New iPod Nano is Awesome

Get details here…

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

The Wildnerness Downtown

Arcade Fire and Google have joined forces in creating a new online music experience called “The Wildnerness Downtown.”  Based on HTML5, the experience pairs Arcade Fire’s song, “We used to wait” with a video directed by Chris Milk and allowes viewers to create their own personal view on the experience.

Check it out here…

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Technology, Design & Art | No Comments »

Thank you, iPad and LOVE Magazine

Yes, they’ve done it again…  Not only have they given us full frontal of the most beautiful women of all time (fashion icons issue), not only have they dressed Rosie Huntington Whiteley up like Jessica Rabbit (current issue), but now LOVE Magazine has found the direct route to our hearts- that is through a pimp iPad application (and it’s FREE)!

We strongly urge anybody with an interest in technology, beautiful women, interesting editorial video, or fashion, to download the application for iPad now (before they start charging for it).  Our favorite features are Ana Beatriz Barros brushing her hair, Leticia Casta writhing around on the ground, and Dree Hemingway jumping on the trampoline.

Posted in Technology, Fashion, Design & Art | No Comments »

The 288945 Most popular websites

Courtesy of Fast Company, this is an interesting infographic created by Nmap showing the top 288945 most popular websites on the internet (larger the icon, the higher the rank)…

Click below to see the full size image measuring 37,440 square pixels

Posted in Technology, Design & Art | No Comments »

Beautiful Game, Beautiful Videos…

The New York Times recently debuted a series of beautiful videos showing slow-motion women tennis players.  The accompanying article describes the shift in the sport as ladies have become stronger and now play with more power than in the past… I recommend checking out the article if you are a tennis fan, but watching the videos even if you dont follow the sport because they are so interesting to watch.

“Women have certainly never hit harder and not just on account of improved equipment. They’re stronger, bigger, faster, better trained and pushed above all by the example of the Williams sisters. Serena, glorious and musclebound, and Venus, long-limbed and tall, have redefined the sport around power. Years ago, tennis writers used to call Martina Navratilova, listed at 5-foot-8 and lean, a giantess with popping veins because other women seemed weaklings by comparison. Now most tour players would dwarf her. In large part what makes Henin, at 5-foot-5, such an exception on the tour and such fun to watch is that she’s nearly always David against the rising tide of Goliaths.”

Watch videos here…

Posted in Technology, Design & Art | No Comments »

Animated Typefaces

From the hallowed offices of uber-agency Calango (from Holland), come the latest in animated Typefaces.  Appropriately called “Moshun,” Fast Company points out, “the digital world is increasingly where brands are built and killed, whether you’re talking about Facebook pages, embedded ads, or corporate Web sites. Innovative companies that want to make their names pop — literally — will flock to non-static typography. Unfortunately for Krielaars, there’s no way to turn Moshun into a full-blown font at the moment. Though we’re betting that you’ll soon see more projects like this soon.”

Posted in Technology, Design & Art | No Comments »

Hermes is back in the saddle…

With a history of innovation and luxry in the saddle-making business, Hermes is going back to its roots and re-entering the arena with a new product.  Named the Talaris saddle, Luxist has the details… “Hermès unveiled the luxe item in conjunction with the Saut Hermès international show-jumping event it recently held at the Grand Palais in Paris. The $9,000 high-tech modular saddle features a tree made of carbon fiber and injected thermoplastic in place of the usual wood and steel, covered in the finest saddle leather. Master saddler Laurent Goblet came up with the design, aimed at taking the strain off the horse and the rider’s backs. “This is at the heart of the essence of Hermès, which is about marrying tradition and innovation,” the house’s artistic director Pierre-Alexis Dumas told WWD.”

(Think that would fit on my bike?)

Posted in Technology, Design & Art | No Comments »

Power, Kanye West Follow up…

As a follow up from Friday’s post about the Marco Brambilla X Kanye West mashup, here is a very interesting excerpt from Fast Company (Cliff Kuang) about the making of the video…

Kanye being Kanye, he stumbled across Brambilla’s work at the Standard Hotel in New York, in the elevator, which features a video screen playing Brambilla’s mind-boggling Civilization, which stitched together hundreds of found video clips to create a single video collage of heaven and hell.

Kanye eventually got in touch with Brambilla, and they both agreed that one track in particular off of Kanye’s album, “Power,” fit Brambilla’s own aesthetic best, with its intimations of overweening pride and a potential fall. “There’s one line in the song that says, ‘No one man should have that much power,” Brambilla explains. “That apocalyptic video fits my work.” Brambilla, though, insisted on a few criteria: “We agreed that it wouldn’t really be a music video,” he says. “There would be no cuts. And it wouldn’t even be the same duration as the track. Just 1:30.” (Partly owing to how long it would take to make anything longer.) As a result, the work isn’t a music video as much as it is a moving painting–in more ways that one.


Visually, the entire video is a homage to Michelangelo’s ceiling fresco for the Sistine Chapel; the composition was created by layering new images over a photograph of the ceiling. Brambilla usually works with found videos, gleaned from TV, movies, and the Internet, but in this case, he shot each and every one of 40-odd portrait vignettes.

Then came the technically complex part–Brambilla often has to wait for technology to catch up to his visions, and he’s always just about six months ahead of what’s possible. In 1999, even before the Matrix came out, he shot one of the first 360-degree images, of a falling man that appears about to hit the ground (a visual reference to Harry Shunk’s famous portrait of painter Yves Klein). For Civilization, he actually had to wait for new version of FLAME, the video editing software, to come out, since predecessors couldn’t handle the whopping 350 separate layers of video Brambilla was working with; he was also pushing the capabilities of the newest version of Maya, which was then brand-new. Brambilla used both those tools for “Power” (which has just 22 layers). Additionally, he shot the portraits with one of the newest Phantom cameras, which are capable of super slow-motion.

As to working with Kanye, Brambilla says it was a pleasure. “The first set of photographic references he sent for the video were these really graphic, sexual images,” he says. “These were the types of women he wanted in the video. But because he’s always wanting to push the envelope, there were basically no constraints on the video.” Except one: Kanye would be the star.

Posted in Technology, Design & Art | No Comments »

And the world’s biggest Apple store is…

Covent Garden (Just down the street from the fantastic Covent Garden Hotel…)!  “Brushed steel, glass stairs, oak tables – the latest Apple retail store in London’s Covent Garden has everything you’d expect from the company. Due to open on Saturday, it will be Apple’s 300th store and its biggest yet, but the high-profile opening is also a welcome distraction from the recent launch of its misfiring iPhone 4.

Apple’s retail strategy relies on filling its chic, spacious stores with attractive devices. The first retail outlet opened 10 years ago in Virginia, and Apple now has stores from China to Switzerland, from the iconic glass cube on New York’s Wall Street to the Louvre in Paris. Later this summer, new shops will open in Chicago, Paris and Shanghai, the latter featuring the largest pieces of curved glass ever manufactured.  Each store is overseen by Ron Johnson, Apple’s senior vice-president for retail. He said it would have more space for children, training, small business services and kit in stock than any of its other stores in the world.

Apart from two small outlets in Westfield and Brent Cross, the often chaotic and crowded Regent Street store has served central London until now.  Retail analysts Verdict estimate that despite the spacious layout the Regent Street shop has the highest sales density of any retailer in London, generating an average £2,000 per square foot. Consumer electronics firm Dixons generates £536 and TopShop’s flagship store at Oxford Circus £1,000.  “For most people, what they call flagship stores, it’s just for the brand and doesn’t make money,” said Johnson. “It was a big bet to come to Regent Street and open a store like that, and it worked.” ”

(via Guardian)

Posted in London, Technology, Design & Art | No Comments »

TMA-1 by Aiaiai (headphones…)

Move over Dr. Dre, Bose or whatever other brand of tinny inferior or unstylish headphones you may know… there is a new guy in town and his name is TMA-1 by Aiaiai…  With endoresements and sound-engineering input from 28 of the world’s most epic DJs including Booka Shade, Flying Lotus, Hot Chip, 2ManyDJs, etc… the list is pretty long and impressive.

SlamXHype recently spoke with the guys at AIAIAI about the project.

Tell us about the motivation behind this new project TMA-1 for AIAIAI.

We had been doing different headphones for a while, mainly in-ears, but had an idea of doing a robust, high-quality headphone aimed mainly at DJ’s. There are of course quite a few out there, but among them we especially liked the Sennheiser HD 25. Both the look and technical aspects of it. Through friends who dj at different levels we heard same story, though, the Sennheiser would break to easily during gigs and travel. So we thought we would give a shot, and make something really sturdy. From a design point of view, we wanted to move away from the very colorful, and try to do something that alluded to the idea of the dj-headphone. You know, if you take a pair of headphones, be it Pioneer, Sennheiser or Monster and hold them in front of a bright light, the shadow they cast on a white wall looks quite similar. You can’t see the logo’s, colors and other little differences. We wanted to work with that shadow image. The robustness of the TMA-1 was also a factor when designing – the less you put on it, the less can break. In that sense, the TMA is thought of, and build as a tool.



The name of the project is worth talking about- can you tell us a bit more about this?

The name TMA-1 is taken from Arthur C. Clarkes’s science fiction novel 2001: A Space Odyssey. TMA-1 (Tycho Magnetic Anomaly-1) refers to the apparent magnetic irregularity found at the Tycho crater on the Moon’s surface by American astronauts. A black Monolith buried 40 feet under the lunar surface causes the anomaly.The monoliths are extremely long-lived and reliable machines and resist destructive testing beyond the theoretical limits of material strength. We found this to be a fitting name for a sturdy, all black DJ headphone.

Who is involved, both design wise and musician wise? And why did you choose to collaborate with them?

On the design of the TMA-1 we’ve worked with Lars from KiBiSi. We’ve worked with him before on other projects, and we are quite aligned when it comes both aesthetics and functionality. The only challenge in working with Lars is that he is stoned out his mind most of the day… So half the times he were presenting us with new ideas, it would be a design for a hat or new type of wheelchair, – he had simply forgotten that we were trying to do a pair of headphones? But we’ve found a way to work around that, and now we couldn’t be more pleased with the end
result. On the music side of things we had two different approaches. We’ve worked with the label Tartelet Records and the producers MannHandle on sound and spectrum, and then we have consulted 28 of the world’s most respected DJ’s on issues concerning the fit, durability, usability and of course also the sound of the headphone. So we hope to have covered most angles.

Posted in Technology | No Comments »