Radiating Creativity

Here's a neat gizmo I found on Boing Boing Gadgets, it's a ceramic food and beverage warmer that sits atop a steam radiator.

Before you get too excited -- it's simply a prototype and not currently for sale, but the comments on the Boing Boing page are encouraging. Even the negative feedback can be used to increase the effectiveness and functionality of the design.

Keep this in mind when working on your own projects.

Why not release an early prototype to a trusted group of product users?

Their feedback (both positive and negative) will tell you what improvements can be made to make your product more popular in the marketplace, and their suggestions will allow you to skip over the need to "fix" things after releasing version 1.0 to the public -- you'll get to jump right to version 2.0 (which is frequently where your competitors enter the market -- releasing their version of YOUR product with all the obvious improvements.)