If the prototypical late night wedding scene finds men on the dance floor with their ties draped across their brows then there’s an equal number of women holding their high-priced heels in their hands in an effort to keep the party going into the wee hours of the night. It’s the fashion paradox for women everywhere, the perfect shoes for the perfect outfit that sacrifice on comfort in favor of stylish, good looks. With this conundrum in mind, two UK-based companies are hoping to cash in on this trend, by providing welcome relief to the tired soles of females everywhere [...]

Dennis Crowley wants to turn your Saturday night into a video game.  The creator of the Dodgeball mobile social platform is adding a competitive factor into the mix of his latest software.
Named Foursquare, the mobile application will let friends know where you are, and let users share tips and tag nightlife spots around their local area. This all happens via text, Twitter and on maps that will display what’s good to do – and also what places to avoid (tagged as “douchebags” hangouts). Foursquare users (or maybe players is a better word) get points based on how many new places [...]

Taryn Ross, Co-Founder of Urban Junkies, will be joining our Good Ideas from London panel at the PSFK Good Ideas Salon London. Along with Matt Brown of Londonist, Justin Quirk of FHM, Paul Andrew Williams of Steel Mill Pictures, and moderator Matt Hardisty of AnalogFolk, the panel will touch upon what aspects of London are exciting them right now.
First, who are you and what do you do?
My name is Taryn Ross, and I am a co-founder of Urban Junkies.  Urban Junkies is a free daily e-newsletter about things going on in London—launches, trends, events, anything we think you need to [...]

The Glenfiddich distillery recently commissioned UK based design studio johnson banks to bring the maturation process of their single malt whiskies to life through a series of artworks.  The creative team decided to use the barrel as their muse, exploring it in its singular parts, as a way of depicting the distinctive characteristics of Glenfiddich’s five signature whiskies, aged 12 to 30 years.  The end result of the project is a stunning display of industrial pieces that give weight to the passage of time. The image pictured at right illustrates “the angel’s share,” the amount of whisky that evaporates during [...]

German artist Carsten Holler’s longtime fascination with the Democratic Republic of Congo has grown into an experimental vision for a temporary night club where Congolese culture collides with its Western counterpart in subtle and interesting ways.   Named the Double Club, Holler’s project is both a music venue and restaurant that seeks to draw clear aesthetic lines between the two worlds while at the same time creating a unifying experience for the attendees.
The restaurant, laid out like a chessboard, serves both Congolese and Western dishes; the disco features a rotating dance floor and a soundtrack that changes at regular intervals from [...]

Feeling naughty, hungover, energetic? IFeelLondon.com is a website that organizes city searching by feel. Choose from nine different categories from naughty to broke, and the service will tell you the best possible places in the city to satisfy your mood. It uses a familiar Google Maps interface, with little signs to indicate possible destinations. It’s a very different but intuitive way to organize information and a useful tool to discover things to do when feeling is all you have to go by. Currently listed cities include London, Toronto and New York.
[via Josh Spear]

In Manila, motels cheekily dub themselves collectively as the “instant hospitality” or “drive-in hotel” industry. Standard practices include offering two hour room rates, vehemently guaranteeing absolute privacy and openly advertising newly launched theme rooms typically inspired by some of the most requested fantasy scenarios (e.g. The Oval Office, the X-Men’s Danger Room, and apparently that cave in Matrix Reloaded).
Recently, two of the city’s largest motel franchises – Victoria Court and Sohotel – are moving towards rooms that de-emphasize the bed setting and instead focus more on drinks, multiple flat screens, video games and surround sound. They are in effect creating [...]

Designer Dave Stovell noticed how unsold stacks of newspapers, left out for re-collection were being used as impromtou stools. Realizing the potential in this relatively untapped source of construction material, he built a series of furniture out of tightly rolled newspapers. Stovell is interested in the compressed life cycle of a commodity with such a rapidly shifting value. It has cultural and economic value on one day as a news source, and the next day it’s all old news and only valued as pulp. The collection features chairs, stools and tables that can all be recycled again at the end [...]

We’ve received details on the next (and what will be our first!) Nerd Nite in NYC, a monthly event that brings together nerds of all persuasions to listen, learn, and share ideas. (Over drinks, of course.) Nerd Nite, which originated in a Boston bar in 2003, has grown far beyond its beginnings as a small get-together for self-proclaimed nerds interested in presenting their passions to their likeminded peers. November 15’s Nerd Nite, which will be held at DUMBO’s expansive new art space, Galapagos, will feature talks from three obsessives  coming from three disparate areas of expertise (evolutionary genetics, role-playing [...]

Shantell Martin is a VJ in Tokyo. Trained as an illustrator in the UK, she moved to Tokyo in 2004 and started drawing at live events. Initially, she was drawing on paper and having those images projected onto the wall – but when a club asked if she could draw at one of their parties, she started experimenting with drawing on a Wacom Tablet.  She has since evolved into using a wireless tablet slung from her shoulder, so she can wonder through the crowd and illustrate the scene – each line drawn to the beat and simultaneously projected onto the [...]

DJ C’Mish over at the Turntable Lab blog has posted a funny but legitimate observation about behavior he’s witnessed on today’s dancefloors. He cites party goers current propensity for being overly engrossed in texting and staring at their phones rather than enjoying the music.
C’mish vents:
Somebody’s gotta re-make Midnight Star’s “No Parking On The Dancefloor” with a modern version – “NO TEXTING ON THE DANCEFLOOR!” Seriously, how many times have you gone a party and seen all these wallflowers chillin’ and texting. You can be spinning the most bad-a** jam and the biggest response you can get is people looking up [...]

We’ve always appreciated London’s fabric, not only for their innovative musical lineups and overall curation, but also for the rigorous attention to detail the staff puts into the entire experience. This past weekend, the team behind fabric launched a new, highly-anticipated London venue called matter. We spoke with Cameron Leslie, fabric’s Managing Director and a key architect of the new venue (along with owner Keith Reilly) to discuss the overall vision, creative collaboration with Pentagram, and their obsessive quest for perfect sound.
Explain the rationale and vision behind matter.
Our intention was to build a music venue – it might seem like [...]

Earlier this week, we introduced Philip James of Snooth.com, a forward-thinking entrepreneur bringing location based services and personalized recommendations to the wine industry. For our second installment in our NYC innovator series, we sat down with Michael Sharon of Socialight, the urban navigation service for mobile phones and the web. Sharon shared a bit about his startup and how it’s helping users explore the world around them. In this video, Michael discusses the opportunities the iPhone presents for application developers and mobile advertisers as well as how Socialight is helping align brands with secret parties, art gallery openings [...]

The NY Times has a fascinating piece on the not-so-quietly forming ’sex rebellion’ raging on among Chile’s party-hard youth. Once one of the most sexually conservative of Latin American countries (according to the NYT), Chile is now witnessing a surge in public shows of sexuality (from making out on dancefloors to things much too graphic to be written about here) among its teen population.  In an attempt to make sense of the phenomenon, some doctors, academics and other experts are pointing to the rise of the popular website Fotolog as one of the movement’s main drivers/enablers:
Fotolog, a photo-sharing network created [...]

For most 9-to-5ers, weeknight partying is an indulgence. A regrettable indulgence. Clubs know this, and while some choose to address it by only opening their doors on the weekends, others are altering their programming to cater to this professional crowd (that can’t afford a Tuesday hangover). Springwise points us to a few mid-week, mid-evening ragers that are helping pull in the older revellers and office drones:
Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel recently launched an earlier alternative that still lets revellers get to bed on time. The Gladstone’s Granny Boots series of dance parties take place each Wednesday night beginning at 7:30 and ending [...]