The XKX Jaguar is a new generation electric roadster, aimed at pushing both performance and power efficiency to a new level. This concept tries to revive the glorious design lines of the brand, combining fresh solutions, a unique, new aerodynamics, tailored around the electrical elements of the power system as well as cutting-edge energy feedback.

Inspired by the e-type from 50 years ago.

One of the main challenges during the concept drafting was avoiding the heaviness associated with many of today’s muscle cars, including actual Jaguar models. Like with the models of the golden era, we wanted to recreate a thin, elegant profile, but still showing off all the extra power and technological improvements. The solution was dividing the volume into two separate perceptive entities: one that “floated over” and transmitted the characteristic veil-like feeling, and another, below this layer, that spoke of all the power and adrenaline this car was capable of, which was translated into ample front and rear openings at the sides. The morphology of the lower part was the most important and is obviously the most distinctive compared to current roadsters; the delicate equilibrium of the large curves of the air intakes had at the same time to transmit aggressiveness, but still appearing light and ephemeral, giving the adequate perceptive lightness to the upper curves.

Understanding the Brand

Sketches

Clays

Mirrors

Another characteristic feature of the Jaguar XKX are the totally disappearing side mirrors. At about 1cm thickness, the mirrors perfectly fit the shallow hatch made in the door piece when the car is stopped and they unfold again in working position when it’s turned on. This adds to both the aesthetics, and protects the side mirrors from any damages when parked.

Aerodynamics

Given a much smaller and cooler power plant than conventional, the aerodynamics was conceived in a new innovative way. The side deflector intakes of the front were made broader, so a much larger amount of air does not get stuck by the engine, instead, it flows behind the front wheels, getting out behind them and sliding along the doors and then taking another shortcut through the rear wheels and out from the big rear openings, greatly reducing the total flowing path and subsequently drag.

Aerodynamics

Almost 60% of the energy used by a typical car at highway speeds is spent to counter air friction. Obviously, that is A LOT of energy spent for a function that is indispensable, but not the primary (to push the vehicle forward). The body of the XKX is covered by a layer housing microscopic ripples of piezoelectric cells, which, stimulated by the pressure of the air flowing over them (the actual air friction experienced by the car) produce electricity that is fed back to the vehicle’s battery, increasing both efficiency and performance.

Details

The Jaguar XKX

Link to project on Behance

Copyright John A. Savoia

For some of us, cafes are sacred places given the amount of time we spend in them.  As of a few years ago, I no longer have the appetite for the ubiquitous coffee chains and franchises; local cafes have much more character.  You know you’ve hit gold when you find a place that has phenomenal coffee, free Wi-Fi, ample power outlets and a great atmosphere.

This past week, we caught up with Lucy R. Valena, founder of one of my favorite cafes in Cambridge, Voltage Coffee & Art, to talk about coffee, art and what the future holds.

1. Where did the idea of mixing coffee and art come from?

Coffee and art are a natural pair, and I have always loved the idea of an ampersand concept: something that fuses two ideas together and explores the relationship between those things.  It’s something that I’ve always been fascinated by- in my artwork and everything else.

2. I read that you didn’t initially set out to open a cafe after graduating from university.  Could you share a bit about that story and what drove you to pursue this particular dream?

I graduated from Hampshire College with a degree in studio art in Spring of 2007.  I had no idea what I wanted to do with my shiny new degree- all I knew was that I had to go to Seattle first to make sure it wasn’t the perfect place for me.  My parents met and married each other in Seattle, and I was born there although I grew up in New Hampshire; I had always felt that there was something important for me in Seattle, and I was just itching to find out what it was.  As it turned out, it was espresso.  On my first day in there, I stepped into a coffeehouse and the barista poured me a latte with a beautiful rosetta on it, which I had never seen before.  I remember smiling to myself and thinking, “I’m not leaving this town until I learn how to do that”, and I didn’t.  It took about 4 months.

During my time in Seattle, all I could think about was how much coffee people were drinking, and also how many wonderful projects were happening.  I kept thinking about Boston, and how much I would love to see that kind of spark injected into the culture here.  So, when I moved back to the East Coast, I decided to launch an espresso catering service in hopes that it would serve as a bridge to a brick and mortar location.

3. The fact that Voltage’s showcasing of artwork has a greater good element to it, giving exposure to local artists, is wonderful.  And the flip-side of that of course is that it’s a great way to get repeat-customers.  Was that always your plan for Voltage?  And have you found that customers show interest in purchasing the art?

Our goal in Voltage is not only to serve awesome coffee, but to provide something like a springboard for young artists in the area.  In Boston, there are plenty of places with art on the walls, but the work often isn’t well curated or displayed- it almost feels like an afterthought.  There are also plenty of high brow, white box galleries in town, but that world is a difficult one to break into.  I’ve found that our commitment to young artists has been very mutually beneficial because of the incredible amount of energy it continually creates within the space.

Our curator, Anna Schindelar, is always pounding the pavement and finding new artists, so we are able to change out the art shows every six weeks.  On top of that we usually have some kooky project we’re working on, an unusual object displayed on the counter, or some new recipe- there’s rarely a shortage of news and shenanigans.  I think the energy within the space is what makes people come back every day, and we definitely have sold a good amount of art to Voltage regulars and art collectors alike.

4. What are the biggest hurdles that you had to overcome to get to where you are today?

When I first launched Voltage as an espresso catering service, I was 23 and truly had no idea what business meant.  I didn’t know anything about taxes, cash flow, accounting, licensing, or really any of the information I thought I needed to know in order to start a business.  However, I remember realizing one day that I had something that a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs have trouble acquiring: the knowledge of how to build things from scratch.  I am a sculptor, and have learned from years of making things that essentially anything can be constructed- once you start making plans, all it takes is time.

5. Everyone that I’ve visited Voltage with has commented that the coffee is phenomenal.  Could you share a bit about how you came up with the menu items as well as what goes into your coffee-making process…other than love!

All of the recipes for the Voltage Standards- the exotic flavored lattes and hot chocolates, were developed in my kitchen the summer before the catering service launched, and tested over the next year by customers.  During that initial development stage, it was a somewhat random process- I would literally just experiment making different ingredients into syrup and trying out different fresh infusions.  And yes, it was definitely a labor of love.

6. I get the sense that the staff’s hearts are in the work, to paraphrase Carnegie; they clearly love working with each other and making coffee.  How would you say that that kind of harmony comes about?

We have been very lucky, but this place has also been built on a very close-knit foundation.  My second in command, Zoë McDonnell, is my best friend.  We had adjoining studio spaces our senior year at Hampshire, and have a really good working relationship.  She and I went our separate ways after graduation, but when I decided to open the shop, I called her up.  She was living in California at the time, and I essentially called and asked her when she was going to move back here so we could make some cool stuff happen.  I don’t think I’ll ever forget the magic of that conversation- as I recall, she sort of paused for a minute, and then said, “Well, it might take me a couple of months to get my stuff together, but… okay.  I’ll be there soon.”

My staff has truly become a family- we hang out quite a bit outside of the shop and have a great time together.  We all help each other out, and I honestly just have so much love in my heart for all of them.  The extended Voltage family is becoming such a cool network of awesome people, and what else could I possibly ask for in this world than to be building things alongside wonderful people?

7. What’s next for Voltage?

There are some seriously exciting projects in the works, but I can’t quite reveal them yet.  Let’s just say that the next Voltage will be a different kind of business, not a coffeehouse & gallery, but another ampersand storefront that links a different natural pair and elevates the relationship between those things to a new level.  Vague, I know, but I will give you a hint: I just put in my application to attend pastry school in the Fall.

Voltage is located on Third Street in Cambridge, MA and is open weekdays 7AM to 7PM and on Saturdays 9AM to 7PM.

I once sat in a room with a pen and paper on the desk and thought to myself:

I’m going to think very hard and come up with a great idea by the end of the day.

Von Goethe had promised that “talent develops in quiet places…” and, well, the room was dead quiet.

But I never did. That was about 7 years ago.

It was a while later that I came across another piece of writing, this time by John Donne, that read:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main

I realized that inspiration was the additive result of a series of smaller experiences that one can only be exposed to within the flow of life. Experiences that if viewed on their own may not seem very significant.

This has been a great project for a great client, so make sure you grab a bite if your on Bahrain.

Inspiration

Brand Elements

Identity

Characters

Menu

Website

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Also checkout this project on the Behance Network.

Illustration courtesy of Mozilla.org (click image for link)

The course is a combination of practical in-class exercises, case studies and interactive lectures, culminating with a one-on-one coaching session with the professor. I took the course partly because it mandated that students participate in class, and since I had raised my hand and participated in lectures during the entirety of the program a total of just one time (Jim Utterback’s Technology Strategy, last lecture, the answer came back as “yes”), I made it a personal challenge to try and fix that.

The coaching session was the real life-changer. I emailed the professor ahead of time saying that I wanted his candid opinion about what the reason might have been for not getting offers from the two companies that I had had a set of on-site interviews with to date despite walking away from them confident that I had done well. Shalom saw right through me and pointed out that my perception of myself did not really match how I actually came across, which was an eye-opener. Despite believing that I was candid and relaxed, which is the case in normal situations, during interviews, I seemed to come across as reserved and cold.

I took the bouquet of advice and promised to apply it to the four on-site interviews I had lined up in a few weeks in San Francisco and the Bay Area. Sure enough, being myself worked wonders and I heard good news from all four companies. So to invoke the oft-used, seldom meant cliche, the course did in fact change my life.

I guess the take-away is this: it’s important to leave a graduate program with an improved arsenal of engineering tools, Systems Optimization being one of my favorites, but it is probably more useful to take advantage of courses that teach one about the most complex system of all: oneself. That can do wonders.  But then again, maybe one doesn’t need to go to graduate school for that?  Well maybe they do.  I don’t know.

[Default size, Hi-res version]

Baby Fatima saw the light of day last week and became the newest member of our family.  Contrary to what I had expected, she appears to always be calm and composed…so much like her father then

Signed copies of oversized Windows CDs

I was sitting in the office of one of the Windows Group Program Managers in Building 27 at around 2:00PM after having gone through three interviews, each an hour long.  Building 27 is one of the oldest buildings on the Microsoft Campus and I was told that Bill Gates had his office there before he left the company.

We were about 10 minutes in when, as luck would have it, I got a new email and and my iPhone sounded the usual alert.  I must have accidentally flicked the switch at some point.

The interviewer appeared distracted and perhaps even annoyed.  Fair enough, I thought.  I would have been annoyed too had it been me.  What followed panned out into one of the more memorable experiences of the day, in hindsight.

Is that an iPhone I heard?!

Yeah, hehe…

I don’t understand, why would you have an iPhone?

I switched to serious mode (no “hehe” this time):

So, I had a Nokia phone for a long time and was very skeptical of smart phones because of their short battery life, unusable touch screens (the feedback was delayed and they were too annoying) and other reasons as well.  I then got an iPhone because everyone seemed to have one and my Nokia phone had started to act up; at one point, it decided to crash and deleted all my media files and messages while it was at it.  I can’t say that I’m discerning enough of the mobile space to know the relative merits and drawbacks of the different smartphone offerings.

Huh.  So is your laptop also an Apple?

It is, yes, but I do have Windows 7 installed on it and I regularly switch between OS X and Windows.

Why do you even have Windows?  I mean what’s the point?

Well, I have to because a lot of academic programs only work on Windows (did I just say “have to”?) Wait…no I didn’t mean “have to” (good god).  I mean I have it installed and use it regularly and it so happens that I use it for some academic applications as well.

Huh.  So…What browser do you use?

I use Firefox and Chrome a lot since I do a lot of Web development and they have great debugging and code inspection tools.

I really don’t understand why you would choose to use OS X and then not Safari.  If you like Firefox and Chrome, then why not use them on Windows.

I don’t know.  I honestly don’t know.

Do you like IE?

As I had already been painted with the brush of heresy, I think I said something like:

I use it a lot when I’m developing cross-browser compatible code.

The second half went great with the whiteboard design and coding questions and I made it to the 5th interview with the Director of Program Management who was a genuinely great guy, probably one of the kindest and serenest people I’ve ever chatted with.  The conversation went really well and we ended with him asking me which projects I’d like to work on as a PM in the Windows group, which I took as a sign that they would likely be extending me an offer.

In the end, I didn’t get one.  I wonder if it’s because of the whole “Apple” episode with the 4th interviewer.  Despite growing up with MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 and being an avid user of all subsequent versions of the OS and despite BASIC being the first language I coded in, I think my candor may have gotten the best of me and made me come across in unfavorable light.  I can’t stop laughing whenever I remember that interview.

Seattle was beautiful though.  Pike Place Market and the pier were breathtaking and reminded me a lot of Bahrain.  The salmon I had at Anthony’s Pier 66 restaurant that evening was unbelievable and Microsoft were overly generous with covering all of my expenses.

I wrote this post in late March 2011 right after my on-site interview with Google for an Associate Product Manager internship in Zurich. I figured I’d make it public since it is ‘job-search’ time for a lot of students and so the below might prove useful.

The Google interview
Since I didn’t find much material online about ‘Associate Product Manager’ interviews, I thought I’d put this post together for anyone who goes through this process in the future. Because of the NDA, I can’t reveal specific questions, but I’ll give as much info as possible – in actual fact, I didn’t read the NDA all that carefully, so I may have agreed to give up my first-born for all I know!

The process is typical of all Google interviews: a recruiter calls to give you an idea about the position and ask about your geographic preferences, then there’s one to two phone interviews and then you go through a string of on-site interviews.

Phone interview
In the phone interview, I got asked the following type of questions:

Some of the questions were those lateral thinking ones where there’s no right answer; the interviewer just wants to see how you think and how accurately you’re able to estimate given limited knowledge. The trick here is to make reasonable assumptions and abstract. So if you’re asked how many planes are flying over the city of Atlanta, for example, abstract the latter to a circle or a square depending on which shape helps most and then base your calculations on that assumption.

The others were product-specific. The trick here is to talk about a product that you like using and be able to justify its merits, its shortcomings in moderate detail and be comfortable with thinking of new ideas for improving it on the spot. This might require some practice, especially if you’re the type of person who can’t be creative when put on the spot. Make sure you’re somewhat familiar with Google products so that you can talk about them with ease and be aware of their idiosyncrasies.

I got a call a few days later that I had made it through and would be interviewing on-site. Although I’d applied to the Zurich office, I was going to do the interviews here in Cambridge. Two of the interviews would be over VC with Product Managers in Zurich and the third one would be with a Software Engineer in Cambridge. So I spent Spring Break going over algorithms and data structures in the E62 Study Rooms.

On-site interviews
The interviews started at 9:30AM and went until 12:30PM. Each lasted for 45 minutes.

The first interview was with a very friendly Product Manager in Zurich. First, we went over some of the projects that I had done in the past and she asked me about my start-up company and how it started, projects, major challenges, etc. We then went through a particular non-technical product and discussed in a lot of detail how we could improve it. The challenge here is thinking of something that you’re fairly experienced with on-the-spot and then being able to go through 40 minutes of talking about how to improve it and implement those improvements. With this kind of interview, it’s really not enough to just gloss over concepts and processes; you will end up having to talk about them in great detail. The interviewer will push you until you break. Hopefully, you won’t, but that’s the idea. We then talked about the future and discussed a few products that I felt would be trend-setting.

In the end, she asked if I had any questions. Since she had experience working on Google Maps, I asked her a few questions about Maps that I had had for a while. One was regarding collision detection. Right now, if you have lots of markets in one spot, it’s really difficult to see what is where unless you zoom in. It would be nice if there were some collision logic to take care of that. She said that that was a very good point and wasn’t sure why it hasn’t yet been implemented. My other question was about local labels: not all countries have them.

The second interview was also with a Product Manager in Zurich. We spent almost the entire interview talking about how to design a particular technical product. So I started by breaking down the problem to its main sub-components and then went through each of them. The amount of detail I was being asked here was much more than the first interview. I felt that by the end of the interview, I could actually go out and build this thing! The interviewer wasn’t only interested in the first solutions that I came up with, but also in alternative ones. This is sometimes more easily said than done, but I feel like I did a good job at coming up with alternative solutions. In the end, we focused primarily on resources (servers, hard disk space, processing rates) and talked about how much infrastructure would be required to actually build this thing. We went over potential bottlenecks and weak points and I had to come up with solutions for alleviating them. All in all, I might not have clicked with with the interviewer on a personal level, but nonetheless, enjoyed the experience.

The third interview was with a Software Engineer. He was actually one of the kindest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of chatting with. We went through a large number of algorithms and data structures questions, as expected. In the beginning, we went through a few problems that I had to calculate the runtime complexities for. We then went through a few more problems that I had to think of suitable algorithms and ADTs for. There was a discussion of HashMaps (again, as you’d expect), interfaces for a few typical ADTs in Java, packets, Web servers, protocols and a number of other things. In hindsight, it was certainly better going through lots of problems than focusing on just one, as was the case with an interview that I went through several years ago. In SE interviews, if you get stuck with a problem that you don’t know anything about, you’re basically done.

Final thoughts
I certainly benefited from reviewing data structures and algorithms and writing out sorting and searching algorithms on the blackboards in E62 and E40. I didn’t end up doing much coding on the day, but the exercise certainly helped. I also benefited from doing lateral-thinking type questions (e.g. estimate how many golf balls can fit into a school bus). Again, I wasn’t asked any of the questions that I went over, but the exercise put me in the right mindset for the interviews. In the end, I didn’t get the job, and was recommended for a Software Engineer position, which I’m not too sure if I’ll pursue right now. From the feedback I got from the recruiter, it seemed like two of the interviewers recommended me for the post while the third didn’t. Hope you do better. I’ll certainly try again next year!