile increased or will increase. Projects and organizations are growing bigger and bigger and the number, frequency and severity of risks are positively correlated to it. We are from a generation that understands the necessity for environmental protection, and in activity that is related to it quantitative risk analysis is an essential step. So let’s remain aware of that increasing need.

This time I predict robots. I mean, look at it. Robots are so cool. Everyone who has seen I Robot or matrix will agree with me. Robots replacing humans are already everywhere, but I think their presence will inevitably increase in the future.

My favorites robots are vending machines. They could sell everything, from metro tickets to cars.

Robots will free us from annoying hand work and they will also do it faster and better. Add artificial intelligence (today, the chess world champion cannot beat a 24$ program) to that, and their future is quite bright.

What robot would you like having?