Fast Company

RED Scarlet Officially Ready to Bite at Canon, Nikon's DSLR Heels

Kit Eaton — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 08:30:36 EST

We love technology here at Fast Company. And we're big on design too. Which is partly what makes RED's digital cameras quite so awesome, since they mix the two exquisitely. And the newly official RED Scarlet may even change the DSLR game too.

RED has been hyping the Scarlet for over a year, and it's taken until now for the company to make the device official. Partly that's been due to tweaks and improvements, and partly (as the demise of the CrunchPad has shown) it's because bringing a novel, unique and potentially revolutionary product to market is no easy thing. Still, the delay has meant the Scarlet 2/3-inch device now has "one additional ASIC and four additional boards" bringing "many new features to the program." That does, of course mean that while the price shot up, so did the feature set. The price is now a serious sounding $4,750 (up from a projected $3,000 last year), though it does get you a bunch of camera modules that are roughly equivalent to a starter kit that you get when buying a traditional DSLR...just much cleverer.

Though the Scarlet is sometimes referred to as a 4k camera (officially a 4096 by 2048 pixel sensor size) it's actually a 3k unit--meaning its sensor can capture 3072 by 1536 pixel images, which works out at just 4.8 megapixels. So why do we say it could change the DSLR game, when Canon and Nikon offer so many more megapixels with their consumer and professional cameras? Because the Scarlet is actually a hybrid machine, falling somewhere between DSLR and professional digital video camera--RED dubs it a "digital still and motion camera." This means that, unlike Canon and Nikon, which are just beginning to adapt their traditional still cameras and dabble with HD video recording, the Scarlet can shoot 3k video--much higher resolution than HDTVs need--right out of the box at 120fps, in RAW format. It can even downscale in-camera to 1080p or 720p at 60fps so its video output is ready for HDTVs.

That, along with the modular nature of the Scarlet's design--which means it's easy to bolt on whole new sections to the camera to radically adjust it to your needs, even to produce 3D-film cameras--means when it arrives in early 2010, it's likely to shake up Canon and Nikon a bit. Their DSLRs have traditionally held much of the prosumer/professional end of the digital camera market, and are making waves in the digital video market...but perhaps not for long. And, of course, check out the Scarlet's viciously cool looks--no EOS can match the Scarlet in looking fit for purpose quite so aggressively.

[RED via Akihabaranews]

Freeze: The Antarctic Treaty Turns 50

Anne C. Lee — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 07:30:00 EST

Map by Mike Reagan

On the first of December 1959, 12 nations signed a pact freezing territorial claims and banning military activity in Antarctica. It isn't human-free (29 nations have research stations there, and 11 people have been born on the continent), but it remains remarkably untouched. Here's a tour.

Infographic: The Antarctic Treaty Turns 50

1. The Weddell and Ross Seas continental shelves are believed to hold 50 billion barrels of oil. That's more than double the known reserves in the U.S.

2. The Transantarctic Mountains have deposits of coal, gold, silver, copper, zinc, lead, and tin, but a moratorium on commercial mining is in place in Antarctica through 2048.

3. Antarctica's biggest population center is the U.S.-operated McMurdo Station. In the summer, the community can swell to more than 1,000 people; this past winter, there were just 153.

4. Antarctica's two-letter Internet suffix is ".aq." Internet access is via satellite; a dish on Black Island provides 10-MB-per-second service to McMurdo.

5. Tourism is one of Antarctica's two main industries. Antarctica had 37,858 tourists last year. Most visitors arrived by sea -- a typical 10-day cruise to the region runs from $5,000 to $10,000 per person -- and nearly all landed on the Antarctic Peninsula. No ship carrying more than 500 passengers may land in Antarctica.

6. Fishing is Antarctica's other principal industry. The annual quota for the legal Antarctic krill fishery, centered in the Southern Ocean, is 4 million tons. The tiny crustacean is used to make feed for fish farms and omega-3 oils for health supplements.

7. Illegal fishing takes thousands of tons of seafood from Antarctic waters each year. One prime target in the South Pacific: the toothfish, also known as Chilean sea bass.

8. Antarctica is home to nearly 40 million penguins. The biggest population of the Emperor, the tallest species and star of March of the Penguins, is in the Ross Sea Sector, where more than 80,000 pairs breed.

9. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide is the best place on earth for scientists to harvest ice cores -- cross sections of ancient ice with trapped air bubbles that provide data about the earth's atmospheric history. The longest Antarctic ice core on record: 4,961 feet.

10. The Bentley Subglacial Trench has the lowest elevation of any piece of land on earth, at 2,450 meters below sea level.

11. It's estimated that fewer than 10,000 people have ever visited the South Pole.

Audi's 2011 A8 Sedan has a "Space Frame," Lots of LED

Julie Taraska — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 07:00:00 EST

On the eve of the L.A. Auto Show, Audi took a left turn and chose to unveil its new A8 luxury sedan in Miami. The event, which occurred as part of Design Miami, also marked Audi's 100th anniversary.

The car's major innovations is that it has an aluminum body, dubbed the Audi Space Frame, that weighs 40% less than a comparable steel structure.

The A8 also has full LED headlights, which use light-emitting diodes for all light functions; they are a departure from the tubular light modules still commonly used today. (That's designer Tom Dixon showing off the frame and headlights above.)

The low beams comprise ten individual modules forming an arc situated below the wing-shaped chrome contour. Beneath them is another arc of 22 white and 22 yellow LEDs that provide the daytime running lights and turn signals. (With a color temperature of 5,500 Kelvin, they resemble daylight and are much less tiring to the eyes.) Located just above the wing are the high beams, whose light is generated by two four-chip LEDs and a free surface reflector system.

The tail lights feature 72 LEDs per unit and consume only 9 watts of power per unit.The tail lights appear to be a homogeneous strip, but actually are is a trapezoid with the upper segment a plastic tube and the lower a reflective, textured free-form surface.

Above, a peek at the interior of the A8. Under the hood it's got a 4.2-liter TDI engine.

Actress Lucy Lui emceed the fete, and was joined by property developer Craig Robins, the co-founder of Design Miami; designer Tom Dixon; and Audi designer director Stefan Sielaff.

Infographic of the Day: Telling a Dead-beat Client to Shove It, With Pie Charts

Cliff Kuang — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:30:03 EST

A classic email exchange between an ungrateful client, and a put-upon designer.

We've already seen just how stupid design clients can be; now designer David Thorne has added an amazing email exchange with one of his dead-beat, would-be clients. Summarizing it doesn't do much--just click and enjoy.

Ultra-Green Underground Data Center Will Heat Helsinki

Ariel Schwartz — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:00:40 EST

Companies like Google and IBM are constantly clamoring to prove that they have energy-efficient data centers, but a new cloud computing hub located in the bedrock below Helsinki's famous Uspenski Cathedral might have them all beat. The data center, built by IT firm Academica and scheduled to go live in January, will capture heat from computer servers and use it to warm Finnish homes via a network of water-heated pipes.

Academica's data center, which the company claims is the greenest in existence, will use just half the energy of a typical data center, provide heat for 500 homes, and save Academica approximately $563,000 each year on power. So why haven't we seen more underground data centers? For one thing, not every city is lucky enough to have massive underground bomb shelters like the one being used by Academica. But rest assured that Academica's innovation won't go unnoticed.

Eventually, Google might trump the Finnish company with a super-green data center of its own. The search giant filed a patent last year for a floating data center that uses ocean water to stay cool and wave energy to power on-board computers.

[Via Reuters]

iPhone App Expands Redbox's Slow-Tech Space in DVD Rental Market

Stephanie Schomer — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 17:30:00 EST

We recently wrote about how Redbox, the cheap and easy video-vending-machine company that's undercutting Blockbuster with its dollar DVDs and rapidly expanding kiosks (21,000, up from 12,000 last year) and creeping up on Netflix with $198.1 million in sales last quarter (double its take for the same quarter last year). It's secret? It offers easy physical DVD rentals in a world gone mad for streaming. And now the the Redbox iPhone app makes the hunt for last-minute movies even easier.

Here's how the new free app works: Redbox users search for movies, either manually or by genre. Then Redbox guides you to the nearest location with an available copy of the desired flick using Google map. Can't make it to store for a few hours? Reserve the movie from your phone, pay the first night's fee, and pick it up later that day. The app doesn't offer movie reviews, a function Netflix and users of, say, iRentMovie value greatly. But Redbox is more of a take-what's-available sort of thing, and for people without enough foresight to manage a cue or plan ahead so a new release arrives the moment its available via mail, Redbox is the ticket.

Flat-Pack Magic: Ten Amazing Folding Chairs

Cliff Kuang — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 17:00:18 EST

Seven chairs made of single sheets of plastic, cardboard, and foam--and which take just seconds to assemble.

Folding, flat-pack chairs make sense in our carbon-conscious age. They require relatively few materials to make, and they're far more fuel-efficient to ship. Here are seven takes on the theme:

The Flux, which debuted this year at a Dutch furniture fair, is easily the best-looking of the lot. Made from a sheet of plastic, it folds up so that you can carry it like an over-sized briefcase:

One classic assignment for student industrial-designers is to make a chair out of cardboard. James Schaffroth, a student at RISD, managed to create this amazing chair/desk that supports 200 pounds:

Eric Ku's Chair/Chair is made of five pieces, which spell out the word:

Another carboard chair, by Elias Kulukundis, which was inspired by origami:

Another cardboard chair, but you can buy this one. The unfortunately named Flexible Love Chair sounds like something you'd find at an orgy, but it's nonetheless a miracle of adaptability. The accordioned, honeycomb structure can be fit into almost any shape:

Andrej Blazon's Charity Chair was designed to resemble the hat traditionally worn by an order of charitable nuns. The project is open-source, so anyone can download the plans and make the chair themselves from found materials, thus making it uber-local, and carbon-light:

Sara Paculdo's Flat Chair won't win any beauty pageants, but it's a fascinating experiment. The piece is made just of laser-cut foam; the final shape emphasizes the way that the chair distributes the sitting forces--the entire structure is (purportedly) under constant tension, which allows it to support weight:

Omri Barzeev, a recent design-school graduate, has a knack for folding stuff into chairs. The back of his Zaza chair starts as a single sheet of plastic, which he then covers in felt and folds into shape. The legs of the chair are basically one huge clamp, holding the backrest/seatpan together:

Christian Desile's folding chair was an award-winning standout at September's Maison & Object, France's largest furniture fair. It folds remarkably flat for storage, in a cart or on a wall:

You weren't tired of cardboard chairs were you? Whew. Tom de Vrieze's Kraftwerk chair, which recently won DesignBoom's carbboard chair competition. (He kind of cheated though--the chair is filled with expanding foam.)

Kindle Outsells Every Other Product on Amazon (And What That Really Means)

Gizmodo Staff — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:30:10 EST

According to a breathless press release, the Kindle ereader is the "#1 bestselling product across all product categories on Amazon." That means it sold more than the iPod Touch. More than the Wii. More than Going Rogue. How? It's easy!

Step 1: Market a device for two whole yearsStep 2: Issue a price drop a few months before the holiday seasonStep 3: Remain the exclusive retailer for said deviceStep 4: Profit! (To an extent that is completely and intentionally unclear to everyone!)

When Amazon tells you that the Kindle is the highest-selling product on Amazon, you're supposed to think of it as you'd think of anything else: as a strong, reliable metric in gauging how well a product is doing in general. The thing is, there is no "in general" for the Kindle. There is only Amazon. Anyone who wants a Kindle and doesn't normally shop at Amazon has to make an exception. Anyone who wants a Kindle and doesn't normally shop online has to make an exception. The Kindle didn't outsell the iPod Touchâ€”not even close.

It's worth noting that, as always with the Kindle, Amazon is not giving us any sales numbers to look at. They've consistently claimed this is to protect competitive interests, which led journalists, and the public, the consistently believe that the figure must be kind of embarrassing. But with this exceedingly proud announcement, Amazon has revealed at least part of their reasoning: good PR. To proclaim that the Kindle has outsold every other product in the world (on Amazon!) makes it sound like the device is, at the very least, not a failure. Which it probably isn't! But let's look at what we really, honestly know: The Kindle outsold every other products in its parent company's online store, which has an exclusive on the device. We have no idea how many units are sold, nor do we have any idea how many Amazon expected to sell, or how many they'd need to sell for Kindle to be considered successful. We know that sales have gone up during a heavy shopping period, but that's about it. It's a closed system.

In other words, we know nothing new. Well, except that a certain other book store with a noticeably similar strategy and much hotter hardware is just about to show up piss-drunk at the Kindle's Christmas party, to try to steal its girlfriend. [Press Release]

In partnership withGizmodo is the world's most fun technology website, focused on gadgets and how they make our lives better, worse and more absurd. Source: Kindle Outsells Every Other Product On Amazon (And What That Really Means)

Playing House: Two Cool Tools for New York Renters

Alissa Walker — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:00:00 EST

Even the experts can get tripped up with the esoteric language of New York real estate--like, what the heck is an ULURP?--so two new design-driven collaborations help New York renters to understand their communities and know their rights.

The Envisioning Development toolkit is developed by the Center for Urban Pedagogy with a long list of partners, and designed by Glen Cummings of MTWTF, to help communities understand how their neighborhoods are getting built--and how they can take an active role in shaping them. Components for the affordable housing toolkit are available now, like an interactive felt chart, a guidebook, and a map to help residents hold workshops where they can learn about policy in New York City. The online map is especially mind-blowing as it charts the income of any neighborhood in New York, then can be adjusted to see what percentage of its residents can afford to live there.

Another Center for Urban Pedagogy collaborator Candy Chang (she designed its New York City street vendor guide) recently created another awesome tool to help renters, Tenant Flash Cards. A collaboration with non-profit Tenants & Neighbors and grant from Sappi Ideas that Matter created a 30-card deck that translates New York state's Tenants' Rights Guide into a fun and informational reference guide. These are available for only $10--a great holiday gift for any New York newbie!

Bookstore Baksheesh: The Real Estate Deals That Sell Books

Adam Penenberg — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:30:01 EST

The closer a table is to the front of the bookstore, the more expensive the real estate--and each book on each table costs publishers anywhere from $3,000 to $30,000, and even up to $50,000 depending on placement. [Viral Loop Chronicles Part 6]

Step into any Barnes & Noble and the first thing you see are tables covered in books. 'Tis the season, so there's the "Happy Holidays" table, with its quirky array of titles--Cornell West's new memoir, Ken Auletta's Googled, Alexandra Horowitz's Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know, a biography of Thelonious Monk--authors and subjects with seemingly little if anything in common. The "Gift Books" table (20% off) is stacked with painstakingly crafted art books--one with gorgeous photos of the Vatican flanked by the Marvel Comics Encyclopedia and a history of Lego, the snappable children's toy. There's "Children's Books," "History," "Biographies," "New Arrivals," and "New in Paperback." Off to the right, Dean Koontz warrants his own narrow shelf. So does Michael Crichton. Beat a path to the cash register and you may stop to chuckle at the "Humor" table.

Have you ever wondered who decides which of the 55,000 books published each year end up on which tables and why? It's not serendipity, not by chance, not because some Barnes & Noble tastemaker is trying to lure us with the most scintillating reads of the year. It's marketing, pure and simple, all of it bought and paid for by publishers. One editor I spoke with, who, like almost everyone else I interviewed for this column insisted on anonymity for fear of alienating powerful booksellers, calls it "bookstore baksheesh."

The practice is known as Co-op, and each book on each table costs publishers anywhere from $3,000 to $30,000, and even up to $50,000 depending on placement. The closer a table is to the front of the store, the more expensive the real estate. But quantity, duration, and even the season affect what publishers must pay. Holiday placement--Christmas, New Years (when a flood of self-improvement "new you" books comes out), Fathers Day, and Mothers Day are big seasonal tables and demand higher prices. If you see books with their covers facing you, odds are publishers paid for the privilege. (These are called "end cap" displays.) While I'd like to believe that my new book, Viral Loop, is one of the best business titles of the fall (SmartMoney did), my publisher had to pay Barnes & Noble to include it in the "Best of Business" bay for a month and the "New Arrivals Hardcover" table for two weeks.

Barnes & Noble is not alone in charging publishers for placement. Borders names its price for front-of-the-store placement. Large independent booksellers sometimes glean money for tables and get $50 for mentioning a book in their newsletters. On Amazon, my publisher paid for a month of "Buy Viral Loop Get Predictably Irrational" and at 19 airports there were displays at Paradies stores pairing Viral Loop with Fast Company magazine.

Booksellers and publishers have draped a veil of secrecy over the entire practice. A spokesperson for one publisher told me this "information is considered proprietary" and "it would be against company policy" to talk about it "even anonymously." But really, there's nothing nefarious about it. It's all part of the retail game. When you control the distribution channels, you get to make the rules. Department store, supermarket and drug store chains all demand pay-to-play placement on their shelves.

"If you took everything out of a supermarket that was bought and paid for promotions, it would look like Soviet Russia," says Lorraine Shanley, a principal of Market Partners International, a consulting firm. "Books have a kind of halo effect because they are advertisement-free, but they are not promotions-free."

Barnes & Noble monetizes only a scant 3% to 5% of a store's total space, far less than supermarkets. The miles and miles of shelves crammed with books with only their spines showing don't cost publishers anything. But because Barnes & Noble, Amazon and Borders control distribution, they have immense clout, deciding which titles stick out when customers browse their stores and Web sites. They are empowered by a scarcity of space: There are so many books but only so much square footage available in stores. But publishers only invest in titles they predict will sell, and Barnes & Noble has the final say, sometimes refusing to stock books on tables if it decides customers won't buy them. For mid-list books, the booksellers have the upper hand. For top-selling authors like Mitch Albom and now Sarah Palin, the bookstores need the books to fly off shelves as badly as the publisher do, and in that scenario the publishers often gain leverage.

While authors complain the loudest, it's a tough business for everyone involved. A recent post on "The Profitable Publisher" blog kindly crunches numbers. If a book lists for $30, the publisher gets between $15 and $18, but it has to pay a wholesaler 15% ($4.50) and a distributor another 15%. Take the higher number and Hyperion, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and the rest end up with $9. Pre-publication (cover design, text design, copyediting, etc.) run about a buck. Printing: $3.25. Author royalties, maybe $3 a book. Don't forget salaries, rent and the like, which may cost a buck or two on each title. Then there are returns, with booksellers returning unsold merchandise to the publishers, who either remainder it for pennies on the dollar, or simply pulp it. In the end a publisher is fortunate to wring a few cents on a book. No wonder it's a hits business, with John Grisham, Dan Brown, Stephenie Meyer, and J.K. Rowling carrying the rest of us. If a publisher gets one or two big books a year, it might report margins of 10%--if it's lucky.

Meanwhile, bookstores don't have it any easier. Of the $12 Barnes & Noble receives for carrying a $30 hardcover, a high percentage is earmarked to overhead. A store has to sell about 2,000 hardcovers just to pay rent on a superstore, which can reach $20,000 a month or more. Then there are salaries in both the store and corporate headquarters, utility bills, maintenance, taxes, marketing, and advertising. Maybe, just maybe, the company earns a buck or two off of each title. If it doesn't sell enough books, it doesn't stay in business.

With publishers and booksellers battling over such slender margins, no wonder booksellers aren't shy about pushing publishers around, since, well, they can. Amazon calculates how much business it did over the course of a year with a publisher and dictates how much it will spend on marketing, like it or not; it also offers used books on the same page as new titles (royalties accrue only on new books) which publishers view as an affront but are powerless to prevent. Barnes & Noble deducts marketing costs from the amount it owes each publisher for the books it sells and has its own rules for returns--20%, 30%, sometimes 40% of a particular title--which it ships back to publishers who must eat the cost.

A former children's book publisher, who left the business 10 years ago, still gripes about Barnes & Noble. "They're bullies," he says. Out of the blue he would receive a truckload of books that had been sitting on shelves for two or three years, many of them torn, dog-eared or colored in. Sometimes, he claims, they weren't even his books. He'd send them back but Barnes & Noble would simply deduct the amount from his account. It wasn't personal, just business.

And this business permeates everything. So the next time you find yourself wandering into a Barnes & Noble and stop at a table to thumb through a book that catches your eye, remember that a publisher paid to put it there, hoping you would do just that. It's not that you've been punk'd. You've just been marketed to.

Adam L. Penenberg is author of Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today's Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves. A journalism professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, Penenberg is a contributing writer to Fast Company. Viral Loop Chronicles appears weekly.

[Photos by brewbooks]

Twitter Abracadabras Weasley Whereabouts Clock Into Reality

Kit Eaton — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:00:01 EST

Oh Harry Potter, you may be the stuff of fantasy for kids everywhere but you're not real. Which is why Twitter is more awesome: It's really real, and someone's just used it to make a version of the Weasley family's locator clock.

If you don't remember the Weasley family's magical Whereabouts clock from the Harry Potter series, here's a quick reminder: It doesn't tell the time, but it does have nine hands (one for each family member) that track everyone's location in real time. The dial has Home, School, Work, Traveling, Lost, Hospital, Prison, Quidditch, and Mortal Peril engraved upon it, and as Lord Voldemort's evil power expands more and more time is spent with the hands pointing to the last one in that list. It's magical, unique, and sadly fictional of course.

Enter Twitter, and a nimble-fingered DIY Arduino programmer. The premise is simple: Take the Twitter feed of each family member every couple of minutes or so and parse the text for known locator-status words. Recognize relevant phrases, then pass control codes to a programmable Arduino board hidden inside a replica Whereabouts clock. Result: Individual's hands are driven to point to the relevant location on the dial, with a choice of Home, Lost, Texas, Traveling, Prison, Work, Church, Minnesota, School, Read Me, Doctor and, yes, Mortal Peril (though since G.W. Bush's power has waned, it probably won't point here often).

Simple, brilliant, soon to be turbo-powered by the expected explosion in geo-located Tweets, and I really really want one.

[MagicClock via HackedGadgets]

Cyber Monday: Marketing Myth No More?

Kit Eaton — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:30:05 EST

It's Cyber Monday--Yay! What's that you say? "Nothing but a marketing myth designed to boost pre-Holiday sales?" And Black Friday is, what, a day when we're genetically predisposed to camping out in a 33-degree wintery mix for a midnight sale on Nerf cannons at Toys 'R' Us? It's all marketing. And while Cyber Monday may never be the new Black Friday, 2009's sales figures make it look a little more real.

Black Friday, while itself the product of marketing, is a logical time for stores to launch sales. Consumers generally have the day off and feel like a stroll about the mall to work off some of the massive dinner they ate the prior night. Cyber Monday, by contrast, comes after the holiday, when everyone's usually back at work, bloated and tired from driving eight hours home from grandma's house and already stressing the backlog of unanswered e-mail at work.

For years, Cyber Monday has been controversial, numbers-wise, too. In 2005, when the term was coined by the Shop.org Web site as a promotion, Business Week wrote: "Cyber Monday isn't nearly the biggest online shopping or spending day of the year. It ranks only as the 12th-biggest day historically, according to market researcher comScore Networks. It's not even the first big day of the season."

But last year ComScore's figures showed it ranked in third place for the year's biggest sales day. This year e-retailers are once again updating their online stores with discounts to try to attract another wave of consumer spending. And as the light glimmers at the end of Recession Tunnel and retailer report a successful Black Friday, we may well expect ComScore's figures to move Cyber Monday even higher up the list.

So at what point does an entirely made-up marketing event become something real (for whatever definition of real you choose to accept in this Internet world)? Well, surely Black Friday's sales events started off, informally, in the same way. And here's a bit of a left-field piece of news to set you thinking: Britons are expected to spend a whopping £300 million today. Yup--that's British consumers, living in a nation which doesn't even celebrate Thanksgiving.

[Via MediaLifeMagazine, BusinessWeek, The Telegraph]

Why Is Your Web Designer Wearing a Blue Hat Today?

Alissa Walker — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:00:00 EST

You might have already noticed that the avatars of your most Web-friendly friends have donned a real (or Photoshopped) blue knit beanie today. Sure, the weather's getting cold, but November 30 has also been deemed the third annual Blue Beanie Day for Web designers and developers who support Web standards.

Hundreds of supporters--who call themselves "Standardistas"--have already uploaded their blue beanie shots to a Flickr pool in a show of solidarity. The blue hats signify that they'll adhere to a set of best practices for standardized, accessible, universal Web design and development. It's these people you can thank for building Internet experiences focused on usability, meaning those of you puttering along on the oldest copy of Internet Explorer can navigate sites just as beautifully as the newest Google Chrome browser.

The reason for the blue hat is a nod to the bible-like Designing With Web Standards author Jeffrey Zeldman, who famously donned a blue knit hat in his author photo for the book, which was published in 2003. This year, perfectly timed to coincide with the blue-hat day, the book's third edition has been published, with plenty of updates for the Standardistas to fill their blue-hatted heads.

Now That's a Motorcycle

Cliff Kuang — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:30:29 EST

A U.K. firm resuscitates the beauty of 1960s motorcycle design--with laser etching and screen-printing.

Have you noticed how ugly motorcycles are becoming, what with all the grotesquely overgrown choppers and ridiculous-looking crotch rockets? It's time for a design intervention--and Carefully Considered is here to help.

The design firm was recently tasked with creating a new type of motorcycle for a U.K. start-up, Mac Cycles. The responded by taking the design back to the cafe racers of the 1960s and 1970s. As they write, "The intention was to create something new in a category overwhelmingly garish with logos and neon graphics."

In all, they created eight prototypes, each of them finished with laser-etched detailing and screen-printed graphics:

Actually, this is the second time that Carefully Considered has taken note of a design culture gone haywire: In 2006, they produced a series of show bikes for Trek intended to combat the "NASCAR stylings," "horsey logotypes," and "lightening bolts" of modern bike design:

Check out all the motorcycles here.

[Via Core 77]

Today's Vision of Tomorrow: Augmented Reality-Boosted Beer Drinking, Via Stella Artois

Kit Eaton — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST

Probably not good news if you've just fallen off the wagon: Stella Artois has just leaped aboard the augmented reality advertising app bandwagon, and it's almost certainly the way beverage ads will go in the future, mainly through convenience.

We've shown you many times the different, exciting ways that AR can expand the utility of your humble smartphone--mainly for fun, but also for useful purposes. Well, Stella Artois has just launched an AR iPhone app dubbed Le Bar Guide that is, so the company says, the "first global 3D augmented reality iPhone bar guide." Essentially it's an AR app that tells you where you can sink a glass of Stella's finest beer nearby to your present location, wherever that may be on the planet. And it therefore neatly wraps up AR's potential fun factor, usefulness, and commercial viability in one tiny app.

The blurb says the app is "for beer connoisseurs and lovers of fine bars around the world"--mostly that involves highlighting bars that serve Stella. But by letting you find bars that serve the brand by locality or rating, the app is promoting both Stella Artois' products and the establishments that actually sell it--damn clever. Thanks to the convenience of AR-assisted navigation to said bars (handy if you're already a little under the influence) it'll probably drive plenty of new foot traffic there. And with the words "Stella Artois" ringing in the mind of the app's users, it'll also likely be responsible for a healthy chunk of sales too.

And that's why you'll see plenty of other beer makers quickly chasing Stella's tail--if there's money to be had, you can be sure they'll try and get hold of some, by hook or by crook. And while this will be no doubt very convenient for the average beer-drinking, smartphone-owning Joe, it could quickly result in a kind of small-market saturation problem (that'll face many products in the AR advert game at some point) with too many competing offerings. Then the companies will have to work out clever ways to make their AR app stand out from the others--using more aggressive AR ad tactics than mere convenience such as this app offers. What do you think the perfect solution might be? I think I may have one idea: AR App-driven drinking games. Oh deary deary me.

[Via YouTube]

Apocalypse Now: Scenes from the Industrialized Wasteland

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:30:00 EST

Society6 Is Etsy for the Artsy, Crowds Curate

Stephanie Schomer — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:00:59 EST

In the past few years, a number of Web sites have surfaced to make quality art available to the masses (at affordable prices). Gallery owner Jen Bekman's 20x200.com offers limited edition prints starting at $20. TinyShowcase.com does the same, and donates a portion of profits to a charity of the artist's choice. Both sites have developed a fan base, understandably--similar to a gallery, if you like a site's taste and aesthetic, you'll keep going back for more.

But what happens if you take away the curator and leave everything up to your customers?

Society6 aims to find out. Its goals are greater than simply selling high-quality prints. By creating an accessible social network, Society6 has produced a collaborative community of artists and art enthusiasts, where art can be bought, sold, promoted, and created.

"We've sort of taken ourselves out of the equation," said Justin Cooper, who founded the site along with Justin Wills and Lucas Tirigall. "You don't have to get by our personal taste to make your art available for sale. "

Purchased artwork is printed on demand, with Society6 setting a base price to cover production costs and a small profit for the company. The artist (anyone can join) then chooses the mark up and sale price of the piece--giving Society6 a wide range of price points--and when sold, they keep 100 percent of those profits.

When the site launched in May, its grant program--now called collaborations--came along with it to further business opportunities. Companies partner with the site to offer high-profile opportunities for artists (this also benefits the site, which doesn't display regular advertisements. To get space on the site, advertisers must "make it collaborative," Cooper says). MTV offered the chance to design track artwork for Travis McCoy, and Modern Amusement wanted a t-shirt design for the 2010 line. Kidrobot is currently recruiting artists through the site. More than 70 other collaborations have been awarded in the past six months.

"Artists, instead of being exploited and making submissions and waiting to see if they win a contest--this lets them just throw their hats in the ring based on their existing body of work. And there's almost always a commission that comes along with it," Cooper said.

Not an artist? No problem. Art enthusiasts are welcome to join the site as curators, who can select their favorite pieces and help promote them. Curators make up 30% of Society6 members, and others can follow their selections, similar to a Twitter feed. The pieces that receive the most promotions (from artists and curators alike) are displayed on the Society6 homepage.

A curator with a particularly good eye can even make some extra cash. They can create a "collection" of their favorite pieces, and promote that collection on their own Web site or blog. If it results in a sale, they get a commission.

It will be interesting to see how the young site grows, but based on the success of similar sites--20x200 frequently sells out of prints--it seems that creating a more interactive environment couldn't hurt its chances of catching fire.

[Society6]

Dirty Secrets Behind the Contagious Marketing of Clean

Martin Lindstrom — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:30:00 EST

Suddenly, you see it everywhere--in airports, hotels, restaurants, and of course, in most public bathrooms. It's on sale in corner kiosks, wedged conspicuously between the gum and People magazine. And in a blink, it's been seamlessly integrated into life as an essential everyday item. Just five years ago, the product never existed anywhere, and yet if you were to conduct a straw poll, most would confide that they simply couldn't live without it.

I'm not talking about the iPod or the Blackberry, or even your favorite pair of Crocs--I'm talking about antibacterial hand gel--the kind you can squirt whenever you feel the need to cleanse. And from what I see around me, a lot of people seem to be feeling pretty dirty these days.

It's a phenomenon prompted first by bird flu and now by swine flu. Ironically, neither virus can be prevented by sanitary wipes nor cleansing gels, since both are spread through minute droplets sneezed or coughed out by someone who's infected. But the thought of contagious diseases that have the capacity to kill has driven us into a sanitation spin.

A while back I conducted an experiment on NBC's Today Show. It involved scanning a woman named Kelly's brain as she walked down the supermarket aisle. The objective was to study her thought patterns as she made a selection from the thousands of products on offer. Supermarket executives closely monitored the large screens displaying Kelly's brain activity as she engaged in her choices. They were thrilled with her selection of brands, and applauded her decision-making processes.

Kelly first picked a baby shampoo, later explaining that her child's pediatrician recommended the brand. Interestingly, this very choice generated the most brain activity during the shopping spree, supporting research that says when an authoritative figure recommends a brand, our brains focus more intently. This probably goes some way towards explaining why testimonials remain effective. Furthermore, the executives were intrigued by the fact that the "discount" signs consistently registered on the scans, despite Kelly denying being affected by them.

There was one thing that the executives, the film crew, the producer, and even the viewers failed to notice. Every time Kelly picked a product off the shelf, the brain measured a 4-second reaction. And it's this reaction time that can force a manufacturer to change everything about their marketing strategy, including their packaging and marketing campaign.

Let's take a moment to think about this. Every time Kelly selected an item from the shelves, she held it momentarily and examined it. There's nothing surprising about this. What was surprising is that once she'd made her decision to buy that very product, she'd return it to the shelf, and pick another just like it, stashed three rows behind. This whole action took less than four seconds. Did she consider the first item dirty? Perhaps.

Research reveals that a similar experiment conducted five years ago, minus the brain scans, showed their "Kelly" couldn't have cared less. What she initially picked off the shelf went directly into her trolley. But now, this fear of contamination has permeated the shopper's psyche.

The brain scans showed that as Kelly took the product off the shelf and at the same moment decided to buy it, a strong activation in the amygdale area of her brain took place. The amygdale is responsible for generating fear and danger, as well as psychological discomfort. The fear was registered with every first contact Kelly had during the entire shopping expedition, from the Dove soap to the Gillette foam, as well as the Elizabeth Arden beauty products. The fearful response grew even more dramatically when the product of her choosing was the last item on the shelf. So much so, that she opted for another brand rather than go with the last-standing item.

This, you may say, is the response of just one woman, and as such, cannot be held as an ultimate truth. I suspect however, that her reaction is far from unusual.

After her shopping trip, I asked Kelly why she finally bought the shampoo and gel, while on the other hand she returned the shaver and mascara to the shelf. She replied, "I love the brand but for some reason, I just didn't feel for it right now." Had I decided to build my future strategy based on the outcome of good, old, conventional qualitative research techniques, I would never know how to solve the problem of Kelly's brand rejection. However, the deciding 4-seconds measured by the scan revealed that cleanliness had catapulted up the ladder of priorities... now by far surprising any other factor--even though she was a big fan of both the brands she ended up rejecting

One may ask, what made Kelly believe the product second from the front to be cleaner? Another study of ours shows that most women pick the second cubical when entering the bathrooms simply because they feel the first is too dirty. This psychological quirk generally means the second cubical will be dirtier, but it's all about an instinctive reaction built into our behavior from early childhood--an insight which marketeers now fully understand in their brand-building endeavors.

Environmental issues, media fragmentation, and the need for increased consumer interaction with the brand have become the most pressing topics in the branding world. As the globe focuses on these very important issues, another trend seems to have slipped in the side door--the need for sanitization. Despite the insidious nature of this need for clean, the affect on our behavior is so subtle that even consumers are not aware of its power to control our behavior. It's embedded itself into our culture, our behavior and our decision making to such an extent, that to a large degree it controls where we choose to spend our money.

Whatever you may think of it, those brands who are clever enough to identify and run with it, will be the ones who will be reaping untold rewards. In a consumer population who has come to expect their food to be well sealed and vacuum packed, their expectations have now extended to every category they purchase being sanitized for their protection.

But there's another message underlying this fact. Far too often we look in the wrong direction for answers, forgetting that we are fundamentally emotional creatures, 85% driven by our subconscious mind. Yet today 100% of all our research seems to rely on studied, conscious research techniques. A little food for thought, I guess. So long as it's sanitized before we do the thinking!

Martin Lindstrom is a 2009 recipient of Time Magazine's "World's 100 Most Influential People" and author of Buyology--Truth and Lies About Why We Buy (Doubleday, New York), a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. A frequent advisor to heads of numerous Fortune 100 companies, Lindstrom has also authored 5 best sellers translated into 30 languages. More at martinlindstrom.com.