BusinessWeek Online: Kathy Walsh was just 16 years old when her hair began falling out. She’d then fashion her own beehive wigs and decorate them with strings of pearls. In black and white photographs from back then, her hair looks a foot tall. After years of struggling with the problem herself, she finally decided to open up her own wig […]
Turning Hair Loss into Gain
iSkin eVo2 Wildsides
Gizmodo: The new iSkin eVo2 Wildsides are everything I hate about “hip” product design: gaudy colors, ridiculous X-treM advertising, gimmicky glow-in-the dark features, a naming scheme that sounds like it was first carved by ballpoint on a 7th-grader’s notebook (Verve! Rebel! Diva!), and a price ($35) that far outweighs the amount of thought or effort that went into their creation. […]
Marketing’s Reality TV
MarketingVOX: Creative outsourcing firm Aquent launched an online “reality show,” pitting five designers against one another to create campaigns in several specific fields. The work will be shown online and judged by the public, winnowing down the numbers to get to the one designer best able to tickle the fancies of the web visitors. The Studio Smackdown will run through […]
Clean Toothbrush, Thanks To Violight
DailyCandy: There’s something really, really gross in your bathroom. Something that harbors millions of micro-organisms and tons of bacteria. A seething hotbed of icky contaminants. It’s your toothbrush (ew!), and, we hate to tell you, but it really ought to be cleaner. It can be — with the help of Violight, a new toothbrush sanitizer designed by Philippe Starck. Using […]
Social Life Of Brands
PSFK: Call it lifestyle marketing. It’s not enough for a company to just sell you a product any more. The goal, today, is for you to live the lifestyle any given product is supposed to represent – and for that company to create and cater to that lifestyle. The Toronto Star says, “It’s a major shift from designing advertising campaigns […]
Tools For Radio Waves Hunters
We Make Money Not Art: Oren Horev , Myriel Milicevic (who had worked also on the Zone project) and Marcos Weskamp designed the Amazing All-Band Radio, three innocent-looking devices that allow users to hunt short, medium and long radio waves from the comfort of their home. The antenna of the Microwave Boombox captures the high-frequency signals of wireless communication devices […]
Movie Location Tourism
Trends in Japan: A new breed of tourist is beginning to attract the attention of tour operators and of localities where movies have been filmed. The main objective of these visitors is not to see famous landmarks or to go shopping but to visit the settings of popular movies and TV series. They are eager to experience for themselves the […]
Need Help Loading My iPod
The New York Times: It sounds like a line from a spam e-mail: Work from home! Low risk! Flexible schedule! Earn hundreds of dollars each gig! But an emerging group of resourceful entrepreneurs says there is no catch. The rising popularity of Apple’s sleek iPod has created a new niche service: the professional iPod loader. There are housekeepers to tend […]
Soapshow
Trendwatching: Prefer soap shows over reality TV? Then check out this case of GRAVANITY par excellence from The Netherlands: Soapshow, a multimedia concoction that enables any needy individual to create his or her own soap series, for all the world to see. Users create their own soap by posting texts, voice, pictures, and video of their daily lives onto their […]
RFID Tagging Getting Big
BusinessWeek: ProfitLogic’s software is already at work in Gap and Target stores, and President Scott Friend sees many more retailers following suit. The transformative technology that entails tagging merchandise with radio frequency computer chips (RFID) is on the horizon. But ask anyone at the 2005 annual convention of the National Retail Foundation (NRF) and it’s clear that most of the […]