Hasta La Ideas

In 2003 Rebecca Finell was finishing up her ID degree at Arizona State U while mothering an infant child. The combination of these two situations gave her the idea for the Frog Pod, above, a drainable scoop that lets you gather floating toys out of a bathtub and stick ’em to the wall to drip-dry. She entered it in that year’s Juvenile Product Manufacturing Association design competition, won, and subsequently co-founded Boon, Inc., a toy company.

Seven years later, Finell is busy–she’s added two children to her family and more than sixty countries to her distribution list. Boon is booming, and looking at their massive product line-up provides a hint as to why. The prolific Finell has come up with ideas for 20 new products a year every year since the company’s inception, making her the Karim Rashid of toy design in terms of sheer output.

Read her story here.

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If you happened to receive one of those Nook devices as a gift this holiday season and have been enjoying the little book-reading gadget, know that what you’re holding in your hand is at the center of a big, ongoing legal battle and now a continued headache for its retailer and owner, Barnes & Noble. Beginning earlier in the year, the book chain was taken to court by Spring Design, who claimed that the retailer had stolen their designs for an eReader after the two companies had been in talks to collaborate on a device. After that collaboration didn’t wind up working out, B&N released the Nook and Spring released the Alex. Though the latter was released after the former, Spring saw a number of design similarities from the original concepts they’d brought to B&N. After a summer of fighting off the suit, trying to have it dropped by arguing that the design copyrights are too vague in the already crowded eReader market, the retailer was dealt a blow this week when a federal judge ruled that the case can and will move forward. Here’s a bit of Judge James Ware‘s statement:

“The court finds that plaintiff has presented sufficient evidence to permit a jury to reasonably infer that defendant improperly used or disclosed at least some of plaintiff’s trade secrets information,” Ware wrote.

“There is significant factual dispute, however, as to whether plaintiff’s information had a substantial influence on the Nook’s design, or whether defendant independently developed all of the Nook’s features. Moreover, comparing the specific features of the Nook with plaintiff’s alleged trade secrets is a fact-intensive task best left to a jury.”

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Just in the nick of time to save the holiday season, the American Institute of Architects has bestowed a gift upon the industry by releasing their latest Architectural Billings Index figures. After last month’s dive, made all the worse by having been preceded by several months of climbing, the index suddenly rose several points, locking in at 52 and beating the October numbers by two, the first time it had climbed into the positive since 2008 (as a reminder, everything above 50 indicates an increase in construction billings and general growth within the industry). That after last month’s blast of stark reality, the AIA’s top financial expert isn’t quite ready to ring in the new year by saying the worst is now past:

“While this is heartening news, it would be premature to say the design and construction industry is out of the woods yet,” said AIA Chief Economist, Kermit Baker, PhD, Hon. AIA. “We continue to hear a wide mix of business conditions, with a good deal of it still indicating flat or no demand for design services. Once we see several months in a row of increasing demand we can feel safe saying we have entered a recovery phase. Until then, we can expect continued volatility in business conditions.”

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We think we’ve made our general attitude about ceaseless year-end lists abundantly clear. But like always around this time of year, we reluctantly slide a little and wind up posting one or two. In this case, it’s architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne‘s great wrap-up, which we found interesting in particular because he spends most of it talking about the recent view from the ground at Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the world’s largest tower. You’ll recall that, after delays aplenty, the gigantic structure finally opened in early January. And then a few days later, closed again. But, whew, then it opened again. After that, outside of a couple of odd stories here and there, and all those clips of people skydiving off of it, the Burj quickly slipped back out of the news. So it’s interesting to hear from Hawthorne about what’s been going on, or rather, what hasn’t happened, notably getting business tenants and residents to actually use the place. Of the condominiums, the critic reports, roughly 92% of them still remain vacant. The troubled, exist-beyond-its-means Burj is clearly a great metaphor for the building industry and the speculation therein as a whole and Hawthorne uses it well. Of course he also files the required end-of-year slideshow with all his best and worst picks (as does the New Yorker‘s Paul Goldberger, who smartly kept the focus to just New York), but this piece about the Burj is certainly the meat and potatoes of seeing 2010 as a snapshot.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

What the freak? I just read this article in the Times about how gasoline costs less than ten cents a gallon in Venezuela, and they’re all driving around in like, ’70s-era Dodge Coronets and Plymouth Valiants simply because they can. This guy even referred to a ’74 Lincoln Continental as “economical”–folks, that’s a car that’s 19 feet long and gets 10 to 12 miles per gallon. And you can literally fill it up, according to the article, for a dollar.

I’m expecting soon they’ll discover there are actual dinosaurs running around in Venezuela’s jungles.

Anyways do check out the original article, there’s an explanation, a slideshow, and video.

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