productivity

Although hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, it's a royal pain to make.

Most industrial hydrogen producers currently make the gas by heating methane and water to 815 degrees Celsius and causing a reaction. Unfortunately, this process generates 9.3 kilograms of carbon dioxide for every kilo of hydrogen, so it's not environmentally friendly or cheap.

Other companies like Signa Chemistry have come out with chemical catalysts that can strip hydrogen from water.

Then there is electrolysis, which involves cracking water molecules with electricity. Electrolysis doesn't produce any greenhouse gases or chemical residues so … Read more

From the "Zaky Pillow" to the "WhyCry Baby Crying Analyzer" to "Pee Pee Teepee," Baby Gizmo has published the results of its annual "Most Ridiculous Baby Products" survey.

Enjoy!

Here's the deal:

You (the beloved Download user, the reason we're here) are out there somewhere, while I (Greg Penhaligon, product manager of Download) am way up here, sequestered in the crystalline fortress that makes up the Download Control Center. My job is to make Download into the best site of it's kind for you, but what is that exactly? What do you want? I converse with some of you in the forums, read your occasionally expletive-laden emails to customer service, but we've never had a proper way to keep you up-to-date with what we're … Read more

The Putting People First blog by Experientia has pointed me toward the excellent essay "The Long Wow" by Adaptive Path's Brandon Schauer. Schauer outlines a vision of creating lasting customer loyalty and brand value that runs counter to the fixation on quick wins and instant gratification, which many companies, under the pressure of shorter product life cycles and CMO tenures, seem to pursue these days. He defines "The Long Wow" as "a means to achieving long-term customer loyalty through systematically impressing your customers again and again."

This goes far beyond adding new features … Read more

Monday morning, Zoho, the online productivity suite, announced full offline functionality for its Zoho Writer product. Zoho had previously released partial offline functionality for Writer earlier this year, but you could only read the documents and not edit them. What good is that? Luckily, as a little post-Thanksgiving gift, we now have full offline editing, utilizing Google Gears (download Google Gears for Windows or Mac from CNET Download.com).

The offline functionality here couldn't be any easier. If you need to go offline, just hit the "Go Offline" button at the top, give Zoho permission to use … Read more

Firefox has Flock and Songbird, but it's not the only open-source app with some nifty spin-offs. OxygenOffice Pro is developed from OpenOffice.org, but don't let the name fool you: It's completely free, and like a Thanksgiving turkey it's stuffed with even more features. (Anybody else up for a list of Turkey 2.0 features?) Anyway, it's very much like its parent, and you can opt out of whatever features you dislike during the installation.

… Read more

Finally, a USB gadget that's actually useful. We had pretty much given up on the one-time novel plug-and-play desktop devices until they became so common that practically anything that required electricity was being turned into a USB product. Thanko's recently released aromatherapy treatment was probably a new all-time low.

The "USB Hoops Basketball Game" is a undeniable exception to that trend, the first USB-worthy item in recent memory. Our only quibble is the obvious missed opportunity: The game keeps score on its own digital display, but the USB connection could have been used to create all … Read more

Environmental marketing firm TerraChoice found that many retail products overstate their environmental attributes, a practice which risks causing skepticism among consumers.

The company sent people to big-box retail stores to find products labeled as green. In the process, it found that almost all of them committed at least one of what it calls "sins of greenwashing."

Most common was the "Sin of the Hidden Trade-Off," where manufacturers claim a product has a green feature, such as recycled paper content, but don't pay attention to potentially more important issues, such as global warming or water use. … Read more

Can you call a concept a cultural phenomenon if different people conceive of it at the same time? Within the past few months, three publications have come to similar conclusions. The digital media agency Avenue A | Razorfish released a study called "Fast Forward: Designing for Constant Change." It consists of thirteen essays as well as research exploring how consumers' digital media habits are changing, and how this affects the design of user experiences and brands. The key take-away is: Today's online users are forced to adjust to constant change in increasingly volatile rich media environments, and they … Read more