Amazon Adopts New Business Strategy - Giving Away Films For Free!

The way people spend their free time is set to change yet again. The internet has rapidly been eating into into both the hours we don't send at work (as well as those that we do), taking more and more time away from the time we used to spend watching TV. Well, TV is just not quite ready to be cast aside so easily, and more than going down with a fight, it is seeing a rapid reincarnation. Most of my English friends spend their time online watching the BBC iPlayer, and now I am sure my friends in the US will have an equally time consuming distraction as the IMDB site launches its new free TV show and film service.

The IMDB (Internet Movie Database), is set to offer movies and TV programs for free. Amazon that owns the site has started to offer a range of movies as well as popular series such as Lost. New episodes from TV series that have not yet even been broadcast on TV, including the new Knight Rider series will be offered for free. Shows will include advertising, but should the film not be available, or should viewers want an ad-free experience an alternative film will be suggested that can be downloaded from Amazons video on demand digital rental site.

So, Amazon, a pioneering online success story and true company of the digital age has already shown that it is having to move to avoid it's business model coming under threat. Rather than deny the inevitable, and try to protect its online sales and rentals, by offering content for free, they will integrate an ad revenue model, which ultimately will lead to increase online sales from users that are willing to pay for enhanced and ad free content.

Amazon are clearly targeting being both 'the destination' online to buy content and to own the best sites about the content they are selling. They also recently launched SoundUnwound a new site that they want to become the 'Wikipedia' of music and bands.

X-Rated Erotic Horror Film Marks Relaunch of Agent Provocateur Lingerie Site

Agent Provocateur, has completely revamped their website. It is not the most difficult thing to draw attention to, when you have the opportunity to legitimately show your product on scantily clad young models, but gent Provocateur do it with class and attitude in every area. They are leaders when it comes to innovating with video online, and are no newbies to video on their site. This time however they have the luxury of the web catching up with their ideas. The new x-rated style site delivers an emersive video experience. The erotic and dark theme has a combined look and feel of vintage horror and cult erotic movies - See end of this post for video. Sexy full screen action which also features an equally kitsch soundtrack.

The interactive video invites visitors to create their own path through the erotic story, and eventually decide the fate of the stories ‘Young Virgin’ protagonist. The main print campaign image also contains a hidden secret mystery to be solved. After a well made and evocative brand building experience there is a stylish online store to capitalise on all the visitors the site will have provoked.

The leading luxury lingerie brand is clearly investing heavily in online, and the site reflects and increased focus on the web, aimed at capitalising on the huge success of online sales through their site.




This campaign image contains a hidden message. Solve it to win the competition.

OLPC To Be Sold By Amazon - Rare Opportunity To Get Your Hands On Future Design Classic

For all of you that missed out on last years opportunity to get your hands on one of the most important computers designed in recent history, AND do your bit for the developing world at the same time, there is a second chance! The laptop in question has been developed for the much talked about One Laptop Per Child initiative, with the aim of providing a sub $100 computer for each child in developing nations. In order to avoid the issues experienced when the OLPC programe ran the same initiative last year, Amazon has been chosen to run a programme to enable United States residents to buy one of the most innovative laptops invented (that can also be powered by a hand wound generator) and for every computer sold, a second laptop will be donated to a child in a developing country. The computer will be available from November until the end of the year. Despite the computer costing only slightly more than $100, this is a price point for mass orders and not the public. The combined cost of the two computers will be set at around $380. This is set to be a design classic, as some of the industries best have worked on the project and pioneered many innovations to reduce the cost to near the $100 benchmark cost. Don’t miss out this time round.

Visit the site of OLPC for more details.

New Nest Furniture and Lighting Online Store

The newly redesigned online furniture store Nest, features an excellently designed interface that is clean and simple, that complements well the classic lighting and furniture designs on offer.

As well as some pretty expensive cult products, the store also offers more affordable items from one of my favorite product designers, Suck. The dead man pen holder is pure genius, and their mat that reads 'come in' or 'go away' depending on which way you approach it is fantastic.

Diesel Online Store Launches

Finally it is here. But it has been worth the wait. You can now buy online from the Diesel site, from Europe and USA from a single online store.

The Diesel Online Store officially launches today, and does so with an interactive window called the Diesel Style Lounge, that is designed to explore things that would not be possible in the window of a normal highstreet store. Models are seen floating underwater in a submerged space that the user can explore and discover the key outfits of the season. The models spin and flip as the camera pans around them Matrix style, and uses effects that are more commonly found in Hollywood movies than online.

For those that prefer a quicker and more direct experience, they can navigate direct to the male and female sections and browse from over 1,000 specially selected items. There are about three times as many items in this store than you would find in a normal Diesel store, and the selection has been chosen specifically for the more demanding and forward thinking online consumer. Some of the most sought after pieces, including specialist denim and fashion show items previously only available in a few cities, are now made available to people worldwide.

The presentation of the collection in the Style Lounge, in my opinion really represents a new direction in fashion photography. The technique used is a kind of 'Motion Photography', where the focus is still clearly on presenting the product, but adds a new dimention to the emotional angle of the image.


I have been fortunate to be a part of this amazing project, which has brought together people and companies from many different countries, and had a lot of fun on the set of the motion photography. The shoot in Berlin, Germany used a specially hand built HD Digital Video camera. The models, suspended from rigging were shot at 250 frames per second at full high definition resolution, so that when played back at normal speed it would slow one second of time down to 10 seconds. It was a fun shoot, and there was an elemtent of luck that shone down on those days. Firstly one of the models turned out by chance to have worked in a circus as a trapeeze artist since she was nine, and my Apple Power Book that got dropped actually remained in full working order (despite now sporting a rather nasty dent!).

Here are some images of the site and the shoot.

Will people pay more for DRM free music?

Apple announce today that it would be making all of EMI's music catalogue available from it's iTunes store WITHOUT Digital Rights Management - meaning that the music will be able to be copied to any other music player or played on any other computer without any software controlled restrictions.

Users will be able to choose between DRM protected tracks, or the unprotected alternative. The unprotected tracks will be mastered at a higher quality than the DRM protected tracks, so will offer better quality and be usable on pretty much any digital music player, but will cost about 1/3 more (about 30 cents).

This annoucement makes all the more sense of Steve Job's recent outspoken statement regarding the future of music distribution and his desire to see DRM free music. This now seems like clever positioning prior to this very interesting announcement. EMI will certainly appear as pioneering and brave following this announcement.

I am not sure that I find the DRM of Apple that intrusive(unlike the Microsoft equivelant), although I would prefer to have DRM music naturally so that in future I could use the music on any platform. So I am not sure I would pay a premium. Good on EMI though!

Read more at Apple.

Faile

I saw Faile exhibiting in the Lazarides Gallery Soho, London last week. The Faile site is a great experience of the Faile art brand. I am saving up to buy some of their work!

Check out the Faile site.

Pictures On Walls - Online Gallery

This online gallery sells original pieces and prints from AIKO, BANKSY, EINE, ERIC the DOG, FAILE, HEWLETT, INSECT, INVADER, MCLAUCHLAN, MICALLEF, TOS

Check out the site here.

iLike - The Future of Music Communities?

iLike is a relatively young music community based software service, having only just reached the rip old age of four months, but I predict that this is going to become a very popular service, and the principles on which it is based will be adopted by many other music services.

It is wonderfully designed service with a very fresh, clean and modern interface. The service itself is very simple in concept - to help you organise and share your music, allow you to interact with people who share similar music tastes and recommend new music. While many other sites and services are setting out to do similar if not exactly the same things, iLike combines so many of the best concepts and in such a well designed package that it stands out from the rest.

iLike sets out to introduce you to music that you will like but have not yet listened to and combines several simple methods.

First you must create a profile which can be shared among the rest of the iLike community. You start by manually describing the genres and actual musician that you like. This creates a crude profile of your music tastes. But by downloading a small software gadget that analyses what you play in iTunes or Windows Media Player the service it able to get a realtime view of your music preferences, initially taking a snap shot of your music library and then starts an ongoing analysis of your music listening habits in the most logical way, by making a note of every time you listen to music on your computer or iPod. Continuing to build up and ever more perfect picture of your listening habits.

Users of iTunes software also have the benefit of having a user interface directly in the iTunes browser, that gives you access to your profile and community features of iLike. It shows you similar songs to the ones that you are currenly playing - so if you like Muse but want something similar, simply start playing one of your Muse tracks and it come immediatly back with recommendations similar to Muse. The recommendations all link to 30 second previews accessed via the iTunes store. You can also rate the songs in your library so iLike can determine which ones you like over others. Being embeded in iTunes and so always there when you are playing your music, with no need to remember to login to a website is a strong feature. We all have far too many sites to surf, to remember to come back to so many sites we have registered with. Once registered you are likely to continue to use the service as it is also very unintrusively implemented. The concept of dedicated software to access web content is going to be a strong trend in future.

Interesting are the complex algorthms that they use to determine what you would like to listen to. The most successful services in the future will be those that have alorythmns that are able to search massive quantities of data and deliver you only a few, but highly relevant results. While is can be easy to relate certain bands with others, the software that calculates your recommended suggestions is far more complecated.

iLike also harnesses the community of users and networks you to people that share similar tastes in music. By being able to easily browse other peoples libraries that share similar bands, it bives you a less mathematical and more human way to discover new music. You can build up lists of friends and see what they are listening to, what is most popular and recommend tracks to them.

This is the future of tracking and understanding trends and analysing music consumption. Bands can find out exactly who is listening to their music and which songs are played the most. This must be really interesting to base understanding on the actual listening rather than on record sales.

iLike seems very heavily geared at providing an excellent service, with the aim of generating revenue from providing traffic and sales to the iTunes store. The strong links between iLike is also apparent in it's design, as it seems to have been designed specifically to fit in with the iTunes software. I ask how long will it be before iTunes buys iLike or releases their own version of this community software.

A really great aspect of iLike is that it not only recommends establish artists, but is a forum discovering new music talent. Capitalising on the content of their sister site Garage Band, it acts as a filter on the many thousands of unsigned artists that have submitted their music to Garage Band. So through iLike you are also recommended new unsigned bands who's music is easily downloaded for free with one click straight to your iTunes library.

The service requires so little effort, yet delivers good value. you do not need to make friends, build pages, maintain blog etc, but you can do all of these things with it if you wish.

Download iLike and join the community HERE.

Less Rain - T-Shirts

A really nicely designed and fun t-shirt design label. The t's are nice, farly common designs, and nothing too new - the dot matrix and 'Hello - My Name Is' t-shirts are cool as you can customise them with your own designs, blocking out squares on a matrix, or writting your name on the name sticker design. What is really nice is the simple and ironic animated store.

Check them out here...

Alessi - Kaj Watch

Designed by Karim Rashid for Alessi the Kaj Collection of watches are sleek, futuristic and paired down. Beautiful.
I saw this while checking out the Kobalt Online store - a Korean eCommerce site (also very beautiful) - but not sure quite else where you can find them.

Fuel For Travel

Fuel for travel is a new service available at Amsterdam's Schipol airport that allows travellers to download video and music content onto their MP3 players, mobile phones and portable video devices. Top selling albums, TV series, audio books and travel guides can be bought and downloaded from the special kiosks. They are already partnering with RedBull, MTV and Nickolodeon who are providing digital content. I assume that this branded content is provided free?

The content is only available for selected devices and currently this does not include Apple's iPod.

Plan59 - Retro American Illustration Museum

This site is an insanely rich and extensive archive of illustrations and photographs of American cars, trucks, advertising, fruit crate art and interior design. Plan59 must be one of the most extensive collections of retro commercial art online and is a useful research tool for anyone interested in design through the 50's and 60's. The images are available to buy online, or you can order prints of a vast selection of images.

Visit the site.

Scrawl Collective

Frequently updated with new members joining to exhibit and sell their work, this is an excellent resource for street style illustration and art. Featuring the works of Mr Jago (featured above), Phlash, Will Barras, Danny Sangra and many other fresh young talents. A good place to make an investment in affordable art.

Halloween Site For Loft

Japanese brand Loft have launched a Halloween themed site to promote what looks like a fashion collection - I can't quite fathom it out, but it is a stunning site. Beautiful intro with comic style graphics and video of the models wearing the clothes. This very successfully presents the products in an extremely emotive way. The site has been created by Japanese agency CMD9.