In July, 2001 Gale International negotiated a joint venture agreement with POSCO E&C (Korea’s largest engineering and construction company) and the City of Incheon, South Korea, for the planned development of a completely new city, called Songdo City. Located at the site of General MacArthur’s 1950 landing, Songdo will be the first “new” city in [...]

Just how big is the market for photo personalized goods?  A few years ago, it was very unusual to see products that had been personalized with photographs.  Now, it is commonplace with a large selection of online suppliers and also offline stores in shopping districts having the equipment to put photo images on a variety [...]

Two articles have recently been published that provide an interesting comparison between current car manufacturer’s approach to personalization, and the prsonalization ideas put forward by up-and-coming auto design students. In the manufacturer’s corner is Skoda (part of the Volkswagen Group), which was reported in UK magazine Auto Express as planning to offer a service to [...]

Auto Express, a British car magazine, reports in a short news item that BMW are: “…working on a design for a super-efficient factory that can make bespoke cars in five days, instead of the current wait of up to six weeks. But there’s one hitch – it could be eight years before the “fully flexible” [...]

Recently I wrote about the difficulties that the U.S. auto industry finds itself in, due to its over-reliance on the build for inventory business model, as well as dependency on SUV sales for profitability. At the end of that posting, I asked the question as to what might happen if there was a disruptive change [...]

There have been a few recent articles from various sources regarding the U.S. auto industry, which provide an interesting basis for a discussion about the role of mass customization in the future of the automotive sector. In Industry Week, a recent feature by Yorgos Papatheodorou and Michelle Harris, which primarily dealt with the geographical spread [...]

The Idaho Statesman carries an article about Tom Falash, who opened a wine store in Boise, Idaho, USA. This is not a regular wine store. It lets customers make their own wine for less than US$10 per bottle. The process works as follows: Customers can taste wines before choosing which one to make. Falash takes [...]

This ‘article’ recently appeared on satirical website The Onion: SANDUSKY, OH—Area resident Pamela Meyers was delighted to receive yet another thoughtful CD recommendation from Amazon.com Friday, confirming that the online retail giant has a more thorough, individualized, and nuanced understanding of Meyers’ taste than the man who occasionally claims to love her, husband Dean Meyers. [...]

A number of interesting conferences dealing with mass customization and related topics will take place in 2007, and I thought it might be a good idea to summarise what is happening during the year ahead. The first event of interest is a German language-only event MC2007 Salzburg (Mass Customization Tagung für Deutschland, Österreich und die [...]

+ Dash Navigation Inc. has made a deal with search engine Yahoo! that allows Dash Express users to search Yahoo! Local for nearby products, services or businesses from their cars. Dash Navigation is located Mountain View, Calif. and is funded by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Sequoia Capital, and Skymoon Ventures. The company says that [...]

The IEEE has begun work on a standard to create a comprehensive personalized health informatics system.  The working group creating this standard will hold a workshop in London, UK, on 24 and 25 January 2007 to form an action plan for developing the standard. The meeting, the IEEE 2407 Personalized Health Informatics Workshop, will be [...]

From Ross Dawson’s blog, Trends in the Living Networks, comes a posting about the amazing Trend Map for 2007 and beyond. Nowandnext.com and Future Exploration Network have collaborated in producing a map of major trends for 2007 and beyond, across ten segments: society & culture, government & politics, media & communications, science & technology, food [...]

Business and innovation website Springwise has compiled ‘Top 10 Business Ideas in 2006′ under various categories. These lists are an interesting review of the best and most innovative business ideas of the year, but some are of particular interest to this website due to their association with mass customization, outside innovation, crowdsourcing and so on. [...]

Blogger Mike DelGaudio wanted to produce a customized photo book of family events during the year.  He had about 1000 colour photos that he wanted to include in the book. He has published a very comprehensive analysis of the various websites that offer customized photo books, showing how much his photo book would cost in [...]

As the worlds of television and the Internet converge, writers and television producers are developing new forms of interactive and personalised television. On 27 December, the world’s first ‘ShapeShifted’ romantic comedy was broadcast, as “Accidental Lovers” (page in Finnish language) was shown on Finnish national television station, YLE TV1 (page in Finnish language). Using original [...]