Archive for September 2007

In only a few days, a group on Facebook called ‘Support the Monks’ protest in Burma’ has managed to recruit 200,000 members and spur protests around the globe by using Facebook’s Event system and discussion boards. Impressive.

Burma Protest On Facebook

Google is showing some love to non-profits. While they’ve always had a great Google Grants program that allowed non-profits to take advantage of unsold inventory in AdSense, Google made two important announcements this week.

First, they announced that Google Checkout will be free for non-profits in the US. This means that non-profits can accept online donations through Google Checkout without being charged transaction fees. It does, however, seem that Google is testing the waters, as they also announced that this is a limited-time offer that will only last through the end of 2008.

In addition, they announced the launch of YouTube non-profit channels, which will allow non-profits to take advantage of the popular video sharing site to spread their message. Some of the first organizations to sign up include the American Cancer Society, The ONE Campaign and The March of Dimes. The program includes the ability to customize their channel page for free, increased limits on the amount of video that can be updated, promotion of the videos throughout YouTube and of course, the ability to accept donations through Google Checkout.

Follow these links to learn more about Google Checkout for non-profits, as well as the YouTube non-profit channels. Thanks to Mashable for the heads up.

We caught this photo of oversize sculpture on Londonist - and it’s Friday, so we love it. It’s part of an ad campaign for a TV show (we reported on the other sculpture that’s part of this campaign on IF!) The photographer inkognitoh says:

The sculpture is smack bang in the middle of Victoria Station but I believe the old Spanish man licking his nose may have moved on elsewhere ;)

Flickr

Back in February I posted about Iqons, a social network for fashion mavens. Now comes OurThreads, a new social marketplace for buying, selling, trading and donating clothes and other sartorial objects. In one sense, OurThreads is like an online version of a dud swap: you have some old clothes you want to get rid of, so you trade them for someone else’s gently worn garb and voila! you have a new wardrobe for free. In another sense, it’s like eBay: you sell your old clothes online to earn some extra cash. But I think one of the best things about the site is that it acts as a platform for designers to get their work seen and sell their original pieces, cutting out the pesky problem of convincing a store to carry your goods.

OurThreads also has quite an interesting revenue model. Buying, trading, and donating is free, but OurThreads takes 3.5% of the selling price of an item. That’s pretty standard. What’s not so standard is that members can also purchase ads within the site (priced in bundles), in order to drive traffic to their “closet” (aka homepage).

It’s almost a year since we started to talk about Branded Utility - a term that suggests that successful brands in the future need to be useful. Since that time we’ve seen discussion across the blogosphere and even the new marketing magazine Contagious spent much of their summer conference in London on the subject.

PSFK decided to go back to one of the co-originators of the term and ask how he sees the development of the idea he seeded.

Interview

“Ever dreamt of being in a band? Now’s your chance!” says a Brooklyn-based Band-for-bid that is selling itself (literally) via eBay auction. The selling of unconventional items is not new to the eBay marketplace, but the group behind the “BUY A ROCK BAND! (you be the front-man)” auction is really offering the chance to make a wannabe rocker’s dream come true, if only briefly. In five days and some hours, the highest bidder will be entitled to:

-A photoshoot with the band done by a professional photographer

-One full day of rehearsal (minimum).

-A band listing with the winner as the frontman on MusicNation.com.

-One song written by the winner, with the band’s help, recorded at a professional studio.

- One gig with the winner as frontman…location, venue, and time, to be determined.

From what we can tell, the sellers are serious; and with the current bid at $610, let’s hope they are.

We don’t know too many people who are ready to chuck their laptops in favor of their handhelds. But in case you were thinking about it, Publishing 2.0’s Scott Karp offers a reminder as to “why the mobile web sucks“:

1. “Wireless carrier networks are SLOW”

Karp argues that across all services and platforms, the mobile web is still maddeningly slow. His simple example demonstrates the point pretty well:

Last weekend, I was trying to figure out how late Costco is open on Sunday. It would have been faster, literally, to call my wife at home and ask her to look it up on a real broadband connection. That’ a sad state.

2. “Public WiFi access is a SCAM”
An abundance of WiFi choices doesn’t mean much when each network requires a separate subscription and fee. Karp argues that with municipalities’ plans for free WiFi growing stagnant, having a wireless-enabled device is useless unless you’re willing to shell out a considerable amount of money.

3. “Sites aren’t formated for small screens”Karp argues that on blackberries and iPhones alike, web content is still either A) not formatted correctly, or B) a pain to navigate - and often both. As he puts it: “Looking at a normal web page on iPhone’s 3 inch screen is like surfing the web through a keyhole.” Which ties into his fourth point:

4. “Mobile device screens are too small”

Karp emphasizes the obvious: any handheld, by virtue of its portability, just can’t offer the screen size that allows us to comfortably perform more complex or time-consuming tasks - like banking, blogging, or shopping.

5. “Advertising gets in the way”

This is one of Karp’s more compelling points:

When pages load with blazing broadband speed, I don’t care if ads load along with them. With a nice wide screen, I don’t even care if ads take up a large portion of the screen real estate.

But on a small screen, all bets are off. Ads that slow down page loading or fill up the screen are going to be most unwelcome, unless they are extremely relevant and useful, i.e. a coupon for what I want to buy in the type of store I’m searching for.

There aren’t many ads yet on the mobile web — other than banners made for the full-screen web that annoyingly load. So this is more about anticipating the suckiness to come.

[via Publishing 2.0]

PSFK friend Johnny Vulkan is a bit of a Monocle magazine fan. So much so that he bought a piece of the specially designed luggage that Monocle has created with Porter of Japan that meets hand-luggage regulations and fits perfectly under an A320 seat. He’s currently traveling with it and his Flickr account is showing the results of what he calls ‘The Tyler Brulee Challenge’ where he puts the bag to the test to see if it really is useful. On Flickr he says:

Let us see how it (and I) do on an 8 day trip to London, Paris, London and back again to New York. As well as a week’s supply of clothing and ’stuff’, I somehow managed to squeeze in my Apple MacBook Pro, a Nikon D80 Digital SLR, the current issue of Wired and Bill Bryson’s ‘A Walk in the Woods’.

The Tyler Brulee Challenge on Flickr

Architects Foster + Partners have revealed stunning plans for redeveloping the FC Barcelona soccer stadium in Spain. The exterior has a skin of scale-like tiles that create a mosaic screen that wraps the colours of FC Barcelona around the sides of the stadium. Integrated within the coloured tiles is a special lighting system which allows the external façade to be used for lighting displays and even images can be created on the stadium’s outerwalls.

Foster + Partners
FC Barcelona

[via dezeen and Influxinsights]