Cool advertising:

“To p romote the exclusive thrillers and horror films on 13th Street, the toilet of a nightclub in Hamburg was specially prepared. Just after entering the room, the light suddenly goes out and the room is bathed in Black light. And now a bloody crime scene becomes visible on the floor and walls: “See what others don’t see. 13TH STREET. The Action and Suspense Channel.” ”

14-16 April in London: Onitsuka Tiger Vending Machine

I love the whole world for Discovery Channel

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And cool products from Swissmiss
The Teafort Tea-over-ice
and
Magnetic leaves for the fridge

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Habbo has conducted its Global Youth Survey, questioning 58,000 teens aged 11-18 over 31 countries, including Europe, US and Latin America. Habbo broke down typical teen web users into five typical personality types, which were evenly split around the globe, although there were variations from country to country. These types are achievers, rebels, traditionals, creative and loners. Further info can be found here.

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Sprint’s Samsung Instinct, an Iphone competitor?

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How Social Networking Could Kill Web Search as We Know It: “With the rise of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Second Life, LinkedIn and even Google’s own Orkut, the next generation of Web users may find what they want by using their social network rather than a search algorithm. After all, the people in your online social network should know you better than a mathematical equation, right?”

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I came across 2 articles back to back talking about attention being in the center of the new economy: the first one in Wired and the second one, dated ‘05, by Umair Haque of BubbleGenerations/HBS
“Across consumer markets, attention is becoming the scarcest - and so most strategically vital - resource in the value chain. Attention scarcity is fundamentally reshaping the economics of most industries it touches; beginning with the media industry.”

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UK first islamic pub

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Still on the anthropology of cellphones: Playing With Fire: On the domestication of the mobile phone among Palestinian teenage girls in Israel. “[The paper] examines how the mobile phone alters social dynamics, relationships, and the construction of gender in Palestine. In short, they document how culturally specific gendered practices (not technological features) frame the meaning and value of technology.” A good summary and a really interesting paper.

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Not as impressive as the latest Sony Bravia ad, but still quite imaginative. The Rampenfest, a viral initiative for the launch of the BMW serie 1 in the U.S., where inhabitant of a small Bavarian city, Oberpfaffelbachen, build a 400 meters hight ramp to catapult BMWs in the U.S. Here’s the (false) company behind The Rampenfest.

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McDonald’s launch the unsnobby cafe intervention/website. I went to a McCafe while I was in Stockholm and was quite pleased by the experience actually…

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“Back in October, when Takashi Murakami’s retrospective opened at the LA MoCA, the inclusion of a guerrilla Louis Vuitton store within the museum garnered almost more press than the exhibition itself. […] actors - posing as street vendors - were set up outside the museum selling authentic Louis Vuitton products alongside the monogrammed canvases designed especially for the exhibition store by Murakami. The tongue-in-cheek stunt brought to life the very serious issue: it’s still not a social taboo to see street vendors hawking counterfeited designs. Which is a strange injustice to the worlds of art and fashion when you consider the theft of intellectual property rights is a criminal offence.”

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I just had a look at the L’Oreal e-strat 2008. On the first 30 team, there’s only 3 of them which are from the Occident: Spain/Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona (5th), Australia/Monash University (15) and France (30th). There’s 11 teams from The Philippines (all from Ateneo de Manila University) and 10 teams from Indonesia (Institut Teknologi Bandung). The best MBA teams (it’s both MBAs and undergrads) is in 12th position.

And then you look at the finalist and you realized how messed up their selection is. They’re taking one team per education level (undergrad vs MBA) per Zone… Which gives one team from Western Europe, one from Southern Europe, etc….

The best team from Western Europe got an overall score of 73.9 (they’re going to the finals). That would place them roughly in the 20th position if they were from Indonesia, Phillipines, Uzbekitstan. Actually, if the finalist weren’t taken from each zone, they’d be something like 1 team from Spain, 1 from Poland, 1 from Russia and the rest from Indonesia and Philippines.

Just a thought.

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(Must see) Foam. woah. for Sony Bravia. ****

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Everybody has been talking a lot about Stuffwhitepeoplelike.com lately. Why? This article sums it all.
“When I moved to New York, I imagined my dating repertoire would reflect the diversity of a Barack Obama rally (#8). [… but] People like me who moved here to drink from some mystical font of urban cultural capital, then just kept on dating within the tight-jean pool. If you’re one of these people, you can supposedly appreciate the irony (#50).
And an example of a date …
“We met at an Asian-fusion restaurant (#45). I ordered the vegan teriyaki (#32), she ordered the sushi (#42). We bonded over our bad memories of high school (#83), and compared the uselessness of our respective liberal-arts degrees (#47). She told me about her work at a non-profit (#12). I told her my reasons for not owning a TV (#28). We both agreed New York was the greatest city we knew (#26) because of the diversity (#7), the indie music (#41) and the architecture (#34). “

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The money of the US presidential candidate

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Coolhunter launched dear-god.net. I’m only posting this because Coolhunter launched the site. I’m not particularly a fan…

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A great piece by NY Times on Jan Chipchase, anthropologist for Nokia: “His mission is to peer into the lives of other people, accumulating as much knowledge as possible about human behavior so that he can feed helpful bits of information back to the company — to the squads of designers and technologists and marketing people who may never have set foot in a Vietnamese barbershop but who would appreciate it greatly if that barber someday were to buy a Nokia.”

Hear him out:
“Chipchase’s theory that in an increasingly transitory world, the cellphone is becoming the one fixed piece of our identity.”
+
“There are a growing number of economists who maintain that cellphones can restructure developing countries in a similar way. Cellphones, after all, have an economizing effect. My “just in time” meeting with Chipchase required little in the way of advance planning and was more efficient than the oft-imperfect practice of designating a specific time and a place to rendezvous.”

his blog

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I’m always amazed by people posting notes on the subway newspapers (Metro and stuff) here in Paris. Well, it seems they do that in every major city uh? Subway Crush launched in order to connect people who might otherwise have some problems to talk to a stranger on the subway.

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Marilyn Monroe sextape story. “An illicit copy of the steamy, still-FBI-classified reel - 15 minutes of 16mm film footage in which the original blond bombshell performs oral sex on an unidentified man - was just sold to a New York businessman for $1.5 million, said Keya Morgan, the well-known memorabilia collector who discovered the film and brokered its purchase.”

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Artist of the day is: Datarock

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For women: Top Ten Trends/Ready to Wear Spring Summer 2008

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I once had an idea of designing pencil with smell and taste, so you know, when you’re chewing the end of it, it actually taste good. Well, it seems that the smell part is gaining the mainstream (but it’s kinda old, my girl only used to buy smelling pens 2-3 yrs back…)

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Evernote is like, bookmarking for real life. “Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at anytime, from anywhere. […] On the web. On your desktop. On your phone. Everything you put into Evernote is always synchronized across all of your devices. That way, all your memories are available to you wherever you are.”

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Tweetclouds allows you to make a word cloud from a twitter profile. Sweet.

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Swissmiss had a delightful collection of stories for today:
Blank is blank is a new blog by Justin Feinstein, copywriter for hum, well according to this he worked/works at Renegade
“Filling out a timesheet from three weeks ago is like trying to put together the events of a drunken evening: You’re never really sure what you did.”

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That sofa is HOT! Damn! I was just talking yesterday about how I’m missing a sofa in my apt…. most ppl left comment about how this would be great for bands, I add up: for small apt, a nice sofa you can bring over to ur friend’s place to watch a movie. Why not?

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From Good Magazine:
An plant-powered air-purifier

A portrait of Lea Thau from The Moth, which “is dedicated to promoting the art of storytelling. We celebrate the ability of stories to honor the diversity and commonality of human experience, and to satisfy a vital human need for connection”.

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Wired’s Geekster Handbook, a Field Guide to the Nerd Underground.

On the same note, these guys reviewed Outside: the real world game. “On the whole, Outside is overrated, and many gamers will find themselves forced by friends and family to play it against their will, but it still deserves a high rating. I give it 7/10, and look forward to improvements in future patches.”

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I told y’all I would get back at you with a list of sites of street hunting. Check this out.

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The 50 greatest comedy sketches of all time: with videos.

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Kanye West blog. And it’s like any other blog. He’s posting some fresh stuff, like this BMW Billboard in Moscow, the Loopita seating and that wireless remote control from B&O

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The Everywhere girl: a girl took a photoshoot for a stock photo website and became the “stock-photo celebrity”. Coz she’s basically, like, everywhere.

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I was at a tech talk last month and they were talking exactly about the same time: the convergence offer of France Telecom: Listen to a movie at home, switch to continue it on your mobile while riding the subway and finish it on your computer the next morning.

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TechCrunch review of the new Flickr Video upload capabilities

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Meeting people by cellphone/Mobile social networking … I mean, that’s nothing knew, but it might hit mainstream as soon as most cellphone will allow it … “The startup behind the new application won’t let me disclose their name yet. But the application is awesome. It shows you everyone around you who has it installed on an iPhone (default privacy is set to off, but can be changed). Users can scroll through nearby users, and set filters for men, women or age ranges. If you find someone interesting you can pull up their profile and ping them. If they respond you can start a chat, on the phone or in person. Of course, they can also choose to block you.”

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Arist of the day: Nat King Cole

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I posted about Ndeur yesterday, a company that made custom painted shoes. Here’s a bunch more, from today’s buzzfeed.

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Improveverywhere make the day for those little league kids: The best game ever

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Consolidated aesthetics: “I like the idea of a consolidated aesthetic totality; what you make looks like what you listen to, sounds like what you wear, and speaks like what you believe in. In simpler terms, my girlfriend might look like she’s in a band I’d listen to, my haircut looks like it belongs in the chair I’m sitting in, and the work I’m designing might be written about in a book that I would read.”

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“ ‘Bolero’ is an exercise in compulsivity, structure and perseveration,” Dr. Miller said. It builds without a key change until the 326th bar. Then it accelerates into a collapsing finale.Ravel [was] in the early stages of a rare disease called FTD, or frontotemporal dementia, when [he was] working on “Bolero”. The disease apparently altered circuits in their brains, changing the connections between the front and back parts and resulting in a torrent of creativity.

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Scratch beginnings: A guy moves to a randomly selected city with $25 and plans to have a place to live, a car, and $2,500 in the bank—all within one year.

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Americans and Europeans on religion, happiness, government, and war. Some surprising facts: French believes in God at 27% (73% in the U.S.) and think believing in God is necessary to have good values at 13% (58% in the U.S.)

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I’ve been building personas lately for projects at work and while searching for some infos I stumble upon this: “Personas are an extremely valuable tool for marketers in any field. If you’re not familiar with the term, personas are representations of your target audience based on research and interviews. From PR to digital to advertising, any marketing team or agency can benefit from developing client- and/or brand-specific personas.” A great graph explanation here.

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Op-Chart: Making Money Hand Over Fist
An oil trader demonstrates the hand signals used on the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange.

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The top 25 blogs, by the Time Magazine

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Through Springwise (coolhunting of businesses)
NDEUR handpainted shoes

Etsy, hum, ebay for handmade stuff

Issuu is a new site that converts users’ documents into interactive, magazine-style online publications that can be viewed directly in a web browser.

Bookswim and Paperspine allow you to rent used books

Bellendoejezo organizes cell phone workshops. A group of VMBO students (preparatory middle-level vocational education for students aged 12–16) was trained to work as phone coaches.

Blurb, a publishing software and services company that brings bookstore-quality publishing to the masses.

Parts of Sweden currently offers add-ons to six of IKEA’s most popular product lines, from various doors for Expedit units to wine racks for Ivar shelving.

Pernod Ricard’s customized label program, which has actually been around for a few years, allows US residents (over 21, of course) to order personalized labels for Chivas Regal, The Glenlivet, Jacob’s Creek, Kahlua, Mumm Napa and Wild Turkey Russell’s Reserve.

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 Lies I’ve told my 3 year old recently: If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the sky.

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Oxford Landing’s South Australian Shiraz wine label sports a useful innovation - a tear-off tab to retain all the useful bits of info to remind you about your great wine experience.

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My next travel guide: Unlike presents search functions, specialized guides focused on art collections, vintage clothes hunting, and architecture, events listings and much more. So if your idea of tourism includes checking out the hottest young galleries, coolest shops and maybe a demonstration of a new type of synthesizer, Unlike is the guide for you.

On the same note, whenever I’m going somewhere, I’m always looking at superfuture or dropping a line on the forums to ask for some advices.

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Starbucks change of strategy: “After years of focusing on the espresso market, and after months of allowing itself to be caught in a distinctly unpremium battle with emerging competitors such McDonalds, today it returns to the drip business, and to its roots, with Pike Place Roast — named after its first store in Seattle.”

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David Yocum and Brian Bell’s architecture office in Atlanta.

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A huge thread on kottke.org of people mispronouncing words on purpuous

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Fears: Ranked from childhood through parenthood

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Ad for American Apparel, back of Vice Magazine
via Copyranter

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A great biz card design for a couple counselor

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“Ten Thousand Cents” is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase are all $100. The work is presented as a video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously. The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, “crowdsourcing,” “virtual economies,” and digital reproduction.

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And this made me learn about Amazon Mechanical Turk. “When we think of interfaces between human beings and computers, we usually assume that the human being is the one requesting that a task be completed, and the computer is completing the task and providing the results. What if this process were reversed and a computer program could ask a human being to perform a task and return the results? What if it could coordinate many human beings to perform a task? Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate “artificial artificial intelligence” directly into their processing by making requests of humans.”

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This week marks the launch of Facebook Chat—a new way for you to communicate with your friends in real-time. The Wall and Inbox have been the primary ways to communicate, but when more immediacy is necessary—for example when making plans for lunch in half an hour or arguing over a foul call in the NCAA tournament—they might not be enough. Chat aims to fill this gap.

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Hum. Nothing will happen with the Eiffel tower after all. (in french)

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The New Kids on the Block are back: “New Kids On The Block — five now fully-grown men who forever defined what the modern boy band would look and sound like — are back together for the very first time in nearly a decade and a half, and currently hard at work on their first new album since 1994. That still untitled album should be released sometime this summer, preceded by the New Kid’s first new single since the Nineties, and followed in the fall by an already hotly anticipated international concert tour.”

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Comme des garçons for H&M, this september: “The famously avant-garde Japanese label, spearheaded by design powerhouse Rei Kawakubo, will provide a range of both men’s and womenswear, as well as childrenswear, accessories and a new unisex fragrance for the retailer.”

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Fold us candidate let you build little folding character of your favorite US candidate

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Hanger Chair is a folding chair that doubles as a clothes hanger

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Streetpepper is a collection of people styles, photographed off the streets.
I had some other sites about that kind of stuff, i’ll post them later today or tomorrow…

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Sidney Lo was featured on Coolhunting “At only 21, Lo’s work shows a maturity beyond his years and proves him to be a thoughtful documentarian of both people, place and time. “. Most/Some of his models are members of the fashion/culture website superfuture.

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