Archive for January 2005

Ok, ok, we had a concern about Apple’s popularity recently but that hasn’t stopped manufacturers creating over 400 accessories for iPod: from $19 plastic cases to $350 speaker systems. Business Week has just produced an analysis into how Apple plans to "keep the party going for its many partners."

Business Week Article
PSFK iHalo Trend Article

Almost missing this online purchase when it flopped through the letter-box, I was thankful when the girlfirend waved it in my face and asked, "Shall I chuck this out?"

Banksy is one of the most prolific street artisits in the UK and his latest book, Cut It Out, shows that whilst some may dismiss him as a vandal he is a great social commentator and satirists. It’s only after I left London, left those bones behind, that I realised what an important artist he really is.

Banksy’s Cut It Out On Amazon
(Img via Duncan Cumming)

Gawker Media have launched 2 new blogs Lifehacker & Gridskipper. Lifehacker will review software downloads, spam filters, virus killers, spyware, cleaners, search engines, email applications, internet phones and bla, bla, bla and is sponsored by Sony; and Gridskipper as an "urban chic travel weblog" - which today shows a rather drunk guy at a table of empty cans of Pabst. Sounds like our expectation of travel, for sure.

So, two more bloody Gawker blogs to add to our RSS Aggregator (which happens to be Gawker’s Kinja too!). Who whispered ‘monopoly’ just then?  ;)

Gawker Media
via CayMag

In 2002 I set up a company called Set Loose Movies to take advantage of the, apparent, demand for viral marketing in Europe. Established mainly to deliver emailable mpeg videos (viral ads) we soon realised that there should be a great opportunity to use video online in not just advertising but in editorial (website content).

We were probably three years to early for a market still new to broadband, an industry struggling with streaming issues and software embattled with codec compatibility problems. Despite some early success we had to mothball Set Loose after a year. We always believed that the web could be the future of TV, however.

In 2003 I wrote a piece on Ecademy entitled ‘Is the future of interactive TV, the Internet ?’ where I argued,

"The internet has always been driven by the user because of its freedom of choice. The broadband user can find an endless choice of rich media that they’re interested in. TV provides that user with a restricted broadcast schedule and iTV with its walled-garden environment restricts the freedom of choice further."

Fast forward to today and BitTorrent. More than 20 million people have already downloaded the application. Each week dozens of shows are shared by hundreds of thousands of people. "The Simpsons," "Family Guy" and "Friends" top the most-popular list, but even "SpongeBob SquarePants," "Trading Spaces" and "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" landed in the Top 20 for the week ending Jan. 16, according to file-sharing monitor, Big Champagne.

And ripping from the TV isn’t too difficult to do these days. About thee same time I set up Set Loose Movies, Isaac Richards was unhappy with the cable box provided by his local operator (dismayed by the sluggish channel-changing capability and the sparsely informative program guide), so he decided to build a better cable box from scratch, the NY Times reports.

Read the rest of this entry »

memeorandum presents a distinctly readable and relevant hourly synopsis of the latest online news and opinion, combining weblog commentary with traditional news reports.

Memeorandum Site

A famous LA dermatologist who counts lots of film and tv stars among her clientele tells PSFK that famous and almost-famous LA girls in their 20s are flocking to her to get their lips pumped up and reshaped.  She mixes together two new injectibles called Restylane and Cosmoderm to create a much more natural-looking fake lip than was possible with the old collagen injections (which got a bad rap for giving women’s mouths that swollen, Jocelyne Wildenstein-like effect), so there’s no obvious way to tell which stars are getting a little enhancement in this area. 

In Sunday’s New York Times critic Manohla Dargis bemoaned the ever-growing trend of actors "perfecting" their features to the extent that \they cease to look like individuals and even hinder their ability to act (http://www.nytimes.com), but it doesn’t seem like this phenomenon is going anywhere–especially now that dermatologists and plastic surgeons are able to do ever-more-subtle enhancements (protecting their patients from winding up on awfulplasticsurgery.com)

Bored of all that kite surfing? Need a better way to ride the wind? Well, you could always hop onto one of Theo Jansen’s Strandbeest creatures. Theo has spent the last ten years been obsessed with plastic yellow tubes. With these tubes he makes skeletons which are able to walk using the the wind.

Eventualy Theo wants to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, erm, "so they will live their own lives."

Strandbeest Site via Josh Rubin via Wired

One of the big trends in the hotel industry today is the creation of permanent residences within a hotel property with the additional offering of the regular hotel services.

Although this is not a new thing (some commentators point back to the Cammelback Inn in the 1960s), it’s the renewed vigour of the hotel industry to pursue this offering that has caught our eye. Starwood Hotels have created a whole floor of permanent residences at the prestigious St Regis in New York and their W Hotel chain are now provide opportunities to buy into the Wonderland lifestyle.

In fact it’s happening all over the US from Vegas, to Aspen to Florida. The Miami Herald notes that more than 30 condo-hotel projects have been built, are being converted or are planned from Fort Lauderdale to Key Biscayne. The Plaza Hotel in New York is being refurbished and will reopen in late 2006 with 200 condos and 150 hotel rooms as well as a multi-level luxury department store, Luxist reports.

Travel & Leisure define the phenomenon as:

In this type of real estate deal, a room or suite is sold to an individual. The buyer can opt to place the unit in a rental program and receive revenue to offset costs for the balance of the year. All residents have access to hotel services and amenities. The purchase price can vary from several hundred thousand to several million dollars. In some cases, rental programs will warehouse your personal belongings (which are then reinstalled exactly as you left them).

Hotel Chatter coins these ‘condo hotels’ as CoTels. They say,

CoTels are all the rage these days. From Miami to Vegas developers are touting the values of a CoTel. No more hotel bills, but the same high service standards, plus you have equity to boot. Some CoTels will even rent your room when you are out of town and give you a nice kickback.

Some of this trend has been fueled by baby boomers looking for retirement homes, whilst boomer’s kids are looking for second homes. The trend of ‘togetherness’ (of friends and family coming to a resort to hang together)could also be a driving force here. Setai developer Jonathan Breene adds:

"Having the fridge stocked in advance or clothes cleaned and stored by someone else is incredibly alluring for over-scheduled individuals. Today, people want everything done for them."

Services have reached a new level, from private chefs to 24-hour butlers. Concierges can also arrange jet or yacht charters and snag elusive restaurant reservations.

Hotel Chatter’s On Ben Afflick’s Room At The Aqua Blue, Las Vegas
Miami Herald On Condo Hotels Are This Year’s Chic
Travel & Leisure On Home Away From Home
Luxist On Plans For The Plaza Hotel

Is this the future of office communication? Sprint have announced that about 8,000 employees at Ford Motor will stop using their desktop phones and start using their cell phones, USA Today reports.

Sprint?! Aren’t they the crappy cell phone service - poor SMS, weird handsets, etc? PSFK wonders: is using this brand a route to the future or just a technological cul-de-sac! And we also wonder if all those employees will be worrying about their health - having to stick that radiation blaster next to their head more often. Maybe they will all need one of these.

USA Today Article via Textually
(Image: The Cubes available at Firebox via Josh Rubin)