The S.S. Minnow was supposed to take a three hour tour but the crew and its passengers managed to crash into a unknown island instead. Microsoft team members from its Xbox division hope to avoid the fate of Gilligan and the rest of that ship's travels with its own cruise ship experience.
Microsoft's official blog talks about the company's participation in Unreasonable@Sea, a long 106-day ocean voyage that has a rotating passenger list of various "innovators, investors and commentators", along with 630 undergraduate students, that are working together to come up with solutions to world problems. The voyage, created by the Unreasonable Institute, started in San Diego in early January and will end its trip in Barcelona, Spain on April 25th.
The blog features an example of what Microsoft is doing on board the cruise ship, in a post written by Daniel Epstein, the founder of the Unreasonable Institute. Epstein said that one of Microsoft's Xbox team members started to work with an engineer that had helped to develop "the most efficient solar concentrator on Earth". The two people worked on a proposal for a new solar concentrator that would be much cheaper than current devices. Epstein said:
Amazingly, in just over a day, using nothing more than creativity and rudimentary prototyping supplies (i.e., tape and cardboard) they re-created the frame for the Solar Concentrator in a way that may lead to a design that is upwards of 10 times lighter and 2 times cheaper than the current model.
Source: Microsoft
10 Comments - Add comment