Archive for October 2007

If you want to know what the kids are up to, who do you ask? Miss Ruby Pseudo of course. For a long while, PSFK has been fans of Ruby’s blog where she interviews the youth about their lives and lifestyles. We dropped the trend-spotter-extrordinaire a line to get a read on the youth, their brands and her adventures.

What one critical shift in youth culture should we be aware of today. Why?

I think the main scratchy shift in youth culture today is the problem of being different, how difficult it is for true underground to typically exist anymore. In this information culture, where we infect each other with what we’ve seen, heard and noticed at a rate of knots, the miniscule can become mass and monitored overnight, which is a shame.

‘Cool’ is highly accessible these days, there’s no excuse for not being so. With that comes the backlash of reinventing what cool is and - once again - making it elitist and inimitable.

What/who are a few of the companies that are embracing the changes in youth trends and promoting innovation and creativity?

Funnily enough, I always revert back to what Bobby Benson said in one of the first live interviews Ruby Pseudo did, where he explains that he expects brands to be consistent, to be reliable. For all these brands switching up and changing their messages every magic moment, its actually leaving the consumer wondering and wandering. For me then, perhaps with the youth consumer in mind, it is about brands that are connecting them to each other without asking for anything in return (nope, not even asking them to spread their service/product message).

It’s about brands that aren’t trying too hard to impress nor appear too ‘hip’ and hardened. However, saying this - I don’t know that there’s necessarily many brands that do understand this. Nike, and I’d say this anyway, do, (sorry).. Apple do (again ’sorry’ -but hey, isn’t it time some other brands come and impress us?) and Penguin are doing a good job at not being placed in the same box as their affiliate industry of music - and their Spinebreaker project is really interesting…

Faris and I discussed how we liked Wispa coming back to market, but i’m not sure that it isn’t a big PR stunt we don’t yet know about…
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Socialight, the location-based community platform that delivers user-generated information through geo-tagged ‘sticky notes’, have just launched a location-aware search service for London, offering hyper-local, custom-filtered content on your phone. The site is currently in Beta for the UK so PSFK caught up with Simon Davis and David Belnick from their London team to find out more about the state of the location-based services market that they’ve just entered.

Everyone’s been talking about location-based social networking services, how do you see this working for the future?

Location-based services got a very bad name with the initial offerings, what you would get wasn’t worth it. Everyone’s wanted it but it’s never been delivered. But tons of people have got great location-based content, it’s just very difficult for those people to know how to develop a mobile service to put it on their phones. With Socialight we can go to companies like Time Out and offer them another channel for communication.

The idea of Socialight is that it offers different types of content for different types of people broken up by the channels, and through either bookmarking it or texting specific words to the short code it will pull you in to different kinds of content. To us, the user-generated aspect is very important in terms of having people interact with the service and improve the quality of the data, but we have also built up some channels through buying in and commissioning content, in particular Late Night London which is loaded with opinionated content created by musicians, DJs, artists and people who are out late! We’ve tried to make this an open platform so that anyone with appropriate content can also create these kinds of services.

As well as the usual networking comments and tags, we envisage you creating lots of little communities around specific types of location-based content. As the channels grow there’s the possibility of collaboration and communication with those that are all interested in the same thing within that channel, plus there’s the ability for whoever created the channel to then communicate with them. It’s a way of creating communities around people’s content and existing content. It is community created, but it’s not community for community’s sake.

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There’s no better day than Halloween to take a look at bespoke “fancy dress” shop Prangsta. The boutique, which is based in London, uses discarded scraps of vintage silk, lace, suede and charmeuse to create luxurious, fanciful costumes for those tired of cheap synthetic get-ups. Prangsta was started by St. Martin’s College of Art graduate Melanie Wilson, who describes the shop’s purpose as “turning rags to riches”:

The majority of “fancy dress” shops tend to offer cheap mass produced and unconvincing representations of a rather limited repertoire of familiar characters, often making a mockery of the concept of “dressing up” and placing a perimeter fence firmly around our imaginative possibilities. Prangsta’s feel for quality coupled with our slant towards the theatrical and bizarre has transformed all this, making the process of role-play, mask wearing and self-abandonment a more wholesome and personally rewarding experience.

In addition to their fancy-dress costumes, Prangsta also creates wonderful bespoke regular-dress clothes, for occasions such as weddings or balls. There’s a styling component too, where the designer will match you with the perfect jewels, accessories, and even make-up.

Prangsta

Google is to release code that allows any web site to create their own facebook using a common set of APIs. Open Social is an open web API that can be supported by two kinds of developers:

• “Containers” — social networking systems like Ning, Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, and Friendster
• “Apps” — applications that want to be embedded within containers — for example, the kinds of applications built by iLike, Flixster, Rockyou, and Slide.

Marc Andreessen says that this is the exact same concept as the Facebook platform, with two huge differences:

With the Facebook platform, only Facebook itself can be a “container” — “apps” can only run within Facebook itself. In contrast, with Open Social, any social network can be an Open Social container and allow Open Social apps to run within it. With the Facebook platform, app developers build to Facebook-proprietary languages and APIs such as FBML (Facebook Markup Language) and FQL (Facebook Query Language) — those languages and APIs don’t work anywhere other than Facebook — and then the apps can only run within Facebook. In contrast, with Open Social, app developers can build to standard HTML and Javascript, and their apps can then run in any Open Social container.

… Is this good for the web? This is very, very good for the web. Open Social is the kind of standard that web developers love, and can easily use. I think it will become a standard part of many developers’ toolkits. It builds on HTML and Javascript, many people can support it, and it will be interoperable — I know that because it already is interoperable for the partners in this week’s launch. It’s all good.

Where’s MySpace? Beats me.

Where’s Yahoo? Beats me.

…Closing thought? Congratulations to Google — the crew at Google has been outstanding in conceiving of, implementing, and evangelizing Open Social to the initial set of partners — and now, to the world. Thanks!

We are excited.

Google Open Social
blog.pmarca.com: Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web

If municipal WiFi networks can’t get the backing in order to provide wireless blankets over cities, why not leave it up to the residents to create the network instead? They could use systems like FON - especially if they’re backed by someone they know and trust… and the rumor is that the FON peer-to-peer WiFi system has a new friend - Steve Jobs.

Jobs expressed interest in a sit-down with Varsavsky, which eventually took place earlier this month in Jobs’ top-floor office at Apple headquarters in Cupertino.

“He was very interested in FON; the meeting went on for an hour and a half,” said Varsavsky, who described Jobs as appearing “trim” and “fit” in his ripped blue jeans and black hooded sweatshirt. “He’s extremely curious. He asks a lot of questions. He’s not the nicest guy — I mean his questions are inquisit [sic] to say the least. He’s to the point.”

Apple, of course, sells its own brand of AirPort WiFi routers. However, Jobs’s interest in FON may be driven by the prospect of ubiquitous WiFi access for owners of his company’s new iPhone and iPod Touch handhelds.

FON allows users to share their WiFi connection with other FON subscribers.

AppleInsider | Steve Jobs keen on a world where people share WiFi

An article in the Telegraph that starts “The race is on to discover the next Banksy.” makes us cringe. Let’s find the new street artist so we can all make some dosh, why don’t we? Banksy and the street art movement his work fueled seems to belong to a certain time - the first five or six years of this decade up until the Wooster Collective Spring Street event. Or was that a wake? Yes, we still love Bansky’s new work but looking back on the whole movement, it feels that the energy that was street art has died, or at least hibernated, and contemporary art has moved on and so have the artists.

An extract to to make you wonder what the street art movement has really become:

News of a new talent can spread rapidly. “Someone came in and as soon as he had bought a painting he was on his mobile. Suddenly I was inundated with buyers for the same artist,” says Jones. During my hour-long visit to the gallery on Saturday he sold five works, including two by Miami artist José Parlá. “Two years ago, they would have cost one or two thousand pounds,” says Jones. “Now they are up to £35,000 each.”

The number of galleries showing street art is also expanding. Last week the Black Rat Press opened under a railway arch in Rivington Street, east London, and sold £120,000 worth of prints by American street artist Swoon.

Art sales: Graffiti draws a new crowd - Telegraph

Following Chris Anderson’s outburst against PR people, here’s another outing of poor PR work - Gawker reacts to a publicist by publishing their email and deliberately omitting their client’s name:

“I noticed that last year Gawker covered the CLMP Spelling Bee and that a Gawker photographer was in attendance last night. I was wondering if anyone from your team was covering? It was apparent that sponsor, [Redacted] Vodka, definitely added an extra element to the evening for the contestants and guests! It would be great if you could mention that contestants sipped on [Redacted] Vodka Martinis!”

What? “[Redacted] Vodka, definitely added an extra element to the evening for the contestants and guests!” My god, are PR people really hired to write that crap?

Crap Email From A Publicist

Although we have discussed the concept of memory cards with in-built WiFi before, it has taken a while for a decent functioning WiFi DS cards to appear on the market. The blogosphere is abuzz with a new card from Eye-Fi and will send photos wirelessly from a digital camera to a Wi-Fi-enabled Mac or PC using wireless networks. The card works with any current SD-compatible camera, and will automatically upload photos onto pre-selected social networking sites or on-line photo labs when the camera is turned on.

Now what someone needs to do is to create a directory of WiFi locations and add this to an upload app for the card. Then you could automatically geo-tag photos without the need of GPS or cellular triangulation. Anyone??

Eye-Fi On Amazon
Press Release

This little thought piece by Rob Walker on the lies people put on Facebook reminds us of our theory on Red Coat, Black Coat:

I’ve long contended that most of the stuff we read about how people are so “confessional” online is a bunch of hooey. MySpace and its ilk aren’t about confessing. They’re about presenting a marketed version of yourself — better looking, smarter, cooler, etc.

More: murketing » LieSpace!