Barnes & Noble is gearing up to launch what it calls the "world's largest bookstore"

After Starbucks announced that its Wi-Fi HotSpots would be available gratis for iPhone users, B&N has stepped in to announce complimentary AT&T Wi-Fi for any customer that visits a Barnes & Noble bookstore nationwide. All customers shopping in Barnes & Noble stores can now freely download and preview any of the over 700,000 eBook titles with hundreds of thousands of public domain titles available from Google, with that number expected to reach one million in short order.The existing AT&T Wi-Fi network at Barnes & Noble has been available to customers since 2005, but it wasn't until now that anyone would just walk into a Barnes & Noble store and have complimentary and unlimited access to the Web. Gives you a whole new reason to rekindle that interest in "reading," now doesn't it?

BMW is joining Honda and pulling out of Formula One at the end of the season. Is it another victim of the financial apocalypse within the auto industry, or are the boys from Bavaria bailing because their results this season have been dreadful?

New York City is buying one-way plane tickets for homeless families to leave the city.

It's part of a program by Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration to keep the homeless out of the expensive shelter system, which costs $36,000 a year per family. More than 550 families have left the city since 2007. All it takes is for a relative to agree to take them in.

The city employs a travel agency for domestic travel and the Department of Homeless Services handles international travel.

City officials say there are no limits on where a family can be sent and families can reject the offer.

Families have been sent to 24 states and five continents, mostly to Puerto Rico, Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas.

City officials say none of the relocated families have returned to city shelters.

The Dutch have been fighting the rising and falling tides for centuries, building dikes and pumping water out of areas that are below sea level. Now, rather than fight the water infiltrating their land, the Dutch will use it as part of a new development called ‘New Water‘, which will feature the world’s first floating apartment complex, The Citadel. This “water-breaking” new project was designed by Koen Olthuis of Waterstudio in the Netherlands, and will use 25% less energy than a conventional building on land thanks to the use of water cooling techniques.

Security researchers plan to reveal a security hole that would enable hackers to take complete control of an iPhone with a text-messaging attack.

Security researchers Charlie Miller and Collin Mulliner will publicize the exploit Thursday at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference, according to Forbes. The researchers said the hack involves sending a series of mostly invisible SMS bursts that effectively hijack an iPhone. From thereon, a hacker could control all the functions on the iPhone, such as e-mailing, dialing contacts — and, most alarmingly, sending more text messages to hijack even more iPhones.

This is the funnest thing to happen to boring old milk since the crazy straw! The Coca-Cola Company just launched a new carbonated milk drink called Vio "Vibrancy Drink," and New Yorkers are the first consumers in the world to pour the product into their discerning mouth holes! Developed in their Atlanta laboratory, the beverage requires no refrigeration and comes in four "natural" flavors: peach mango, berry, citrus, and tropical colada. According to the Post, it's being sold in delis around NYC for about $2.50 per 8oz aluminium bottle, and each bottle has 26 grams of sugar. The company promises that Vio is "a refreshing sensory experience" that contains just "a hint of rBGH-free skim milk" and tastes "like a birthday party for a polar bear."

Two different types of fictive projects based around bottled water have hit the market recently. With “daily nutritional values” ranging from -200,000% Carbon Tetrachloride to 2% polar bear tears and 98% melted ice caps, they are both part of campaigns to raise awareness over toxic spills, lying advertising and to end our massive consumption of bottled water.

I believe we are at a watershed moment in the advertising business. Yes, the advent of “New Media” is a major contributing factor, and has definitely changed the way many clients are communicating with prospective customers. But learning to cope with new forms of communication and media is something agencies have overcome in the past, and in many cases actually benefited from. No, I believe that the true seismic change which has taken place in the business over the last thirty years is what I call its “Conglomeration.” Meaning that every major agency, with the single exception of Wieden+Kennedy, belongs to one of the four major holding groups, all of which are publicly traded, and are therefore primarily concerned about making their balance sheets and quarterly results look good to shareholders and the douchenozzles on Wall Street.

While many have written off MySpace as an ailing behemoth of social networks past, the site is hoping to reanimate their users by defining the site as a new platform for venting creativity. Echoing their early days as a community of young bands, MySpace wants to reposition itself as a place for young creatives, rather than a disorganized collection of companies, bands and individuals all spamming one another.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a lot of buzz generated by the news that Starbucks was looking to explore new store layouts and designs and even considering dropping the brand name from certain locations. The plan is to create new environments that will try to re-explore the spirit of a traditional coffeehouse including the sale of wine and beer plus playing host to live music and poetry readings.

Last Friday, the Seattle based corporation opened 15th Avenue E Coffee and Tea - the first of these ’stealth stores’ called. Our PSFK spy got herself down to the cafe “inspired by Starbucks” and snapped some of these photos on her phone.

The look is vastly different from the the brand’s standard. 15th Avenue E Coffee and Tea has a rustic but modern mix of wood and tin plus a celebration of coffee beans and tea leaves. Espressos will be made using a manual machine. If you didn’t know it was Starbucks, you’d think you found a hidden neighborhood gem.

The Putting Lot explores the possibilities of vacant lots in the city with an emphasis on community spaces. Our aim is to inspire the imaginations of our visitors and provoke a conversation about neighborhood sustainability.

We invite you to play the nine holes, each designed by a different team of artists or architects, enjoy local Brooklyn-based bites at the snack-shack, participate a variety of activities and events, or just stop by and hang out in the shade.

Bokodes, as they are known, can hold thousands of times more information than their striped cousins and can be read by a standard mobile phone camera.

The 3mm-diameter (0.1 inches), powered tags could be used to encode nutrition information on food packaging or create new devices for playing video games.

The tags are smaller than barcodes, can be read from different angles and can be interrogated from far away by a standard mobile phone camera.

GossipCop.com was created to police the gossip industry. Launched in July 2009, it is the go-to destination for credible celebrity news. Every day the site separates fact from fiction, and has fun doing it.

Gossip Cop has more than 200 websites, TV shows, newspapers and magazines currently under surveillance. So anything the gossipers report wrong can and will be used against them.

a 1965 IKEA catalog

Employees of Facebook recently moved into their new home at the Stanford Research Park. Prior to that, workers for the social networking site were scattered throughout 10 locations around the city of Palo Alto.

Studio O+A, a San Francisco based interior design firm which grew out of the dot-com boom worked with Facebook on the transformation of the massive 150,000-square-foot space which was the former laboratory of measuring equipment manufacturer Agilent Technologies.
The design takes its inspiration from the patchwork nature of Facebook users and employees, bringing together seemingly disparate elements to form a cohesive pattern and using color and interior spacing to create neighborhoods within the open plan space. The company’s executives sit in central areas, accessible to all employees. Large lounges and open spaces provide venues for the community to come together.

The full Amtrack experience

And i say: It Was Time!

Amtrak, America’s passenger rail service, is often chided by politicians as a waste in a country obsessed with automobiles, but current economic pressures and the incomparable luxuries of rail travel may finally be getting the attention it deserves. The trip cost $72, $50 less than a flight would have been, though the trip took an extra eight hours or so. However, unlike most air trips, train trips are an entire experience. No baggage fees, plenty of legroom, incredible views and as the author discovered, could be exposed to treats like wine tasting and crab cakes in the parlor car. He also found that people were much more willing to chat with strangers and the general atmosphere was more relaxed.

In sociology, homosociality describes same-sex relationships that are not necessarily of a sexual nature. For example, a heterosexual male who prefers to socialize with men may be considered a homosocial heterosexual. The term homosociality is most often used with reference to male relationships. "Bromance" is also used to refer to a close but non-sexual relationship between two men.

A bromance or "man-crush" is a close but non-sexual relationship between two men, a form of homosocial intimacy.[1] Coined in the 1990s, the term has historically referred to a relationship between heterosexuals, but the term has gained currency in describing such relationships when one of the men is gay.

Bullshiting taking to the next level.

Muzorama is a short 3D animation film based on the universe of french illustrator Muzo.

A recent ad campaign by Land Rover uses the tilt-shift photography trick to make viewers do a double take. Tilt-shift photography uses an incredibly shallow depth of field to create the illusion of miniature subjects, which is also possible in videos. Our eyes interpret the very blurred foreground and background as a tiny environment, even when the subjects would be clearly difficult to reproduce artificially.

At PechaKucha Night in Tokyo Vol. 63, Anne Gross gave a presentation on what she called “Guerrilla Gardening,” a Landscape Architecture project she worked on at the Brandenburg University of Technology in Cottbus, Germany.

40 students recovered 10 city sites of wasteland and turned them into gardens — Guerrilla Gardening. We all together organized every single step, from designing to financial support and realization, up to a great opening event that included a symposium.

The link includes a few images from Anne’s presentation.

A Google employee has a working prototype of what 3D videos would look like on YouTube.

"YouTubePete" said in a YouTube forum thread that he's the developer working on making a stereoscopic player during his "20 percent time" at Google.

The sample video, which was dug up by SearchEngineRoundtable.com, can be found here. I happened to have a pair of amber/blue glasses lying around, and when I finally found the correct mode in the drop down menu to the bottom right of the player, I did indeed see 3D. It was grainy and dark, but it worked.

How many billboards did you pass today? If you can even keep count, you're lucky. Most of those are made with vinyl. And most of them get thrown away. Over 3 million a year in the US alone. That's nearly 10,000 tons, or to give you a visual, about the weight of 2500 adult elephants. Once it makes it to the landfill, it's not going anywhere. Vinyl does not biodegrade. We thought something should be done about that. Starting this month, we are.

Terracycle together with Yakpak will be turning those billboards into messenger bags, backpacks, and more. As a byproduct of those billboards being built to withstand the elements, these have a lifetime warranty. As Yakpak founder Stephen Holt put it to me, "The only way one of these bags will ever end up in a landfill is if someone chooses to throw it away."

epaper in tokyo metro

a remarkable and timely new term - “hand-me-up”. It’s the act of a member of a younger generation passing along newish, but out-dated technology to a member of an older generation.

that's impressive and such a small leap to our technological future!

Background explanation from my point of view: Windsor, Ontario, Canada and Detroit, US, are both the respective national spinal chord of auto industry in Canada and in the US.

Broken City Lab is an interdisciplinary creative research group based in Windsor, Ontario that tactically disrupts and engages the city, its communities, and its infrastructures to reimagine the potential for action in a collapsing post-industrial city.

Cross-Border Communication is an interventionist performance series based on the desperate need to communicate with Detroit, Michigan from Windsor, Ontario.

Using a 6000 lumens projector, Broken City Lab will transmit a message to Detroit once a week for 45 minutes from September to November 2009. Each week will feature a different message that we write and project onto the CIBC building, located at Ouellette Avenue & Riverside Drive in Windsor and clearly visible from downtown Detroit.

Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), the tech-savvy 27-year-old son of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), looks into his father’s disappearance and finds himself pulled into the same world of fierce programs and gladiatorial games where his father has been living for 25 years. Along with Kevin’s loyal confidant (Olivia Wilde), father and son embark on a life-and-death journey across a visually-stunning cyber universe that has become far more advanced and exceedingly dangerous.

most anticipated sci-fi movie of next year?

The Flavorpill 50 are “the most respected event creators in every one of its major markets”—NYC, LA, Chicago and San Francisco. For these select venues and cultural institutions, Flavorpill has opened up their platform. Each of the 50 has its own custom page to upload information about its latest exhibitions and/or one-off events, publish them, and see their content integrated into the website. They can also create interactive giveaways (prizes including VIP passes, season membership, and complimentary cocktails) and tie them to events.

Design Supermarket has just opened in the underbelly of La Rinascente, the biggest, oldest and, well, only department store in Milan. The Supermarket, a sprawling trove of recession-friendly design booty, is the latest floor of the 150-year-old establishment to get dusted off, thanks to the king of sleepy-store reinventions, Vittorio Radice. Radice worked makeover magic on the London retail stalwarts Selfridges and Marks & Spencer before returning to his native Italy in 2006 to take on Rinascente, one fluorescent light at a time. The beauty of Design Supermarket can be found not just in its sleek interior, designed by the minimalist master Claudio Silvestrin — or in its full-scale shop-in-shops dedicated to golden Italian institutions like Kartell, Alessi and Nespresso — but also in its democratic approach to design. With Paola Navone porch lamps (90 euros) alongside Eno leather baskets (100 euros) and Royal VKB’s kitchen pourers (9 euros), it’s all molto economico as well as chic.

For a new store development grocery retailer Tesco plans to rent 30 ‘allotments’ for part time gardeners to locals in Lancashire in the UK. In tandem with an interest in grow-your-own-food PSFK has noticed around the world, there has been a recent boom in interest in allotments in the UK (see our interview with an allotment ‘owner’ here). The store will also sell starter kits to the renters, the Daily Telegraph reports.

After 6 months of waiting, yesterday I finally saw the first prototype of the Nike Tiempo shoe I’ve customized. I was invited to take part in the City Tiempo/CTRS/Livestrong collaboration, in which 8 riders from 8 different cities chose a colorway for the Nike City Tiempo shoe.

I decided to do a completely black shoe, which, when lit by car headlights or the flash of a camera, becomes something completely different.

Basically the idea is to have 3M reflective material – in black – all over the shoe, apart from the swoosh, laces, and sole. So during the day the shoe is sober and black, and at night it shines brightly, and adds to your visibility when riding.

I’m really happy with the results, as I was worried that the effect wouldn’t work. Took some crappy shots last night at a dinner, better images coming soon!

A positive feedback mechanism for wasting company time on the Internet.

MOODROOM, announced that they will be opening Canada’s newest andmost ambitious shop-and-service destination dedicated to fashion for the home this spring in Montreal.

The store boasts an animated and interactive venue, the first-of-its-kind in Canada, where brands are encouraged to partner with MOODROOM Selections & Services, Inc. to present themselves – design story and all - directly to consumers.

“There is a void in the marketplace for home products to authentically connect with consumers in a relevant and interesting way. At MOODROOM, we intend to revolutionize the shopping experience by creating an ambiance of cutting-edge style, creative inspiration, trend news, exceptional custom service and pleasure.”

Hungry for real engagement, frustrated by fragmentation, brands want to put the message to us face to face, just to make sure we are getting it. More importantly, they are getting better at doing it.

The central tenet of experiential marketing is to let consumers inside the brand, in the least metaphorical sense. A TV ad makes you think about a product; the experiential version might put you in a comfy chair, give you a massage and entertain the kids while you eat the product - as demonstrated by the Natural Confectionery Company's ongoing roadshow, created by Sledge. Hugh Robertson, managing director of rival specialist agency RPM, explains: "We talk about being able to prove the truth behind the brand claim.

Choose A Different Ending is an interactive film that allows you to decide what happens next. You can interact with it, choose what to do and decide how it ends. In Choose A Different Ending you decide whether to live or die.

The best correction ever: in 1969, after the moon shot, NYT retracted a 1920 editorial saying space flight was impossible

The Plaza Nueva drugstore, in Bilbao (Spain), is set in an emblematic square of the historical centre of the city. The square, also called Plaza Nueva, is a protected area due to its historical value. The pharmacy was first open a century ago and had not been altered since then. The new owner acquired the local in 2008 and wanted a complete renewal, even though tradition and respect for the surroundings was to be taken into special account.

San Francisco based design collective, Grayscaled, recently completed the flagship store for online company Mission Bicycle, based in San Francisco, California

Japanese designers Isolation Unit have designed the interior of a salon in the Harajuku district of Tokyo, Japan, for hair-dressing chain LIM.

Northumbria University graduate Jack Bresnahan exhibited a series of biodegradable, plastic lids for turning used tin cans into household containers at graduate show New Designers in London last week.There are 9 plastic lids in the set, which turn the cans into objects including a vase, soap dispenser, sugar caster, tea and coffee canisters, toothbrush holder, money box and desk tidy. Jack has created a range of 9 different biodegradable plastic lids, that can be placed on the top of a freshly-washed baked beans can for example and transform its purpose. From a vase to a soap dispenser, a sugar pourer to toothbrush holder, money box to desk tidy and tea and coffee canisters, these stylish lids take tin cans to a whole new level.

There's much that's predictable about a British summer, but it's not a season preserved in aspic. Alongside the time-honoured traditions are emerging trends that say much about Britain in the 21st Century.

The forementioned virtual restaurant website

The blurry line between real and virtual experiences is so well contained in that new japanese venture…

When the virtual restaurant Air Yakiniku appeared online last January, it became both an instant success in Japan (where else?) and one of the more curious signs of these globally lean times. The “restaurant,” a Korean barbecue, works like this: once you’re on the site, you’re given an apron to print out and wear to keep “grease” from splattering on your computer. I’m not joking. Then you’re asked to choose from slices of pork, chicken or beef, which a hand splays out on a full-screen sizzling BBQ spit. Visitors are encouraged to have (real) bowls of rice and dipping sauce on hand as they watch and listen to their beef crackle and char. A bell softly dings when the meat is cooked, a hand with chopsticks appears, and it’s time to … um … eat.

AND smokers ratio per country

I HAVE been a practising Christian all my life and a deacon and Bible teacher for many years. My faith is a source of strength and comfort to me, as religious beliefs are to hundreds of millions of people around the world. So my decision to sever my ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, after six decades, was painful and difficult. It was, however, an unavoidable decision when the convention's leaders, quoting a few carefully selected Bible verses and claiming that Eve was created second to Adam and was responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be "subservient" to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors or chaplains in the military service.

This discrimination, unjustifiably attributed to a Higher Authority, has provided a reason or excuse for the deprivation of women's equal rights across the world for centuriesThe impact of these religious beliefs touches every aspect of our lives.

see le diner de cons

There are indications that China intends to make the yuan a greater factor in international trade and investment. HSBC economist Qu Hongbin believes that the yuan could become one of the top three currencies in the world by 2012. "The internationalization of the renminbi has become a leading item on the policy agenda" in Beijing.

China can also begin extricating itself from the "dollar trap," in which the country, through its trade, amasses giant surpluses of dollars, which forces it to invest in dollar assets. This is why China, which holds $805 billion in U.S. Treasury securities, is the U.S.'s largest creditor. But this dollar hoard makes China's national wealth vulnerable to the whims of Washington's economic management. One of the reasons Beijing has been urging a gradual reduction in dollar dependence is the massive losses China could suffer if the value of the greenback was to erode as a result of U.S. deficit spending.

great infographic on the size of the web

A German nursing home has come up with a novel idea to stop Alzheimer's patients from wandering off: a phantom bus stop

“It sounds funny,” said Old Lions Chairman Franz-Josef Goebel, “but it helps. Our members are 84 years-old on average. Their short-term memory hardly works at all, but the long-term memory is still active. They know the green and yellow bus sign and remember that waiting there means they will go home.” The result is that errant patients now wait for their trip home at the bus stop, before quickly forgetting why they were there in the first place.

“We will approach them and say that the bus is coming later today and invite them in to the home for a coffee,” said Mr Neureither. “Five minutes later they have completely forgotten they wanted to leave.” The idea has proved so successful that it has now been adopted by several other homes across Germany.

Artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster have taken piles of trash and turned them into interesting abstract artworks depicting people or animals. The piece above is called White Trash (With Gulls), it is comprised of six month’s worth of trash and two dead sea gulls. The image portrayed is a self portrait of the artists relaxing with a glass of wine.

You’re crammed into a tiny space with several other people, spending an average of thirty seconds staring at either the floor or the wall. That’s what makes elevator advertisements and art so brilliant - people have little choice but to look. Marketers and artists have taken advantage of this very captive audience in some brilliant ways, from creating optical illusions with stickers to transforming the space into an apartment or even a disco club.

The romance, of course, is between the men. Women are trophies or tokens in an endless quest for esteem and standing between the adherents of "pickup", both in real life and on the internet message boards where people post tips and stories. The jargon of the art, as explained in both The Game and The Layguide, is aggressive and militaristic. The woman you want to seduce is the "target"; her friend might be an "obstacle"; a male friend who accompanies you is your "wing". These latter terms were taken by Mystery from the film Top Gun, in an apparently unconscious tribute to that film's fervid atmosphere of homoerotic competition.

The places in which seduction is practised are known collectively as "the field". When they come home, they write a "field report" and post it to the internet for appreciation and commentary. This is a kind of group masturbation, the real goal of psychosexual release coming when the man is once more safely removed from the company of women.

Ernest Beaux (December 8, 1881, Moscow, Russia – 1961, Paris) was a perfumer best known for creating Chanel No. 5, perhaps the world's most famous perfume.