The Inventorspot website has a news item on the new customized travel guides being produced by Dorling Kindersley (DK) Travel. They are similar in concept to Offbeat Guides, which were covered on this site recently. The Inventorspot article considers the DK Travel customized travel guide to be a superior offering to the Offbeat Guide, although [...]

Cincom, which provides software solutions for configuration of complex products (often called product configurators), has started two separate blogs to engage with its customer base. The first of these blogs is called Complex Selling Made Effective, with articles written by contributors from Cincom, principally Louis Columbus and Dale Wolf of Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions. While [...]

Could 2009 be the year that crowdsourcing takes root in the area of car design? My last 2008 post here described how Caterham, a specialist British sports car maker, is crowdsourcing the design of its next car. In late December, an article in the Boston-based XConomy website described how Local Motors, a startup company in [...]

Caterham, the specialist British sports car manufacturer, has launched a crowdsourcing initiative for the design of its next model, in association with PerformancePR, an automotive public relations company.  The project, named Splitwheel, which is described as “a revolutionary online project to design and build a new performance car based on the collective decision-making of its [...]

David Sifry, the founder and former CEO of Technorati, has announced a first public beta (test version) for a new personalized travel guide service called Offbeat Guides. Offbeat Guides create personalized, up-to-date travel guides that cover over 30,000 travel destinations, using a combination of search technology and curation by both amateur and professional travel experts.  [...]

Two design software companies this week had significant announcements. Delcam, based in the UK, will later this year launch a new version of its CopyCAD reverse engineering package. CopyCAD Pro will be the first product development system to offer “Tribrid Modelling”, by adding triangle modelling to the combination of surface and solid modelling that is [...]

In an article proposing how banks can retain customers in the current financial climate, one of the tactics that CRM Buyer website advises banks to offer mass customization: “Banks have a real opportunity to leverage data and technology and to personalize every customer’s experience. In contact centers, for example, new analytics-based technology can draw on [...]

ZD Net reports that Intel is joining with Asus to create WePC, which serves as a sales site for Asus but is also an effort to gain community input in the PC design process. Make Your Own Jeans, which provides made-to-measure denim fashions at affordable prices, has announced a new add-on service that allows clients [...]

A very good article on the current popularity of mass customization by Kimberly Palmer, titled The Store of YOU, appears in the US News and World Report. The article mentions many of the brands that are well known practitioners of customization, plus a few more that are new to me.  Some interesting quotes: “…because consumers [...]

As part of the re-activation of this blog, I’ve decided to include an occasional update containing links to stories of relevance to anyone interested in the progress of the mass customization business model and all the related trends that have come to prominence in recent years. So, here goes: The website of Colby College in [...]

A recent post on this site profiled FellowForce, an open innovation project that acts as an intermediary between enterprises and individual innovators. At the time I had noted that the FellowForce website had certain limitations which limited the prospects for success. However, since then FellowForce has made an innovation of its own that should enable [...]

Springwise recently reported on developments involving the new trend of crowdsourced band management, which can also be referred to as ‘crowdfinancing’ as the participants pay a fee for the privilege of being involved in deciding the direction of a band. The first entrant in this new marketplace, Sellaband, recently celebrated its first anniversary. The Sellaband [...]

CreateSpace, part of the Amazon.com, has recently announced a new online Books on Demand service. CreateSpace was originally founded as CustomFlix Labs, Inc. in 2002 and acquired by Amazon.com Inc. in 2005. Prior to launching the Books on Demand service, CreateSpace was already providing inventory-free, physical distribution of CDs and DVDs on Demand, and video [...]

Mikko Ahonen, who runs the Beyond Creativity blog on open innovation, creativity and technology, has posted an interesting evaluation, of Fellowforce, a service that acts as an intermediary between companies and individual innovators or problem solvers. Fellowforce is a collaboration between Building Better Business, a Dutch organisation that promotes entrepreneurship and a related business called [...]

In recent months, technology magazine Wired in collaboration with NewAssignment.Net has embarked on unique project – to launch a reporting project that would focus on a particular trend or area of interest, and then open up its reporting process to outsiders, who would work with the Wired editorial staff to carry out interviews with key [...]