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Roughly 17 million air passengers travel through Paris during the summer, presenting the city's airports with a significant logistical challenge. To keep tempers cool and spirits high this year, the Aeroports de Paris implemented an unconventional plan: free dance lessons for passengers. Much like the free light therapy the airports offered over the winter holidays—which we covered back in January—summertime passengers can use their wait time at the airport to learn any one of 15 dances offered by the airport's resident trainers from "L'Ecole des Vacances," including Afro Jazz, Disco, Hip Hop, Mambo, Modern Jazz, Rock & Roll, Salsa, Samba, Tango, Cha-Cha and more. Music and trainer instructions are broadcast through cordless headsets so as to minimize the disturbance to other passengers, and lessons last 10 to 15 minutes each. At Paris-Orly, they take place on a dance floor in terminal South at boarding gate 17, with roving workshops also available in the boarding area at Paris-Orly West. At Paris-Charles de Gaulle, the dance floor is located in terminal 2E, gate E51, with itinerant workshops in Terminals 3 and 2F. Dance floors were designed by the Aeroports de Paris boutiques. Classes are available each summer weekend between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. through August 17th. There's nothing quite like free love to elevate consumers' moods, particularly when it includes a dash of sympvertising to relieve the stress of travelling and provides some status skills to boot. No doubt the airport boutiques will benefit, but another possible scenario could involve the sponsorship of such an effort by a local dance studio chain. Either way, one to emulate in any travel or hotel context! Website: www.aeroportsdeparis.fr/Adp/fr-FR/Passagers/Departs/Evenement Spotted by: RK
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We've covered enough crowdsourced innovations now that it's pretty clear the trend has taken hold. One thing we hadn't seen until just recently, however, is a crowdsourced restaurant. Enter Elements, an eatery being planned to open next year in Washington. Crafted by a "beta community" of some 400 participants, Elements will serve raw and organic locally grown vegetarian food in an environmentally sustainable way. The Elements project was launched back in February 2007 by Linda Welch, a Washington businesswoman who partnered with local entrepreneur and crowdsourcing proponent Neil Takemoto. Beginning with just 14 members, the beta community involved in creating the restaurant now includes designers, potential chefs and a local nonprofit called Live Green, which works to help establish environmentally sound businesses, according to the Washington Post. The concept has expanded dramatically from the original idea for a small cafe to a full-fledged, green-certified restaurant. Members earn points for their participation efforts, such as attending meetings and referring new members; those with at least 1 percent of the total points are eligible to share in the 10 percent of profits allocated to members, the Post reported. Meanwhile Welch, who is funding the project, still has final say on any decisions. Local growers, vintners, brewers, artists, musicians and community groups ultimately will all play a key role in the restaurant, which will also offer classes and lectures and sponsor events. Elements' crowdsourcing approach has not only provided a way to tap into a broad range of local expertise—one member, for example, is an expert in LEED, the green building certification system—it has also built a loyal base of customers interested in patronizing the 3,500-square-foot, community-focused restaurant once it's open. Welch explains: "Most businesses are started because you have a great idea, and you take it out to the public to see if they like it. This is the opposite. We're finding out what people want and doing it." That's the power of crowdsourcing, and we couldn't have put it better ourselves. ;-) Website: elements.collectivex.com Spotted by: Brian Yang
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Last summer, SANS—a small New York fashion label—launched an intriguingly simple shirt known as the Square Shirt. It made the rounds on fashion and design blogs, and subsequently sold out. The label has moved on to new collections (including socks with carefully placed holes), and no longer sells readymade Square Shirts. Instead, they've released the pattern so that customers can make their own. The straightforward pattern means that anyone who can use a sewing machine can fabricate one. After buying and downloading the digital pattern, customers print, cut and sew their own. SANS, which is known for creating cool clothes from organic materials, suggests using a worn garment or remnant piece of fabric. The pattern is priced at USD 6, which includes an original SANS label sent by post to add that branded finishing touch to the shirt. We like the notion of a brand taking one of its iconic pieces and instead of retiring it after the season is through, recycling it as a DIY project. Which appeals, of course, to the growing number of consumers who like to make things, and also gives anyone a chance to own something that might have previously been out of reach (SANS sold its Square Shirts at around USD 85, and in limited edition runs). While few products are as easy for consumers to reproduce as SANS' simple shirt, the notion of releasing a product's design is definitely worth exploring. Website: www.sans.name
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Encouraging people to organize their own wine tasting parties, 4xProeven (Tastingx4) combines a board game with a four-pack of wine. While wine tasting games certainly aren't new, they generally include game elements only, not the wine itself. And here's where we think 4xProeven missed a great opportunity (or maybe they're working on it). Instead of including unbranded wines, partner with a well-known label and turn the game into a smart and simple way to tryvertise, getting customers to sample a variety of reds or whites while connecting with the brand. We're sure Springwise has a few readers at E&J Gallo and Jacob's Creek. Time to give this one a spin? ;-) Website: www.4xproeven.nl
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Catering to design-conscious urban cyclists who'd rather not sacrifice style for safety, a group of Danish designers has created a bicycle helmet with interchangeable covers. Copenhagen-based Yakkay sells a simple shell helmet (dubbed "Smart One") that's tucked away under one of ten different covers. The helmet retails at DKK 599 (EUR 80 / USD 120), and the covers are sold for DKK 299 (EUR 40 / USD 60). While chin straps betray their true nature, the helmets otherwise resemble hats and caps worn for fashion, not protection. Yakkay states that the number of seriously injured cyclists with head injuries is around 2,500 per year in Denmark (on a total population of under 5.5 million). And that's in a country where motorists are accustomed to cyclists, and where most roads have separate bicycle lanes. As more consumers across the world hop on their bikes to reduce their gas bills, carbon footprints and waistlines, the market for innovative cycling products and services should grow at a healthy pace. One to tap into! Easy way to get started? Ask Yakkay about regional distribution opportunities. (Related: Stylish fire protection kits.) Update: please don't email Yakkay about international distribution. They wrote to tell us that they have a plan in place for their international launch and are currently receiving too many distributor requests. Website: www.yakkay.com Spotted by: Lori Webb
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3VOOR12, a multimedia platform for music that's run by Dutch broadcaster VPRO, is piloting a new heat-mapping system at this year's Lowlands music festival, which takes place next weekend. Using familiar web terminology—Hot or Not—the festival's visitors will be able to let others know which of twelve venues is hosting the hottest show at any particular moment. The voting system will run on a mobile app that users can download to their internet-enabled phones. (Those with wifi-enabled phones will be able to use 3VOOR12's free festival-wide wifi.) Considering the distance between venues at large events like Lowlands, a crowd-controlled, up-to-the-minute heat map seems like a clever idea, especially if users can view voting results from people who like the same bands they do. (Not currently a feature of 3VOOR12's application.) Related: CitySense, a mobile mapping tool that uses GPS to reveal San Francisco's nightlife hotspots. Website: weblogs.vpro.nl/digitaal/2008/08/06/hot-or-not Spotted by: Dutch Cowgirls
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When we wrote about San Francisco-based My Farm earlier this summer, we noted that Oregon-based Your Backyard Farmer had reportedly been doing something similar for a few years already. Sure enough, turns out the two-woman company began installing organic gardens throughout the Portland, Milwaukie and Lake Oswego areas of Oregon back in 2006. Your Backyard Farmer requires just a plot of land big enough to feed the mouths involved—10 by 10 square feet is about the minimum for an individual or a family of two—along with six hours of direct sunlight a day and an outdoor water source. In exchange, the farming team will provide clients with an organic vegetable farm right outside their door, customized to their family's size and dining choices. Customers get to choose the produce they want grown from a seasonal list of summer and fall crops. Your Backyard Farmer both installs and visits the garden once a week to weed, harvest and do any additional plantings necessary. Each time they leave, a basket of freshly harvested vegetables is left behind that's cleaned and ready to be cooked or eaten. Weekly costs for a garden big enough to feed a family of four are roughly USD 40. For those who want to learn to do it themselves, Your Backyard Farmer also offers a consulting program that runs from March through November, including about 2 hours a month of on-site consultation on topics including soils, pest, disease, garden planning, crop rotation, succession planting, trellising, weeds, transplants verses seeding, cover cropping and more. All of which is further evidence that consumers really do want more control over their food. Help them become urban farmers, and help yourself to a rewarding new business! Website: www.yourbackyardfarmer.com Spotted by: Michael Turri
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Anyone who has ever tried to call a large company has learned to dread the labyrinthine touch-tone menu systems most employ. Fortunately, help is now on the way from a Canadian startup with a "Deep Dialing" service that lets users avoid those phone menus altogether. Toronto-based Fonolo works by using transcriptions of the phone menus of large companies so that users can navigate them visually. Users simply pick the company they need to call, scan through the company's phone menu visually, then click the spot they need. Fonolo will automatically dial, navigate the menu and then dial the user's phone. When the user answers, they will be connected to the right spot in the menu—hence the name, Deep Dialing. Users can bookmark any point in a phone menu that they call regularly and access it as a simple URL through their browser or smart phone. Fonolo can also build and maintain an “intelligent call history” for the user to keep track of calls and conversations during a bill dispute, for example, including storing text notes and saving recordings of each call; transcriptions are coming soon, the company says. Fonolo uses patented technology that "spiders" the phone system much the way a web search engine like Google spiders the web. The system regularly dials companies, navigates their menus and uses a combination of speech recognition, signal processing and human editing to maintain an updated map of “phone space.” Fonolo also just opened up its system to developers, introducing an API that lets developers build applications that interact with the Deep Dialing service. More at developer.fonolo.com. For users, the system is free and can be used on any phone, with no software to install. Fonolo will reportedly be ad-supported once it launches officially. It's currently still in private beta, but is accepting email addresses for invitation to the public beta, which is coming soon. No word yet on its geographical reach, but it certainly won't be long before the telcos sit up and take notice. One to get in on early! Website: www.fonolo.com Spotted by: Ozgur Alaz
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Textbooks have long made up an all-too-significant proportion of college students' annual costs, currently approaching an average of USD 1,000 per year in the US, according to Make Textbooks Affordable. General outcry has ensued, but a new experiment from publisher Flat World Knowledge just may provide a new—and ad-free—solution. Beginning this month and continuing through the Fall 2008 semester, Flat World Knowledge is conducting a beta test in which it is offering four different textbooks online for free to hundreds of students at 15 colleges and universities across the United States. The texts are from the areas of business and economics, and will replace traditional textbooks in a single class or class section at each participating institution. Not only will students have free online access to the expert-written, peer-reviewed and professionally edited texts, but the texts will be open as well through a Creative Commons licensing scheme, giving faculty the ability to customize them as they wish for their classes. Unlike other free text ventures out there—such as US-based Freeload Press and Danish Ventus Publishing, both of which have been covered by our sister site trendwatching.com—Flat World's business model doesn't depend on advertising. Instead, it offers affordable supplementary materials to students beyond the free online book, including printed, on demand textbooks for around USD 30; audio books for around USD 25; and downloadable and printable files by the chapter. Also available are low-priced study aids like podcast study guides, digital flash cards, interactive practice quizzes and more. Eric Frank, Flat World's cofounder and chief marketing officer, explains: “The time has come for open textbooks. This new model of textbook publishing will result in increased choices and dramatically lower costs for students. It can enhance learning by giving instructors more control over content, and by leveraging the power of social learning networks around content. Between the oligopolistic practices of the big publishers on one end of the spectrum—and piracy on the other—lies a better solution: open textbooks." Flat World plans to collect feedback over the course of this semester-long test, and then commercially launch its concept worldwide in time for the Spring 2009 school period. The launch will feature an expanded product roster of eight textbooks, all focused initially on business and economics subjects. A total of 15 textbooks are currently under contract and in Flat World's pipeline. Free and open software is already gaining ground in the world of technology, and now we have the possibility of a similar pattern in textbook publishing. There's no doubt cash-strapped college students love free love, as has already been shown with photocopies, notepaper and notebooks. Will this one take hold? You can bet there are countless students hoping so. One to watch! (Related: Textbook rental for college students.) Website: www.flatworldknowledge.com Spotted by: Flemming Birch
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Booking beauty and fitness appointments by phone can be an irritating chore, what with the muzak to be endured, the difficulty of finding convenient appointment times and the potential for coworkers to overhear too much about one's personal hygiene. Paying full price makes the burden doubly irksome, so New Yorkers could only have been pleased recently to witness the launch of Lifebooker. Lifebooker is like a personal concierge that lets users search, browse and book discounted appointments at the top health and beauty spots in New York City for free. An extensive array of beauty and health services are listed on the site, which has forged partnerships with local establishments through which they set up profiles including business descriptions and complete service menus. Each spa, salon and studio posts real-time appointment availabilities on Lifebooker as well, allowing users to search through them dynamically online. Users simply enter the criteria they seek (service type, date, time and neighbourhood), click the “Find” button and Lifebooker produces an up-to-the-minute list of what the city has to offer. Users can also browse ratings both for the establishment and the service type, created by members who have actually booked and honoured appointments there. Once chosen, appointments can be booked online and are sent to the user's cellphone. In addition to the convenience of booking online, Lifebooker also offers exclusive discounts at the city's top health and beauty spots, negotiated specifically for users of the site. Perhaps even better, each time a user attends an appointment booked on Lifebooker and then rates it afterward, they earn reward dollars that can be used toward their next appointment. Booking and rating a USD 100 facial appointment, for example, earns USD 5 in reward dollars that can be used as early as the next day. Just by cutting through the hassle and streamlining the appointment-booking process, Lifebooker could gain a devoted following. The addition of discounts, honest ratings and a reward system, however, promises to make the service irresistible. One to replicate in cities around the world! (Related: Mobile beauty salon makes everything transparent.) Website: www.lifebooker.com Spotted by: Thomas Schell
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