Archive for November 2004

One trend none of us pay enough attention to: As one blogger puts it, "AIDS doesn’t care what age, religion, race or gender you are, whether you are famous, beautiful, or seemingly indestructible."

See worldaidsday.org and the UN site for more information on the issue of AIDS and AIDS Day events. 

Via Caff @ Ad-Rag

Just quickly. Jalopnik is asking:

(a)Will Nissan out-Scion Scion in the US with the new Cube, which is big in Japan?  Link
(b) Could Britain’s MG Rover re-enter the US market with a deal with Chinese automaker Shanghai Automotive? Link
(c) What will become of the new car designs from students at Spain’s Elisava School of Design? Link

Well…we reported Foodball in Barcelona and now we, erm, ‘proudly’ report (via Fast Company) a new restaurant concept: one devoted to serving breakfast cereal. Cereality is opening thier first full scale, sit-down restaurant, near the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia serving 33 kinds of name-brand cereal, along with Cereality-created cereals, and specialty items like cereal bars.

Staff at Cereality will wear pajamas and FC reports:

The restaurants are starting out near college campuses, because as the New York Times reported several weeks ago on its front page, cereal is all the rage as the latest college eating trend.

Cereality Site
Fast Company Post

Having seen an explosion of café-life and restaurants in recent years, Norway is seeing the return of the home-cooked meal with family and friends. According to survey by the MMI the "hottest new trend" has had a huge upswing since 2001 with highest interest among young adults aged 25-39.

"Many signal who they are through food. Food is fashion and provides identity," said SIFO food researcher, Annechen Bugge.

Just Food Article

What to buy this Christmas? A regularly updated run down on articles featuring what’s hot this Holiday season:

Nothing but the very, very best (Detroit Free Press)

Josh Rubin’s Holiday Guide

Fortune’s Best Products Of The Year (Fortune)

TV Interactive Toys

Toy Makers Face An Unmerry Noel (NY Post)

Teens Tell Parents What Tech Toys to Buy (Y Pulse)

Toys R Us Trend Predicitions (PR Wire)

Stores Bet on Season of Frivolity, Fur-Lined Flip-Flops (AOL)

http://www.capitalnews9.com/content/headlines/?ArID=106637&SecID=33

A look at the future of cars. Or at least Toyota’s view. Here are five low emission hybrid cars currently in concept.

The Highlander: an electric hybrid engine inside an SUV engineered to meet the EPA’s rating for a Super Ultra Low Emission Vehicle. Estimated to get 600 miles from a single tank.

The FTX truck powered by an V8 hybrid gas-electric with V6 fuel efficiency.

A Giugiaro-designed carbon-fiber Volta that sports a 408-hp Hybrid Synergy Drive (a 3.3-liter V6 with an electric motor for each axle), delivering 435 miles on a 13.7-gallon tank (or 700km for 52lts)  and features "drive-by-wire" controls, allowing the steering wheel and pedals to be positioned in front of any one of the three people in the front.

The 4-wheel-drive mid-engine 2+2 CS&S sports car. An electric motor drives the front wheels, while a gas engine and electric motor in combination drive the rear.

The Fine S uses hydrogen fuel cells below the deck for a low center of gravity, and employs independent 4-wheel.

TreeHugger Post

Related PSFK Posts
Here Comes The Crossover Hybrid
Toyota’s Hybrid Cars
Cars To Run On Cell Phone Batteries

This month’s Marketing Y Medios has an insightful article into the Latino/Hispanic youth market. Here’s an extract:

Compared to their general-market counterparts, Hispanics tend to leave school earlier, start families sooner and join the job market at a younger age. Latino teens do form part of the larger echo boomer generation but they are much more than just a subset. The way second-generation teens adapt to and/or change life in the U.S. will shape the future of all Hispanics in the country at large. But no one fully understands who they are or what they want or how they will view their ethnicity. Not even themselves.

You can try to define them by their likes and dislikes but rarely by their ethnicity alone.

They are, for the most part, teenagers first and Latinos second. Speak to them in Spanish, and they may not understand. Talk to them as if they were gringos, and they may not like it. Whatever you do, don’t confuse an Angeleno with a Tejano or talk to a Cuban about La Raza.

Out with the melting pot, ditch the tossed salad metaphor and consider instead that second-generation Latino teenagers may be "un ajiaco de contradicciones" (a stew of contradictions) as Gustavo Pérez-Firmat writes in his poem Bilingual Blues. Altogether, the multifaceted identity of Hispanic adolescents resembles a Rubik’s Cube, even if that toy went out of fashion long before they were born.

When it comes to marketing to teenagers, forget about the maid and forget about the gardener. The vast majority of Hispanic teens are Made in the USA and will not fade quietly into the background.

Meanwhile Anastasia Goodstein’s Ypulse blog summarises some of the findings on Latino teens in the in What Teens Want Report. The key findings she cites are:

Language: Young Hispanics don’t define their Latino Identity by the language they speak but instead by maintaining their community’s traditions and cultures through family, music, and food.

Pioneers: Many young Latinos are the first in their families to finish high school or college, making Young Hispanics see themselves as pioneers.

Trend Setters: Young Latinos take great pride in the fact that they are setting trends for general population consumers.

Party Crews: Latino teens forming into “party crews” to work together to create elaborate flyers, promotion, and music for regular parties.

Celebrities: Dave Chappelle and Angelina Jolie are celebrity favorites among young Latinos.

Movies: Action/adventure and comedy movies both ranking highly among young Latinos. Horror films and “car movies” are of notable interest too

Marketing Y Medios Article via Hispanic Trending
Ypulse Post

Purely digital art sold as software or access to online environments is a developing trend in the art market, Slate reports. At the Frieze Art Fair in London in October Eli Sudbrack, a Rio-born, New York-based artist also known as "Assume Vivid Astro Focus," displayed his work in a huge tent in Regent’s park. Close by, two galleries (Peres Projects of Los Angeles & John Connelly Presents of New York) were offering to sell the digitally printed wallpaper from the installation for $15,000 three times using an electronic-edition sales model that "has left other art dealers perplexed and envious":

In this model, buyers receive only a certificate of authenticity and a CD-ROM holding the giant Adobe Illustrator file used to produce the wallpaper’s image. Despite the high price tag, getting the wallpaper physically fabricated remains the collector’s problem—and an expensive one at that, easily running into thousands (or even tens of thousands) of dollars.

Purely digital art has been creeping into the art market over the last decade, but it still remains very much marginalized. What sets Sudbrack apart is that his model is a hybrid, safely within the object-oriented paradigm of classical collecting yet exploiting digital production’s advantages. (In the broadband age, the CD with the piece’s image is really just a prop, after all.)

The bigger issue is the "secondary market" where work could slip into peer to peer networks and be distributed openly destroying the resale value. Could? PSFK wonders…

Slate Article

A new trend in releasing films? Neverland Films, the independent film company, released the feel-good holiday flick "Noel" in select theaters on Nov. 12th. The following week, Amazon started shipping the DVD on Flexplay discs, which expire 48 hours after the package is opened. In addition, the movie will air this Sunday on TNT.

The company behind the Flexplay DVDs, The Convex Group, is billing this as the first "trimultaneous" release of a feature film, "designed to offer consumers multiple viewing choices while also generating awareness about Flexplay."

Fast Company Article