Advertising: Movies, TVs and Magazines Work Together in Web Campaign

As major marketers shift more of their advertising spending to the Web, media companies like Hearst Magazines are scrambling to keep up.

New York Times

Culture Institutions Go After the Short-Attention-Span Crowd

Around 3,000 people, seemingly all in their 20s and 30s, attended the first Takeover at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

New York Times

Robot cars race around California

A $2m race for robotic vehicles in the Californian desert offers a glimpse at a driverless future for cars.

BBC

The New Nostradamus

Can a fringe branch of mathematics forecast the future? A special adviser to the CIA, Fortune 500 companies, and the U.S. Department of Defense certainly thinks so.

If you listen to Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, and a lot of people don’t, he’ll claim that mathematics can tell you the future. In fact, the professor says that a computer model he built and has perfected over the last 25 years can predict the outcome of virtually any international conflict, provided the basic input is accurate. What’s more, his predictions are alarmingly specific. His fans include at least one current presidential hopeful, a gaggle of Fortune 500 companies, the CIA, and the Department of Defense. Naturally, there is also no shortage of people less fond of his work. “Some people think Bruce is the most brilliant foreign policy analyst there is,” says one colleague. “Others think he’s a quack.”

Good Magazine

MIT developing carbon-free, stackable rental cars

Sure, we know you love actually owning a car, but let's be honest -- in large cities with condensed layouts, your H3 doesn't make a lot of sense.

A group of researchers at MIT have been hard at work developing a solution that's kind on the planet and your scrawny legs. A team called Smart Cities have designed a small, two-seat, electric vehicle -- which they call the City Car -- that can be "stacked" in convenient locations (say, just outside a subway stop), and then taken on short trips around urban areas. The cars -- which are based around an omnidirectional "robot wheel" that encases an electric motor, suspension, and steering -- can be "folded" and attached to a group of other cars for charging.

The lineups of rentable vehicles would be accessible from various points around a city, with six or eight cars occupying just a single "regular" car space. Of course, you'll have to forgo your 24-inch rims... but that's life.

Engadget

World Premiere of Sufjan Stevens' "BQE" [Brooklyn, NY; 11/01/07]

Nostalgia for modernism + urban planning + indie rock + Brooklyn reference + orchestra = Sufjan Stevens' "The BQE"

Constructed between 1937-1964 as part of infamous city planner Robert Moses's master vision for New York City's social reality, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway rose as 11.6 miles of neighborhood-severing, money-eating, limited-access overhead highway grimness. The book about Moses's modernist cruelty and obsession with cars over human needs is called The Power Broker, a relentless, detailed portrait of one man's egomania in urban planning.

Which is part of the reason why, when Sufjan Stevens said he had written a symphony about the BQE, people got so excited. Maybe Stevens would, through the power of art, convey this bleak inter-borough piece of citywide dismay as something majestic, the way he had transformed Detroit or Decatur.

Known for his chamber-pop miniatures about humble white working-poor life, Stevens has become indie's populist orchestrator. But he's also enough of a fool to try his hand at large-scale composition, having boasted of writing 50 albums extolling the dignity of local culture. Fans who celebrate his outsider ("indie") ambitions to excel in academic forms clap for his being at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave festival regardless. Given classical's lust for young flesh and filled seats, the crossover of Stevens's rapt fan base into three nights of sold-out crowds already deems the event a success.

Pitchfork

AdMob Offers First Facebook Mobile Advertising Solution

San Mateo based mobile advertising solutions provider AdMob has announced AdMob for Facebook Mobile, a mobile advertising solution for developers of third-party Facebook applications.

AdMob has enabled optimized mobile ads for Facebook Mobile, which developers can use to monetize their mobile applications. Developers can start showing ads and earning money immediately.

AdMob for Facebook Mobile is said to be the first monetization solution for Facebook Mobile developers.

TechCrunch

$200 gPC launches at Wal-Mart

PC maker Everex rolls out a budget desktop PC today that costs $200 and combines the Ubuntu Linux kernel with Google applications and open source software.

The Everex gPC, goes on sale tomorrow at Wal-mart and is being touted by the company as a close collaboration between the PC maker, the open source community and Google that is intended to "bring Linux to the masses."

The machine uses a 1.5GHz Via C7-D processor, Via UniChrome Pro IGP graphics core, and comes equipped with 512MB of memory, an 80GB hard drive, a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive, and has built-in Ethernet.

But the real secret sauce is a software suite that begins with what the company calls its "gOS," which turns out to be a customized Ubuntu Linux kernel. The software bundle includes open source desktop applications highlighted by OpenOffice, GIMP photo software, the Xing DVD and video player, and Rhythmbox music management software.

PC World

F.T.C. Chief Vows Tighter Control of Online Ads

The commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission said that the agency would be exerting a tighter grip over online advertising.


New York Times

The new wave of Americana bands

The band's name is Salt & Samovar. Another artist raising the flag and infusing some grand ole opry spirit is elvis perkins. check them out on myspace.

How Is Your Head Screwed On?

Open this up, look at the picture quickly and decide in which direction it is spinning… clockwise or counterclockwise?

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22556281-661,00.html

That Nearly Scared Me to Death! Let's Do It Again

Fear is a handy evolutionary mechanism for staying out of danger. So why do we get off on it sometimes?

If the half-billion dollars spent by Americans on horror movies last year is anything to go by, I'm not the only one to ask that question. Scientists believe the answer is that humans have evolved to enjoy fear.

"There's a substantial overlap between those brain areas involved in processing fear and pleasure," said Allan Kalueff, a brain researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health.

As Halloween approaches, the latest research into fear suggests that the neurological systems in our brains that are stimulated by fear are the same as those associated with pleasure. So while you're watching Saw IV or playing Resident Evil, you get the gratification of real fear without any of the danger.

Scientists say that while watching a scary movie, or playing popular games like Bioshock and Dementium, information runs from your eyes and ears to an almond-shaped clump of neurons called the amygdala. Located front-and-center in your brain, the amygdala has long been understood as vital to instantaneous emotional processing, especially of love and pleasure.

Wired

EasySponsorship: DIY Fundraising

EasySponsorship is a free online application that allows users to create their own online sponsorship/fundraising pages to collect donations from anyone from anywhere in the world for anything.

Each user is given a unique web address that they can send to friends and associates as part of their fundraising efforts. Supported currencies are Pounds Sterling, US dollars and Euros. The service is completely free and all money goes straight to the user, with a revenue model reliant on site advertising.

TechCrunch

She’s Famous (and So Can You)

Tila Tequila’s grasp of the marketplace proves brilliant.

TILA TEQUILA turned 26 on Wednesday, and the reader is advised to do whatever is necessary to forget that useless fact. Wipe it, as the metaphor goes, from the hard drive. Try also to obliterate the knowledge that Tequila is not, oddly enough, her real name (Nguyen is); that she is what Wikipedia — in an entry only slightly less extensive than that on Sigrid Undset, the Norwegian novelist and 1928 Nobel laureate for literature — refers to as an “American glamour model”; that she is a former performer on the Fuse cable TV show called “Pants-Off Dance-Off”; that she is the centerpiece of a hit MTV television series “A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila,” which made its debut early on Oct. 9 and was immediately, as the Hollywood Reporter noted, No. 1 in its time period in the network’s target demographic of people 18 to 34; and that the signal reason for this breakout success may also be the basis for Ms. Tequila’s unconventional fame, her boast that she has 1,771,920 MySpace friends.

Dispose of the information. You won’t need it for long.

How, one may ask, is it possible for a personality who great hunks of the citizenry never imagined existed to build up a social network more populous than Dallas? How can Tila Tequila have become enormously famous having done little of note beyond appearing as Playboy’s Cyber Girl of the Week? When exactly in the Warholian arc of fame did we arrive at a point where we create celebrities of people so little accomplished that they make Paris Hilton look like Marie Curie?

Who says any longer that one must be able to sing or dance or emote in order to attract an audience or, anyway, a batch of new friends in the ether? Who says that only winners win? As reality TV, with its durable affection for flame-outs, car wrecks and actual losers, has made abundantly clear, even after the tribal council has voted you off their tropical island, you’re still welcome in our homes.

When Jake Halpern set out to write “Fame Junkies,” his book about what is now a universal obsession with celebrity, he was surprised to uncover studies demonstrating that 31 percent of American teenagers had the honest expectation that they would one day be famous and that 80 percent thought of themselves as truly important. (The figure from the same study conducted in the 1950s was 12 percent.)

“Obviously people have been having delusions of grandeur since the beginning of time, but the chances of becoming well known were much slimmer” even five years ago than they are today, Mr. Halpern said. “There are an incredibly large number of venues for becoming known. Talent is not a prerequisite.”

New York Times

Pay Up, Kid, or Your Igloo Melts

A virtual penguin teaches kids how to spend real cash, upsetting some parents.

New York Times

Hello, India? I Need Help With My Math

In a new wave of global outsourcing, personal chores are moving offshore, and this is leading to some daunting challenges, both economic and cultural.

New York Times

AOL To Announce Internet "Do-Not-Track" List

Most consumers are familiar with do-not-call lists, which are meant to keep telemarketers from phoning them. Soon people will be able to sign up for do-not-track lists, which will help shield their Web surfing habits from the prying eyes of marketers.

Huffington Post

Who needs an ad agency when your corporation is a cult?

I guess there's not much point in doing creative development when when someone's already made your commercial, and tested it, for you. An 18-year-old student from Leeds gets his youtube video polished up a bit to be the television commercial for Apple’s new iPod Touch.

New York Times

Howtoons cartoon science project book

Howtoons is a terrific new science project book that has how-tos in the form of comic strips. Co-author Saul Griffith. who has been writing Howtoons comics for MAKE for the last 3 years, was recently awarded a MacArthur "genius" award.

Part comic strip and part science experiment, Howtoons shows children how to find imaginative new uses for common household items like soda bottles, duct tape, mop buckets, and more–to teach kids the "Tools of Mass Construction"!

BoingBoing

Bands find video games a ticket to fame

PARIS (Reuters) - Singer-guitarist Walter de Castro couldn't believe his luck when he found out his band's song "The Core" would be featured on "FIFA 2008," the Electronic Arts popular soccer game.

Reuters

Devendra Banhart and Paul Klee at SFMOMA

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is presenting an exhibition that pairs the artwork of Paul Klee with the drawings and beautiful freak folk music of Devendra Banhart. According to the SFMOMA, the exhibit, titled Abstract Rhythms: Paul Klee and Devendra Banhart, "explores the relationship between music and visual art." It features more than a dozen of Klee's works on paper along with thirteen of Banhart's drawings, created along with his new album Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon. Seen here at left, Klee's "Der Verliebte (Man in Love)" and, at right, Banhart's cover art for "Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon." From the SFMOMA:

BoingBoing

Design Concept: Disappearing Wall Stairs Should Be In Every Millionaire's Home

Aaron Tang's wall stairs are meant for living areas that are short on space, but they're so awesome that I'd want them even if I had 1,000,000 sq. ft. house.

Gizmodo

EveryScape's 3-D Maps Take You Inside Landmark Buildings

EveryScape's 3-D maps go one step further than Google: They let you explore the insides of buildings, too. The service, launching next week, will give virtual explorers views of restaurants, hotels and landmarks in San Francisco, Boston, New York and Seattle.


Wired

Gnarley: FunnyOrDie Extends Into Extreme Sports

Will Ferrell’s FunnyOrDie video startup is spreading its wings with a new site: ShredOrDie, focused on extreme sports and hosted by pro skateboarder Tony Hawk.

TechCrunch

In Foray Into TV, Google Is to Track Ad Audiences

Google plans to announce a partnership with Nielsen to give advertisers a better snapshot of how many people are viewing television commercials on a second-by-second basis.

New York Times

WPP Group Buys a Top Digital Agency

The WPP Group, the giant advertising company, bought Blast Radius, a leading interactive agency, as part of a digital shopping spree.

New York Times

Microsoft Buys Stake in Facebook

The investment ends two months of jockeying among Microsoft, Google and Yahoo for the right to invest in and forge close ties with the fast-growing social networking Web site.

New York Times

New eBay site helps finance poor

Ebay launches a new web site that allows people to invest in loans that lift people out of poverty.

BBC News

Virtual worlds threaten 'values'

Virtual worlds for children could undermine the human values that societies need them to learn, says industry veteran.

BBC News

Facebook Experiments With Ads Targeting People’s Interests

The big promise of advertising on social networks has always been the ability to target members by their own self-proclaimed interests and demographics. Facebook, as expected, has quietly taken a step in that direction with its Facebook Flyers ads (these are sidebar advertising widgets that Facebook still controls, as opposed to the majority of ad inventory on Facebook that falls under its deal with Microsoft). In terms of revenues, these Flyers probably don’t amount to much yet, but this is one Faecbook experiment worth keeping an eye on.

TechCrunch

Smelly screens selling beer on the streets

The aroma-emitting Kaoru Digital Signage display will be appearing in front of a Tokyo beer hall called Kirin City from October 21 and will assault the noses of passers-by with scents of orange and lemon and the eyes with video of foaming jugs of beer.

Apparently, the men in suits reckon the citrus is “associated with beer” so the field test resulting in crowds flocking to the bar like journalists to, well, a bar will show that they’re correct. Either way, each installation uses ultrasound to vaporize aromatic oils and can waft the result over 500 cubic meters.

Digital World Tokyo

BlinkBox: User Generated Ads For Movies, TV (and it’s fun)

A new UK startup launches on Monday called BlinkBox. Users take pre-created clips from movies and television shows (the clips can be shortened by the user) and add a personalized message at the beginning.

TechCrunch

Google’s Purchase of Jaiku Raises New Privacy Issues

While Google’s Jaiku purchase may not seem like an earth-shaking event, some say it is the start of a truly interconnected world, where a chunk of our existence will migrate online.

New York Times

Welcome to the Rat Race: Steelcase's Desk/Treadmill Mashup

Anyone who reads the fine site Book of Joe knows that the man behind the blogging empire is religiously devoted to working out while writing, and prides himself on having integrated a treadmill into his workspace. Well manufacturer Steelcase thinks that this trend has grown beyond one individual multitasking in his underwear, and is poised to introduce a nicely-designed product called the Walkstation which seems more at home in a CEO's office than your messy living room.

Engaget

Sony's Virtual World Brand-Friendly

A couple of announcements indicating that Sony's upcoming PlayStationHome (site, wiki) virtual world will have plenty of ad inventory:

GameIndustry.biz: "SCEA has announced the formation of an in-game advertising business unit. Although the in-game advertising unit will be responsible for incorporating advertising across all PlayStation platforms, its emphasis will be on PlayStation Home, which 'will present opportunities for SCEA to deliver dynamic, relevant advertisements in game.'" [Oct 8 2007]

Advertising Lab

The T-Phone: Interesting Idea, Poor Excecution

The T-Phone concept from designer Jeong-Kyun Nam, with its nifty design and eminently losable doodads, is an example of a creative, if slightly ill-conceived, solution to an interesting problem.

the device uses RFID equipped badges as an object-based dialling system. Each badge is programed with someone's number, and can be labeled with a picture, icon or writing for easy identification. It is intended for seniors, confused by, and resistant to, new-fangled phones with their multiple menus and call lists.

While the badge interface, in solving one problem, appears to create others, it is a great example of a novel approach to user interfaces and, in particular, the use of transparent technology and product design to create a comfortable experience for the non-technologically inclined.

Gizmodo

Bedroom 747: Man Builds $30,000 Jumbo Jet Simulator in his Bedroom

John Davis spent eight years and £15,000 building a Boeing 747 flight simulator in a room in his house. And now the 47-year-old's hobby has turned into such a full-time occupation that he has jacked in his job as a graphic designer to run a full-time flight simulation business from his home in Coventry, UK.

Gizmodo

The Web as Dominant Platform: Google VP Articulates a Revolution

Jeff Huber, Senior VP of Google, talking about Google "Gadgets" (aka Widgets ) at the Web 2.0 Summit made a very telling statement about the future of computing:

“The Internet has already won. The Web is the platform–a mosaic of gadgets, APIs and container all over the Web.”

His declaration of the web as the dominant platform in computing describes an approach to software design that is kind of a no-brainer for anyone watching the trends in desktop widgets, Facebook applications and the like. However, this kind of thinking also represents a paradigm shift in the established thinking about how we use computers.

Thinking about networks as the basic platform, not as a function of computers, but as their essential identity, represents a change in how companies will approach software design, and how users' will approach their own PCs.

Reading this, I can't help thinking of Sun Microsystems' original vision of the future of computing; as network based, with applications living on the network rather than individual hard drives, and PCs being little more than dumb terminals with storage capacity for personal files.

The ramifications of such a structure, however, are far reaching, affecting computer cost and, therefore, the so-called "digital divide", collaboration and, therefore, the structure of new business, as well as security, ownership, copyright, and much more.

It's a simple statement that, as I said, seems obvious to anyone with a passing interest in the subject. The downstream effects of this thinking, however, are very significant.

ZDNet

If You Thought a Half-Hour of TV Was Worth 4 Minutes, Here’s Proof

The mini-episodes of discontinued TV programs, to be shown online, are part of a Pepsi campaign designed to celebrate the brand’s old logos, slogans and jingles.

New York Times

Don't Fear Big Beer: The Long Tail is Nothing New

Garrett Oliver, Brooklyn Brewery Brewmaster, writes an interesting Op-Ed piece in the New York Times. Coming off the recent merger of beer giants SABMiller and Molson Coors, forming MillerCoors, he writes about how, as a "craft-brewer" he isn't worried about his business in the face of this new super-brewery.

His example of the beer industry has obvious parallels to the growing trend of locally grown produce, small batch production etc. With all the talk about the revolutionary "Long Tail" economy, it is interesting and refreshing to hear this much hyped "small is beautiful" trend spoken of in terms of "a return to normalcy" after one generation's aberration rather than a wholly new phenomena.

New York Times