BigShinyThing

According to Creative Review:

Typeradio.org relies on the various typography conferences that take place around the world as it’s at these gatherings that [typeradio's founders] Beekman and Enebeis are able to round up a selection of the most noted speakers and probe them with their wide ranging and frequently tangential questions. The results are broadcast while the conference is on (the Typeradio team went to New York’s TypeCon in July and, more recently, Helsinki’s ATypI conference in September) and then archived online for future listeners.

It’s the particular kind of content that makes the project rather special as, while typography is of course the central core of the conversations (for all you typophiles out there, issues of type selection, kerning, serifs and illegal fonts take up much of the air time) it’s often the questions that aren’t type-related that produce the most unique insights or reveal more of the personality of a designer.

The station itself explains, “Type is speech on paper. Typeradio is speech on type.” Talk about mixed media …

Ford has not only launched his own film production company, Fade to Black, and started writing his own screenplay. He’s also announced plans for an eponymous menswear label next year, which he says will provide “the ultimate luxury store for men”. This weekend he was doing PR for his tie up with Estee Launder.

The two phase deal will see a November launch of a limited edition Amber Dew range and the relaunch of the label’s 50 year old Youth Dew fragrance. Next year, a standalone Tom Ford Estee Lauder collection will be unveiled. Ford is already busy plundering the company’s 60 year old archives, a trick he learnt at Gucci, with the intention of revitalising a number of iconic 60s and 70s products. Ford recently told Women’s Wear Daily:

There’s so much flash right now, so many people endorsing things. Things are reaching a sort of hollow peak. Quality of product is number one. If I were designing ready-to-wear right now, that is what it would be about – real, true value … I mean value in terms of quality.

Both deals are in partnership with his Gucci cohort, Domenico de Sole, the business brains behind his design brawn. In this weekend’s Observer fashion supplement, Mark Tungate, author of Fashion Brands: Branding Style from Armani to Zara, explained the dynamic behind the duo:

Ford has never been your typical fashion designer who sits on a pink cloud thinking about his art and claiming not to be interested in commercial matters. As you might expect from a man who shares his name with an iconic car manufacturer, Ford wants to sell. He has commercial tastes and has said so on many occasions. He doesn’t think marketing is a dirty word. De Sole, so rare among management, knows creativity is about taking risks.

Ford has also done a fabulously silly shoot for W magazine – pictured – in which he cavorts with Barbarella styled men and $3000 female sex dolls – pictured. Ford says of the shoot, “We’ve become plastic, objectifying the human body…waxed and polished and buffed and shined up and manipulated,” Ford says. “And then, of course, I’m portrayed as the one doing the manipulating, the polishing, buffing, shaping, which is what I do. It’s just what we do. What the fashion industry does.”

The image was on Apple’s site. Thanks to the power of the Internet though is it saved for posterity here and on various other blogs. We look forward to Nike running an ad with ‘Just Do It’ emblazoned in front of, say, Gandhi. Oh yeah. Apple already did that.

Gawker has a nice crit of why brands associating themselves with important historical figures is a Not A Good Idea:

Because the greatest tribute is always to be posthumously whored out to sell flimsy, overpriced, glorified walkmen to yuppies and aging boomers.

True.

Following Sky’s purchase of EasyNet, which will see the broadcaster muscle in on the lucrative broadband market, BT has come back with its own TV on demand service. BT’s ‘catch up TV’ will offer a similiar (but limited) capability to Sky’s PVR, Sky+, enabling internet customers to watch programmes shown during the previous week without needing to record them. From next summer, customers will be able to buy boxes and then pay for certain shows, with others being free. Head of retail Ian Livingston said: “No longer will BT customers be reliant on TV schedules.”

The BBC has the full story.

Technorati tracks and indexes blogging activity. It has now reached 20.2 million blogs and counting. Technorati also claims that a new weblog is created every 7.4 seconds, which means there are about 12,000 new blogs a day. Bloggers also update their weblogs regularly; there are about 275,000 posts daily, or about 10,800 blog updates an hour.

This story came from one of them, boing boing.

We wrote about the launch of Wooster Collective’s borrowable street art archive a while back. Since then Streetsy has grown daily with images handily tagged, including the rather tragic scene shown.

Nice utilisation of modern tech: camera phone + flickr +tagging = streetsy.

It’s hard to believe that Google has only been around for seven years – it seems like forever. It’s certainly catching up with Microsoft which veritably middle aged by comparison (it was founded in 1975). Google also reported a 127 percent increase in general and administrative costs, due largely to an increase in hiring. The company said it had nearly 5000 employees at the end of September, up from about 4200 at the end of June.

CNN has more on this story.

Bigger pictures on our flickr photostream.

CutUp have a new exhibition opening on 4th November, at Seventeen – 17 Kingsland Road, E2. They’re clearly not anti-corporate enough to refuse sponsorship for the show from Leffe…

Bigger photos are available on our Flickr photostream.

A few weeks ago we remarked on the similarities between The Guardian’s style page and New York magazine’s Look Book page. Now, compare and um don’t contrast The Guardian’s Saturday edition ‘News Matrix’ and New York magazine’s longstanding ‘Approval Matrix’.

There is of course a camera tossing blog and lots of nice examples on Flickr. Featured photo is from Mr wild turkey’s flickr photostream.

Earlier this week when the story was at the rumour stage, a Sky spokesman hinted the company was looking at other ways of connecting with its viewers.

“Sky intends to continue to set the pace of change in media content and distribution,” he said.

Many analysts predict that in the future most TV will be watched via computers. Instead of programmes being received via a traditional TV aerial, satellite dish or cable connection, they will instead be sent via broadband internet. This would imply that Digital Video Records are merely a phase in the digitisation of home entertainment.

Easynet has its own equipment in 250 local BT exchanges, giving it direct access to 4.4 million homes and 850,000 businesses in the UK, mainly in the bigger metropolitan areas.

More on this story is available from the BBC site.

Such a provider is up for sale in the shape of OneTel, yours for a mere £300 million from current owners Centrica PLC. Rumours of Sky’s interest in the telecoms industry were sparked with speculation that the firm’s decision to raise £1 billion through a bond issue stems from a desire to engage more aggressively with cable and internet providers. The purchase of a telecoms company could also lead to Sky offering a truly on-demand TV experience. Further investment of between £100-200 million is reportedly planned by the company to develop an ultra-speedy internet service through local loop unbundling, potentially offering video on demand and IPTV capabilities.

These moves would further bolster Sky’s position in the UK against the newly merged cable providers NTL and Telewest as well as the Freeview consortium, which ITV and Channel 4 have finally confirmed their intention to join.

More doodles are viewable on both his eponymous website and on Biro-web.com.

Once you get past the zillion pages of ads, it’s rather beautiful … see the FT site for details. Get it while it’s non subscription…

The reluctant vendor writes on the listing:

Collecting is Fun! The birth of the Personal Computer was one of the most significant events in our history. You can have one of the most complete collections. Our collection documents the history of the PC. We also have vintage Test Equipment and Electronic/Scientific kits used by early hobbyists.

Bidding is currently at $20,000 - reserve not met.

Call it Web 2.0, call it this year’s dotcom hype, call it what you want. The latest and coolest generation of websites are designed to be bent, broken and pasted together by users themselves. Well, users who can code, anyway. Photo-sharing site Flickr, Google Maps, and blog search engine Technorati are just a few sites which publish interfaces to their internal workings, so anyone with some programming skills can use their data to their own purposes — see for example our earlier story about online maps.

Ning takes things a step further — rather than providing a specific hackable service, Ning’s API provides general tools for building community and data-based online applications. Imagine the bastard child of Google Maps and Hotornot.com, but done by everyday users instead of people who really understand how to program. We’re a little doubtful — our resident geek observes that while it’s easy to Ning-up a work-alike of an existing site, real innovation takes some real coding skills.

More about this ‘mash up playground’ on the Googlemapsmania blog.

Research company ComScore found that 94 million U.S. Internet users, or 56 percent of those online, watched streaming video. Based on the previous three months, the research firm found those watching video did so for an average of 73 minutes per month.

The research represents the first figures released by ComScore’s video ratings service, based on its panel of 2 million Internet users who have their activities tracked by ComScore and extrapolated to the entire Internet audience.

Web video offerings have grown this year, as more than half of U.S. Internet users now have broadband connections. On top of that, advertisers have shown keen interest in placing their TV advertisements online in the form of pre-roll video ads watched before clips.

ComScore found that men are more likely than women to watch Web video, representing a disproportionate 61 percent of Web video streamers against their 50 percent portion of the Internet audience. However, of those who watched Web video, males spent less than two minutes more time watching.

Importantly for advertisers (but maybe not for employers), ComScore found online video is most popular during work hours, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., when consumers are typically difficult to reach via traditional media.

Report from Advertising Age.

The featured lovely is from Flickr user icethesite‘s photostream.

The campaign is due to be broadcast in Belgium next week. It opens with the Smurfs dancing, hand in hand, around a campfire and singing the Smurf song. Bluebirds flutter past and rabbits gambol around the familiar village of mushroom shaped houses until, without warning, bombs begin to rain down. The smurfs scatter and run in vain from the onslaught. The final scene shows a scorched and tattered Baby Smurf sobbing, surrounded by prone Smurfs. The endline reads, “Don’t let war affect the lives of children.” The ad is part of a fundraising drive to raise £70,000 for the rehabilitation of former child soldiers in Burundi.

Philipppe Henon, a spokesman for Unicef Belgium, said his agency had set out to shock, after concluding that viewers had become immured to traditional warzone images. “It’s controversial,” he said. “We have never done something like this before, but we’re learned over the years that the reaction to the more normal type of campaign is very limited.”

Unicef’s agency, Publicis, decided the best way to convey the impact of war on children was to tap into the earliest, happiest memories of Belgian television viewers. They chose the Smurfs, who first appeared in a Belgian comic in 1958. The animation was approved by the family of the Smurf’s late creator, “Peyo”.

Julie Lamoureux, account director at Publicis for the campaign, said the agency’s original plans were toned down.

We wanted something that was real war – Smurfs losing arms, or Smurfs losing a head – but they said no.

Footage of the ad has already appeared online.