Topic: Cool Products

Late one night in a college architecture studio, Jason Lentz reached that point when fatigue and deliriousness spark an idea so far out, it just may be genius. Standing on a stool and encasing himself in a cardboard […]

Over 40,000 people visit the emergency room each year for table saw related injuries, and almost 4,000 of those people end up losing at least one finger. That’s a table saw accident every 9 minutes. 10 table saw […]

What if you could download and print a physical component directly to your printer? The Pirate Bay (TPB) is confident that this will soon be a reality.

With 80% of people residing within 50 miles of a coast, it’s not surprising that efforts to better understand and protect our oceans get a lot of attention. Our customer, Liquid Robotics, has been all over the news […]

Whether a 6 a.m. jog around your neighborhood sounds like an ideal start to your day or the furthest thing from it, most techies can agree that incorporating the year’s most innovative and well-engineered gadgets into […]

Liquid Robotics, an Arena customer and Bay Area startup, is on a mission to change the way we understand the ocean. Although oceans cover 71% of the earth’s surface, we know very little about their weather, currents, […]

I love a good opportunity to brag about Arena customers, and so I’d like to thank Lytro for giving me something to talk about.

Mobius is a small company, with fewer than 20 employees, yet it’s been able to scale by strategically using its resources. Since its launch in 2005, Mobius has survived a recession, a period of rapid growth and a […]

It’s easy to make the assumption that a successful business requires robust infrastructure, surplus funds and a large amount of manpower. While that may be true in some cases, size and money are becoming less […]

It took ten years for Aaron LeMieux, founder and CEO of Tremont Electric, to turn his product idea into reality. LeMieux’s product—the nPower PEG (Personal Energy Generator)—is a universal charger powered by kinetic […]

Like most of us here at Arena, I am a huge fan of “the next big thing.” If you are developing new technology for the purpose of innovation, nine times out of ten I’d like to be your friend.

We saw the bill of materials (BOM) for the iPad 2 last week and were impressed by the low costs Apple was able to achieve for its newest version of the tablet, which is considerably improved over the original. With […]

December can only mean one thing: holiday gift shopping. In the effort of constructing my own wish-list, I’ve spent the past few days browsing through a variety of unofficial guides denoting this year’s “must-have” […]

As I get ready to start my Thanksgiving cooking, I can’t help but wonder if I’m missing out by not having Christoph Thetard’s foot-pedal-powered kitchen appliance at my disposal. A giant pedal-powered flywheel […]

For his final project in the University of Montréal’s design department, product designer Christophe Robillard asked, “If the bicycle is the standard bearer for sustainable transportation, shouldn’t the object itself […]

A robot learning to flip pancakes from Sylvain Calinon on Vimeo. Even if you put science fiction aside, it’s not hard to imagine a seemingly endless number of real-world applications for robotic technology. But have […]

The Herman Miller Mirra office chair has a lot of good things going for it: It is made of 42% recycled materials It is made with no PVC (read about PVC problems here) It is 96% recyclable It is Greenguard-certified […]

Here’s another one in the category of products that *really* make a difference in the lives of users. Atomic physicist Joshua Silver has developed “Adspecs”—fluid-filled adjustable eyeglasses—and with his […]

The betacup is a recently completed competition to re-imagine a coffee cup with reduced environmental impact. As many as 58 million coffee cups are discarded every year in the United States alone, and along with most […]

According to Marty Neumeier in his excellent book, The Brand Gap, a brand, simply put, is “a person’s gut feeling about a product, service or organization.” But all too often, when considering a product roadmap, […]

If you’re facing a tough design challenge you may want to look to nature to see how millions of years of evolution have addressed a similar problem. Biomimicry (which Marc mentioned in a blog post about tools to help […]

If you’ve never seen the SawStop table saw in action, it’s worth watching this video for the sheer engineering vision it took to pull this off…. This is magical product design that changes lives. P.S. The story of […]

Most umbrellas today are cheap – literally and figuratively. They turn inside out at the slightest of winds. They are given away to advertise everything from tequila to the World Wildlife Fund. The handles are molded […]

Earlier this year, I posted a video of the production process for the revolutionary Adidas Jabulani soccer ball to be introduced at the upcoming FIFA World Cup. Now, on the eve of the tournament, several players have […]

Anyone connected to the construction industry has been hit hard by the economy in the past few years. And now, unless a company is part of the green revolution, the construction industry is going to rebound without […]

Joe gave some great advice in his series of posts on how to gather and apply useful product feedback. Quirky, a “social product development start-up” that builds and sells consumer products takes it a step further. […]

Two Rice University students have created a low-cost product that could allow doctors to save lives in developing countries. Sophomore Lila Kerr and freshman Lauren Theis assembled a working centrifuge out of a salad […]

If you have ever purchased a DVD, you may have noticed a sticker with a barcode and a metallic ring of some sort attached to the DVD or packaging. That sticker is an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tag, and this […]

At Arena our customers make such a wide range of interesting products that it’s always fun to learn what each new one does. For years we’ve been adding a growing number of customers in the clean technology and clean […]

Thanks to The Impossible Project, Polaroid film is back, and production of Polaroid cameras is following. In the 1960s, half the homes in America had a Polaroid camera. By the year 2000, 13 million of them had been […]

If you are in the Bay Area this week, stop by the Stanford Cool Product Expo (CPX) on Wednesday, April 7, 2010, from 12–6pm at the Stanford University Arrillaga Alumni Center. The Cool Product Expo is a free event […]

I returned from Vancouver a few weeks ago and unlike the NHL players, my Olympic hangover is finally gone. If you ever get a chance, I highly recommend attending the Olympic Games. It is rare and exciting to be able […]

To call Local Motors the designers or even the manufacturers of the Rally Fighter is not quite accurate. While the company’s badge will be on the car, it has been a facilitator more than anything else. Local Motors is […]

Products that resonate with their users on an emotional level become ingrained in user’s lives and generate their own grassroots marketing buzz. These are the products that users rave about online, tell their friends […]

As someone who picks paper towels over electric hand dryers every time, I never would have expected to find a dryer that I not only want to use, but actually want to talk about too. Until, that is, I discovered the […]

SolidWorks leadership issued an internal challenge to a small group of hands-on designers: design an electric vehicle using SolidWorks and build it in 9 months. The result? This hot rod, which uses an electric bus […]

In the fall of 2009, my good friend Tim Taylor and a squad of like-minded insane people decided to build a race car. This race car, to be precise: The car was built to compete in the 24 hours of LeMons race, an […]

iRobot, makers of robots with such varied talents as vacuuming floors and defusing roadside bombs, has released a video of its latest R&D effort: the Blob ’Bot. The Blob ’Bot is a soft shape-shifting robot that rolls […]

Photo used with permission from Plimoth Plantation. This article from the Boston Globe talks about a crazy project to recreate a fancy embroidered jacket from the 1600s undertaken by Plimoth Plantation, a living […]

Min-Kyu Choi, a recent graduate from the UK’s Royal College of Art, has redesigned the standard British power plug with beautiful simplicity. His design reconceives the bulky unit originally invented in 1946 into a […]