BigShinyThing

There are rumours this week that Apple is about to make a bid for the original Personal Video Recorder (PVR/DVR) manufacturer TiVo

The financial markets seem to be taking the news seriously as TiVo shares increased by 17 percent

See article from computer review business online here

An open letter from Forrester analysts Josh Bernoff and Chris Charron pleading with Steve Jobs to Do the Decent Thing is here

The really interesting point is this:

The brands are compatible. Apple’s and TiVo’s customers both love their products–in our DVR survey last year, 19 percent of respondents used the word “love” to describe their DVRs, with TiVo users leading in satisfaction. Why? Because TiVo, like Apple, creates products with insanely great design.

Digital video recorder (e.g. TiVo or Sky+) users are spending 22 percent more time with media than the average person. Interestingly, their media consumption patterns are particularly acute for print media and the Internet. They spend 48 percent more time with newspapers, 43 percent more time with magazines and 40 percent more time with the Internet than the average consumer."

Read the full mediapost.com article here

Dyson has announced that it is outselling Hoover in the US a mere two years after entering the market. The bagless vaccuum cleaner maker has gained a 20.7 percent share of the $2.3bn (£1.2bn) whilst Hoover has 15.6 percent. In 2003, the British group only had a 4.6 percent share but sales of 891,000 - a threefold increase - in the past 12 months have made it the market leader

The Guardian has open access coverage of the story here

The Financial Times covered this story back in November last year but Tyler Brule has now picked up on it for his rather tame media show The Desk (BBC 4 Wednesdays). Koreans vote for their favourite stories and the top ones win monetary prizes. In a country where the conventional and state media is tightly controlled, one ohmynews ‘citizen reporter’ (as the site calls them) has recently won the equivalent of $20k (the annual wage in Korea) for a story criticising the government.

For non Korean speakers the international site is here. It also proves founder Oh Yeon Ho’s global ambitions… he has also been busy evangelising about model of ohmynews and citizen reporting .

The UK print media is increasingly drawing on gossip sites such as Popbitch and Gawker to feed its stories, a CNN journalist has been brought down by bloggers and the BBC successfully conned by The Yes Men. And this is only in recent months. Is bottom-up media such as ohmynews.com where we will get our most trusted information from in the future? And as Oh Yeon Ho predicts, is this the end of 20th century style journalism?

The article is here

The BBC reports the key findings from the Envisional research: “It’s now as easy to download a pirate TV show as it is to programme a VCR,” said Ben Coppin.

According to Envisional 18% of downloaders were from within the UK and that downloads of TV programmes had increased by 150% in the last year.

Exact figures are difficult to pin down, but it is thought that about 80,000 to 100,000 people in the UK download TV programmes.

A typical episode of 24 was downloaded by about 100,000 people globally, said the report, and an estimated 20,000 of those were from within the UK

The industry has coined the term “time-shifting” to describe this trend of being able to watch what you want, when you want. The more retro phrase is video on demand.

The BBC ran a trial of what it calls the Interactive Media Player (iMP) last year, which was based on a peer-to-peer distribution model.

It let people download programmes it held the rights to up to eight days after they had already aired. It is looking to do a more expansive trial later this year.

The BBC already allows radio fans to hear programmes they missed online up to a week after broadcast.

About six million people in the UK now have a fast, always-on net connection via cable or phone lines.

A typical episode of 24 was downloaded by about 100,000 people globally, said the report, and an estimated 20,000 of those were from within the UK.

Turkish artist Pinar Yolacan — aka ‘the tripe artist’ — presented the following portraits as part of her first solo exhibition in New York City (Rivington Arms, New York December 10 - January 21, 2005).

The exhibition consisted of 19 subjects who were recruited via a casting call on craiglist. All of the subjects were white and between the ages of 50 and 70. Yolacan took a polaroid of each women and sent them off with a loose date at which they would reconvene. In the interim the artist studied the subjects, the kinds of personality traits their looks conveyed, and devised a garment that each would wear for the second shoot.

Yolacan sees a kind of ‘otherness’ (her term) in these women of a certain age and class that she magnifies in their garments made out of tripe, cow stomach, chicken skin and lamb testicles. The outfits convey the Victorian elegance that Yolacan perceived in such women during her first experiences of Western European life in the UK.

Carly Fiorina sacked:

When the news was officially announced this morning, people were dancing — literally dancing — around their cubicles

- HP employee. This coverage is a bit revenge of the geeks but it’s a compelling story none the less .

Read more here.

However, Campaign (subscription required) reports that:

that outer space will have to be knocked off media schedules. The US Federal Aviation Administration plans to bring US companies with grand ideas back to earth by banning billboards in the night sky.

enjoy

“It’s a completely new way of moving your body,” LaChapelle says. “You can’t believe what you’re watching. It’s insane. You’ve never seen bodies move that fast. These kids are creating an art form from nothing. It’s inspiring.” His ‘discoveries’ have also featured in videos for Missy Elliott, Black Eyed Peas and, more recently, Leftfield .

To give you an idea, the trailer to Rize reads ‘the images in this film have not been sped up in any way.’

From advertising age, this story about a movie ‘non-placement’ that has created demand for a sneaker that doesn’t exist …

The unpaid inclusion of a nonexistent Adidas shoe in the movie The Life Aquatic has sparked a brisk consumer demand for the product. This custom-made version of the Adidas ‘Zissou’ is now for sale on eBay. Other Web sites provide instructions for making your own Zissous.

Using plastic yellow tubes, this Dutch artist makes skeletons which are able to walk on the wind. Eventually Jansen plans to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives. The site shows stills as well as short movies of the beasties on the move.

Little Girl with Dead Leaves (1946), was the first ever image recorded by French photographer Edouard Boubat. Fifty years later Boubat said:

I sometimes walk through the Jardin de Luxembourg [again] and I have never seen another little girl dressed in dead leaves…