Monthly Archive for June, 2010

From at The New York Times…

Nicolas Hayek, a Lebanese-born business consultant who is widely credited with having saved the Swiss watch industry with the introduction of the Swatch, the inexpensive, plastic — and, as it transpired, highly collectible — wristwatch that made its debut in 1983, died Monday in Biel, Switzerland. He was 82.

Mr. Hayek, a founder and the chairman of the Swatch Group, died of heart failure while working at the company’s headquarters, according to an announcement on the company Web site.

The formation of the Swatch Group, which in addition to Swatch today comprises high-end watch brands like Breguet, Omega, Longines, Tissot, Calvin Klein and Mido, made Mr. Hayek one of Switzerland’s wealthiest men. The exquisite irony is that the company came about after Mr. Hayek was brought in to help shut the foundering Swiss watch industry altogether.

A flamboyant figure with a roguish sense of humor, Mr. Hayek was “a rare phenomenon in Europe — a genuine business celebrity,” as The Harvard Business Review described him in 1993. More…

From Greg Frost at MITnews…

William J. Mitchell, the former dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, who pioneered urban designs for networked, “smart” cities and helped oversee an ambitious building program that transformed MIT’s physical campus, died on June 11 after a long battle with cancer. He was 65.

Mitchell was considered one of the world’s leading urban theorists. Through the work of his Smart Cities research group at the MIT Media Lab, he pioneered new approaches to integrating design and technology to make cities more responsive to their citizens and more efficient in their use of resources. He likened tomorrow’s cities to living organisms or very-large-scale robots, with nervous systems that enable them to sense changes in the needs of their inhabitants and external conditions, and respond to these needs. A major portion of this new urban infrastructure focused on revamping urban transportation as we know it, and included the development of the CityCar, a light-weight, electric, shared vehicle that folds and stacks like supermarket shopping carts at convenient locations and has all essential mechanical systems housed in the car’s wheels. Other Smart City innovations include the folding electric RoboScooter, and GreenWheel, which turns an ordinary bicycle into an electric-assisted one. More…