Events and lifestyle site DailyCandy will be launching their own members-only site called Swirl, which will carry designer clothing and accessories for up to 80% off.

The newest iteration of the NBA 2k series includes a feature called “NBA Today” that includes daily updates from events happening in real world NBA games. How teams and individual players perform on the court affects the video game commentary, performance and stats of individual athletes.

Internet Eyes is an online service that opens up access to closed-circuit cameras to the public, awarding cash prizes up to £1,000 each month to the users who catch the most crooks.

The other day, we highlighted some of the ways that magazines are diversifying their business models to remain both relevant and solvent as more and more of their audience moves online. We suspect (and hope) that print and by extension, traditional storytelling will always have its place, but there is clearly a shift towards multimedia narratives – combining video, audio and other interactive features – taking place as more publications bolster their reporting with additional content available online.
While this trend is most noticeable among print magazines that are attempting t0 adapt their product to the web, there are also a [...]

Image credit: Getty Images, Craig P. Jewell/Flickr
Turns out there might be a biological imperative to explain our addiction to information that leads us to obsessively check our Facebook profiles for updates and inexplicably lose hours at a time searching for obscure bits of information on Google. Scientists refer to this desire as seeking or wanting, a practice that affects the dopamine centers of our brains and causes us to chase the potential reward just around the corner rather than settle for the tangible one right in front of us. This quest for what might be, creates a seemingly infinite feedback loop where [...]

We’ve written previously about the reverse trend of internet memes inspiring honest-to-goodness books, but it appears that the web’s influence on real life as reflected in popular media knows no bounds following news that five of New York Magazine’s most prolific commenters have made the unprecedented leap from peanut gallery to professional.
The five vocal contributors will be lending their unique perspectives to a series of chatroom-style ads for British bank HSBC. The campaign is tied to the bank’s “Soapbox” television and print ads, which feature conversations on hot button topics such as education, the economy and the environment. For the online component [...]

Without coming across as too macabre and curmudgeonly, we’ll simply say that with dawn of the internet, the business of death has gotten a lot more complicated these days. Consider that wills once existed for the sole purpose of ceding ownership of physical objects, and quests for immortality - things like cryonics, transhumanism, fountains of youth and religion (ahem) - remained firmly planted in the realms of fantasy, but as the lines between our real and digital worlds continue to blur, these customs have changed. The things we leave behind, from virtual businesses to entire online lives, now have an immaterial existence and longevity all [...]

Commentators have been arguing for a few years now that we will see a shift of marketing budgets from offline to online… I agree that digital media will drive a dramatic drop in offline spending but I don’t know if I agree that the money will flip online.

For those with family members unskilled in the dozens of photo-sharing services online or those that prefer hard copies of photos, there is now a solution to upload and automatically mail loved ones your recent snapshots. Picwing will [...]

Ribbit is an open API platform for integrating phone call features into the online world. Calls, texts, and voicemails can be integrated into web banners and sites.
In the demo pictured above, drag and drop features were used to create a pizza banner with features to place an order over the phone. After inputing your number and clicking “Call”, a rep would call you and take your order.
The next demo involved a community voicemail-box. Let’s say you want to promote a movie before it comes out, you can set up the voicemail and have actors call into it leaving updates about [...]

Whether or not you fully agree with the chosen terminology and accompanying ideology, we felt Kevin Kelly’s recent piece in Wired that examines the history and growth of what he calls online “socialism” takes an insightful look at the ways people are interacting in the digital realm. Kelly tracks the movement as it shifts from passive sharing information towards more active collaboration, a trend that is enabling greater innovation through decentralized forms of production. Examples of this include opensource efforts like Wikipedia and Boxee. He views this as a hybrid system that lands somewhere between a non-market and free market economy, [...]

Traditional music charts are based on shipped albums, or units sold. While this may have been an accurate method to judge music popularity in the simpler times of top-down, centralized music distribution, today’s media-consumption behavior patterns do not always adhere to such direct paths. Though sales may be the ultimate indicator of the public’s love for a song, online activity – streaming, discussing and sharing can illustrate the different ways music now becomes popular.
We Are Hunted is an online music chart that uses a wide variety of sources to determine the current state of society’s chaotic music listening habits. By [...]

As Twitter quickly becomes a household name, some are finding uses for the microblogging tool that go beyond work and play. One of of the most thoughtful we’ve seen is Twipple – twittering + random acts of kindness. As the twitter page explains, “a twipple is a random act of kindness via twitter. We post 1 twipple per 100 sign ups. So please sign up and tell your friends. twipple ideas also welcomed!”
We asked Twipple creator and PSFK friend Floyd Hayes to share a bit more about ‘the twipple effect’.
First: what is twipple?
A twipple is a Tweet combined with random [...]

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 [...]

Poken is a new toy that attempts to bridge the gap between online and offline play. It’s a plastic creature, in the form of a panda or bumblebee or three-eyed monster, that transfers social networking information via ‘high-fives’ (and RFID). After making new friends face-to-face, kids can bust out their RFID-enabled keychains and instantly exchange their online identity details through a poken-to-poken high five. After the exchange, users then connect their toy to a computer via USB, where they can download the info onto poken’s database, which helps them manage and distribute the new data on the user’s social networking [...]