What do our faces say about who we are?

In a kind of augmented reality / virtual reality mix, Marc Owens’ Avatar Machine puts the user into the center of a video game-like experience.

As further evidence of the increasing threat that crowdsourcing poses to advertising agencies, PepsiCo’s Mountain Dew will reward marketing duties for a $100 million-plus business to a consumer-picked player, via an online contest beginning in late November 2009.

Yamaguchi Takahiro’s art tends to revolve around calligraphy, graffti, typography and sound. In his latest work he turns the act of writing into physical performance.

The Samsung Freecycle concept envisions a mobile/social system where bikes are connected to each other and riders wirelessly.

We wrote last week about Apple’s efforts to preserve the sanctity of the album through artwork and extras, a move that attempts to synthesize the digital format’s emerging dominance with the holistic listening experience of the past. But what is the future of the album exactly? Is it merely an outmoded concept that speaks more to the artist’s craft than what the audience actually wants to hear (i.e. hit singles divorced of any context that can be easily inserted into personalized playlists)?

As far as most experiences go, we like to keep ours decidedly on the side of the real, but with the internet increasingly taking over more aspects of our lives, that’s becoming a bit more difficult. Thankfully though, the digital realms haven’t managed to find adequate replacements for some things, eating and drinking chief among them, until recently perhaps.
The NY Times points to the strange trend of virtual bars and restaurants that are popping up on the web, a concept that is becoming so popular in fact, that one such establishment, Air Yakiniku, is now the 29th most searched site [...]

The economic downturn has forced cost-consciousness into the way high fashion is being presented. The Economist reports that during last week’s NY Fashion Week, several designers slashed the $100,000+ cost it takes to do a 20-minute catwalk show out of their budgets, opting instead for more straightforward things like having their models interact with crowds in small gatherings. This forced creativity has also led to new digital-based innovation as more members of the global haute couture community ditched fashion shows altogether in favor of launching music videos and internet-based campaigns. What’s interesting is that some of these changes might become [...]

The world of storing and sharing digital information has vastly expanded and improved in recent years.  Now a new device, dubbed the Leyio, hopes to push the rarely used ultra-wide band technology into a new direction for communication with digital data.  The premise of the device is to allow, “for the first time, the digital generation…to take their online experience offline.”  It’s essentially a tiny storage product that can be paired with other Leyios to share information.
The 16 GB memory can be connected to a regular USB stick, a computer with the included dongle or with other users through a [...]

There’s an interesting piece on the Profero site on how companies that have chosen to take digital into their hearts could thrive in the recession:

At our Good Ideas in 2009: Digital salon yesterday, much of the conversation surrounded how our online identities are created, both actively – through our own decisions of what we share about ourselves – and passively – through the actions and perceptions of others.   Given that we only have control over half of that equation, how do we ensure that the best and brightest portrait of ourselves is seen by the wider community?
Piers posited his “Red Coat, Black Coat” theory back in 2006, which proved to be a harbinger of conversations to come about approaches to online privacy as [...]