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Ideo's prize-winning utility bike debuts via Kickstarter

A clever electric bike, which won a design competition last fall for creating the best urban utility bike, is coming to market via Kickstarter today.

The Faraday, designed by the Palo Alto, Calif., design consultancy Ideo and Santa Cruz, Calif., bike-maker Rock Lobster Custom Cycles, took home top honors in the Oregon Manifest creative collaboration challenge, which CNET followed. The competition paired global design firms with small, handcrafted bike builders to create a bike for city living.

That success generated enough interest that Adam Vollmer, who led the design efforts for Ideo, left the firm to launch a company to … Read more

Ideo's electric bike wins design competition

An electric bike, created by the Palo Alto, Calif., design consultancy Ideo and Santa Cruz, Calif., bike maker Rock Lobster Custom Cycles, has won the competition for creating the best urban utility bike in the Oregon Manifest creative collaboration challenge.

The bike, which combines classic styling with an electric motor, beat out the creations of the pairing of Portland, Ore., design firm Ziba with bike builder Signal Cycles, and the tandem of San Francisco design consultancy Fuseproject with Santa Rosa, Calif., SyCip Designs.

On its Web site, Oregon Manifest posted reviews of each bike from four independent critics. Then, it … Read more

The ultimate utility bike? Maybe it's an e-bike

PORTLAND, Ore.--For years, the cycling industry has wrestled with creating a bike convenient enough for the masses.

A new effort from the Palo Alto, Calif., design consultancy Ideo and Santa Cruz, Calif., bike builder Rock Lobster Custom Cycles may have pushed the industry a step closer to achieving the goal. The team created a bike for the Oregon Manifest 2011 Constructor's Design Challenge, a bike building competition pitting three teams of designers and handcrafted bike builders. Their goal: create the best utility bike for urban living.

This summer, CNET visited with the three teams--including the pairing of Portland … Read more

ShopWell gives food buyers new tools for healthy eating

If you're going to try to help people figure out the best foods for their individual circumstances, why not bring a little Silicon Valley sensibility to the table?

That's the thinking of ShopWell, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based start-up that's hoping to become a major player in the ever-growing personal nutrition recommendation arena with a high-tech matching algorithm.

Founded by Brian Witlin, a former entrepreneur-in-residence at leading design consultancy IDEO, ShopWell is aiming to give individual shoppers Web- and mobile-based applications that offer the best possible suggestions about what groceries to buy based on their own personal … Read more

Designing the ultimate utility bike

Inspiration comes in many forms. Just ask the team of designers at Ziba design consultancy in Portland, Ore., and bike builders at nearby Signal Cycles, who are working together to create the ultimate utility ride.

The group of five took a Franken-bike out for a spin this spring. It was a standard hybrid bike, the kind you see commuters pedaling to and from work everyday, with the notable exception of a sidecar, just off the right side of the rear wheel and just big enough to fit two bags of groceries.

The sidecar had no gloss, no fit or finish. … Read more

Huawei unveils Ideos X3 smartphone, Slim S7 tablet

BARCELONA, Spain--Huawei Mobile World Congress press conference is still a day away, but the company jumped the gun and announced four new devices on Monday.

Details are slim at the moment, but we can offer what we know.

The trim Huawei Ideos X3 smartphone runs Gingerbread on a 3.2 inch-screen.

The Huawei Ideos S7 Slim tablet has a 7-inch (480x800 pixels) capacitive touch-screen and measures about half an inch thick. Features on the Froyo device include Bluetooth, HD video, a Web browser, messaging and e-mail, a music player, a camera, and Wi-Fi. The S7 Slim can make cellular and … Read more

Huawei Ideos X5 will please Android purists (review)

We first glimpsed the Huawei Ideos X5 at CES and declared it a good-looking, midlevel Android phone. It runs the standard version of Android 2.2 (Froyo), which means that it doesn't have any of the extra interface graphics that manufacturers sometimes add for visual flare and to differentiate their phones from rivals'. That's sure to please those campaigning to let Android be Android without additional skin modifications.

The Ideos X5 has very solid hardware specs, like a 3.8-inch capacitive touch screen, a 5-megapixel camera, and 720p HD video capture and playback. It also has expandable memory … Read more

CES: Huawei Ideos X5 First Look (video)

LAS VEGAS--One of the most interesting (and possibly best) things about the Huawei Ideos X5 is what it lacks.

The Ideos X5 is one of a couple Android smartphones we've seen without a customized skin on top of the stock Android operating system. Not all of those skins are bad by any means, but Android purists will welcome the simple, straightforward interface. Take a look at the phone and its features in this First Look video from the CES show fly.

CES: Huawei Ideos X5 runs stock Android

LAS VEGAS--Just as we reported yesterday, Huawei introduced a new phone for the U.S. market at this year's CES, the Huawei Ideos X5. This midrange Android handset is no stranger; it's already been released in Asia. The U.S. timetable is much murkier--Huawei is keeping the U.S. launch date, carrier, and price under wraps until later this month.

In that sense, the specs are no surprise. The slim, trim Ideos X5 has a nice 3.8-inch screen with a WVGA display (800x480 pixels). It looked bright in our hands and we liked the dark gray brushed … Read more