This unique “triangular” cabin called the Allandale House, is a modern version of the forest cabin based on an extruded A-frame that was constructed for an idiosyncratic connoisseur and her family. More images and info here.
Way back in February 09 we told you about the impossible project ! That a team of Polaroid lovers, wanted to find funds to save at least one Polaroid factory. And they did ! Apparently the film quality is not there yet but of course a very cool packaging and for now, it only comes in b&w, but they say color PX film is on the way…
Here is below the image of their Press Package
Read More about The Polaroid is back ! (23 words)
© C* for TrendLand -> Fashion Blog & Trend Magazine, 2010.
Calling itself an "all you can eat, on demand, whenever you want it" music service, MOG gives its users access to "just about every artist, album and song ever made" for $5 a month - certainly not a deal to scoff at.
"You can see the queue, you can jump to anywhere in the queue, when a song comes on the library, you can save it," said David Hyman, CEO of MOG, at today's unveiling. "When you listen to Bob Marley radio, it's not Bob Marley inspired radio. You get Bob Marley 24/7."
Today's launch brings this sort of on-demand music delivery to your smartphone. MOG will be launching for Android and iPhone early in the second quarter of 2010. Users will get full access to 7 million tracks on demand, the ability to download music to the phone, MOG radio, 64 ACC+ audio quality with higher quality available by download, for $10 a month.
The demo of the mobile app for Android showed a responsive, full-featured application that allows users to browse through artist discographies, with the ability to add entire albums to the playlist and voice search functionality.
Looking at the iPhone app, we saw a search based app that gives users the ability to play by album, song, playlist or artist radio. An interesting service we've only seen with MOG was the slider, which allows the user to give a variable on how they would like MOG radio to work, whether focusing solely on the chosen artist, on similar artists, or somewhere in between. The user can also switch over to look at the album a particular track comes from, play that album and even chose other songs from that album.
The app is not yet available for download on the iPhone and Hyman said that similar services have not had a problem so far. He guaranteed that there would be no problem for the Android, but couldn't say the same for iPhone.
There is a bit of buzz in the crowd here at SXSW that Spotify CEO Daniel Ek will be announcing the similar music service's arrival on U.S. shores when he speaks tomorrow at the keynote speech. We also spoke with Michelle Fields, a marketer with Napster.com, who said that a Napster mobile application was also on the way. Napster offers nearly 9 million songs to its users.
"We have a very strong mobile strategy and a mobile application will be unveiled soon," said Fields.
While we long ago swore off CDs and moved over to the likes of Last.fm and Pandora, this sort of music portability might actually bring us back into the land of the paid consumer. What do you say? Will you shell out 10 clams a month to carry around more music than you've probably ever owned in your pocket?
Charting The Beatles is a project by graphic designer Michael Deal to express the history of that band through quantitative infographics. Pictured above is one describing their working activities, divided into touring, filming, and recording. Deal invites anyone to participate by contributing their own infographics to a flickr set.
You hate it but you love it -- Diggy Simmons is the hottest thing to hit pubescent rap since Kris Kros. Check out his latest video below.
Seriously though, teen rap is getting set for a second coming with the likes of Diggy, Lil Twist, Lil Chuckee etc. starting to bring the heat.
On Thom Yorke’s interpretation of the Liars Proud Evolution, he surrounds lead singer Angus Andrew’s vocals in a battle of electronic programming. The track starts out with a basic loop, then comes Andrew’s vocals that evoke a deep isolation and soon Yorke adds a simple but satisfying cord progression and allows for the programming to take you on a trip of its own. Yorke’s ability to to focus in on the most important aspects of a track, in this case Andrew’s vocals and Yorke’s chord progression, and keep it simple while then building electronic storms around that to drive the track into new territories is part of his genius. It might not seem like much, but it’s simple and complicated at the same time and that’s not an easy feat to accomplish.
Listen to “Proud Evolution (Thom Yorke 500qd Remix)” here
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
Buy Here
© HEART for TrendLand -> Fashion Blog & Trend Magazine, 2010.
Sebastian Schneider has designed the Franzl table and bench. Franzl is inspired by the traditional german beer table and bench. It is foldable and stackable..
The Franzl Table and Bench by Sebastian Schneider » CONTEMPORIST
Sonos has now confirmed the Index Ventures investment we reported two days ago. The company has taken an additional $25 million in capital from Index, raising the total raised by the company to $65 million. And Index Ventures Partner Mike Volpi, a former CIsco executive, has joined their board of directors.
From our original post:
Volpi will bring real expertise to the Sonos board. As recently as 2007 he ran an $11 billion routing and access products business for Cisco. He clearly knows how to sell products at scale.
Sonos has been around since 2003 and has raised some $40 million from private angel investors and BV Capital. Until last year the company sold very high end music products that users loved passionately, but the mutli-thousand dollar price point for a complete system made mainstream penetration difficult.
But in 2009 Sonos began selling a new product, the S5 music system, that users control via their iPhone. The S5 is just $400 and has driven “massive growth” says the company.
Like Flip last year, Sonos likely had a choice between selling now or raising new money for major expansion. Flip sold to Cisco. Sonos, it seems, is taking more money, but adding an ex-Cisco exec as well. Perhaps they’ll get their cake and eat it, too.
BY MACCABEE MONTANDON Thu Mar 11, 2010
It's been the retailing story for years--and new research says it still is! Yes, online sales continue to soar, recession be damned. We were all probably at least vaguely aware of this phenomenon but to see it in such stark numbers astounds anew. Perhaps the most eye-opening figure of all is the average amount that an Internet shopper spent last year: $1,006.50. Sure buys a lot of Lady Gaga downloads. Or these.
Infographic: Rob Vargas
“If you’re counting on the internet replacing cable, you’re crazy,” says Cuban; Ronen posits it as generational—if you’‘re 50 with HD, you’re comfortable the way things are; if you’re 23 and getting your first apartment, you see things differently. Cuban doesn’t see the same possibility of making money from TV online; he’d rather get small amounts—when he can—from multichannel distributors.
Ronen on Redbox: “You’re already going to the supermarket to pick up condoms and you’re picking up the movie.”
Cuban: “When you’re in an a la carte universe, the cost of marketing goes through the roof.”
Let’s make a deal: But he told Ronen: “If you offer me $3 a sub for all million of your subs, I’ll do it.” Ronen replied, “If I bring you a deal that pays you three bucks a sub ...” Cuban reminded him it would take a guarantee. Ronen asked if he would do with a guarantee. Cuban said yes and offered him the same as the HD Net rate card: “You take rate card for a half-million subs and you’ve got a deal.”
Who’s the man: A former DirecTV (NYSE: DTV) subscriber talked about dropping the service because he got tired of paying “the man” for bad service. Cuban: “What Avner’s saying is he wants to be the man.” Ronen: “Boxee is an open source project .. if we’re becoming the man, if we’re trying to get too greedy” someone else can come in. Work in progress.
The Economist has an interesting chart showing a handful of cities, ranked according to the latest cost of living data. New York provides the benchmark with a score of 100. The world's most expensive cities, in order, are Paris, Tokyo, and Oslo, with scores around 140. Mumbai is down in 131st place with a score below 50. It would be interesting to compare this to the average incomes in these places. Via PSFK.
Why does a salad cost more than a Big Mac? Part of the reason is that a huge proportion of our food subsidies go to meat while only 0.37 percent go to fruits and vegetables. That makes meat and dairy artificially cheap, so we end up consuming more of it than we should, and getting fatter.
© Bruno Helbling
Czech photographer Bruno Helbling shared with us this concrete house designed by marte.marte Architekten Feldkirch, Austria. You can check the text description, more photographs and drawings after the break.
Approaching the house, it seems monolithic, almost hermetic. Two incisions divide the building, which sits prominently on a relatively level hill, guide guests to a small entrance niche and offer a view of the introverted courtyard to the north. The hard shell opens up towards the valley and the south side, and the extensive glazing reveals the scenery and mountain panorama. The terrace faces the pond and small integrated stream, which blend in with their natural surroundings, lends the courtyard a sense of an open air living room and connects the entrance floor to the grounds via a ramp.
The main functional areas are arranged in flowing spatial transitions from the garage to the master bedroom, and from the studio style kitchen to the living/dining room. Due to the diagonals and axes, the visual relationships amaze and suggest size and expanse. On the lower level, the rooms are compact and more defined. Children’s rooms, a study, a utility room, a bathroom, a sauna and a music room round off the range of rooms.
© Bruno Helbling
Materialisation and detail reveal elegant restraint. The smooth exposed concrete surfaces find their counterpart in the interior in the tactile and optical softness of the white pine floors, built-in furniture and walls. The character of the house turns out to be bright, inviting and almost homey. Windows and doors in white aluminium bring robustness into play and add to the powerful appearance of the concrete.
© Bruno Helbling
The structure with its notches and recesses sits on the hill like a meteor that has just landed. The adjacent litter meadow embraces the natural bathing pond and brings the cultivated green zone right up to the house. An unpretentious bathhouse built on the foundation of a small barn is an additional atmospheric and useful link to the surrounding agricultural land.
The New York Times gives us one more reason to peek into Chatroulette: An awesome interview with Russian teenager Andrey Ternovskiy, who built the voyeur/chat site everyone loves to talk about. lt;/p>
Ternovskiy is visiting the US and flirting with investors, and you can see why they’d want to talk to him. The 17-year-old spent three days in his bedroom building the site, named it after “The Deer Hunter”, and now it attracts more tha 30 million visitors a month.
He’s also savvy enough to tell everyone that he’s perfectly happy to go it alone. Though it would be easier for him to do that if Google (GOOG) would send him a check. He says the search giant won’t pay him his AdWords money because he’s too young.
Q: Do you want investors?
A: I’m not sure. There are a lot of business people that are interested. I am afraid to take the offers as I don’t have a business plan. If I take the money I’m responsible for delivering on that. Right now I can survive without investors. The site uses pee -to-peer technology and my Web site is not the kind of site that needs a lot of money to run.
Q: So if someone came along to you today and said I’ll give you $5 million for the Web site would you sell it to them?
A: I’m not sure to be honest. The thing is, I could take the money, but what if it won’t work well in the future, I would blame myself. I don’t want to disappoint people.
You should read the whole thing, which doubles as a very nice metaphor for the Web 2.0 era.
Which turns out not to have disappeared, after all. You can now launch a Web service that attracts millions of users without having to leave your parents’ house.
But if words aren’t your thing, here’s that excellent Jon Stewart clip again.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, a bunch of small companies in Silicon Valley thought the future of television was theirs. Soon, the thinking went, TV would be everywhere. Frequent fliers would tune in on laptops and vacationers on tablets from the beach. If so inclined, you'd be able to watch Glee on a cell phone in a tree house. The network suits and the cable guys just didn't have the digital chops to make it happen. Fueled with venture money, tech companies with names like Boxee, Roku, and Sezmi pursued their dream of untethering viewers from their TV sets—and owning a piece of the advertising revenue.
As the big picture comes into focus though, it looks like the cable guys are playing the lead roles, using the $32 billion they pay content providers each year as leverage. The alphabet soup of newbies is still waiting in the wings for a moment that might never come.
What happened? Part of the answer is TV Everywhere, a service in its infancy, conjured up in quiet strategy sessions by Jeff Bewkes and Brian Roberts, the CEOs of Time Warner (TWX) and Comcast (CMCSA). They took a lesson from the music labels, which looked up one day to find that Steve Jobs and Apple (AAPL) had taken control of their inventory. The cable guys came up with a quick fix, one so technologically simple that you don't have to be a geek to get it: Viewers can watch shows for free, but only if they're cable subscribers first. In other words, as long as you tap a subscription code into your device—any device—you can watch anything you want, whenever you want.
The Federal Communications Commission is proposing an ambitious 10-year plan that will reimagine the nation’s media and technology priorities by establishing high-speed Internet as the country’s dominant communication network.
The plan, which will be submitted to Congress on Tuesday, is likely to generate debate in Washington and a lobbying battle among the telecommunication giants, which over time may face new competition for customers. Already, the broadcast television industry is resisting a proposal to give back spectrum the government wants to use for future mobile service.
The blueprint reflects the government’s view that broadband Internet is becoming the common medium of the United States, gradually displacing the telephone and broadcast television industries. It also signals a shift at the F.C.C., which under the administration of President George W. Bush gained more attention for policing indecency on the television airwaves than for promoting Internet access.
If you’re not familiar with Flavors.me it’s Lifestreaming service that I really like. I wrote about how it’s a great way to easily get a beautiful Lifestream built quickly. Well they have now officially launched their service and along with continuing to offer the great features available during the beta for free, they now have premium accounts with additional features.
For a mere $20 a year you can also get the following
They also plan to release a more advanced layout framework, an updated members directory along with a powerful search and new browsing tools. You can take a look at my page on Flavors.me here.
If you’re headed to SXSW be sure to meet the team on Saturday March 13th at 11:15AM at the Meet the press event.
Until now, SlingPlayer was only available over Wi-Fi, which means it was pretty much unusable in most situations where you actually needed it. Now, owners of Slingbox who purchase SlingPlayer ($29.99 in the App Store) can watch TV shows on their iPhones, provided they’re in 3G range.
Although it has approved SlingPlayer over 3G, AT&T points out that optimization is still a big deal when it comes to mobile apps such as SlingPlayer.
“Collaboration with developers like Sling Media ensures that all apps are optimized for our 3G network to conserve wireless spectrum and reduce the risk that an app will cause such extreme levels of congestion that they disrupt the experience of other wireless customers. Our focus continues to be on delivering the nation’s most advanced mobile broadband experience and giving our customers the widest possible array of mobile applications,” said Ralph de la Vega, president and CEO of AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets.
To make sure app developers are following guidelines, AT&T will provide them with wireless network optimization requirements for video and other apps by the end of the first quarter at its Developers Program website.
Amazing stuff from Vancouver based artist Nick Lepard. His technique is amazing!! Check out more of his works HERE
This house is located just outside Santiago, in the rural area of the Colina Valley. The abundant vegetation and open space, dominated by hills and groves, keeps the countryside feel of the environment, worn by urban expansion and insensitive real estate development, which reproduce city-type housing and infrastructure in a natural scenery. Thus, importing the city´s image over it.
While studying rural construction typologies, both housing and industrial, the space virtues of farm machinery and storage sheds and warehouses stood out, mainly due to its structural simplicity, interior amplitude and height, use flexibility, modular construction and its potential for programmed extension, all of which being strongly rated by the client.
© Cristina Alemparte
The elements that build these structures are easy to recognize, making them common and familiar, while individual and defined within the landscape through the use of materials. This infrastructure settles respectfully in countryside geography, through its association to large culture and free surfaces, and poplar groves of interior roads that are seen from a distance as high and long green axes. Size, robustness and clarity of its shape manifest its architectural condition among the valley.
© Nico Saieh
Opposite to this, the thermal and energetic problematic of heating and cooling interiors with large volumes of air, thinking in domestic use and its potential for rural housing and infrastructure, -this time inspired by its own characteristics and landscape-, extending countryside constructive tradition from a sustainable and contemporary environmental perspective.
As a design strategy we resolved to load the house´s structure with more variables concerning function and program, given the larger efforts it demands in the construction process, becoming the project´s theme and guideline. This results in a two story framework of individually shaped reinforced concrete frames, according to function and position in the house. No frame matches the next one, breaking symmetry and monotony of industrial reference models.
© Nico Saieh
Interior space is organized by collecting all service and circulation functions in a two story technical corridor, separated from social areas and bedrooms by a double height brick masonry wall, which runs across the house. Both areas are connected through openings in the wall. The second floor circulation overlooks the living room and terrace, stressing its verticality and role as a central, family gathering space. Three terraces were placed in both ends of the house, facing south for summer time and north for the winter sun.
The columns of each frame have a variable section that increases with height, to create the condition for an insulating exterior wall that provides the second floor and roof with a larger thermal capacity, combining a wide air chamber and a thick layer of mineral wool. This contributes to store the warm air mass for a longer time, using less energy to heat the house, like an old farm house with thick walls of adobe. To cool the house, cross ventilation was designed in both directions and trough both heights, to favor fresh air circulation and passive extraction of hot air.
Landscaping was treated using the site´s surface to build dry areas and gardens around the house, and in function of the natural patios that are formed below and both sides of an old poplar grove that ends inside the site.
