As the new year comes and we ramp up our daily lives once again, I look for technologies that will help me and others in the new year. Here are three of my favorites for 2010.

For many years I have been interested in the intersection of people, nature, and technology, and at the end of 2009 I discovered MindBloom, the perfect digital companion for anyone who is interested in achieving your own significant life goals. Paul Ingram and the crew at MindBloom have done a superb job of moving goal achievement to the next level. An immersive natural metaphor creates a reflective space you can easily enter and exit within a couple of minutes… or linger for a while if you have some pondering to do about what’s important to you. I’ve been using the service for about a month now and I highly recommend it as a way to keep what’s important to you front and center throughout the year. It’s unlike anything you’ve seen in this space before. Do yourself a favor and give it a try — there’s a 14 day free trial and they have a great deal of half off the annual subscription right now.

As a Christmas gift, my family gave me a Garmin Forerunner 405 sports watch. I have to admit, I was skeptical at first, but this thing is quite impressive. Press a couple of buttons and it tracks speed, pace, heart rate, elevation gain, etc. If you’re like me, that information doesn’t matter much when you’re out on a walk or a run, but once you get home, the data syncs wirelessly with your computer (unfortunately through a USB “ANT” device instead of bluetooth, but it works well enough) and the Garmin site shows you a map of where you’ve been, how far, your average, high and low pace, calories burned, etc. I wore it skiing the other day and it tracked my entire day of activities… including an increased resting heart rate at altitude. At my age it’s time to start paying attention to my heart health, so I’m grateful to have this “set it and forget it” device that can give me a baseline for what “healthy” means for me and then makes visible any variation from my norm. It even has me thinking I’ll run a marathon one day!

Finally, I just started using the LiveStrong iPhone app as an experiment. It’s essentially a calorie counting application, but it makes the process fairly easy and gives me useful information such as calorie target for the day, calories burned from exercise (you enter the type and amount of exercise), and calories eaten from food. After using it for a couple of weeks, you have a library of foods you commonly eat and searching for something that’s not on the list is a fairly quick process. It’s all tracked and private (if you want it to be), and the software can help you with your particular health and weight goals. It even made me re-think my portion size for tonight’s dinner… now that’s something!

The concept of Design Thinking is has really taken hold as a primary innovation strategy in the last few years. It has been pioneered by companies like IDEO and by Experience Design professionals in the Web 2.0 space. Martin contends that design thinking is likely to present challengers to traditional management consulting firms that charge large sums of money for incremental improvements. Design firms, on the other hand, do not limit themselves to thinking based on “proof” or “hard data.” They get creative, get innovative, try new things and see how they work in a fast and nimble way. A consulting firm that brings Design Thinking to its clients would be able to deliver breakthrough results for significantly less money. Combining the skills of traditional consulting firms with design thinking firms could be the winning combination that provides both innovation and acceptable risk management for larger corporations. See the Fast Company article on this subject.

I have been using Design Thinking in my consulting practice for a number of years with excellent results. One of the key assumptions about this kind of work is that everyone can contribute to innovation. It’s important to listen to “the need beneath the need” and ask everyone involved what they would do if there were no limits or constraints. Inevitably creative ideas arise from the collective, the “group mind,” if they are invited to the party.