The top ten album sales from Other Music in New York:

Artist
Title
Label

1.
Portishead
Third
Mercury

2.
No Age
Nouns
Sub Pop

3.
Animal Collective
Water Curses
Domino

4.
Matmos
Supreme Balloon
Matador

5.
Jamie Lidell
Jim
Warp

6.
Santogold
s/t
Downtown

7.
M83
Saturdays = Youth
Mute

8.
Kid Creole
Going Places
Strut

9.
Hercules and Love Affair
s/t
EMI/DFA

10.
Various Artists
African Scream Contest
Analog Africa

Other Music

We’re still receiving photos for our collaborative book project including this one from Stanley Lumax entitled ‘The Sewer’ which he took in Ghana. About the photo he says:
“I met these children playing soccer near my father’s home in Nngua, an area outside of Teshi, Ghana. They kicked the soccer ball into the open sewer. I told them not to get it, and that I’d buy them a new one. They all walked with me to get a new ball. When we passed the sewer again, the ball was gone.”
Stanley Lumax Blog
How To Contribute To The At Play Project
At Play [...]

This may not come as much of a surprise to many folks who have been there and felt the pro-green vibe in the BayArea, but the electric-vehicle company Project Better Place is likely to launch its pay-by-the-jule service in San Francisco.
We first mentioned Project Better Place last Novemeber and their plans to offer ‘free’ cars that were paid for with a surcharge on the electricity you bought at PBP ‘pumps’ (a little like a pay-as-you-go phone).
Earth2Tech reports that San Francisco’s mayor traveled to Israel recently to see a prototype system and is in talks about helping PBP build Electric Recharge [...]

At the end of last week, Noah Brier launched a rather simple site that captured single word responses from users when they were presented a brand logo. Within a few days, the site has received over 160,000 suggestions for brands like Budweiser (King, Beer, Piss), Nike (Sports, Sweatshop, Swoosh), Twitter (Annoying, Chat, Fun, Pointless) and Wholefoods (Expensive, Organic, Paycheck).
What’s interesting is that while so many advertising agencies and brand managers try to connect with consumers on an emotional level, consumers seem to still judge their products on rational, product feature criteria – or so they like to think so.
Noah [...]

An article in the Financial Times suggests that the big box retailer have failed to innovate and have got themselves into jumping on every bandwagon rather than leading consumer expectations and experience:
Michael Collins, retail consultant at Bain & Partners in Chicago, says that while the turmoil is being exacerbated by the economic slowdown, the causes are more deep-rooted, and include the rapid commoditisation of the new “hot” items that traditionally deliver the highest margins for retailers.
A boom in demand for flat-screen televisions supported both Best Buy and Circuit City during 2006. But the following year, Wal-Mart, the mass discounter, aggressively [...]

Google has started to test its Friend Connect feature that lets website owners add social features to their website by just embedding ‘off-the-shelf’ code. The system is sure to make sites offer community rich features. Visitors can log in with their existing social networks login details – Google says visitors will be able to pull from their Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut and Plaxo network – and interact with existing friends on the site they are visiting. It could be a big boost to sites like PSFK who have regular readers. Here’s a video that summarizes the features:

Google [...]

The recent fall out between Sony and Toshiba highlights the issues facing the entertainment industry in regards to emerging formats. Presently, record companies are aggressively releasing new and catalog content…