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A couple of Swedish designers Anna Haupt and Terese Alstin have designed and developed a special kind of helmet: the Hovding helmet for cycling beauties. Safe beauties, that is! Because the $360 Hovding helmet functions just like an airbag collar: it looks like a scarf but it inflates in 0,1 seconds when accelerometers and gyro – meters inside detect sudden jolt. Would you rather wear a classic, traditional helmet or the futurist Hovding?

(via Airbag Collar For Safe Cycling — StyleFrizz)

This is a spectacular example of sidestepping the design conventions of an established market, and reconceptualizing the design constraints and alternative ways to satisfy them. The airbag bike helmet by Hovding is worn like a scarf, and is passive until a crash occurs.

Readers offer their best tips for duplicating tabs in Chrome, putting together makeshift collar stays, and getting yourself a cold drink at the supermarket. More »

We’ve already seen solutions such as DOGTV looking to keep pets entertained while owners are away from home, but what about feeding them? Using RFID sensor technology, Gatefeeder is now looking to provide a solution to this problem.

The cuboid device can hold around one weekend’s worth of food for one cat and comes with a smart ID tag that is placed on the animal’s collar. When the cat pushes the door, the machine instantly reads the RFID tag, opens the door and provides a serving of food. When more than one pet is at home, Gatefeeder offers the right amount of nourishment to each cat based on their ID tags. To eliminate competitive eating, the device fits only one cat’s head and body through the door at once and all food is contained within the device to avoid mess. Medication can also be included in each serving and Gatefeeder’s creators claim that owners of small dogs could benefit from the machine as well. Gatefeeder is currently on sale for USD 249. The device is shown in more detail in the video below:

With many owners leading increasingly busy lifestyles, this could prove to be a useful device to ensure pets do not suffer if there is no-one home to feed them. One to replicate to cater for other animals?

Website: www.gatefeeder.com
Contact: info@gatefeeder.com

Spotted by: Cecilia Biemann

“There is less mobility in the work force because the computers are not simply displacing jobs, they are taking out the middle. Computers are good at routine cognitive tasks in the middling white-collar range, the desk jobs, the jobs that require keeping track of things, making arithmetic calculations. They are not so good at motor tasks, the blue collar jobs that require coordination, manual dexterity and sense-of-the-world adjustments. Computers can crunch numbers but they can’t drive a truck or make up a hotel room.”

– Rick Bookstaber, The Bifurcated Society  (via courtenaybird)

Don’t wake up in a roadside ditch.

Don’t have a grandson with a dog collar.

Stop taking in stray animals.

These news Directv spots sure have a lot of directives for us to follow. But it’s this directive the company hopes will come through loud and clear: Get rid of cable.

I like this campaign a lot, probably because it’s a campaign that relies on narrative to sell. And in a clever ways it does sell by painting cable subscribers as lackards and doofuses.

If there’s one thing the world needs it’s a service that lets you build a shirt using 3D rendering technology. Sure we could use cars that run on water and world peace, but let’s get the little things out of the way, right?

Thankfully, there’s BleuFlamme, a website created by a gaggle of eight engineers who have dedicated their lives to the sale of custom shirts.

Building a shirt is fairly simple: you pick a style, a collar, some fabric, stick it all together, and they have it made in Hong Kong and shipped to you. They start at $99 each – a bit steep, but it sure beats a trip to Cameron Road. We’ve covered a number of these custom shirt sites, most recently J Hilburn and all of them seem to be improving upon the age old custom tailoring model. The question, then, is whether this model needs disruption?

There are plenty of folks out there who want custom clothing. I’m no clothes-horse but a nice custom shirt looks good. $99 good? Hey, if you’ve got the IPO cash, why not flaunt it?

BleuFlamme isn’t sitting still and will be improving their service over the next year. Quoth founder Jin Takahito:

<div style="margin-left:30px;margin-right:30px;padding-left:15px;border-left:3px solid #ccc;font-style:italic;"This coming Q1 we will release a rotatable 3D shirt model so you can preview your shirt design from all angles – implemented in pure HTML5 – something from a technical standpoint, is very hard to accomplish but in return provides better user experience from across any browsers any device. I will also introduce Community Gallery of shirt designs contributed by our users where you can get some initial inspirations when designing your own dream shirt.

He also notes that “We are pushing human civilization forward as we speak,” which is a pretty noble goal, although a bit shortsighted. We’re going to need custom shirts when we leave to civilize species on other planets, Jin. Will you be there for us?

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Readers offer their best tips for quieting certain notifications on Facebook, putting together makeshift collar stays, and hanging onto your headphones. More »

Despite LinkedIn’s professional focus, it’s Facebook that’s leading social networks to become a major way people find new jobs. 20% of those unemployed and looking, employed and looking, or employed and open to a new job said “an online social network directly led to finding their current/most recent job”, according to a new Jobvite study. Of these 22.1 million Americans, 84% attributed their job to Facebook, while 46% cited assistance from LinkedIn, and 36% cited Twitter. The findings should signal HR departments and recruiters of the importance of social networks, and especially Facebook, to their success.

Last year, just 13% of job seekers had found their latest gig from a social network. The rise of Facebook as a job source can be in part tied to the proliferation of tools that harness the social network’s biographical data and massive user base. BranchOut released its Recruiter Connect enterprise search product, and Jobvite, Work4 Labs, and Monster.com now provide ways to distribute job openings through Facebook.

A year ago, Facebook redesigned the profile to make work info immediately visible, which prompted more users to keep it up to date. Combined with the size of the user base and the frequency with which they visit the site, recruiters can both search a larger pool of applicants and expose job listings to a larger audience using Facebook than LinkedIn.

The dedicated professional social network is still very important for recruiting high profile white collar employees. However, as Facebook improves privacy controls to make it easier to count both professional and personal contacts as friends, it is chipping away at LinkedIn’s value-add for the blue collar work force.

Manufacturing is a key sector of the economy, and with all the manufacturing jobs shipped overseas in the last decade, American companies are falling all over themselves to appear as American, and as industrial, as possible.

Now, it’s Carhartt’s turn:

This ad from Team Detroit doesn’t do a lot for the brand, in my opinion. Carhartt already owns the blue collar market, and the men and women who buy Carhartt are making their decisions on the job and at retail.

Does this garment serve me well? Does it fit and will it last? Those are the questions Carhartt buyers want answered.

Plus, all these tight shots of hooks, and molten metal are growing tiresome. The American worker doesn’t go to work everyday in a cinema noir landscape. Can we let the freaking sun in, please?

Previously on AdPulp: Fade In: Red Wing, Minnesota | Einstein Said, “Nationalism Is An Infantile Disease” | Independents Drink Tennessee Whiskey | When American Cars Aren’t Really American, Americana Docudramas Probably Are Not The Way To Go | Despite Massive Under-Employment, “We Are All Workers”

A few months ago I was giving a talk in my hometown of Memphis, TN, and someone asked what the city could do to ignite more entrepreneurship in among inner city kids. My immediate answer was teach coding– even basic app building skills– along with English and Math in every public school. I was surprised that my brother– an engineer who worked for many years in Silicon Valley before relocating to the Midwest– didn’t necessarily agree. “That depends on whether there are still enough coding jobs for them, or they’ve all gone overseas,” he said.

It was then that the great American panic of a few years came rushing back to me. Somehow I’d forgotten all those business school reports and magazine covers warning the US that it wasn’t just the factory jobs going overseas; the white collar engineering jobs were all leaving Silicon Valley too and going to Eastern Europe, India and other pockets of the emerging world. These reports screamed that kids lulled into computer science degrees by the great late 1990s were graduating into the work world out of luck. Just like the Detroit factory worker, there was just no way for them to compete with the thousands of engineers graduating annually in India and China.

It’s amazing just how wrong so many people could be. Just a few years later, one of the only bright spots of employment in the entire country is for coders. In California, the latest numbers show unemployment at a staggering 12%. Yet if you are a coder in Silicon Valley, the world is your oyster.

You can apply for Y-Combinator, you can raise money from hundreds of angels and VCs, you an bootstrap a simple Web or mobile app off of your credit cards, you can work at Google, Facebook, Zynga, Groupon, or one of the thousands of other startups desperate for coding talent. Every entrepreneur tells us hiring is the single hardest challenge they face right now.

Those wacky offices you see Jason Kincaid parading around in on TC Cribs are getting wackier as companies like DropBox and Airbnb want their companies to stand out even more to in-demand recruits. Why do you think everyone wants to their company on Cribs? COME LOOK AT HOW FUN IT IS TO WORK HERE!

Recently I asked Dustin Moskovitz–  the Facebook and Asana co-founder and the world’s youngest billionaire– to come be a judge at San Francisco Disrupt. He joked that he was going to tell the smartest entrepreneurs their startups were doomed so they’d give up and enter the workforce instead. At least I think he was joking. (By the way, he’ll give you a $10,000 allowance to pimp your desk if you come work for him.)

As someone who used to work for one of those magazines, let me apologize if you decided not to learn to write software because of all of those covers. But you probably shouldn’t rely on the media to tell you want to do for a living anymore than you should listen to CNBC for investing advice. Either could have gotten you screwed out of a goldmine in recent years.

The idea that all the software jobs would leave the Valley was the second great lie of the early press and excitement around globalization. The first was that America would always stay the “brain” of the global workforce, while everyone else in emerging markets just did our grunt work, leaving us all the innovative, high-paying jobs. I wrote an entire book refuting the implicit navite-mixed-with-raciscm of that view, so I won’t argue it again here.

At first blush, it’s strange that both of these myths so fervently believed a few years ago both appear to be false, because they seem at odds. Either you believe people in the rest of the world are smart enough to do the higher level work and freak out about white collar jobs leaving the US as the rest of the world’s worker base gets more sophisticated OR you believe the rest of the world will forever just do the grunt work and more sophisticated US jobs are safe.

But as it turns out there was a fundamental flaw with that either/or dynamic that Marc Andreessen articulated perfectly in his recent Wall Street Journal oped: Software is eating the world. (Ironically, Andreessen became a coder because he read in US News & World Report it was a good way to make money. Lucky for him, he wasn’t born a decade or so later.)

What that means is software jobs are not the zero sum game we anticipated back in the early 2000s when many companies were sending them overseas. Instead, they’ve expanded exponentially as more industries have become fundamentally about virtual delivery. And the trend isn’t just about a company like Pandora, Zynga or Amazon pushing music, gaming and books to be software-only  products, rather than physical things packaged on shelves. Nor is it just about the new globally exploding market of social media. We’re also seeing the biggest resurgence in companies disrupting the real world since the early days of the Internet, with Airbnb, Uber, Groupon, GetTaxi, and a host of other names taking on long-neglected, fragmented industries in new digital ways. Andreessen and his partners are betting that healthcare and education are next. Accel, too, has been placing some big bets on education.

Not only have software jobs expanded dramatically by industry, they’re expanding dramatically within industries too. You can’t overstate the impact of two billion people being online, and estimates that five billion will have smartphones within the next ten years. Even today, more people have basic mobile phones than have toilets, and those phones can provide a staggering array of digital services from banking to education to news and information.

Because digital companies reach so many more people than the days when we were fretting about the demise of software jobs, the handful of companies that dominate a category like social media are building massive organizations. And, unlike the dot com days, most are doing so profitably.

Silicon Valley isn’t the only place benefitting. Ask entrepreneurs in China how hard it is to recruit and keep video game developers. Or ask me how hard it has been to recruit Chinese bloggers over the last few months. It’s no longer an age when a Web company launches in the US, and years later the rest of the world is ready for those products and features. It’s an age when a Web company launches in the US, and a version of it launches in Berlin, Russia, India, China and a host of other countries within days, creating a smaller amount of jobs than we have in Silicon Valley but certainly more than those countries had ten years ago. More important: Those jobs are working for local companies, not doing low-level engineering for big US multinationals. That’s a much more meaningful way to break the poverty cycle in the long term, as multinational jobs will only employ so many people with limited upside potential.

Will all of those software jobs be safe? In both the Valley and overseas, the answer is most definitely not. The bulk are being created by startups, and the nature of startups is to IPO, sell or go out of business. They are supposed to be risky, and everyone going to work for one should remember that. The two latter categories could easily result in a huge wave of layoffs in coming years. That’s a far bigger risk for emerging markets just building their startup ecosystems than it is for the Valley.

There will be the regular commenters wringing their hands about a “job bubble”– and while we’re clearly not in a financial or psychological bubble right now, we may well be in a job bubble. It’s way too easy to start a company now, and the gulf between winners who get big enough to go public and everyone else is wider than it has ever been in Silicon Valley. (That’s one reason we’re not in a financial bubble.)

Still, if you are a recipient of that job bubble would you trade places with any the tens of millions of people out of work in the United States right now? I doubt it. Benefitting from a job bubble is not only a first world problem, it’s an upper-class-educated-lucky-to-be-in-the-right-industry-at-the-right-time kind of first world problem. The entire city of Detroit has the right to punch you in the face if you believe that’s the biggest macroeconomic problem the US faces right now.

If you’re worried, save some of that cash you’re raking in for the potential rainy day, and thank God you work in software. In a market like this, better to be the eater than the eaten.