You can find out more about the award at: http://www.wsj-asia.com/aia The dateline for entry submission is Friday, 26 March 2010 at 11.59pm Hong Kong time.

The New British Standard

Slimmed Down Three-Pin Plug

The Royal College of Art’s graduate show has opened, and this year, the show-stopper was actually — a plug.

Min-Kyu Choi impressed every passerby with his neat, apparently market-ready plug that folds down to the width of a thin mobile computer.

“Many of today’s mobile computers have become wafer thin but here in the UK, we still use the world’s biggest three-pin plug,” says Choi.

Enter Choi’s slimmed down British three-pin plug wonder.

Choi’s plug is just 10mm wide when folded. To unfold it, the two live pins swivel 90 degrees

and the plastic surround folds back around the pins so the face of the plug looks the same as a standard UK plug.

The idea produced a spin off, too. Choi created a multi-plug adaptor,

which is a compact standard plug sized unit with space for three folded plugs to slot in, as well as one that charges USB devices.

The multi-plug adaptor has an ultra-compact sandwich design that enables three compatible plugs to

cohabit side by side to take up a remarkable small amount of room

The ultra slimline triple plug adaptor

The USB-pluggable three-pin plug adaptor

It’s so plausible and so obvious a product that it should produce a few red faces;

how many more years are we going to endure attaching our palm sized mobiles

and wafer thin laptops to an object that’s barely been touched since its first design in 1946?

Choi picked an everyday product that most other designers might have found too mundane to dabble with

and drastically improved it – exactly the kind of thinking that we should be celebrating right now.

A very clean and elegantly simple solution to an age-old British problem

An incredible way to feed power directly to charge USB devices – a solution no one has thought about. Till now.

Choi’s full menu of uber-ideas for revolutionising the archaic British plug

Note: Please register (Free) with Vanan at tel: 68281989 or at email: innovate@smu.edu.sg if you wish to attend

Greenberg calls himself an “invention groupie.” The author of “Gadget Nation,” he’s written about quirky inventors who have dreamed up everything from a talking toilet paper dispenser to a “Vidstone” grave marker that displays a video tribute of the dearly departed.

Now is a great time for an inventor to become a rock star, Greenberg says. The economy may be slumping, but he and others say inventors are poised to enter a golden age.

(The above text are taken from http://edition.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/01/12/invent/ )

Article taken from “Today” newspaper, 8 Jan 2010,  Page 14
http://www.todayonline.com

Now, a national scheme to address this lack has drawn the keen participation of veteran incubators and angel investors from the likes of MySpace.com founder Brad Greenspan and Silicon Valley’s Plug & Play.
(Click on the picture below for full detail)

Article taken from “Today” Newspaper, 31 Dec 2009, Page B1