David Lidsky's Blog, page 4847

Guvera: Discover Music You're Trying to Avoid

Advertisers and consumers beware: The new online music service Guvera falls way short of the revolution its name suggests

You can't build your own playlist. There's no shuffle option. Forget autoplay. And did I mention that registration is required?

Guvera, a new online music service launching in the States March 30, is trying to revolutionize the way we pay for music. Rather than mimic the streaming models of MySpace and Pandora, the Australian start-up offers downloadable mp3s free of...

Do Hybrid Cars Emit Excessive Radiation?

Should we add hybrid cars to the list of things that emit unsafe amounts of radiation? A research committee funded by Israel's Ministry of Environmental Protection thinks so. The committee studied radiation emitted from various hybrid vehicles over the past nine months with some disturbing results: the current generation Prius is safe, but the Honda Insight, Civic Hybrid, and previous generations of Prius's all emit "surplus" radiation.

According to The International Agency for Research on...

Virtual Goods in Location-Aware Mobile Games: The Future of Product Placement

Booyah, a location-based game start-up, has announced it'll be trying out a new type of promotion that may be the model for smartphone ads in the future: In-game, virtual goods placements, based on your real-time location.

Booyah's partnership is with Swedish clothes chain H&M, and the resulting ad plan is dazzlingly simple: When you're near an H&M location, a particular piece of clothing--perhaps one on promotion--will appear in the Booyah MyTown location-based social "game." If any of...

Why NYC's New Dedicated Crosstown Bus Lane Owes a Debt to Bogota, Colombia

How one brilliant idea has traveled from Bogota, Colombia all the way to New York City.

Urban planners, rejoice! Today, the New York City Department of Transit announced a radical new plan for improving the city's bus lines: A fully dedicated express-lane for buses, running crosstown on 34th Street. It's expected to improve bus speeds by 35%, on a route where buses are stationary a whopping 40% of the time. And it marks another huge, bold idea from Janette Sadik-Khan, the DOT commissioner...

Almost Genius: Emanuele Pizzolorusso's Crumpled Maps

Most city maps are awkward, fold-up creations that fail for a variety of reasons. One, they're unwieldy. Two, potential bag-snatchers and pick-pockets can spot you a mile off--you might as well be holding an umbrella emblazoned with the neon legend: New to City. Rob Me. Three, they never fold back the way you want them to. Four, it doesn't take much for them to rip. So, industrial designer Emanuele Pizzolorusso's ingenious idea is the Crumpled City Map.

Made from the Dupont fabric Tyvek...

Fashion Forward: A Sustainability Report Helps Clothing Brands Plan for the Future

Amidst the new outfits swishing down runways at this year's London Fashion Week was a different kind of fashion launch: The British non-profit named Forum for the Future released its sustainability trend report for the industry. But the report, named Fashion Futures 2025, is no endless stack of statistics, like so many other trend reports that seem like they were written to make your eyes glaze over. This innovative toolkit includes a range of free materials, from a workshop guide to...

Google Translates Multilingual Web Into One Universal Tongue: Chrome

Google's making sure that Chrome's ascendancy is a global phenomenon, using a uniquely Google trick: It's building automatic machine translation into the browser itself. Is Google trying to turn the planet into a happy chattering Net family?

Google, announcing the tweak, notes that the Web is an "amazingly multilingual place." Well, duh! There are nearly 7,000 languages in the World so that's really not much of a surprise. And while we may be sometimes forgiven for assuming that English has...

Video: Just Watch These Crazy Holographic Drums

Ad-director Chris Cairns commissions turntables and drumkits topped with holograms, to create a hallucinatory live performance for the Scratch Perverts.

Recently, acclaimed commercial director Chris Cairns produced a wacky short film featuring the Scratch Perverts called "Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs Inc." (Embedded below.) When it came to translate that film into a live performance, he didn't skimp. To recreate the rotating heads of the previous film, he commissioned a bunch of...

Battersea Born Again: The Pink Floyd Icon Goes Green

Rafael Viñoly's redevelopment plan for London's Battersea Power Station clears a final hurdle.

London's iconic Battersea Power Station, once dismal and menacing enough to grace Pink Floyd's Animals, is one step closer to an ambitious rebirth as massive, eco-friendly mixed-use development by Rafael Viñoly. The $8.2 billion plan will include 3,700 homes, 1.6 million square feet of office space, and 500,000 square feet of retail, ringing the power plant in undulating, terraced waves. The power...

Lessons From Chile: Better Building Codes Work, so Why Don't We Have Them?

Chile's seismic construction codes saved lives in the latest quake, but what if the next Big One happens here?

The earthquake in Haiti prompted a lot of architectural analysis of buildings there, and in megacities around the world. Without proper planning--and stricter building codes--most of the biggest cities on earth are "rubble in waiting." (See a round-up of the current discussions about Haiti here.) If Haiti showed architecture's failure, Chile might show its success.

The quake...