Every day, we look at everything that is going on in the Sandbox, searching for impactful projects, stories and ideas by Sandboxers. We then repost the most interesting, inspiring or brilliant stuff here on our blog.

Today Andy Ellwood shares a reflection on news overload and peer curation. Andy is the Director of Business Development at Gowalla and passionate about connecting good people and great opportunities. Check out the original of this blog post here and share your thoughts with Andy via Twitter or Facebook.

Conrad Murray is just the latest Amanda Knox who was the most recent Casey Anthony. And, despite the fact that you may or may not have remembered that name after it fell out of the 24 hour news cycle a couple months ago, you took time out of your day to give a rip because… well, why again?

In the same way that our overly connected world has encouraged us to have an opinion and be involved with every worthwhile cause, the sensationalism of “news” is at an all time high. With the wonders of Facebook and Twitter, everyone can be a part of breaking the “news” as it happens. And, while that is an adrenaline rush that I’ve never really understood or invested much time in experiencing, yesterday afternoon when I looked at the content being shared and commented on, it was all about a verdict in a case that, if asked about it a week before, none of the folks I interact with online would have cared about. But, since it was breaking news, it filled my timeline on Facebook and Twitter for about 15 minutes and everyone had an opinion. Then it was done.

I admittedly have a very low information diet. I don’t go looking for news and when news finds me, I don’t pay that much attention to it unless it is actionable and relevant to the priorities I have set for my day or the endeavors I am in the midst of. I use my relationships on the interwebs to filter news the same way that royalty used to have food tasters to make sure they don’t get poisoned. If enough of my friends care about an article or a subject outside of my focus, then I’ll take a look. Otherwise, I let someone else waste their time reading about stuff that doesn’t matter in search of the stuff that does.

Just because a story is on a “news” site, in a magazine, or made it on tv doesn’t mean you have to care. Don’t let the fear of missing out (FOMO) on news paralyze you and cause you to miss out on making the most of the things that actually matter.

Every day, our community manager Katrin Winiarski, reads through her feed of all Sandboxers’ blog posts. Every Thursday, she chooses the most inspiring, funny or brilliant one and reposts it on this blog. This post has been written by Sandboxer Edward Harran. This is only a shortened version, the original version can be found here.

Sandra Diana Troegl, 28, is currently based in Berlin and one of three Co-founders of Nest, an Agency for (eco)social causes. Before co-founding Nest, she worked for armedangels, an eco fashion label in Cologne. Sandra on facebook and twitter

Tell us the story of your latest project / occupation.

Beginning of 2009, I met Daniel Kruse and Ole Seidenberg. We share the vision to use the web for social change and decided to start our own social business to turn this vision into reality: Nest Agency for (eco)social Causes.

What are you doing and how did you get there?

At Nest, we consult NGOs and sustainable enterprises on how to use the web to push social topics. I got there with a standard business background plus some programming knowledge and the Online-Marketing I did for armedangels.

Tell us about the biggest successes and failures in your life. What worked, what didn’t, and what did you learn?

My biggest success so far is being a startup social entrepreneur – do what I can do best and using it for social impact. I encounter failures everyday though. I feel like failing on a constant basis because I cannot solve climate change or catastrophes like Haiti and I can’t measure what my contribution is. So I learnt to take small steps, one at a time, and to motivate myself to keep going.

What do you want to achieve in the next week, the next year, the next 10 years?

Next week, I would like to close an important Social Business deal with one of our clients and to finish my accounting to do’s. Next year, I would like to have an own office with Nest and a Team of five people. Next ten years, I would like to have kids and be able to work the same way I do now. And have the same fun with it.

What was your most inspring moment during the last two weeks?

Meeting a 24 year old entrepreneur who build up a company with now 50 employees and hearing about his dream to do something meaningful after he sold his company.

How could other Sandboxers and the outside world support you and why would that be exciting for them?

In Berlin: we need support for our flashmobs and events! Especially during the www.re-publica.de in April – we are looking for Geeks and Hackers interested in participating some form of Social Hack Days – it will be fun!
Online: follow @nest_im and spread the word that it’s possible to start an agency as a social business.

Sandra’s favourites:

Movie- Trainspotting
Place on earth- Malpais, Costa Rica
Travel destination during last year- Lenzerheide
Quote- “The map is not the territory”, Aaron Muszalski at the 26th Chaos Computer Congress

What does Vincent, owner of New York pizza shop 11B Express, have in common with young entrepreneurs? Both go by the motto “If I don’t eat it, I don’t serve it.” This seemed to be the theme last night when NYC Sandbox Co-Ambassadors Niamh Hughes and Fabian Pfortmuller organized a 30+ guest Sandbox event with one of the leading European technology incubators, Seedcamp. Fired up by garlic jalapeno pizza (yeah, it’s a little potent) and several jugs of wine, NYC Sandboxers and Seedcamp entrepreneurs shared their pitches and passions.

Seedcamp has a group of seriously impressive companies on their US tour (going through NYC and San Francisco). Check out the startups below.  Guests included Reshma Sohoni (Founder of Seedcamp), Evan Cohen (General Manager of Foursquare), entrepreneurs from Columbia University, and many others. As usual, it was a delicious evening filled inspiring ideas.

Advertag – (London, UK) Tag-based search technology for classifieds and image search.

Brainient – (Bucharest, Romania) – Helping video publishers monetize video content by adding interactive elements and affiliate marketing.

Codility – (London, UK; Warsaw, Poland) – Automated testing of programmers via the Web, saving employers and recruiters both time and money.

Erply – (Tallinn, Estonia) – ERP on the web. Comprehensive CRM, accounting, billing and inventory management for SMEs.

Kukunu – (London UK) – A social travel planning platform to build and organize your holiday, because travel is better when you plan it yourself

Kwaga – (Paris, France) – Makes your inbox easier to manage by intelligently screening and organising your emails.

Patients Know Best – (Cambridge, UK) – Patient-controlled medical records. First customers include the UK’s largest private health care provider, and the UK’s largest children’s hospital.

Platago – (Vienna, Austria) – Helping game developers to publish their games on social networks.

Shoutem – (Zagreb, Croatia) – Enables you to create your own microblogging community for your business or brand.

Wondergraphs – (Leuven, Belgium) Social business analysis that saves organizations time and money with easy to use exploration, sharing and context aware search

YubiTech – (Ramat Gan, Israel) Enabling mobilization of Desktop application to cross-mobile platform, in a fraction of cost and time, bringing best user experience to the mobile users.

At Sandbox we’re fortunate to interact every day with some of the most inspiring young innovators around the world. Our members are constantly driving new ideas and exploring untouched opportunities. Observing patterns within our community and studying trends of our clients, we identified six major themes to watch out for in 2010 and beyond:

1. Unique and Genuine Corporate Cultures

Many young people today are afraid of becoming “corporate slaves” limited to standardized work without any meaning. To be successful, companies increasingly don’t only have to be efficient, but must also create genuine corporate cultures that attract and retain employees, customers and shareholders.
Read more >>

2. Create Meaningful Relationships

Being connected to others is crucial to our personal and collective success. The evolving “social web” phenomenon has made these interactions easier. In turn, creating and sustaining meaningful relationships will become even more important and valuable.
Read more >>

3. Hippies 2.0: Do What You Love and Get Paid for It

More than ever, young people have a strong desire to do something meaningful in their lives. We see twenty-five year olds having their “quarter-life crisis” and asking themselves about their purpose in life and how it impacts society. This new “passion generation”, as we call it, mixes their drive for meaningful impact with another old concept: capitalism.
Read more >>

4. Linking Data to Objects

The term “augmented reality” has been around for some time. It describes technologies and processes that add digital data to real-world objects and places. Now, finally, we think that all the pieces are in place for these technologies to spread widely, become more developed, and dramatically alter our lives.
Read more >>

5. Social Business Design

The internet is more than a tool, it is an evolving user-powered organism that creates and manages vast information. The trends seen in the evolution of the internet can be leveraged by organizations and translated into new structures, processes, business models and cultures. “Social Business Design” makes organizations more agile, more connected and more transparent.
Read more >>

6. Emplotment: The Skill of Making Sense of Stuff

Historically, the most natural form of communication is story telling. Then came the ideals of rationality and objectiveness and banned stories to the realms of fiction. Today, we experience information overload. As the vastness of data around us increases, the value of storytelling multiplies.
Read more >>

In many ways, the six themes overlap and share the following properties:

• Emotional Innovation: In pursuit of happiness, we are creating innovative living and working spaces that give sense of purpose and reflect our passions. We also had intense discussions about this topic at the recent Palomar5 summit in Berlin.
• Blending Virtual and Physical: Technology is no longer just an instrument, it is deeply integrated into the heart of society, amplifying the individual voice and shifting social dynamics.
• Social Everything: The internet was the start, but today everything is connected through the social web, from organizational structures, corporate cultures, product development, marketing, problem solving, and the human experience.

We would love to hear from you: What do you think of these topics? What are your big trends for this year? Let us know in the comments!

Among our guests we were lucky to have Zurich based Sandboxer Dominik Grolimund. Dominik just received the 2009 Swiss ICT Award for his company Wuala, a technology firm with a revolutionary approach for secure online storage. Dominik discussed cyber-security with future Sandboxer Jade Nester, who is an international telecommunications expert in the Office of Communication and Information Policy at the US Department of State. Sandboxer Nils Remmel, who is visiting Washington for several weeks to conduct PhD research at the IMF, had an engaging conversation with law student Mike Raykher about the recent financial collapse.

It was also a great pleasure to welcome four new members to the Washington DC Sandbox scene, including Eric Kuhn (a rising journalist, commentator, and Audience Interaction Producer at CNN), Nick O’Neill (Founder of Socialtimes.com and well known social media expert), Alexander Zachary Girod (Founder Legal River), and Arthur Sabintsev (PhD student studying theoretical nuclear physics while writing popular Firefox extensions on the side).

Future Sandboxer Don Ball (Founder of Global Catalyst Group—an organization with similar values and goals as Sandbox) shared his vision for empowering Gen Y leaders with a voice in tackling some of the major challenges facing our generation. We were also excited to have future Sandboxer Robbie Gross (media coordinator for Newt Gingrich), talented photojournalist Mark Abramson, technology enthusiast George Ivanov, and up and coming Georgetown entrepreneur Crystal Ding. Future members Denis Baranov and Anton Zolotov shared their experience working on a new start up they hope will revolutionize online event publishing.

As all Sandbox dinners, Friday’s gathering generated fresh ideas, contacts, and future collaborations. With the continued expansion of the DC Sandbox community, we hope to create even further inter-city collaboration between our US Sandbox hubs in New York City, San Francisco, and other growing Sandbox hubs around the world.

Paul Gleger is Head of US Business Marketing and is the Washington DC Sandbox Ambassador. He has been part of the energetic Sandbox team for over two months and loves telling others about Sandbox’s mission to connect the most inspiring young leaders and innovators from around the world.

Now Shashank Nigam who authors the blog “Simpliflying” made a clever move: He himself made a song which provides United Airlines with 10 solutions to dealing with this “social media attack” in a fun, innovative way and engaging its passengers, too. Watch his YouTube video response, talking about the things United could do to rescue their brand:

Shashank is a leading airline marketing and branding strategist. You can find him on twitter, facebook and LinkedIn. We are a big fan of “The Answer” and looking forward to what happens next.

Johanna is currently interning with Sandbox, she assists the team in various areas and is focusing on community management. Lately she has been inspired by the German “brand eins Magazin” – focus topic BIG DREAMS. You can find her on facebook here.

Everybody talks about how important corporate culture is. But often, companies tend to see investments in corporate culture as «luxury» – something that is nice to have, but doesn’t really have a monetary value.

Well, two days ago, online retail giant Amazon bought online shoe seller Zappos; they paid almost one billion dollars in shares and cash.

Why did Amazon do that? There logistics are unparalleled; it would have been easy for them to start selling shoes on their own (In fact, they already tried that).

But it wasn’t about the shoes. Zappos is successful mainly for two reasons: 1. They have an amazing customer service. 2. They have leveraged social media to build their business.

Both things only worked because of the corporate culture that Zappos has: They try to make their employees as happy as possible. And encourage them in turn to make the customers as happy as possible, too. And they have enough confidence in their employees to let them use social media without corporate communications watching over their shoulder all the time. And the employees reward this trust by being the best Zappos ambassadors, online and offline.

So corporate culture does have a clear value, it seems. In this case, it is almost a billion dollars. Not bad.

(Picture by lowlevelrebel)

Nico has co-founded Sandbox and has, sadly, never bought shoes at Zappos so far. But if they ever ship to Switzerland, he probably will.

Dear friends,
This is the Sandbox newsletter for May 2009. In the first section, fellow Sandboxer Simon Rohrbach takes a look at developments in the AVIATION INDUSTRY. After that, we give you a short update on what has been going on at Sandbox in the last months, and at the end of this newsletter, you’ll find our usual “interesting stuff we came across” section. Reading time is about 10 minutes.

GOING GLOBAL – DEVELOPMENTS THAT WILL TRANSFORM AIR TRAVEL

by Simon Rohrbach, simon@simonrohrbach.com

I see the civil aviation industry as one of the most promising ones in the near future. Even though it is ruled by a set of restrictions imposed by regulations in security and environmental affairs, I firmly believe that civil aviation is an area full of potential for exciting developments, considering the traveling trends ahead of us. Being a regular flight commuter myself, I would like to anticipate some of the changes that might await us from a service and product angle, put in the consumer’s perspective.

Before the flight

Many long-distance commuters today complain that they have to book all their flights separately. Indeed, the process of booking a flight is too inefficient for the needs of regular travelers. Being able to purchase a set number of open flights with open return options would make traveling by air much more flexible
and enjoyable, given that a sufficient number of flights per day is available to handle peak times.

The widely spread concept of the Smartcard might be a suitable solution to enable the model of flexible air traffic – a credit-card-sized value card deducting a certain amount of money whenever a traveler touches a wireless reader to board a train, or, in this case, a flight.

At the airport

For airlines, the airport is a bottleneck – they have to get as many passengers as possible to the airside as quickly as possible. Self-check-in machines seem to be a suitable approach to resolve this issue while keeping personnel costs low – but the current solutions with unintuitive, confusing interfaces can hardly be considered as a viable solution. Rather, they leave many travelers confused and helpless. So what is needed is a more flexible, personalised solution for dealing with travellers – one of them might just be what the Microsoft Office Labs team recently published in the latest part of their Envisioning series (video here and images here), a collection of future forecasts around technology and lifestyle: A context-sensitive touch-surface card in the size of a credit card, providing personalised advice to their carriers, such as check-in time and gate and even a map showing the way there.

After the flight

Although flights are a very safe form of traveling nowadays, many passengers feel that there is still a great deal of uncertainty involved. Hence, we can often observe others and ourselves sending texts to our loved ones to inform them that we have landed safely on the ground.

Resulting from this need, services like ArrivedOK and Delaycast are starting to emerge. ArrivedOK for example lets air travelers define a set of people that are automatically notified via personalized texts, e-mails or Twitter messages whenever the air traveler has arrived at his destination. Delaycast allows air travelers to look up flight delays in advance and hence avoid arriving at the airport too early.

This level of transparency and communication is yet unknown for many air service operators. It is however absolutely possible that airlines will soon start to adopt such concepts, if not even acquire these companies or partner with them to provide a better service.

Conclusion

There are many exciting developments that await us. Most of the technologies mentioned above are already in use today – it is just a matter of turning them into meaningful services. This, however, will take patience and many more people willing to go global.

WHAT SANDBOX HAS BEEN UP TO LATELY

The Sandbox online platform, connecting our members and establishing a global dialogue between them on multiple subjects, has launched in a first version just a few weeks ago. We’re currently testing it with select members, while we are preparing to start accepting applications from new members. Stay tuned to our blog to receive updates. We were also busy connecting our members in the real world: We hosted Sandbox dinners in Zurich, Geneva, Singapore, San Francisco, New York and London. We also co-hosted an event on entrepreneurship at New York’s Columbia University.

Simultaneously, Sandbox has started to work closer with corporate partners. We’re consulting with a multinational company in the field of social media, and have successfully run a focus group for a major bank on Generation Y. If you’d like to know more on how Sandbox could help you, please get in touch!

INTERESTING THINGS WE CAME ACROSS

- Still think advertising is about making TV spots and billboards? Then you should read all about The Wexley School for Girls (hint: it’s not a school).

- Much has been written about the difficult future that newspapers face. But few texts have been as comprehensive and thoughtful as this essay by Clay Shirky. If you’re in the media business, it’s a must-read.

- We have been very excited about the astonishing growth that our good friends from Poken, a Switzerland-based startup, have experienced. Poken produces small tokens that act as “virtual business cards”: If you hold two Pokens together, they exchange a signal; once you connect your Poken to your computer by USB, you can add your new contacts on various social networks.

- This may well be the best idea we’ve came across so far this year: The Laid Off Camp in New York, a gathering for people “in a career transition” to connect and empower.

- Speaking of the crisis: Guess which industry sees its sales spike as the world economy stumbles and comes to a grinding halt? It’s candy.

- Our friends at innovation agency Atizo asked us to point out the motorcycle innovation contest that they’re running for BMW. You can submit your ideas on the website and win money and other prizes.