PSFK Author:
Hedyeh Parsia

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

Other Music

More jobs from companies like MySpace, Colle + McVoy, the Future Lab and Colgate Palmolive on our listings site (http://jobs.psfk.com):

Sr Director of Business Development (Sales Strategy), MySpace
LA or SF : Beyond the banner

Account Planner, Colle + McVoy
Minneapolis : Innovator with powerful insights

Lead Designer/Art Director, The Future Laboratory
London : Create THE & Viewpoint

GC&MK Summer Intern, Colgate Palmolive
New York : Brilliant brain for trends & strategy

Senior Interactive Strategist, Ogilvy
New York : Discrete problem solving

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 Flickr Set

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 Grid infrastructure in the Bay Area.

Project Better Place

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 has also launched Celebtags.

Brand Tags

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 cut prices on brand-name flat-screen models, triggering a price collapse that delivered a blow to Circuit City’s earnings and marked the start of its current decline. At Christmas, Wal-Mart turned its attention to satellite navigation units, the latest hot category to move rapidly towards market saturation, adding to downward pressure on pricing for the units.

“Consumer electronics has become a fashion industry . . . You can buy a Vizio 30in flat screen TV in a gas station in California for less than $400,” says Jeff Smith, head of Accenture’s global retail consultancy, whose clients include Best Buy.

Financial Times 

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 gives some simple examples about how this might work:

• A cooking site - Review a recipe and provide comments which clarify or improve it. Add a recipe to a social recipe box that appears across multiple cooking sites.
• A musician’s site - Post pictures from your latest concert on the band’s site, and communicate directly with your fans.
• An extreme sports site - Play a motor cross game, then compare your score to friends and other site members.
• An academic site - Discuss and review articles in context with colleagues and the broader community. Filter the discussion to colleagues only, or widen your view. Forge connections with new participants whose comments seem particularly insightful.
• A shopping site - Read expert reviews and tips right next to the camera you’re thinking of buying, and find a friend who has already purchased the same item.
• A philanthropic site - Cultivate a community around your cause, post pictures at fund raisers, let donors connect, and involve their friends.

Google Friend Connect

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 on the DualDisc - a format which is basically a CD and low volume DVD glued together.

Although the DualDisc has been early to market and compatible with all existing players from car stereos to PCs, the weakness to this product is that it holds limited video content (60 mins approx). It will soon face competition from far more sophisticated formats such as the HD DVD and Blu-Ray discs.

Both formats use blue lasers that have shorter wave lengths that allow a much greater volume of content. The HD DVD has 30 gigabytes of space, enough to hold 12 hours of high definition video. Led by Toshiba, the format seems to be more supported by the entertainment sector. Blu-Ray, led by Sony, holds 20 more gigabytes of content but demanding manufacturing processes result in a higher cost per disc than the HD DVD. 

Very recently, Sony and Toshiba did hold talks to find a unified format but these talks broke down leaving both parties to evolve their respective technologies. The threat to Blu-Ray is that higher costs will encourage manufacturers to flock to the HD DVD format (which launches late this year).

However, Sony has one more card up its sleeve, and that’s the PS3, due to market early 2006. The expectation is that the next generation games console will use Blu-Ray discs which will maintain demand - and this debate.

Meanwhile, Sony already has a new format on the market: the Universal Media Disc (UMD) that is used by the PSP. It may have lower capacity but it is gaining acceptance with companies from Universal to Blockbuster. Shoppers can soon buy DVD/UMD combo packages for just a few more bucks. But the shelf life of the UMD could be limited as the PS3 doesn’t appear to be using this format.

As Toshiba and Sony duke it out, PSFK thinks the real debate lies in whether a disc, regardless of its format, can compete with digital downloads in the medium to long term. No doubt that the two giants will make superior products, but haven’t consumers already moved away from the physical?