With over four thousand technical and styling nuances to ensure that the Leica they build is truly individualized, Leica á la carte enables buyers to very specifically customize their own camera.

We were recently invited to a roundtable discussion with David Schembri, President of Smart USA.  The event marked Smart’s first attempt at engaging bloggers as part of their marketing outreach.  While there wasn’t any car being launched, it was a nice opportunity to hear about how the company is fairing and what they have in the pipeline.
Smart has been selling cars in the U.S. for just under two years, and in that time has sold in excess of 30,000 units.  They are in the process of bracing for some new competition, expected to pop up in the next two years [...]

While recycled denim creations may not be a particularly new concept, CScout Japan points us to a nice example of recycling jeans into a hand-made piece of furniture.  You send in three pairs of jeans (or other pant material) to the furniture manufacturer, NOyes, and they turn them into a custom stool.  The NOyes website has a video and step-by-step guide on how the stool is made by hand.
A custom denim stool takes three weeks to make and costs ¥36,720 ($400).
[via CScout Japan]

“Paper is dying, but it’s just a device.” So says Nick Bilton, editor in the New York Times research and development lab. Bilton talked with Wired about what he sees as the future of news delivery, and paper, in his view,  is not going to go away, but it will play a smaller role in how we take in news. One way paper may survive, is as output from “newspaper boxes” that print out a personalized paper with embedded QR and sms codes for each article, that will lead to more in-depth digital coverage.
Beyond hard copies, Bilton is working on  [...]

Scotchlite 680 is an amazing material that looks pitch black until light is shined on it’s surface. When illuminated this retroeflective vinyl completely changes color to a brilliant white. Mike Mandilberg, seeing the obvious safety application, decided to cover his bicycle in the vinyl, with truly spectacular results. A very cool repurposing of this signage material. Check out the video below.
Bright Bike from Michael Mandiberg on Vimeo
[via Gizmodo]