Kohei Nishiyama is the co-founder of a company and a website: Elephant Design and Cuusso.com. They solicit product ideas from individuals (like these modular electrical plug in stacks), realize the feasibility and desirability of those products (There are currently 28 votes for a bag that apparently sticks together without tape), and then manufacture and sell those things (Hey! A Portable Night Light!). It's a process called Design to Order.
posted by sleslie on Nov 27, 2007 - 7 comments

Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites From the fine folks that brought you the Total Terrorism Information Awareness program, another wickedly-named branch of the NSA, the Disruptive Technologies Office (formerly ARDA), is funding research into the usefulness of the Semantic Web for combing through and profiling the 80 million members of MySpace.
posted by bukharin on Jun 9, 2006 - 45 comments