Timbuk2 made the San Francisco Messenger Bag famous, but Rickshaw Bagworks is here to give them a run for their money with bags designed for “people who thrive on the urban experience and celebrate the creative spirit”.
The company was inspired by San Francisco, urban cycling and an intense desire to make great products, and thinks that it’s “cool – if not kind of weird – the way people grow attached to their favorite bag as though it were a pet or loved-one”. They also share a strong set of humanistic, environmental and social values that guide the way they conduct every aspect of their business.
To that end, Rickshaw adorns each bag with the Rickshaw “PCQ Tattoo”, a little graphic patch on an inside tag that represents three things that are near and dear to the Rickshaw family – Passion, Craft and Quality.
The heart represents our PASSION for bags, bikes and our home city of San Francisco.
The silver needle and gold thread represent love for the age-old CRAFT of making bags by hand.
The five stars represent our dedication to the highest standards of QUALITY.
The five stars also honor the constellation of our stakeholders – Customers, Employees, Business Partners, Investors and Community – and our passion to treat each with respect and compassion.
They’ve also created a line of bags called the ZERO Messenger that are designed to follow the ‘less is more’ philosophy, with a combination of minimalist design, monopolymer construction, localized sourcing and wasteless manufacturing – a holistic approach that simultaneously unites form, function and footprint. By specially designing the ZERO bags to optimize fabric cutting, (each is made from a single rectangle of fabric) they can eliminate manufacturing waste and create a great looking product that doesn’t leave a ton of scrap material in its wake.
Plus, by eliminating material waste, manufacturing costs are kept low, and these savings are passed along to the consumer in the form of a price tag that rivals even the sale prices of other bag manufacturers.
If you’re looking for a bag that looks good, doesn’t kill the environment or your wallet, and will survive even the harshest of bike rides through the toughest of cities, then look no further than Rickshaw Bagworks and their unique line of messenger bags and related accessories.
Delicious (the social bookmarking site formerly known as del.icio.us that calls itself “the tastiest bookmarks on the web” and was also the father of the strange domain name), launched its long awaited redesign yesterday to help move the site beyond its late ‘90s style.
Though the underlying functionality is still the same, the new look and feel is designed to make it faster, easier to learn, and hopefully more desirable.
Speed: We’ve moved to a new infrastructure that makes every page faster. This new platform will enable us to keep up with traffic growth while ensuring Delicious is responsive and reliable. You may not have noticed, but the old backend was getting creaky under the load of five million users.
Search: We’ve completely overhauled our search engine to make it faster and more powerful. Searches used to take ages to return results; now they’re very quick. The new search engine is also smarter, and more social: you can search within one of your tags, another public user’s bookmarks, or your social network. Now it’s easier to take advantage of the expertise and interests of your friends, not to mention the Delicious community at large.
Design: Finally, we’ve updated the user interface to improve usability and add a few often-requested features (such as selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks). Our goal has been to keep the new design similar in spirit to the old one, so all of you veterans should be able to jump in without any confusion. At the same time, we’re hoping that newcomers to Delicious will find it easier to learn.
I’m a big Delicious user (http://delicious.com/cory411), but since I use the Firefox plugin, I rarely if ever visit the site.
However, with looks like this, I just might have to give it a second chance.
Apparently the web world is fed up with PDFs, because alternatives are popping up left and right.
The latest entry into this world is iPaper, which aims to entirely replace the PDF.
The basic idea is that, like a YouTube video, iPaper documents can be embedded into any existing web page through a Flash widget, and can display PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and other document formats without the need for separate readers.
Features include viewing documents without downloading any additional software, monetizing documents with integrated advertisements, social aspects with a built in share functionality, enhanced security, and easy integration.
Edit: Box.net, a free online storage and file sharing site, is one of the first sites to embrace the iPaper technology. You can now view any of your PDF, Word, Excel, or Power Point documents that you have stored on Box.net using iPaper.
The Story of Stuff is a “20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns”.
It follows our stuff from extraction through sale, use and disposal, and shows how all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad.
The hope is that the SoS will expose the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and call us together to create a more sustainable and just world.
As 2006 draws to a close, and 2007 draws near, DYH is going to make the first in a series of annual predictions for the upcoming year. What’s going to be hot, and what’s not? Here’s what I think:
Television is going online. More and more shows are going to be available on demand, streamed directly [...]
