Jonathan Kaplan has launched The Melt, a chow chain backed by James Beard award-winning designers, Michelin Star award-winning chefs, kitchen workflow engineers, and millions of dollars from Sequoia Capital. The Flip Cam was pretty awesome, too. How'd that end up?

The networking giant has bought itself a design firm, to shore up its in-house product-development chops.

I was in Istanbul working with a group of technology executives from around the Middle-East/ Africa region and we were talking about the habits of breakthrough strategic thinkers. To get the conversation going, I decided to show a video of the (then recently released) Amazon Kindle 2.

I’ve used the Amazon Kindle case and the eBook story in general in my leadership development programs for years. It nicely exemplifies a strategic pattern that has for millennia distinguished strategists from tacticians and laid the groundwork from some of history’s biggest successes and flops.

Tech innovations that changed the way we read, chat, listen to records, and clean the rug.

These tech toys will help maximize the down time during your trip to the next big business conference.

8 Gadgets to Make Your Business Trip More Fun

There's no hard news on the actual devices themselves yet, but a bunch of Chinese protective cases for the next-gen iPod Touch and Nano reveal they're both getting digital camera units. And that, basically, is the end of the line for Flip.

Smart Design is, well, one of the smartest design shops we know. You may not know the firm by name, but you certainly know its products: OXO Good Grips kitchen tools, Hewlett Packard Photo Printers, Ford's "Smart Gauge" for hybrid vehicles, and the new line of OXO office products are just a few.