Steve Jobs Biography

Fans of Apple can look forward to the coming Steve Jobs biography, which was recently authorized to top bio writer and historian Walter Isaacson.

“Isaacson, who’s president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, has always concentrated his biographical efforts on the likes of Albert Einstein, Henry Kissinger, and Benjamin Franklin: giants of American political, historical, and scientific thought. But the Apple CEO is by far the youngest and most contemporary subject Isaacson has considered, and he presides over a technological and future-forward world, not one that reeks of history.

It’s a curious move on a number of levels. Jobs has never cooperated with anyone who’s written a book about him, evidently going so far as to compel Apple stores to stop stocking other books from publishers who sell those unauthorized tomes. Even though the Times says the book will cover Jobs’ life from childhood to his Apple years, this is a man who for years hid news of his battle with pancreatic cancer and reacted angrily when a journalist unwittingly tweeted from a borrowed iPad. So the idea he would suddenly turn candid, and let Isaacson into every private aspect of his inner life, is at best unrealistic and at worst ludicrous.”

(via Daily Finance)

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New BMW 5 Series

As one of the best selling BMW models, the Bavarian car company would have a difficult time improving their great 5 series.  However, new images from the Portugal preview of the 2011 5´s show a rounder and more classic shape which will most definiteley go over well among fans of the “ultimate driving machine.”

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Apple´s big news…

Will Apple debut their much-rumored tablet on January 27?…  only time will tell.  For now, we can draw conclusions from the speculations of Fast Company…

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The “On” Chair…

This looks amazing!  Say goodbye to Eames, Aeron, and Humanscale…  The On chair looks like it will be invading “cool” offices around the world soon.

Designed by Wiege, the On was five years in the making, and the research effort involved everyone from kinesiologists to materials scientists. The main insight was that the right chair isn’t right for everyone–you might spend years designing the most ideally comfortable chair, only to find that for some, it ends up causes long-term pain. The On, by contrast, has a several “joints” that allow the eat pan to tilt forward, back, and side-to-side–so your seating position can change constantly.

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Polaroid lives again!

After a collective depression of hipsters around the world as a result of Polaroid officially shuttering last year, we are proud to communicate that the company will be revived.

Following the widely publicized death of Polaroid film, it appears as the brand (alongside the recent appointing of Lady Gaga as creative director) will re-visit its iconic range of instant film cameras. With a ressurgence in film as of late, perhaps Polaroid will once again re-create the realm of instant film photography. The cameras will take on a retro aesthetic with a reliance on Polaroid 1000 film. A release date is slated for later this year with cameras set below the $100 USD mark.

In a statement from Polaroid, “Supported by a strategic relationship with Summit Global Group, a longtime Polaroid partner, and The Impossible Project, the manufacturer of classic film for Polaroid film cameras, Polaroid will offer a completely redesigned, modern version of the Polaroid OneStep camera, the PIC 1000. The PIC 1000 will be available in a range of fun colors and use classic Polaroid Color 600 Instant Film to produce the brand’s classic white border instant pictures. The Polaroid Color 600 Instant Film will work with both classic and new Polaroid cameras and will be offered in packs of 10 pictures. The new classic PIC 1000 camera and instant color film will be available at national retailers in 2010. -Polaroid Press Release”

(via Hypebeast)

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Collapsible Shipping Containers

This is a fantastic evolution of one of the most important, but unglamorous, inventions of our time.

“Aside from the Internet, no single invention might be as important to globalization as the shipping container. No joke.  Before that advent of standardized containers in the 1950’s, trans-oceanic shipping was hugely labor intensive and slow, because every ship and air shipment presented a brand new challenge. By contrast, standard shipping containers they allow cargo to be moved in massive quantities, quickly with huge cranes and a small staff; 90% of all international shipping traffic uses them. Two hundred million shipments each year use them. So if you love cheap goods from China, you have shipping containers to thank.

Which makes the Cargoshell, a collapsible shipping container, perhaps one of the biggest innovations since sliced bread. Think about the benefits of efficient packaging design and flat-pack, writ on a massive scale.



As Gizmag reports, the innovations are many. By collapsing by 75%, they radically reduce the volume of empty containers being shipped. At 25% less weight, they cut down on fuel costs. And with a roll-up front, rather than doors that swing out, they can be packed in more tightly, since they don’t require as much open space to unload.”

(via Fast Company)

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New Apple Retail Stores

All of you Mac-obsessors can now obsess about something new…

“The first new store design will be in downtown Palo Alto, near one they opened in 2001. According to the Silicon ValleyMercury News:

The facade will be entirely transparent at ground level, vast skylights will flood the store with natural light, and trees will grow inside, fed by the sunlight from above, according to a proposal submitted to the city’s architectural review board

The architect on the project will be Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, the same firm responsible for Apple’s transparent cube on 5th Avenue, in New York City. But where that design was almost purely symbolic–the cube wasn’t part of the store, as much as a fancy entrances for it–the new glass-fronted design is meant to dissolve the boundary with the sidewalk. It’ll become an inside/outside space that feels like a part of the urban fabric. Or a fishtank, depending on your view.

(In terms of architectural forebears, think of Philip Johnson’s iconic Glass House or Rem Koolhaas’s Prada Epicenter in Beverly Hills, whose entire front is open-air.)” (via Fast Company)

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Headphones for Women by Vestalife

Great new product and positioning…

“Getting a product out of development and to market is one thing. Getting it into the Apple Store is like that times 100. Thousands of companies are vying to make it past Apple’s discerning eye, and even then, it’s not a sure thing you’ll hit shelves. “If the designs make the first cut, there’s a lot of back-and-forth with Apple as we ensure the designs hit on every cylinder,” says RKS’s Ravi Sawhney. “Distribution, margins, packaging, channels…everything has to be just right to break in.” The fact that the Apple Store so quickly green-lit RKS’s new headphone line for Vestalife is a testament to its intelligent strategy–laser-focused on a particular audience and developed with drop-dead gorgeous looks as a high priority.

The key to Vestalife’s success may have also been due to Sawhney’s unique development strategy. He tapped four female designers from his team–Soyun Kim, Leah Thomas, Young Bang, and Hojin Choi–and let them explore whatever headphone concepts tickled their fancies.

The bigger problem for women actually lies in a larger issue around electronics: No matter how sexy those iPod ads look, headphones and fashion don’t go together. If they could just bring the basic hardware a little closer to something you’d actually use to adorn your body, they reasoned, they might be able to reach a whole new audience of trend-conscious music lovers. “With more traditional earbuds, the design stops at the body,” explains Thomas. “We chose to bring attention to the cord, treating it, too, like jewelry that was meant to be displayed, not hidden.” Soft-touch earbuds with flexible fixtures, and colored, fabric-covered wires makes the headphones look more like necklaces, earrings, and headbands than electronics.”

(via Fast Company)

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Daily digital consumption, illustrated

“According to a new study by the University of California, San Diego, from 1980 through 2008 the total number of bytes bitten by Americans has upped by 6% per year and now stands at an incredibly huge sounding 3.6 zettabytes. (Or one billion trillion bytes, if that’s easier to imagine.) The Upswing is, of course, interested in unlikely economic indicators of good news and this is surely one. How lean, after all, can the times be when we continue to gorge on data? And someone has to produce all this content, which means the future of electronic innovation appears to be rather secure. Here we break down what 3.6 zettabytes–or 34 gigabytes a day–means in terms of daily consumption.”

(via Fast Company)

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Turn that noise down!!!

A new study from NPR is proving that popular music is actually getting louder.

“Sound engineers are tinkering with songs to make them stand out on the radio and on MP3s. Thus, pop charts have become the equivalent of an argument, where everyone keeps shouting louder and louder just to be heard.

This graph from NPR of the most prolific pop songs from 1979-2009 illustrates the point:



The basic tactic that sound engineers are employing is to turn the volume of every component on a track way up–from high frequencies to low. That way, the relative volume—basically the midpoint between the extremes–seems to remain the same. But the track sounds louder nonetheless.”

(via Fast Company)

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