Backyard home office in a kit.

I think this is a cool.  Backyard home offices in a kit.

I love all the windows and doors, but there's absolutely no wall space or room for bookcases, file cabinets, paper and supplies.

Home Office? It's in the Yard.

Nearly one in six Americans -- 20 million -- works from home at least once a week, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and over the last five years, the self-employed segment has grown from 6.4 percent to 7.4 percent of the American work force.

Cedarsheds' basic kits run $13,000 and include prefab materials to construct a sturdy 10-foot-by-12-foot office with a 9-foot-by-9-foot deck.

Although he admits the kits are a little pricey, Cheng argues they cost less than a room addition, don’t require contractors and can be assembled and ready for use in one to four days.

Brand your life story

Brand your life story with Dandelife from Tech Crunch.

Dandelife is a fascinating new “social biography network” that launched its beta this week. Users tell their life stories with text, photos, videos and time lines. Part of the business model will be to license users’ stories to corporations seeking case studies and brandable narratives. I feel very ambivalent about this.

The company is lead by Kelly Abbot of marketing firm Red Door Interactive and Edward Shenderovich, CEO of content management company Quantum Art. Dandelife’s advisory team is packed with rock starts: Ross Mayfield from SocialText, Bruce Livingstone from iStockPhoto, Jeffrey Zeldman from A List Apart, Reid Carr from Red Door and Mike Jones of Userplane. Dandelife is currently self funded and seeking angels.

The company’s leading competitor may be OurStory.com, a similar site that received $6 million in VC funding in January. OurStory founder and CEO Andy Halliday told me that his service may allow users to opt-in to anonymous aggregate studies in the future but that user generated content in their system will not be made available to marketers.

UPDATE:  from Springwise

Building on the notion that stories are best shared, Dandelife offers everyone the opportunity to write and share their personal memoirs online, one story at a time. A user's 'vanity page' shows a horizontal timeline, with events neatly placed in history, as well as photos, videos, tags and favourite stories.

Tagging is an important part of storytelling on Dandelife, allowing users to create common threads within their own stories, and connect with those of other members. Besides regular tags (relevant keywords for a camping trip could be 'camping', 'hike', and 'grizzly bear'), a user can also tag stories with the names of people involved in the story.

Being thoroughly Web 2.0, Dandelife works seamlessly with Flickr and YouTube, letting users import photos and videos to illustrate their narrative. San Diego-based Dandelife, launched two months ago, is currently in beta and free to use.

Other recent ventures in the same arena include OurStory, WikiBios, and Eternity4All (featured in Springwise in April 2006). It's all about what trendwatching.com calls life caching: collecting, storing and displaying one's entire life, for friends, family, or the entire world to peruse.

Bring design to barcodes

Via Springwise

Originally from Japan, design barcode is at the Bar Code Revolution.

The variety of designs is wonderful.

Wisdom on Search Advertising

Why search advertising is so important in today's Wall St Journal explained in today. Wisdom for the Web

Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, a unit of New York-based Cendant Corp., calculates that it generates $14 in revenue for every $1 it spends on search advertising. Encouraged by such returns, the hotel company has increased its search ad spending by 500% since 2001

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Search advertising exceeded $5.1 billion in the U.S. last year and represented the largest category of Internet ads, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau trade group and consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.
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Search is "a great environment to build your business, there's no question," says Mr. Williams. "But it's an ever-changing environment and it demands appropriate attention."

The Database of Intentions

Is John Batelle right when he says the Internet makes it possible to predict the future?

A totally fascinating article in the New York Times, The Internet knows what you'll do next

Mr. Battelle, a founder of Wired magazine and the Industry Standard, wasn't the first person to figure this out. But he did find a way to describe the digital crystal ball better than anyone else had. He called it "the database of intentions."
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The collective history of Web searches, he wrote on his blog in late 2003, was "a place holder for the intentions of humankind — a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends."
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A few weeks ago, Google took a big step toward changing this — toward making the database of intentions visible to the world — by creating a product called Google Trends. It allows you to check the relative popularity of any search term, to look at how it has changed over the last couple years and to see the cities where the term is most popular. And it's totally addictive
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Already, more than a million analyses are being done some days on Google Trends, said Marissa Mayer, the vice president for search at Google.

When these tools get good enough, you can see how the business of marketing may start to change. As soon as a company begins an advertising campaign, it will be able to get feedback from an enormous online focus group and then tweak its message accordingly.

How about this brand extension

Lady Clairol Hair Coloring for Elephant-Seals

The parcel contained a letter from the Lady Clairol company saying that their chemists hadn't had so much fun in years, instructions, one or more containers of concentrated shampoo, and several large squeeze tubes to apply it.

All we had to do was to mix the concentrated solution with water and suck it up into the squeeze tubes. Voila! Lady Clairol Special Hair Dye for elephant seals in a handy applicator (now known as Lady Clairol Blue to those unaware of its original name and research origin).

Just squeeze the stuff out on a bull elephant seal and it would pretty much bleach the fur. And it would stay on for months until the old fur rubbed off and new fur grew in, even when constantly immersed in salt water.

Pharming and Molecular Milking

How a tobacco farm in Kent could provide a life-saving drug for millions.

In the perfectly controlled atmosphere of a brick-proof, hermetically sealed greenhouse deep in the Kent countryside, a fresh crop of tobacco plants is beginning to flourish.
There is nothing unusual about the plants' appearance, but they are nonetheless extraordinary. A genetic tweak ensures that every cell of every plant churns out tiny quantities of an experimental drug. When harvested, they could bring cheap medicine to millions.

Scientists say the £8m project could provide a powerful weapon against Africa's HIV pandemic.

The process is called pharming, and to many it is both the future of GM crops, and the future of the drugs industry. If the tobacco plants in Kent are a success, each one will provide 20 doses of an anti-HIV drug - enough to protect a woman from infection for up to three months.

Pharming is a marriage of high and low technology that capitalises on the advantages of both. Instead of needing a $500m drug manufacturing facility that takes five years to pass regulatory approval, pharming uses simple crop-growing practices that have been honed over centuries.

Fast Company

Lots of good stuff in this month's Fast Company.

Mastering Disaster. Gartner says that by 2007, 75% of large companies will have business recovery plans in place emphasizing resiliency and collaboration.

There's Gold in them thar Smelly Hills. A single ton of junked PCs has more gold that 17 tons of ore. Why landfills just might pay for their own cleanup.

Outsourcing Cool.

Design for a Dangerous Planet

Businessweek's Annual Design Awards for new products with one gold going to 2Seconds Quecha, a tent that, using spring hoops, sets up in 2 seconds. Note too, the cocoon disaster relief shelters and the one-handed tourniquet.

Other golds to the DKL Protective Helmet, ResQTec hydraulic rescue tools, SignalOne's Vocal Smoke Detector that uses a parent's recorded voice to wake children in case of a fire and provide them with evacuation instructions.

Key trends, more good design coming from Asia and more design for a dangerous planet.

Favorite Mistakes

The Model A copier, the Edsel, the Hula Burger, Betamax, Lisa, Sildenafil and Breakfast Mates from Businessweek's cover story How Failure Breads Mistakes.

Movies for Older Folk

What's this? Hollywood is finally catching on that a lot of would-be-moviegoers are 50, 60 and even 70 who, so far, have few movies they want to see.

Hollywood Awakens to the Geriatric Deomographic.

But where does that leave truly older audiences, fossils over 50 or 60 or even 70? To Hollywood these have been the perennially invisible men and women. Yet change is afoot. Some filmmakers and smaller distributors have discovered a secret society of mature moviegoers, and they have decided that this audience may actually be worth courting.
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Richard D. Zanuck, a veteran producer who is now 71, learned some lessons about the senior market 17 years ago when he and his wife, Lili Fini Zanuck, produced "Driving Miss Daisy" with Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman. No one wanted to finance it, but the movie went on to earn more than $100 million and won the Academy Award as best picture of 1989.

"After the movie succeeded," Mr. Zanuck recalled, "one executive told me that 'Driving Miss Daisy' was a 'nonrecurring phenomenon.' Millions of people went to the theater to see it. Why is that nonrecurring?"

Digital Writing

Now this is cool - a pen that turns handwritten notes into digital text, files and images. Logitech's Digital Writing System.

The New York Times calls it A Pen That's More Than Meets the Paper

But recently Mr. Hultin made a small, effective change in his note-taking life: he bought a digital pen. The device looks like a slightly plump ballpoint, and works like any ballpoint. But inside this gadget are a tiny camera and an optical sensor that record the pen's motions as he writes, and a microprocessor that digitizes the words, sketches and diagrams that the optics detect.

When he docks the pen in its cradle connected to a USB port, the handwritten notes flow in a digitized stream into his computer and are processed by software, reappearing almost immediately on his monitor in his handwriting. "All the notes I've written are sucked into the computer, and there they are on the screen," he said.

His pen, called io2, is sold by Logitech of Fremont, Calif., for about $200.