Archive for July 2007

Designed in anticipation of the Discovery Channel’s 20th Anniversary Shark Week, Sharkrunners is a new “big game” of “oceanic exploration and high stakes shark research” developed by area/code. It works as follows:

In the game, players control their ships, but the sharks are controlled by real-world white sharks with GPS units attached to their fins. Real-world telemetry data provides the position and movement of actual great white sharks in the game, so every shark that players encounter corresponds to a real shark in the real world.

Ships in the game move in real-time, so players receive email and/or SMS alerts during the day when their boat is within range of an encounter. Players login, choose crewmembers and an approach technique, and then collect various data from the nearby sharks.

Pretty crazy.

Sharkrunners

Check out Kevin Slavin of area/code talk about big games at the PSFK Conference New York here.

In another bizarre turn of events for the music industry, a new company is offering fans a chance to take band management into their own hands. The folks over at VIP Band Manager have invited 50,000 people to get involved with a new group’s entire musical future, allegedly harnessing the “power of the internet to enable people to become managers”.

NME reports:

Each member will take on the role of manager for the company’s new band and the members then get to vote online to decide on each detail of the band - like who are the members, and what tracks will go on their album.

Band members are being invited to audition for the new ground, with the winning band winning a £1 million deal, and the stewardship of the army of managers.

The band’s three targets are to achieve one million fans, stage a 12-date UK tour and get a Number One record. Progress will be charted via online TV bulletins.

PSFK must admit some skepticism as to the efficacy of this venture. Although it could very well be a huge hit, the process itself seems like it would be rather vulnerable to the potential incompetency of such an interminable bureaucracy. Nevertheless, due to the novelty of such pandering to the public’s whims, it will be very interesting to see where this goes. More to come soon enough.

NME: Fans invited to manage band

VIP Band Manager

If you haven’t had enough maps, then here’s another one!

The Information Architects have taken a map of the Tokyo Subway line and put in popular websites linked by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective. The websites are all in association with Japanese cities, so if you know what Shimbashi & Ueno are like, you’ll have a better idea. But it’s still fun to look at, there’s a lot more information than meets the eye.

[via Channel 8000]

Touted as “the best shopping experience in London”, the famous Covent Garden Market will now be open every Thursday evening in August from 5 - 10pm, luring visitors with a spectacular array of gourmet food and the possibility of dining “alfresco style” in “the atmospheric surroundings of hops and hay bails”. Add some great live music and you’ve got a night market that should be enticing to foodies and newbies alike .

Bringing together the best of London’s food markets - traders from Borough to Broadway, Exmouth to Islington will set their stalls out alongside premium food producers never before available in the Capital.

Event Details at The Purple List

Covent Garden Market

We are big fans of Michael Pollen’s writing on the state of the US food industry and the American diet. His article in the New York Times magazine titled Unhappy Meals was a seminal piece for us - and for Cameron Marlow too. On Cameron’s personal blog, the research scientist from Yahoo talks about her idea for a No Corn Syrup Diet where she suggests that NCSD dieters should read the ingredients of everything they plan to eat and if it contains high-fructose corn syrup, don’t eat it. The diagram explains it all, no?

The no-corn-syrup diet | overstated

There has been a spotlight on Wired Magazine’s editorial direction after making a u-turn on its support for virtual world SecondLife. At the end of 2006 Wired was very much in love with the idea and published a significant travel guide in its magazine, but in just over half a year Wired changed its tune with an article called How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life. On his blog, editor Chris Anderson explains:

Well, partly it was the whole “there’s nobody there” problem, which is of course just anecdotal. Like everyone else, I had fun exploring the concept and marveling at all the creativity. Then I got bored, and I started marveling at something else: all the empty corporate edifices. By day I’d speak at marketing conferences that usually had someone pitching SL services, complete with staged demonstrations (the “inhabitants” invariably paid employees). By night I’d go back to the same places, which had reverted to ghost towns once the demonstration was over. I couldn’t understand why companies kept throwing money at in-world presences. Were they seeing something I wasn’t?

The Long Tail: Why I gave up on Second Life

Is it just us or does the idea of Nike Vintage well and truly suck. Nike have released a bunch of retro running sneakers and a T-Shirts that have been ‘aged’ to look like they’re from, erm, a long time ago.

Sure, we understand the inspiration: sneaker heads love hard to find, rare old sneakers - and lots of people like to wear new faded clothes from places like Urban Outfitters because they think it’s cool or something. But why the hell is Nike doing this? We know they rejected much of their sports values for fashion ones a while ago but do they have to play the fad game just to get a buck. Sure some Nike exec with a spiky haircut is very happy that his idea to make a bunch of sneakers just like the well-worn ones in his closet have made it to the production line and marketing machine - but, but…. aren’t Nike supposed to make great stuff that people just love, rather than playing directly to the crowd for a quick applause?

Nike Vintage

In the ever-increasing cross-pollination between real events and their online doppelgängers, music festivals have made leaps and bounds in their attempts to integrate actual shows with the interactive tools of new media.

One such example is Playstation’s 3Rooms, a 9m sq cube that appeared at this month’s Manchester International Festival. The conspicuous metal box contained a veritable laboratory of high-tech, aesthetically pleasing equipment operated by a host of net-savvy students - “the cream of local art and film schools and universities” - all of whom worked towards making the festival more than just a few days of good music.

The purpose of the cube, The Telegraph reports, is, in the words of sponsorship manager Carl Christopher, to:

“use elements of the main festival to help us create a mini-festival within it”. This entailed dispatching teams to each event - Damon Albarn’s Chinese circus show, Monkey, gigs by Lou Reed and Kanye West, Heston Blumenthal’s taste-a-thon and so on - to capture footage to turn into vodcasts, mini-documentaries and animated films.

So what does 3Rooms mean for the future of festivals?

The answer, in part, is that 3Rooms is a response to the changing nature of festivals: as the events become increasingly digitised and interactive, so must the marketers who target them.

Today’s festival doesn’t begin and end standing in a muddy field watching the Arctic Monkeys or, in the case of the Manchester International Festival, sitting in the Palace Theatre rapt at Monkey’s kung-fu routines.

It can begin on festival websites and forums months in advance, as online communities discuss their favourite bands, and make friends and travel arrangements. It peaks during the event itself as people post blogs and upload pictures - while those at home watch live concert streams - then continues afterwards online: hunting clips on YouTube; downloading live snippets from iTunes; regaling Pete Doherty’s latest antics on the forums.

The Telegraph: The festivals that came out of the field and onto the web

The debate continues around the issues surrounding plastic water bottles, the latest Fast Company article “Message in a Bottle” was quick to point out that the United States consumed over 50 billion water bottles last year alone, that’s 167 water bottles per person. One artist in South Africa has chosen to see the beauty in what we throw away.

Heath Nash has created lamps and light fixtures made out of water bottles and caps. South Africa is a Country known for their ingenuity and resourcefulness in creating beauty out of waste, soda cans become radio’s, gum wrappers into purses and now water bottles into light fixtures. By doing this, Nash brings to our attention the need to have a closer look at what we discard on a daily basis and re-examine what we define as beautiful. All of the recycling and manufacturing of the lamp fixtures is done locally, Nash’s work is slated to be shown at The New World show for the British Council and Trash/Luxe at Liberty in September.

MoCo Loco: 2 Questions for Heath Nash