Archive for April 2005

Last year the Hotel des Arts in the heart of San Francisco’s downtown Union Square ran a project called “Painted Rooms” where 16 custom painted rooms from people like David Choe and David DeRosa. Now, Josh Spear reports, they’ve come back adding an additional dozen more rooms including painted rooms by Josh Feldman, The Vinyl Killers, Bryan Dawson and Maya Hayuk. Josh says, “Their roster of top notch underground and emerging artist created rooms is totally impressive–and the sky is the limit here–they say watch
out for future painted rooms from folks like Shepard Fairey (Obey), and Dalek.”

Meanwhile, Josh Spear reports on the Cool Hunting site about Project FOX where Volkswagen have created a hotel, a club, and a studio all in downtown Copenhagen. Promoting the new VW Fox, they took an existing hotel, and got 21 artists to re-design the interior of 61 rooms.

Getting influencers and trendsetters involved in your marketing seems to be very vogue at the moment. Brands are presenting themselves as ‘we are you’ to try to build relevant emotional connections with their target audience.

Josh Spear’s Post
Josh Spear’s Other Post

Using real people in ads may not be something new. I turn on NY1
every morning to see real people telling me that I have a problem - so
why not take some drugs to help.

Anyway, in the UK where they are still somehow obsessed with ‘chav
culture‘, an ad agency has gone onto the streets of Liverpool to select
certain types of real people to appear in HP sauce ads: ones with the
right amount of chavness. With their motley cast the agency went on to
produce ads that feature such scenes as a brawl over the sauce at a
wedding buffet; glammy soccer players’ wives mingling cattily at an Ann
Summers party; and drunken girls in the chippy on a bachelorette night
out.

HP Sauce Ad

What time is it? Checked the screen’s clock did you? OK, now go and ask those colleagues around the coffee table what it is. Go on.

Notice something?

How many of them used their cell-phones to check the time? Has anyone else noticed this but people have stopped wearing watches!?

The most frequent use of the mobile phone today, PSFK would argue, is not for making secret calls or flirty text messages - but to check to see what time it is!

Sales volumes of
Swiss plastic watches fell 25.1% during the first two months of the
year to 1.2mn units, according to the Swiss watch-making federation. PSFK assumes that this trend won’t affect the upper end of the watch market but what does this mean for the lower priced lines of Swatch? And what does this mean to any new entrant thinking there’s a market for disposable watches?

One could argue that the majority of bloggers do not blog to make money but one could also argue that the majority of those bloggers would like to make money out of the blogging they do. Bloggers put a lot of time into them and a lot of readers get a lot of value from
blogs for basically free.

Darren Rowse just posted an analysis of the revenue models top 30 blogs (that use Sitemeter) and found that all the blogs had a revenue stream (versus half the number a year ago). The most popular sites used a mix of Blog Ads, Amazon links or donation buttons.

The problem for all the other blogs who don’t sit in the top thirty is the lack of traffic to effectively make money from advertising. The number one blog, Daily Kos, is avaeraging 443,481 visits a day whilst the number 30, the Digital Photoghraphy Blog, gets 12,581. At that rate, the DPB makes about $200 a day. About $199 more than the majority of other blogs hope to make a day.

There are some basic costs associated with blogging. The cost of webhosting, email, domain names and other stuff could at least take a blogger over $50 a month - then there’s
the nice dinners to keep your girlfriend ‘understanding what the hell
you’re doing until 2am every morning.’

Obviously, bloggers have tried to use advertising to seek revenue but
unless you’re a Gawker or a Scoble you can’t get the traffic. So what are the options?

Some bloggers
are becoming brands in themselves and this has enabled them to offer alternatives to advertising. Josh Rubin, the Cool
Hunter, launched a Holidays gift site last year which
people had to pay $7.95 for access. He told me very soon after it launched that it broke even
easily.

Hugh MacLeod has been offering business cards on his Gaping Void site since time began, but now he has just launched a T Shirt range featuring his
anarchic designs for 20 quid a throw. And the Wooster Collective started selling grown-up-children’s coloring books last year and more recently they started offering mobile downloads of contemporary artists work that cost a couple of bucks each.

And PSFK? Sometimes we argue why we have so many ads. It makes everythign look so messy. Instead, we’ve been asked a couple of times to use our skills and
information gathered through blogging to create custom reports. Now, we’re offering this as a professional service.

As bloggers dedicate more and more time to their crack-like hobby, we’re going to see more and more innovative revenue generating ideas from them. What other examples are there? We’ll keep an eye on this - and update the comments section.

A French appeals court in Paris has
ruled that movie companies must remove copy protection from DVDs within
a month or face financial penalties. The court has granted
UFC-Que Choisir (a French consumer protection organization), a
prohibition on DVD copy protection devices , because they are
incompatible with private copying rights. The lobbying group supports
the private individual, who was unable to copy his Mulholland Drive
DVD to a VHS tape to watch at his mother’s house.

A higher appeals court
may still overturn the decision because the ruling may conflict with EU
copyright laws - which allow for DRM systems.

Register Article

Nokia have unveiled a new premium phone that includes an MP3 music player that it said will outsell Apple’s iPod and another with a camera phone that it forecast will surpass Canon, the world’s top
digital camera maker.

The world’s leading mobile phone maker expects its new luxury
"Nseries" handsets, which feature built-in hard drives and high-quality
camera lenses, to boost sales by differentiating it and increasing its
industry-leading margins. The company expects to ship 100 million camera phones in 2005, and that
Nokia would sell 40 million phones with MP3 digital music players this
year.

By comparison, Apple said it sold 5.3 million iPods in the first three
months of 2005 while Canon was the top seller of digital cameras in
2004, with 17 percent of the global market of 74 million units, reported Reuters.

Nokia’s N91 multimedia phone will have a 4-gigabyte
hard drive that can store thousands of music files. The phone, which
will also run on high-speed 3G and wireless LAN networks, is due out by
the end of the year. The other new phones, the N90 and the N70, will have
two-megapixel cameras with high quality Carl Zeiss lenses. The N90 will
be in shops in the second quarter at a price of around 600 euros
($784), while the N70, also a 3G phone, will hit the shelves in the
third quarter. Apple’s original iPod retails for about 319 euros in
Europe while Canon’s cameras start at less than half the cost of the
N90.

Nokia
Reuters Article

Wal-Mart has launched new online custom CD creation service
that lets internet userscreate their own mix CDs
in the U.S.. The new "easy-to-use, no-download-required" music service
allows customers to select individual songs from a deep
music catalog of over 500,000 tracks. The service costs $4.62 for a 3 song CD - which includes
packaging - plus $.88 cents for each additional song, up to a maximum
of 20 total songs ($19.58).

Kevin Swint, Walmart.com’s director of media categories said, "Whether customers make custom CDs for their favorite road
trip, birthday gifts for family and friends, or creative wedding
favors, the service draws from an expansive catalog of hot new music
releases, rock, pop, country, rap, R&B, and Wal-Mart exclusives to
satisfy all music fans."

The Billboards blog commented on this service by saying:

"This strategic move could prove to be
popular for those still without broadband connections or who are not
savvy with CD burning themselves….But, people without computers will
be left behind….Kudos to Walmart for being the first to market and
creating new revenue opportunities for the industry …I expect other
retailers and music vendors to copy the idea very soon (Starbucks will
probably be first!)  It makes much more economic sense when compared to
deploying kiosks, because the overhead is much lower…less
connectivity, installation and maintenance costs at each store.

Walmart CD Service
Billboard Blog Comment

The Earnest Sewn & Cut is the store of the Earnest Sewn
brand found on Washington Street in NYC’s Meat Packing. The brand’s
mantra is ‘Tradition Noted, History Referenced, Homage Paid’ and you
can see that reflected in the store that looks more like a denim
sweatshop with it’s steam, sanding and cutting machines.

Brendan put down his cup of tea and told me that all the machinery in
the store was working and then told me about the concept of the brand
where they mix a traditional American work aesthetic with the Japanese
system/philosophy of Wabi-Sabi. Wabi-Sabi is the beauty of things
imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. He showed me the stitching which
he told me was uneven (although I couldn’t see it) and and he talked
about how Earnest Sewn took influence in how early Americans used to
make their own garments.

I commented about the contrast between the authentic feel of the store and the plastic monstrosity of the new Puma concept store
up the street. Brendan talked about how the values of the owners
affected everything the brand did and that manifested itslef in the way
the store looked and was run. How refreshing, I thought.

The store includes a cafe area and yes, I even saw some decks (well
your jeans might take over an hour to make on a good day). Yes, there’s
something a little lofty about the attitude of the store
when you walk in but when you consider the soul that’s put into the
items, you think it’s worth it.

In contrast, I was dismayed last week how out of touch the NY Times was when they published a
story that ran like ‘Shock: People buy jeans for over $200!’ The
American attitude towards fashion items like denim has been harmed by
the flooding of cheap denim into the market from dodgy Asian sources by
people like GAP - many Americans, I feel, can;t see the point of
spending more than $40 on an apparel item they probably wear more than
anything else. Earnest Sewn American made and crafted jeans start at
$170 and can be tailored and customized. I’ve always felt that many
people, especially Americans, are hesitant about customization of their
look - and Brendan told me that they too were surpirsed too about how
many folk came in and ordered their pairs customized. There’s now a 2
week waiting list for any pair of jeans.

In addition to the full jeans line, the store will stock the An
Earnest
Cut and Sew sportswear line in June,
and accessories from other vendors, including Carpe Diem shoes and
Holland & Holland bags. A 400-square-foot room in the back of the
store will serve as a seasonal boutique, where brands and retailers
will be invited to set up a temporary in-store shop.

Well worth checking out for inspiration and a new pair of slacks. And by the way, Brendan’s line ‘Noah’ was hanging up very proudly in the back there when I
visited.

Earnest Swen & Cut, Washington Street (c/o Gansevort), New York City

Earnest Sewn

Related PSFK Articles
Site Visit: Puma On 14th NYC
IDividualism: Crumpler Custom Bag Store NYC
Site Visit: Hear Music

Brazilian new media artist Juliana Sato Yamashita’s project "Searchscapes" is a fascinating look at what the future may hold for how we interact with the world around us. It was inspired by an art piece by Jeffrey Shaw from about 15 years ago where a person could ride a stationary bike "through" a virtual representation of a city. The idea is to have a navigable three dimensional map with text correlating to site specific features.

As you navigate through the city you text telling you about the locations you are looking at. You also have a visual representation of where you might like to go. Immediate thoughts of tourists, cabbies, bicycle messengers and law enforcement came to mind. If developed for PDA’s and cell handsets it could represent a look at the next evolution of GPS navigation. Perhaps a logical outgrowth would also be heads-up text overlays onto what we see through glasses or windows as tracked by various positional sensors.

Not sure how interactive the actual development is but the map of Manhattan is currently navigable by clicking and dragging the small orange squares at the lower left side of the screen. The application is really RAM heavy so on computers that are not up to the work load you unfortunately can’t do much with it. Worth getting the flash plug-ins. www.searchscapes.net

Reminiscent of Char Davies’ "Immersence"  www.immersence.com

<via www.core77.com>