The Gunnar Optik glasses from the Inc. list "Good office gifts for a bad economy"

Inc. Magazine hrecently came out with pretty cool lists that I thought I’d share…

The first interesting list is 7 Gadgets That Help You Do More with Less - While all these products are pretty interesting, I want to point out my two favorites:

The Walkstation is now available at the Steelcase Store.

Delivery and installation included.

Ever thought of ways to burn calories at work? Nix the elevator and start taking the stairs…park at the end of the parking lot…walk at lunch…how about walking while you work? The Walkstation makes it really convenient to incorporate a little physical activity in our busy lives.

The Walkstation is a treadmill with a height adjustable desk and a maximum speed of 2 mph (you can’t run even if you try) to keep you concentrated on work while incorporating physical activity into your work routine.

The average person will burn about 100 calories per mph. Assume you walk 1 mph for 2 hours per day each work week for a year and that could equate to 15 lbs lost without dieting or leaving your office!

Don’t think you can walk and work at the same time? Neither did I. I am definitely not the most coordinated person and may have stumbled once or twice, but you get the hang of it pretty quickly. As the Good Morning America clip indicates “It’s like walking and chewing gum at the same time.”

If you are like me, you prefer to walk when you are on the phone…so for those all too frequent conference calls, you might as well be on burning some calories on the Walkstation. Put a few Walkstations together in a circle and find yourself talking and walking on the Walkstations rather than sitting in conference room. There are many ways to easily incorporate walking and working into your everyday routine.

The Walkstation has been getting lots of press since its introduction. Here are a few more articles for you to peruse in your spare time. Wish you could be über productive and read this while working out? Sounds like you need a Walkstation…

So how many of you have ever spent more time opening a toy package than you spent in assembling the toy afterwards? Or you find yourself with the kitchen steak knife in hand, the junk drawer scissors cast aside, as you piece, puncture and wrip at that dreaded plastic clamshell package, long past the point where you care whether you damage the product inside?

That consumer frustration has lead to the introduction of numerous tools for opening packages without the frustration outlined above. There is the As See on TV Pyranna, the One Open-sezz-me Plastic Package Opener that claims it cures “wrap rage” or the abysmally rated Package Shark Pro Opener with Bonus Scissors.

Then there’s the approach taken by Amazon.com: frustration free packaging. Like a good doctor that treats the cause rather than masking the symptoms, Amazon is going to the heart of the problem. As their FAQ says:

We work directly with manufacturers to box products in Frustration-Free Packages right off the assembly lines, which reduces the overall amount of packing materials used.

That means they are also not creating waste by throwing away the original packaging and re-packaging the items. And the scope of their plan is impressive:

This is just the beginning of a multi-year initiative. It will take many years, but our vision is to offer our entire catalog of products in Frustration-Free Packaging.

While I wouldn’t qualify Steelcase and the Steelcase Store as innovative when it comes to our packaging I do hope you’ll find our packaging to be “frustration free. Some strong hands or a basic utility knife will probably do the trick on your next Leap chair purchase. Although I admit that i just might have to add the Zibra-ZPCOPEN-OR to my Christmas wish list.

The Mir:ror by Violet

I stumbled across these two absolutely incredible devices from a company called Violet today. These things go heavily into the geeky part of my being but I’m OK with that.

1) The Nabaztag isn’t new, but is is worth bringing up again. If you haven’t seen this thing, it is rabbit. A rabbit? Well….“A Rabbit connected to the Internet that’ll bring you everything on the web and messages from your friends using coloured lights, the movements of his ears, spoken words, or songs. A Rabbit you can talk to and give orders to. A Rabbit you can ask for advice and entrust with messages to your friends. A Rabbit that reacts to and recognizes the objects that surrounds you…”

2) The Mir:ror – This came across my blog reading via the Boston Globe. The Mir:ror is basically a device that hooks to your computer via USB and then reads tiny RFID tags which you embed in your stuff and then Mir:ror reacts. So picture this: you walk in the door and you have an RFID sensor on your keys. The Mir:ror senses the RFID tag and starts reading your e-mail for you. Or, let’s say that it senses a toll pass and starts reading you the traffic report. How brilliant is that?

More about Violet…..

“Let all things be connectedViolet was inspired by a simple fact: the rift between the virtual world – everything happening on the other side of your computer screen – and the physical world we live in is growing, and growing fast.”

On the other side of the screen, in the digital world we explore with the click of a mouse, everything is possible and accessible. On the web information can be customized for each user’s needs: you can set preferences on any given page, information can be targeted and updated in real time. You can gather news from different sources, mix personal and professional, fun and utilitarian aspects in a single place. In virtual worlds such as Second Life, in computer games, in instant messaging and chat-rooms, you can become whoever you want, take on any guise you like, meet strange and nonsensical creatures. In a world of bytes, everything can be recombined, everything is flexible. Everything can be wondrous and magical.

Unfortunately, we were born on the wrong side of the screen. We are not made of bytes, but of flesh, blood and atoms. We spend the greater part of our life in a physical world that is tough, unfair, inflexible and devoid of magic. The objects that surround us have reduced, rigid, limited functions; they are unaware of our presence and are unable to adapt to us or to other objects. We can seldom define “preferences” or “options” in the real world, unlike what we are used to in most software. You can visit Amazon.com twice and it will recognize you and provide relevant and personalized advice. You can live in the same house for all your life and you will always be a “foreigner.”

So Violet proposes two questions that I think we all ask ourselves

- “Can we really go on living with such a rift, increasingly looking at the world through screens?”

- “Must we stay trapped in a kind of submarine, forever doomed to contemplate idyllic worlds through the periscope?”

Indeed

The author's avatar enjoying a virtual sit.

Have you ever had a glimpse of an idea, told it to your boss who tells you to run with it, and then it turns into a life of its own. This is my case with Second Life. I tried to impress my boss at the time by showing him that I read Business Week, so I brought in an article on this futuristic video-game/alternate reality/buzz creator called Second Life. Not only was my boss not impressed, but he told me not to work on it. I did it anyway.

What is Second Life? According to its site……..

Second Life® is a 3-D virtual world created by its Residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by millions of Residents from around the globe.

Fast Company magazine recently wrote an article on the resurgence of Second Life and how to more effectively market in this virtual world. It is a well written article discussing some of the marketing failures in Second Life and what the most effective way to market is today. From the article:

“Second Life is not a place to make sales. It’s also a venue where large companies don’t have to spend $3 million to build an elaborate island when $10,000 to $100,000, usedjudiciously, can have a much larger impact. Linden Labs concurs. “New marketers often try to imitate another medium,” says Ginsu Yoon, Linden’s VP of business affairs. “Second Life isn’t TV or radio or even the Internet, all of which push information out one way.” “

Our original goal in Second Life was to create buzz. We found a partner and created a small little showroom in Second Life. However, nobody ever showed up, mostly because nobody knew we were there. So obviously Second Life is not place where “if you build it, they will come.” So we changed our strategy and decided to become part of the community. One of the lessons we learned is the Second Life community doesn’t want to be bombarded with your product. The inhabitants of Second Life are wary of traditional advertising; they are creative and want to be treated as the contributor to society that they are. So we ended up upgrading our space and creating a beautiful space and then we invited the community to participate in a critical thought process of our products and how we can best interact with the Second Life Community. We even had a Design Exhibition where many designers showed off their design skills in our promenade. We culminated this Design Exhibition with a 2 hour town hall meeting where designers, marketers, and a whole host of people from Steelcase interacted with people all over the globe in Second Life. It was a wonderful event, providing an opportunity for the citizens of Second Life to learn more about Steelcase and vice versa.

Get your avatar free and check it out…..click here to have your eyes opened to the new reality.