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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.

IT: From the Economist, sentient computing sounds like pervasive computing with a European twist:

By adding sensors to today’s computing and communications technology, sentient computing seeks to take account of a machine’s environment in order to make it more responsive and useful. Sentient computing systems are always on, ubiquitously available, and can adapt to their users. In short, they seek to become real help-mates. To quote a European Commission report, the aim is to create ‘convivial technologies that are easy to live with.’

… Similarly, Microsoft researchers have given wireless PDAs (personal digital assistants) new user interfaces by adding tilt sensors and accelerometers. Users can scroll through documents by tipping the PDA back and forth—as if they were controlling the ball-bearing in a toy maze. Lifting the PDA to the ear creates sensor outputs that cause the device to make a phone call. Researchers have even used the accelerometers to recognise walking patterns so that the PDA can decide whether to accept or divert a phone call.