The New York International Gift Fair happens twice a year at the Javits Center in New York City. It’s a massive, 4-day long show with all the gifts you could ever think of. In our gallery, we pass up the snow-globes, decals, and candlesticks and focus on the special section Accent on Design, where companies like Areaware, DBA, Artecnica, and Joseph Joseph share the latest they have to offer.;
>> view gallery
Florida International University’s School of Hospitality and Tourism Management is launching their first FIU Hospitality Online Auction on September 3, 2010 with a variety of travel and food-related auction lots. Proceeds from the auction will benefit the school’s scholarship program; grants for students to attend industry conferences; and funding for student teaching assistantships. The auction is sponsored by Carnival Cruise Lines and includes over 100 auction items available for bidding from September 3 to October 3, 2010. Lots range in value from $250 to $7,500. Bid on travel packages from Loews Hotels across the US and Canada, Fontainebleau Miami Beach, Ritz Carlton Fort Lauderdale, Carnival Cruise Lines, Sandals and Beaches Resorts, InterContinental Hotels throughout China and more as well as entertainment experiences including tickets to Miami Heat games, the Rachael Ray Show, The View and Jungle Island. Other lots give bidders a chance to get a bit of the FIU experience through classes like
pastry cooking and “brew your own label” classes with FIU professors.
Filed under: Auctions
School Auctions Off Unique Travel and Culinary Experiences originally appeared on Luxist on Sun, 29 Aug 2010 08:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Some of these early 1980’s punk rock hairstyles resemble works of art but they look a little too high maintenance for my lifestyle. Young Marble Giants provide the music for this vintage French video.
In developing countries, low birth weight babies don’t always have the luxury of an incubator to help them. Hopefully this $25 Embrace Infant Warmer can become a viable alternative, it was successfully tested on its first baby a week ago. More »
Back in June of last year, I wrote a short bulleted list of coming trends or advancements that I thought would change the communication industry again. In-fact, I thought and still believe that these things will negate some of the Jedi Jargon that perpetuates the industry shucksters today.
The original post read:
1) Video as application ( This means interface design, too)
2) Searchable Video
3) AJAX working harder to act like an object-oriented language
for rich experiences
4) Mobile compliance on all fronts (which includes animation with
CSS, think Web .5 on your phone)
5) Seamless web-to-desktop applications
6) Mitigating the conversation of a brand into the sale of a product
through social application and tracking the purchase from
online to offline and back again.
7) Adsense moving to display ads. This is very possible and would
change a lot, really quickly, again.
I’d like to continue this post and extend it to include this years developments and how they will affect next year.
By nature and maturity of the mobile space, it makes the desktop experience obsolete. Retail is important and will effectively prove that Experience Design is far more than user-interfaces.
9) A television channel and URL are not different. Don’t bother thinking of them as separate distribution channels. Really embrace what interactivity means and how it resonates with users and prospects.
10) Ideas are greater than facts. They travel faster and live longer than facts.
11) If the web does tier even more, search will become to convoluted to remain viable. I believe transcripts and video-to-text will enhance and change the fundamentals of search marketing. Context and Content will be king again and the Big Idea will prove it’s dominance. Track that instead.
As usual, all feedback and email is appreciated.
I’m off for a run.
After releasing some ominous (and really quite boring) videos the other day, the Halo: Reach marketing team has finally given us a trailer packed with aliens, explosions, jetpacks and firefights. Check it out below, along with previous ads for the game after the jump. Shot in Prague, this new clip was created by director Noam Murro and agencytwofifteen, which describes the spot as “a glimpse into the type of courage and heroism that will be required of all soldiers during the battle of Reach.” Pretty impressive, but the agency’s earlier work for the Halo franchise set the bar so high, this preview comes off as a bit underwhelming. I still prefer the adrenaline overload of the Halo: ODST trailer or the similar live-action, street-level carnage from Ghost Recon 2. The problem with the Reach ads is that they separated the exposition from the action, creating clips that have trouble telling the story, whether viewed together or apart. That said, Halo continues to serve as the gold standard for game marketing, and everyone involved deserves kudos for bringing so much intellect to a game whose plot seems to revel in making no sense whatsoever.
Limor Fried’s MintyBoost project is a great example of DIY and commercial tech working together. Take an Altoids tin, a couple of AA batteries, and some very smart hackery, and you’ve got a lightweight USB charger that you can use to charge/run your handheld iWhatever, or almost any other phone, camera, or small device that can take a charge off USB power. About a month ago, she released this video outlining the Apple hackery needed to make this work.
Reverse engineering Apple’s secret charging methods from adafruit industries on Vimeo.
Clive Thompson profiled Fried and her company Adafruit Industries as part of a 2008 feature in Wired on “open source hardware.” The idea is that hackers like Fried can use what they find out about consumer devices to make and sell their own products, but also to produce DIY kits and share information with others who then build their own projects.
As a case study in the value of sharing this information, consider Rob Scott. Before he took his son on a week-long bike trip this summer, he used Fried’s schematic to hack together what turns out to be a really striking-looking solar charger for his son’s iPod.
It’s always nice to see what the maker community is doing to accessorize their retail gadgets; the results aren’t always super-polished, but they generally solve real problems in important use cases that don’t get addressed by manufacturers, either because they’re too unusual or they can’t be easily solved by more plugs, more peripherals, more complex devices that cost a lot of money. And in turn, we all find out a little bit more about how these magical devices get put together and how they work.
See Also:
In 1966, Esquire published “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” a seminal example of New Journalism and proof that a great writer could capture the essence of his subject without even speaking to him. Last week, in its portrait of Kanye West, Slate birthed a new genre of profile-writing: Call it the Social-Media Write-Around. The sum of the reportage for pop critic Jonah Weiner's “Kanye West Has A Goblet” is the copious splatter of the hip-hop giant's tweeting, Facebooking, Ustreaming and blogging. it's all imagined by Mr. Weiner to be the transcript of an interview with Mr. West.
Until recently, conventional wisdom has been that American pop culture is so unstoppable/inevitable/irresistible that it suffocates other cultures around the world. (In fact, countries including France passed cultural-import laws specifically to keep American pop culture at bay.) Some weeks that still seems to be the case, but more and more the pop-cultural heat, and general topical heat, on Twitter can be found far beyond U.S. borders.
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