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LEGO celebrated the 50th anniversary of its first Danish patent on Monday. I grew up playing with a few tubs of LEGO – the basic blocks and some trays, no kits!

BusinessWeek posted a nice slideshow of LEGO’s manufacturing process. The company produces 19 billion LEGO bricks each year with very high quality standards: only 18 of every 1 million bricks is defective.

That’s 36,000 bricks each minute, and  more than 2 million an hour, according to Neatorama.

PopAndCo.com has a cute flash animation of the process. The audio track is loud, however.
LEGO is moving most of its brick manufacturing from Denmark to Mexico and the Czech Republic, according to the New York Times. US manufacturing and distribution is being moved to Mexican outsourcing firm Flextronics, according to this report.

In September 2007, SupplyChainDigest published a good report about how LEGO management came to this decision. Earlier attempts to fix the company’s value chain had helped, but outsourcing was a step the company was reluctant to take. LEGO toys are an important symbol in European lives.

On BoingBoing, an editor created a timelapse video while he built a 5000-piece, US$500 kit of the Millennium Falcon.

As a final note, the Wikipedia entry for LEGO closes with a brief discussion of the trademark.

Wired, Engadget Mobile and The Register have posted their updates on the FCC’s 700 mHz auction. Bidding started last Thursday for the right to use these frequencies, which include the UHF band that is used by US broadcast television channels 14 and higher. US television stations will stop using these frequencies in January 2009 as part of a long-planned conversion from analog to digital television that will support high-definition television.

In other words, this kind of auction is a rarity. It’s like finding new beachfront property in Waikiki. Of course, no one owns the airwaves. By international agreement, the radio-frequency spectrum is tightly regulated. This helps manufacturers and governements prevent radio-frequency interference (RFI), so that devices don’t overwhelm each other with static and overlapping signals. Specific portions of the spectrum are allocated to certain uses, and countries control how some frequencies are used within their borders.

This FCC auction will decide which companies rent the 700 mHz or C block for the next few decades in the USA.

These frequencies would provide better mobile phone reception than the current bands of 800 mHz to 1900 mHz. Users might get better reception inside a building, for example. As part of the deal, the FCC has mandated that the winners must allow open access to the new networks. That’s not the same as free or inexpensive access, but that requirement does mean the winner won’t have a monopoly. Someone has to design, build and sell the new hardware to use these frequencies.

AT&T, Apple, Google and Verizon have each been rumored as bidders. Current mobile telcos covet the additional bandwidth and coverage. Apple and Google could develop their own mobile data services together or independently.

Google executives have stated the company will match the US$4.6 billion reserve price of the auction, if the FCC agreed to certain conditions. The FCC said no, but there’s no good estimate on how high the auction might go. Perhaps Google was signaling that it was willing to meet the reserve price, but is the company or any other bidder willing the exceed it? Whoever wins the auction has to build out the network and earn enough money from their new services to satisfy stockholders and the market.