Unusual R&D Companies

When you think of Disney what do you think about?

Movies, books, maybe a theme park right?

Did you think about them as an R & D company? I know I didn't.

But lately they've been coming out with some really interesting things. The latest being Paper Generators.

http://www.disneyresearch.com/project/paper-generators/

The theory behind it is that you rub paper and it generates electricity to light up things, (or deal with e-ink displays/etc)

I'm really impressed, I wonder what other companies are doing some interesting R&D that you wouldn't expect. Do you know of any? please tell me!

Hacker Scouts

I love the idea, and I would be interested in supporting (teaching?) if someone wanted to get something like this kicked off and running.

http://www.garratt.info/blog/hacker-scouts-is-awesome-technically/

Data Books

Here is a list of good books for Machine Learning, Data Analysis, etc.

http://blog.yhathq.com/posts/ten-data-books.html


Open source Natural Language Processing book too (linked above anyways, but I don't mind duplicating)

http://nltk.org/book/

HN post on getting the word out on an idea links

Seems like some good ideas, biggest takaway is to figure out your target audience, and make sure to market to them as your primary source, but sometimes other areas find them interesting too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6488822


This is kinda my way of bookmarking something I'm interested at the same time, hope you find it an interesting read like I do.