My son has a “toy day”every week at the day care. That day the kids are allowed to take toys from home to the daycare. Last week my 4 year old son wanted to take his toy gun to the daycare- and he did so. In the afternoon when coming to get my children back to home, one nanny in the daycare stopped me “There is a rule in this daycare. No toy guns allowed!”

…So no toy guns next time, I agreed with my son…

Next to juice squeezing machine and fresh oranges, in the hotel breakfast table in Sweden, I spotted a pack of C-vitamin for guests. Here is a picture of that.

In Finnish we have quite a lot of words that we have adopted from English. Usually, people try to translate a new word first to Finnish, but usually the word stays as it is in the original word, specially if the word is more “technical” or professional from. For example we talk about brands not tuotemerkki (which is the translation of word in Finnish). We talk also about hot dogs and popcorn, even if there have been translations of them in Finnish too. A weak signal was found from an amusement park Linnanmäki from Helsinki. There these words have been translated to Finnish (kuumakoira= hot dog, paukkumaissi = popcorn).

I have started a new hoppy: doing woodwork. I just build a climing frame with slide and a cottage for my two hyperactive children. While doing woodwork I have familiarized myself in shopping at hardware stores (almost as well as shopping in shoe shops). This amazing selection of groceries was spotted in Starkki, one Finnish hardware store. You can buy there coffee, tea, sugar, bisquits, sugar rusks; so stuff that you need to get to keep your energy level up while building. Unfortunately, I could not find any beer from the store

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I have been writing  in my latests posts about couple of cases of coming of “black and white”. One case example was a shop at Arlanda airport selling only black and white items, the next case was canned peas, tomatoes etc. with black and white cans. These b&W canned Smirnoff drinks were spotted at boat from Finland to Sweden.

Again, from Japan the news of the innovative robots keeps on astonishing me. The newest one is a shopping robot- that does the shopping for you. Read here a nice story from PinkTentacle blog.

This ad was spotted in Southern Finland local bus. The ad was about running shoes: Karhu. What is the weak signal here is the text in the ad: technology inside. Even though that ad probably hinted to the complex and advanced manufacturing technique and materials of the shoe, the future trend proably is that all the items contain some kind of technology. Like spoons. Check here VTT’s Smart spoon. Here you can find some information about it.

In Turku University there is a new educational program for kids: Kids university. They have interesitng lecutres by top scientists for kids about various stuff like space, bacteria and history. The lecutres are aimed for 7-10 years old kids. Kids have their own passport to collect stamps about the lectures that they have participated. In the kids university there is also “an adult park”, where kids can leave their parents while participating the lectures. Adults have some other program arranged by scientsts by the university. The kids university is also arranging summer camps for kids.

Leasing or part time ownership is something big in the future I think. Leasing could be one good solution for decreasing material consumption from the environmental point of view.  

Of course the success of leasing depends much on the good business ideas around this theme. Everybody knows leasing cars and videos, and even construction tools, but did you know that you can also lease luxory handbags, babyclothes, books, even dogs (!) In one of the meetings I participated, one woman spoke out an excellent idea for leasing: suitcases. You only need them once and a while, and when you do not need them, they take an awfully lot of space. So who is the brilliant company who ceases this business idea ???

(My suitcase is travelling in couple of weeks to Mongolia with my dear friend.) 

Image: From aeroplane at Helsinki-Vantaa airport coming from London

Customizing is a really hot trend that is noticed by various manufactures and retailers. You can for example buy customized lap tops today with various colors and patterns but of course there is nothing like making your pimping by yourself! There exists for example a blog for IKEA fans for showing their IKEA “hacked” products. But what really amazed me was pages for sharing pictures of your pimped bibles. Check it here.