David Lidsky's Blog, page 4851

Did Monocle Magazine Just Fund Its Hong Kong Bureau With Bag Sales? Totes!

Monocle magazine, Tyler Brulé's style magazine is planning to open up a new bureau in Hong Kong, funded by the sale of bags. The three-year-old publication, which totes (ah-hah!) itself as the foppish offspring of Wallpaper* and The Economist, has flogged 8,000 bags from its two media outlets--one in London, the other in Los Angeles--has also bagged itself (oh dear) a weekly 30-minute TV slot on BBC World News.

The magazine, which flogs $1,425 branded BlackBerries alongside $30 CDs on its...

Gummi Bear Chandelier Is the Sweetest Light Source Around

Compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs) are more energy-efficient than incandescents and cheaper than LEDs, but sometimes the light emitted from the mercury-filled bulbs is a little harsh. So what better way to mellow it than with a gummi bear-laden chandelier?

The Candelier chandelier from Jellio features 5,000 hand-strung acrylic gummi bears surrounding a 50 watt CFL bulb. Only 10 of the 50-pound chandeliers will be made--and we're guessing they won't be cheap. But hey, isn't it worth it...

Twitter Considers Aping Google's Ad Words

There's long been speculation about how Twitter is going to make money. And although it landed $100 million in funding last summer, we're still no clearer as to how this is going to come about. But, as AllThingsD is reporting, there are whispers about how it's planning on going down the Google route with an ad platform similar to Google's AdWords. Just what Google wants to hear, no doubt, seeing as they're already paying Twitter handsomely for its live stream. And let's not even mention...

Rem Koolhaas Loses His Star Designer

Ole Scheeren--the man behind CCTV and OMA's other Asian projects--says zaijian to Koolhaas, leaving the firm to start his own studio.

Rem Koolhaas's Office for Metropolitan Architecture announced today that Ole Scheeren, the Rotterdam-based firm's envoy to Asia and its acknowledged superstar young designer, has split to start his own studio. Scheeren was the director of OMA's Beijing office, and oversaw the CCTV tower project, among others (see below).

Asia is architecture's last boomtown...

Foodzie Co-Founder Emily Olson on Mouth-Watering Sustainability ... And Bacon Jam

San Francisco-based, online artisan food market Foodzie operates on a direct-to-Web consumer model in an effort to strengthen the relationship between sellers and consumers--all while providing the freshest food possible. The Foodzie team recently celebrated its first year in business, during which time it received $1 million in funding. Co-founder Emily Olson shares Foodzie's vision to help small producers to be a bigger part of the nation's regional food system.

Fast Company: What's your...

The Materials Driving Product Innovation in 2010

What innovations might fuel the next wave of product innovation?

Behind every great movement in design, there's a material innovation. In the 1930's, tubular steel begat the Bauhaus; in the 1950's, steam-bent plywood begat Eames-era modernism; and today, capacitative sensors have begat iPhones and touchscreen interfaces. So what materials innovations are afoot now, and might influence the product designs we memorialize 25 years hence?

Material ConneXion acts as a materials broker to the...

Random House's New Digital Obsession Includes a Video Games Division

Random House has announced it's diversifying to offset the failing profits from the traditional book publishing biz, but its target market is fascinating: Video games. So will video games benefit from a publisher, or more the other way around?

Random has set up a dedicated team inside the company with the purpose of generating original story content for video games and to provide advice to games writers already in-mid development. Two original projects have already been started: a fantasy...

Google's Prototype Mirror Could Cut Costs of Solar Thermal Plant Construction

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Google continues its quest to revolutionize the energy industry with a new type of mirror that could cut the cost of building a solar thermal plant in half. The Internet giant is remaining mostly mum about the mirror technology, but the company claims it could be ready in one to three years if all goes well.

Why solar thermal? Google has invested heavily in the technology, which uses an array of movable mirrors (heliostats) to concentrate sunlight onto a collector tower that in turn...

Crib Sheet: Prince Alwaleed--Saudi Oil Tycoon, Fox News Investor

He's a prince! He graduated summa cum laude from Menlo University in 1979! He's the Saudi Warren Buffet! He's also Fox News' fourth biggest investor--although Prince Alwaleed bin Talal claims that he's the second biggest investor in News Corp., after Rupert Murdoch himself. And it's precisely because of his involvement with Fox, whose anti-clean energy policy takes a decade off the life expectancy of ecologists each time they switch on the channel, that has gotten him in the news this week...

Infographic of the Day: The State of the Internet

A video collecting a blizzard of stats about the internet.

As Flowing Data points out, this video by JESS3 is less of an infographic, and more of an avalanche of animated statistics. (A la this video or this videoo.)

But it includes some pretty astounding numbers--For example, there are about 740 million Internet users in Asia alone; Facebook serves 6 million pageviews per minute, requiring 30,000 servers; and there are 148,000 new zombie computers created each day by hackers using botnets:

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