And We’re Off!

The commercial space race hit a pretty big milestone! Yesterday’s SpaceX launch put the first commercial spacecraft with plans to dock with the space station into orbit: I’m convinced that space travel, like the kind Virgin Galactic is planning, will become “reasonably” affordable over the next two decades. You can now book a space flight right on the Virgin site for $200,000. The form is actually quite funny: “Book Directly with Virgin Galactic” or “Book with your Local Accredited Space Agent.” I love it. It’s an outrageous sum of money, but not nearly as outrageous as the $20-$35 million per trip paid to the Russian government by “tourists” over the past 11 years. And now there’s talk of $13,000 trips in the

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Pune: A (Nearly) Waste-Free City

Note: This blog post was originally published on the MIT Public Service Center website. It’s the tenth post in a blog series sharing findings from a research project I’m working on throughout the month of January. January 26, 2012 Paul Artiuch and Sam Kornstein are graduate students at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Throughout the month of January they are in India researching market-oriented approaches to reducing agricultural food waste. They will be sharing their project scope and some of their findings in this blog series. Until now, we’ve spent the majority of our time exploring upstream agricultural supply chains – learning about what happens to food between farms and markets, before it reaches end consumers. Unlike many western countries, Indian

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Innovation Strategy and the Technology S-Curve

Two of my classmates, Matt Lieber and Michael Shafrir, put together a promo video for the Innovation Strategy course that will be taught by Professor Pierre Azoulay this spring at MIT Sloan: The technology s-curve. There you have it. “Cameras, diapers, and pretty much any other kind of technology…” Matt and Michael don’t normally spend their time making promo videos for MBA courses. They’ll be the TAs this semester.

Creepy Video of the Day

“Meet Ant-Roach, an inflatable clackety six-legged robot with a protruding proboscis”: The name was chosen “because it reminds its creators of a cross between an anteater and a cockroach.” Some people take a ride: More here.

Eric-Schmidt Backed “Slice”

Via Techcrunch, Eric Schmidt is backing a new start-up, Slice, that aims to organize and track your online purchases by querying purchase data from your inbox. I gave it a shot earlier this week, and found it to be surprisingly accurate and useful. I generally don’t use online life organization tools (e.g., Mint), but I found this to be a bit different. Instead of simply helping you to analyze your own purchasing behavior, it helps you anticipate and track outstanding items that are either en route or have been held up for some reason. So rather than log onto various sites to track your orders, you can just log into Slice, which has already identified the tracking numbers for shipped

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