Showing titles in Innovations

Alone in a Spartan black cockpit, test pilot Mike Melvill rocketed toward space. He had 80 seconds to exceed the speed of sound and begin the climb to a target no civilian pilot had ever reached. He might not make it back alive. If he did he would make history as the world's first commercial astronaut. The spectacle defied reason, the result of a competition dreamed up by entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, whose vision for a new race to space required small teams to do what only the world's largest governments had done before.

What really distinguishes the people who literally change the world - those creative geniuses who give us one breakthrough after another? What differentiates Marie Curie or Elon Musk from the merely creative, the many one-hit wonders among us? Melissa Schilling, one of the world's leading experts on innovation, invites us into the lives of eight people - Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Elon Musk, Dean Kamen, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, Thomas Edison, and Steve Jobs - to identify the traits and experiences that drove them to make spectacular breakthroughs, over and over again.

How did a balloonist circumnavigate the earth without fuel? How did an inventor design a device that creates electrical power from human footsteps? How did the WHO figure out how to treat and reduce the transmission of Ebola? They all used alien thinking. For over a decade, innovation experts Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux and Michael Wade have studied individuals around the world who have made leaps of creative genius. Their research shows that they are five patterns of thinking that distinguish true innovators from the rest of us.

When I was growing up, I always thought there were only two ways to get rich. Number one: You were born rich. Number two: Some family member left you a bunch of money when they kicked the bucket. As much as people love to talk up the American dream, I grew up inside the American reality - raised inside a trailer in New Jersey, born to a 14-year-old mother. But now, things are a little different. I've done lots of cool things with my life, but most people know me as "the ab roller guy".

Michael Colburn is an inventor. He wasn't always, but he made himself into one and realized a powerful truth: Inventing is a skill anyone can master. Over the last four decades, he has created inventions and built businesses and partnerships worth millions of dollars based on his inventions. Invent, Innovate, and Prosper is a practical handbook for inventing based on Michael's decades of work as a successful inventor. He shares his step-by-step system for launching profitable inventions, along with the surprising real-life lessons that helped him thrive.

Firebrand conservative columnist, commentator, Internet entrepreneur, and number-one New York Times best-selling author Michelle Malkin tells the fascinating, little-known stories of the inventors who have contributed to American exceptionalism and technological progress.

Dale Dougherty, creator of MAKE: magazine and the Maker Faire, provides a guided tour of the international phenomenon known as the Maker Movement, a social revolution that is changing what gets made, how it’s made, where it’s made, and who makes it. Free to Make is a call to join what Dougherty calls the “renaissance of making,” an invitation to see ourselves as creators and shapers of the world around us.

The first-ever inside look at DARPA - the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - the maverick and controversial group whose futuristic work has had amazing civilian and military applications, from the Internet to GPS to driverless cars

The titans of Silicon Valley are racing to build a single world-changing piece of software. They know that whoever gets there first will revolutionise our relationship with technology - and make billions of dollars in the process. They call it voice computing. Computers that can speak and think just as clearly as humans may seem like the stuff of science fiction, but they are mere years away from becoming a reality. In Talk to Me, veteran tech journalist James Vlahos meets the researchers at Google, Amazon and Apple who are leading the way to a voice computing revolution.

Johannes Gutenberg was our first geek, the original technology entrepreneur, who had to grapple with all the challenges a Silicon Valley startup faces today. Jeff Jarvis tells Gutenberg's story from an entrepreneurial perspective, examining how he overcame technology hurdles, how he operated with the secrecy of a Steve Jobs, but then shifted to openness, how he raised capital and mitigated risk, and how, in the end, his cash flow and equity structure did him in.

For decades we've delighted in dreaming about a sci-fi utopia, from flying cars and bionic humans to hoverboards; with driverless cars first proposed at the 1939 World's Fair. And why not? Building a better world, be it a free-flying commute or an automated urban lifestyle is a worthy dream. Given the pace of technological change, nothing seems impossible anymore. But why are these innovations always out of reach? Delving into the history of technology, this book also looks at what lies ahead, showing how the origins of our technology may provide insight into how it realistically evolves.

A big source of tension between the US and China at the moment is technology. And one very small component is now at the centre of this battle for global dominance: the microchip. Controlling chip manufacturing in the 21st century may well prove to be like controlling the oil supply in the 20th. The country that controls this manufacturing can throttle the military and economic power of others. At the heart of this battle is ARM Holdings. The Everything Blueprint describes the titanic power struggle for control of the microchip.

Patents don't have to be a dry and boring subject, and inventors, investors, and business people may (and should) enjoy using them to their advantage. However, to empower the general public to use the patent system to its fullest extent, the need remains for a book that introduces important patent concepts in a humanly understandable fashion, with down-to-earth, practical advice that, more importantly, is not boring, as many patent books unavoidably are to readers who are not patent practitioners.

Innovation is the subject of countless books and courses, but there's very little out there about how you actually innovate. Innovation and entrepreneurship are not one and the same, although aspiring innovators often think of them that way. They are told to get an idea and a team and to build a show-and-tell for potential investors. In Innovating, Luis Perez-Breva describes another approach.

This history of medieval inventions, focusing on the 11th to the 14th centuries, vividly portrays a thriving era of human ingenuity, and the results are still being felt to this day. From the mechanical clock to the first eyeglasses, both of which revolutionized society, many of the commonplace devices we now take for granted had their origin in the Middle Ages. Divided into 10 thematic chapters, the accessible audiobook allows the listener to sample areas of interest or listen to the book from beginning to end for a complete historical overview.

Edison and Tesla were arch-enemies with competing visions as to how to electrically empower America. Their hostility played out in the infamous War of the Currents. Radio, television, robots, electric cars, self-driving cars, solar heating, the internet, and the cellphone were on the mind of one or the other of these geniuses. Which one ultimately proved to have the more accurate and enduring vision for the world? Who is in the news today and why? Come and find out the answers.

In Defying Reality, David M. Ewalt traces the story of virtual reality from ancient amphitheaters to Cold War military laboratories, through decades of hype and failure, to a 19-year-old video game aficionado who made the impossible possible. Ewalt looks at how businesses are already using this tech to revolutionize the world around us, and what we can expect in the future. Ewalt offers a unique perspective on VR. With firsthand accounts and on-the-ground reporting, Defying Reality shows how VR will change our work, our play, and the way we relate to one another. 

The workshop revolutionaries who made our world have never had the attention afforded the political revolutionaries who founded this nation. But it has been these innovators, in small-town attics and on the Mississippi, in Silicon Valley and the wheat fields of Kansas, in a Black woman's beauty parlor and a Dayton bicycle shop, who set America on a course to attain a standard of living unprecedented in the history of the world.

It was early February 1912, and Franz Reichelt, a Paris tailor, and Rodman Law, a self-described “professional jackass” from New York, were poised, respectively, on the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty, ready to deploy an experimental parachute. In bat wings and bundled linen, they were almost certain their contraptions would work. Here is the tale of their inspirations and their pluck - and what happened next.

Marie Benedict widmet sich einer weiteren klugen Frau, die die Weltgeschichte entscheidend geprägt hat und deren Namen wir dennoch nicht kennen. Rosalind Franklin fand nach jahrelanger Forschung die Doppelhelixstruktur unserer DNA, doch für diesen Coup geehrt wurden fälschlicherweise drei Männer... Rosalind Franklin war schon immer eine Außenseiterin - brillant, aber anders. Sie fühlt sich der Wissenschaft am nächsten, den unveränderlichen Gesetzen der Physik und Chemie, die ihre Experimente leiten. Sie wird beauftragt, das Geheimnis unserer DNA zu entschlüsseln.