New Lego Mindstorms!

Chris Anderson
The Long Tail

January 04, 2006

Readers of this blog will know that I'm a big fan of Lego [ http://www.thelongtail.com/the_long_tail/2005/10/friday_fanboy_l.html ], both the products and the company's Long Tailish way of tapping its consumers to design new products [ http://www.lego.com/eng/factory/design/ ] and share their own creations [ http://www.lego.com/eng/factory/gallery/default.asp ].

So I was really excited to hear that after five years, Lego is coming out with a new version of Mindstorms, the geeks' favorite programmable robot construction set. The new version, which was announced this evening at CES [ http://www.lego.com/eng/info/default.asp?page=pressdetail&contentid=17278&countrycode=2057 ], is called Mindstorms NXT. It has a 32-bit processor, proper servo motors, new sensors (including color vision and hearing) and bluetooth connectivity so it can be controlled by a cellphone.

But what's really cool about the new Mindstorms is that they're a collaboration between Lego's engineers and some of the fans who run the very active Lego community projects [ http://www.lugnet.com/ ] built around open-source versions of its software. Lego used one of the fan-designed sensors and asked other fans to help design some of the software used to program the Mindstorms.

Someday business schools will use this as a case study in applying Web 2.0 peer-production techniques to traditional product innovation. In the meantime, you can read all about it in the cover story from next month's Wired [ http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,69946-0.html?tw=wn_tophead_1 ], which we've released early as a sneak preview.