Archive for March 2008

With 42% of its population projected to be at the age of 60 or older, the already beauty-conscious citizens of Japan have been buying up collagen-based products in the hopes of prolonging their youthful appearances. This is instantly evident in Tokyo where a visit to a nearby RanKing RanQueen - a convenience store chain that only carries products that have top sales rankings in their respective categories - will reveal that even the best selling bottled water and gum in the city have collagen as the prominent ingredient. No solid evidence exists yet on the effectiveness of actually ingesting collagen but that’s definitely not stopping the consumption. Pigs’ feet and suppon (soft-shell turtle) have become popular items on the menu - particularly for females - because of their collagen content. Some recent restaurant feedback from Reuters:

“There is a lot of collagen in suppon meals. All our female customers that come to eat collagen say their skins are doing much better the next morning, when they put on make-up,” Sosuke Miyagawa, the owner of suppon restaurant Hanabishi.

Blackbird Tees is a new company based out of Seattle which produces a line of “resume” t-shirts. Screen printed by hand and offering cheeky statements on the front like “hire me” and “I heart job offers,” the shirts are customized with a person’s very own resume on the back. And we know that a good lot of PSFK readers are consultants and independent contractors, so there’s also a line of “freelancer” tees, allowing you to gather jobs as you walk down the street rather than work your butt off for that next contract.

In 2007, Paul Andrew Williams won Young British Director of the Year for his film London to Brighton - a dark and macabre tale about an escape by a child forced into prostitution filmed with only 80,000 UK Pounds. He follows up with a dark but slightly more camp film called The Cottage - which also follows a woman’s escape - this time from kidnapping to a cottage which contains even more challenges than the two blundering kidnappers in pursuit present. The film is on general release in the UK now and will be available to watch at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here’s a the trailer:

Congratulations on getting The Cottage released and also shown at Tribeca Film Festival. We’ve seen the trailer and it’s rather mental. What’s your film about?

It is about two brothers who kidnap the step daughter of a gangland boss who turns out to be a nightmare. Her step brother arrives and everything goes a bit pear shaped. They all end up on a farm where things take a turn for a worse and people get killed.

How does it compare with the rest of the crop of current British film?

As for the rest of the british films of the moment. Some good, some bad, all different.

It must have been about five years since you came into the office we worked in and told me and Ben that you just wrote a feature film over the weekend. That was the first draft of the Cottage. A script in a weekend! In the five years it’s taken to get from that draft to the screen what changes have you seen take place in the movie industry?

It changed a bit during development and we shot it that way, but in the edit we went fairly close to the original script. I do think there are more films being made by first time directors, which is a good thing. I just think it needs to keep going.

They say that the web and copy-and-share culture that has impacted the music industry so radically is about to do the same with the movie industry. As an emerging film maker how do you feel about the impact of these changes on your career?

As a film maker, it obviously is better if people pay for to watch the film as the film industry struggles enough as it is. As a human being, I have downloaded stuff for free before, not movies but songs, so I am not one to judge.

How could ‘free content’ help rather than hindering your career?

Maybe more people will watch it.

>Who inspires your work and how ?

There is a man I used to work with called Piers Fawkes. If I hadn’t met him. I would be making toothbrushes in a factory.

Yeah, sure….

The Cottage

What was an interesting experiment in merging an online stock photo browser into a desktop application, Adobe Bridge has come to an end today. Adobe cites the desire to focus efforts elsewhere. It’s unknown how much of a factor the sale of Getty Images played in Adobe’s decision.

Adobe Stock Photo first appeared in Creative Suite 2 and could be accessed in the Bridge Application. What made this experience nice was that you didn’t need to go through an internet browser (no log-in hoops to jump through), thumbnail images of all your searches were saved for easy retrieval, and you could place content into Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, ect. with just one mouse click. They were dangerously close to having a photo browsing and shopping experience comparable to media on iTunes.

Adobe sent the application off in style, any photo searches the past few weeks returned a series of images thanking users for their support.

Last week, we featured an apparent hack of the digital billboards in LA by an artist. This week, Rob Walker points us to a detailed examination in the Post Gazette of the ways billboard firms are twisting the arms of municipalities to get old billboards converted into digital ones:

Beginning June 1, Texas will allow digital billboards along state highways, even within cities, if municipalities want them. Houston, Dallas and Austin have bans on new billboards, but San Antonio’s city council voted in December to allow 15 digital signs as permanent “experiments,” to the dismay of the San Antonio Conservation Society, Scenic San Antonio, the American Institute of Architects and neighborhood groups.

…In Long Beach, Calif., three neighborhood groups are fighting the construction of six digital billboards along local freeways; each sign would be 40 feet high, with a 30-by-20-foot screen. The Long Beach City Council’s budget oversight committee endorsed the billboards in January, but council will hold hearings on the proposal in a few weeks. The budget committee has good reason to favor the billboards: Their owner would split the revenue with the city, bringing in an estimated $1.5 million to $2 million annually, according to the Long Beach Press-Telegram.

Profit-sharing is just one tactic outdoor advertisers are using to get municipalities to warm to digital signs. They’re also using existing billboards as leverage to reduce their number in exchange for permission to erect digital ones. In San Antonio, twice as much square footage must come down for each digital billboard that goes up.

…”We’re there 24-7,” Clear Channel Outdoor chief executive Paul Meyer told the Washington Post last year. “There’s no mute button, no on-off switch, no changing the station.”

Places: With billboards, cities are facing the digital decision

Rockstar Games latest version of Grand Theft Auto (number four) has an in-game system that allows gamers to buy tracks they’re listening to via Amazon. Named “ZiT” technology, the mechanism is built into the game’s mobile phone system - as your character drives around listening to the radio, they can bookmark a song by dialing the number ZIT-555-0100 and they’ll get sent a text message back with the artist and track details.

If the player has pre-registered at Rockstar Games Social Club site, they’ll be sent an e-mail with a link to a playlist of all their favorite songs on Amazon.com - which they can buy for less than a dollar a track.

The Bits blog over at the NY Times has a piece on the different approaches that Mike Arrington of TechCrunch and Rafat Ali of PaidContent take when it comes to their blogging business. While Mike goes for opinion, Rafat prefers analysis but the Times says that the debate is more than an argument over journalistic style; it reflects how the two companies see their futures.

For Rafat - nimble and on/offline is good:

Mr. Ali [is] planning the Internet version of a trade media company with a growing series of blogs covering media, entertainment and technology. The company, called ContentNext, also added Charlie Koones, the former publisher of Variety, to its board, signaling that Hollywood was an area of keen interest.

There is money to be made, Mr. Ali argued, in conferences and advertising aimed squarely at top executives in these fields. And he dismissed criticism that the site has lagged in page views, saying advertising rates have been very high.

“Our focus is not page views,” Mr. Ali said. “Our focus has been laserlike on the C-level executives in the industry. That’s why we get triple-digit CPMs. That’s nearly unheard of in the industry.”

Mr. Ali and Mr. Richardson are planning the Internet version of a trade media company with a growing series of blogs covering media, entertainment and technology.

For Mike - big is better:

Mr. Arrington described blogging as fitting successfully into two extremes: very small or very large. On one end, he described a “lifestyle business” in which one person who might be able to attract 1 million page views a month might earn a nice living with low expenses. On the other extreme, he suggests there is an efficiency in scale.

“Micro-brands can be very profitable because of the high advertising rates they can get for their audiences, and if you put all the brands under the same roof they can send traffic to each other where it is appropriate,” he said.

The technology blogging market, in particular, has become so crowded with both independents and blogs from mainstream organizations that such scale is needed.

PaidContent vs. TechCrunch: Two Visions of Blogging’s Future - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog

Related On PSFK
Rafat Ali On The Future Of Content Panel At PSFK Conference Los Angeles

From tomorrow Southampton Crematorium will be offering a “pay-per-view funerals” service, allowing family members who are unable to make it in person the chance to watch the service online. The Guardian reports that for £75 a family will be able to purchase a password that will give them access to a live webcast of the ceremony.

Critics believe the webcasting of ceremonies from a suburban crematorium in the UK to the world is macabre. But from tomorrow, Southampton crematorium will begin the £75-per-family service.

The crematorium manager’s, Trevor Mathieson, said he was keen to lay to rest the pay-per-view label. He said: “It’s not as if we’re Sky and broadcasting Premier League football. We’re not putting the services on to the internet for anyone to watch. Security is very important. It’s all about offering a better service to people who are bereaved.”

A digital camera discreetly set up in a corner of the crematorium’s east chapel captures the service. For £75 a family is given a user name and password.

These can be passed on to people who cannot get to the ceremony and they can watch the service as it takes place. DVDs of funerals are also being offered for £50 and audio recordings for £25.

The Guardian: Pay-per-view service at crematorium

Beyond the traditional sports such as Tauijiquan exercises in the morning, there are many work-out parcours in parks or estates in Hong Kong and Macau. When PSFK Germany was in the region recently, it was surprising to see those areas being used and accepted by so many elderly people who were doing their work-out. Hard to imagine to see any German seniors working out in a park like this. While it seems to be possible to grow older and remain an active lifestyle in China, being elderly in western society at the same time predetermines you to be totally passive.

An article in The Globe and Mail last year reported about a Playground for seniors in Berlin that offered similar facilities as the ones seen in Hong Kong. The article states that mid-aged people were more likely to accept the playground while the older audience was rather resistant against this offer:

On a sunny morning this week, a white-haired woman with a cane sat on a park bench, watching the passing scene. The fitness park behind her was empty – but for two bunnies. Asked what she thought of the concept of a playground for seniors, she balked: “Forget it. At my age, nobody’s going to tell me what to do!”

We have collected some photos in a Flickr Set.