Despite a long list of “must try” restaurants in our neighborhood, last week we opted for an entirely new experience and attended the launch of the Good Knife, a new underground supper club in Manhattan’s Gramercy area.
Originally, many such clubs arose as a means of allowing chefs to stretch their creativity. Participants could enjoy an intimate and casual setting, welcome in an era ruled by theme restaurants and grand settings. Foodies especially jumped at the chance to sample new talent. As the popularity of underground restaurants and eating clubs grew, so did the scale and spectacle of [...]

PSFK friend Ruby Pseudo recently published a nice collection of insights on marketing to teens: the Teen Commandments, a primer for brands trying to reach youth in the digital world.  One of Ruby’s compelling findings from her continued research in teen culture was that youth are showing a growing disinterest in social network marketing, with one young research participant stating:
I generally hate – with a passion – all Facebook applications. I currently have 500 unchecked applications. They are of no interest to me whatsoever. I don’t care what celebrity I look like; I don’t care whether I’m hot or not [...]

News School Report is the BBC’s initiative to encourage 11-14-year-olds to become interested in journalism and the news. The BBC offers children from UK schools the chance to make their own video, audio or text-based news at school and to broadcast it for real, with the website becoming a live channel for one day. Launched last year with 120 schools and 3,000 students participating, the successful initiative streamed nine hours of school-based activities and pupils’ news reports, and this year has involved more than 10,000 students from over 250 schools across the country who are all readying themselves for their [...]

In his blog ThisBlogSitsAt, Grant McCracken offers an interesting perspective on the changing of guards in the overlapping worlds of media and commerce, authority shifting away from large institutions and corporations and congregating around smaller networks and individuals (the Tim O’Reillys and other, dare we say, influentials of the world). McCracken compares this power dynamic, though still very much in flux, to a medieval model of government: the large entities act like nation-states that operate “order-in,” with “an embracing idea, and an embracing bureaucratic order” while new media and influencers (and the events they hold, like O’Reilly’s FooCamp) reign as [...]

With the recent reports on McDonald’s being allowed to run it’s own A-level qualifications and Government offering cash incentives for losing weight, it seems that the British Government have got a bit confused in how best to educate the next generation. How refreshing then to see some people taking it upon themselves to teach children about the importance of giving rather than just receiving. The Observer reports on the Dragon School in Oxford’s new plan for ‘generosity’ classes, teaching philanthropy to the next generation of business brains. Having employed Daniel Gill as the exclusive private school’s director of social impact, [...]

One British company is bringing the idea of A, B and C-lists to web surfers worldwide. QDOS, a digital status rating system, has been introduced in Britain by Garlik, an identity protection service.
Playing off consumer competitiveness and curiosity, the system rates you against friends, celebrities, political candidates and Nobel Prize winners. So you can finally position yourself between 50 Cent and Nelson Mandela. They propose that there is actually a method to the madness. Calculating not just keyword frequency, but activity, impact and popularity – all in the name of taking ownership of your digital status.
Because admit it. [...]

UK teen mag Sugar has launched a new social boomarking tool for teenage girls called Sugarscape. Sitting alongside its already existing sugarmagazine.co.uk, the new site, currently in beta, is aiming to be an aggregator of cool gossip, music, quizzes and ‘stuff’ linked to by the sugar team and the readers themselves.
Users can register and download the sugarscape toolbar, then customise their personal page or ‘scape’, and add anything they find on the web by ‘sugaring’ things with comments and opinions. Involving more of a networking aspect than other bookmarking tools, ‘scapers’ can enhance their status by earning points for their [...]

Google announced the addition of translation bots to their Google Talk client, meaning users can now IM in 30 different languages and have it translated (instantly, within chat) to their native language. The system is simple: users add the specific bot they need to their list of contacts in the format of [original_language]2[destination_language]@bot. talk.google.com. So for example, if you wanted to translate what you’re saying from English to Simplified Chinese, you’d add en2zh@bot. talk.google.com as a friend and send it whatever texts you needed as an IM message. You can also add the bot to your group chat to serve [...]

For singles who don’t have a lot of time to search for their soulmate (or just prefer to do it from the comfort of their home),  WooMe may be the solution to their lonely nights. The new dating site offers remote speed dating on-demand allowing daters to videochat with five potential matches in five minutes using high-quality, in-browser voice and video streaming. Users host “sessions” with themselves on the site, with interested pursuers joining in if they’re intrigued by what they see. Hosts then decide who really “wooed them.” Sure, the process takes some of the romance and thrill out [...]

A name sure to be on everyone’s lips very soon, Actics is a brilliant new networking system that helps all companies and individuals to align their ethics with their actions. The first online ethical rating tool, and the first ethical system to implement feelings as an important gradient, the software enables truth and transparency throughout a company, highlighting its understanding of social responsibility far beyond any eco credentials, and further than that, helping align its ethical strategy to make the company better. The system works similarly on a personal level; offering anyone the chance to define themselves through their ethical [...]

CrowdFunder is a great new site that helps individuals raising money within their communities by uniting people with common interests. The concept is pretty self-explanatory and follows the power of the crowdsourcing model: a little money x a lot of people = the power of crowdfunding. Essentially it works the same way as charity sponsorship sites like Just Giving, with one crucial difference: if the total isn’t achieved in the time specified everyone gets their money back.
Rather than being charity-driven the site revolves around community-based projects, aiming to help users raise funds by ‘leveraging your offline and online reputations [...]

Scheduled for general release on November 23, Nothing But The Truth is Nike’s foray into total branded feature films. Described as ‘the script and director only skateboarding movie’, it tells the story of the Nike SB team on and off their boards. Each of the 12 pro and 4 amateur skaters have individually written, produced and starred in a film interpretation of their lives.
Filmed by Belgian director duo Lionel Goldstein and set to an original soundtrack by Mark Mothersbaugh, it looks a little bit Jackass; lots of stunts, lots of girls and some very bizarre personal experiences, however this apparently [...]