business model innovation design we're on a road to nowhere // on a quest to analyze and explore the design of business model innovations, i.e. 'hideous and hidden things' like organizational structures and capabilities, corporate strategies and all things related // on a yellow brick road with a girl, a lion and a straw-man wasting our time // …

These are my links for March 22nd through March 23rd:

• Display Twitter on an Arduino – Hack a Day – The SocialBot9000, as [Chris] calls his build, is an Arduino Uno connected to an Ethernet shield and an LCD character display. The firmware uses the Twitter API to search for recent posts containing the phrase, ‘socialbot9000.’ A PHP script on the Arduino does all the heavy lifting and with the great Bildr tutorial on getting the Ethernet shield up and running
• Arduino playground – Python – Arduino and Python Talking to Arduino over a serial interface is pretty trivial in Python. On Unix-like systems you can read and write to the serial device as if it were a file, but there is also a wrapper library called pySerial that works well across all operating systems.
• Lemonodor: arduino_serial – arduino_serial.py is a Python port of Tod E. Kurt's arduino-serial.c program for communicating with an Arduino microcontroller board over a serial port. It only uses standard Python modules (notably termios and fcntl) and does not require any special serial communications modules.
• Amazon.com Buys Kiva Systems for $775 Million – NYTimes.com – “Amazon has not had great margins,” Jason Helfstein, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Company. “One has to believe they looked at this and thought, ‘Why not just own it and take all the technology in house?’” The acquisition comes as Amazon aggressively adds distribution centers to service its growing consumer base.