Planet launched hundreds of cheap cube satellites for daily photos of the whole Earth
Dove nanosatellites built from off-the-shelf parts made daily global imaging cheap enough to be a product.
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2,000 PUBLISHED CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDSilver Wolf made Thai football commentary its legal whiskey ad
Banned from advertising, the new whiskey renamed amateur league players 'Smooth, Sweet, Oaky' so live commentary sold its taste.
Read the caseCNPC replaced spreadsheet pipeline planning with optimization, adding $530M in profit
CNPC built a network-wide pipeline optimizer with UC Berkeley and Tsinghua, adding $530M profit and cutting $20B+ planned construction.
Read the caseIntel bought equipment options to hedge $5B of annual capex — worth $2B in revenue
Intel's capital supply chain velocity program used stochastic programming on equipment options, saving hundreds of millions and protecting $2B+ of revenue.
Read the caseA quit helpline hid its number in plain sight: the imprint code on every pill
855-HOW-TO-QUIT turned mandatory opioid pill codes into phone extensions, connecting callers to someone who quit that exact pill.
Read the caseiFixit shipped FixHub, a soldering iron built as proof of its own repairability standard
Rather than out-feature cheap open USB-C irons, iFixit built its soldering system glue-free and modular, then let the community teardown do the selling.
Read the caseKalal's Predator tracker learned from its own misses to follow any object
A Surrey PhD student's demo tracked almost anything after one click because Predator kept learning from its own mistakes while it ran.
Read the caseiD Fresh turned the idli batter run into a ₹688-crore omnichannel FMCG
Engineers quit jobs to sell fresh idli batter in pouches; two decades on, an omnichannel playbook turned the short-shelf-life product profitable.
Read the caseHeineken opened Seoul's bars at 4am by letting fans run them
Heineken turned Seoul's closed 4am bars into unmanned Trust Bars where fans pour and pay by honour, cutting labour costs.
Read the caseSMPTE timecode gave every video frame an address and made editing possible
SMPTE ST 12 labels each frame hour:minute:second:frame on the medium, so shots are found and synced by number; it made videotape editing possible.
Read the caseHyundai told an EV story as a 13-minute thriller shot from the car
Night Fishing is a mystery film at a charging station, filmed from the vehicle's viewpoint, starring Son Suk-ku — a Grand Prix at Spikes Asia 2025.
Read the caseNew York financiers built a 47-mile Panama railroad to capture gold-rush traffic
Completed in 1855, the Panama Railroad cut the isthmus crossing from a mule-and-canoe ordeal to hours — the first transcontinental railroad in the Americas.
Read the caseThe US paid cities 35% of bond interest to open the muni market.
Build America Bonds let municipalities sell taxable bonds with a 35% federal interest subsidy; in 2009, 749 issues raised $63.9bn and the market reopened.
Read the caseDeutsche Bahn matched German sights to world icons and lifted rail revenue 24%
German Rail's algorithm found German lookalikes of famous foreign destinations, then served ads comparing live flight prices to its €19 train fare.
Read the casePepsiCo's Lay's gave its 27,000 potato farmers a 10-day blight early warning.
Lay's and Cropin's AI reads satellite and weather data to warn farmers of blight before it wipes out a potato crop.
Read the caseLei Yang's DDN reached ICLR 2025 by keeping the closest of many samples
Generate K candidate outputs, train only the closest to ground truth, feed it forward: ICLR 2025's DDN turns discrete guesses into a distribution.
Read the caseTanishq accepted any old gold at full value to unlock India's hoarded gold
Tanishq's first-ever 0%-deduction exchange turns idle jewellery of any karat into buying power — 33% of sales already come from exchanges.
Read the caseAncient Indian law made guilds legal persons
Ancient Indian law made the guild itself a legal person, so contracts and property outlasted any member's death or retirement.
Read the caseSkyhook located phones with Wi-Fi it never installed, beating GPS indoors
Skyhook mapped existing Wi-Fi access points and triangulated phones from them, giving Apple's iPhone location indoors where GPS dies.
Read the caseKFC made fake mobile-game ads into real playable games
KFC UAE copied the look of scammy game ads, then delivered the playable games those ads had promised.
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