BigShinyThing

We’ve said before that last.fm and similar (but not as good) music recommendation sites are the future of music retail. Well it appears that CBS agrees with us - they’ve just forked out £140m for last.fm.

For those who have just joined us, last.fm was founded in the UK five years ago and it now has more than 15 million active users. It allows users to connect with other listeners with similar music tastes, to custom-build their own radio stations and to watch music video-clips. What we love about the site is that it invites music fans to stumble upon new music and new genres (New Weird America anyone?).

Unlike a lot of media groups who seem to be frantically trying to build their social networking sites (a glance at the marketing press shows that it’s the buzzword du jour), CBS has recognised that the best aproach is to buy one ready-made.

The firm’s president and CEO Leslie Moonves told the BBC: “Last.fm is one of the fastest growing online communities out there.” He said Last.fm’s strength in building communities around music and syndicating content was “central to CBS”. He added: “Their demographics also play perfectly to CBS’s goal to attract younger viewers and listeners across our businesses.”

As part of the deal, Last.fm’s managing team will remain in place and the site will maintain its own separate identity. Here’s hoping …

From Jamie X’s photostream…

We tripped along to the Surrealist Ball at the Victoria and Albert Museum last night where lots of people had made a Big Effort to dress up — as is the way in London nowadays. With thanks to the people we photographed who patiently waited for us to work out how to use the camera.

…but this time the buzzwords are ’social’ and ‘media’. In scenes reminiscent of oooh… 1997 investors and high profile folk all over the place are launching new sites and investing in old ones. The latest? One-to-watch (literally) — video search engine Blinkx.

The Independent reports today that shares in Blinkx surged 40 per cent after the company’s market debut as investors clamoured to invest in the world’s largest internet video search provider.

Blinkx has been spun out of Autonomy, the contextual internet search specialist that has retained a 10 per cent stake in the business. While Autonomy has often struggled to explain the significance and potential of its complex technology to befuddled investors, it appears that the rapid success of internet video companies such as YouTube has underlined the growth prospects of Blinkx.

In scenes reminiscent of the dotcom boom that characterised the markets in the early part of this decade, Blinkx shares surged 40 per cent to 63p on the first day of trading on the AIM market. The initial listing price of 45p a share was already at the top end of the pricing range and the IPO was strongly oversubscribed. Blinkx ended the day with a market capitalisation of £175m.

Blinkx offers more than 13 million hours of indexed video content, making it the largest video search engine in the world. Mr Chandratillake said the company’s technology provides “the critical link” between the consumer and the fragmented online content industry. It processed 1.1 million searches last month alone.

The company has raised £25m that will be used predominantly to bulk up its sales and development staff. Mr Chandratillake said the company was looking to launch a broadband-based television service. He added that the company was also looking to develop an advertising platform.

It remains to be seen if any of these platforms will really make money. How oddly familiar …

So we suppose the ad agency thought: grunge icon + iconic shoe brand - both a bit irrelevant nowadays = exciting brand-generated controversy and lots of sales.

Guess again.

UPDATE:

“The head of Dr. Martens shoes apologized yesterday for an ad featuring Courtney Love’s late husband, Kurt Cobain, and other dead rock stars.

“We are really, really, really sorry,” Dr. Martens chief executive David Suddens tells People magazine. “We do think that it is offensive. We made a mistake. My message to Courtney Love is: This is something we shouldn’t have been doing.”

On Wednesday, Love lashed out at the company via her publicist. “Courtney had no idea this was taking place and would never have approved such a use,” her rep told People. “She thinks it’s outrageous that a company is allowed to commercially gain from such a despicable use of her husband’s picture.”

Suddens says the ad appeared in a British publication and was intended for a one-time use, though it got attention when it showed up on Web sites this week. Suddens says it was a mistake to have allowed even limited use of the ad.

“I wasn’t even aware of it,” Suddens says. “I was still unaware until [Wednesday]. When I found out what happened, I fired [the agency].”

The ad agency that created the effort, Saatchi & Saatchi London, released a statement yesterday posted on the Web site The Daily Swarm. “We believe the ads are edgy but not offensive,” executive creative director Kate Stanners says in the statement. “We regret that the controversy has led Dr. Martens to terminate the contract with Saatchi & Saatchi.”

Stanners goes on to claim that the image was released on a US site without authorisation from the agency. However, an official-looking interview that the writer Andrew Petch gave to the Daily Swarm over a week ago would apparently demonstrate that they were keen to get the word out about the campaign. The article was accompanied by all the executions including ones featuring the recently deceased Joe Strummer as well as Joey Ramone and Sid Vicious.

Erm, do they not understand that the Internet is global?

Source: Newsday via PerezHilton.

Doubt it …

That planet’s about to fall apart like a pig in a blender.

Fab.

Full disclosure: this ad was done by HHCL (RIP), our former employer and manger of BST.

Tom Ballhatchet’s hamster-powered paper shredder. Genius.

Via Core77.

Scratch is a free programming tool that allows anyone to create their own animated stories, video games and interactive artworks has been developed. Primarily aimed at children, Scratch does not require prior knowledge of complex computer languages (although, given the apparent hacker mentality of most digital natives this might not be an issue).

Instead, it uses a simple graphical interface that allows programs to be assembled like building blocks.

“These days, kids interact with all kinds of dynamic things on screen but it is usually a one-way street — they are usually interacting with things that other people have created,” said Professor Mitchel Resnick, one of the researchers at the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT which developed Scratch. Resnick also invented Lego Mindstorms, a robotics toolkit often used in teaching.

With Scratch we want to let kids to be the creators. We want them to create interesting dynamic things on the computer.

The program works by making the act of creating a computer program more like building with Lego bricks.

“Kids make programs by snapping blocks together,” said Professor Resnick, whose position is in part supported by the toy company (way to survive in the 21st century, Lego!).

Objects and characters, chosen from a menu and created in a paint editor or simply cut and pasted off the web, are animated by snapping together different “action” blocks into stacks.

“They don’t have to worry about the obscure punctuation and syntax common in most programming languages,” he said.

Each block contains a separate command, such as “move” or “play drum” and each action can be modified from a drop-down menu. Blocks can only be stacked if they fit together.

So, for example, if someone wanted to animate a cat walking across the screen they could modify the move block to tell the cat to walk forward 10 steps.

If they then wanted the cat to bang a drum as it walked, they could stack the play-drum block underneath, choosing a sound for the instrument and how long each beat should last.

Other actions, such as speaking, changing colour or triggering music, can then be added to complete the animation.

Scratch is inspired by the method Hip Hop DJs use to mix and scratch records to create new sounds. “With Scratch, our goal is to allow people to mix together all kinds of media, not just sounds, in creative ways,” said Professor Resnick.

“We want people to start from existing materials — grabbing an image, grabbing some sound, maybe even bits of someone else’s program and then extending them and mixing them to make them their own.”

Digital creations can then be shared on a site where users can watch other creations and even borrow elements from other Scratch projects to act as raw materials for their own.

Scratch is now available to download for free and works with both Apple Macs and Windows PCs. If you are reading this close to the launch date (15th May 2007) you might want to wait a little while — coverage from digg.com and the BBC et al caused such a huge amount of interest that their server crashed.

AND a version of the tool is also currently being developed for the XO laptop, designed by the One Laptop Per Child Project.

Source: BBC.

See how frightened they look? Free the crackhead 3!

Via the much-better-than perezhilton blog, dlisted.

UPDATE (also courtesy of dlisted). Kitten-flaunting appears to be an emergent celebrity trend. Where’s PETA when you need them?

Late last year we noted how similar some ads for a Chinese Italian restaurant chain were to the photography of Jill Greenbergh. At the time we noted that while Greenbergh’s work had caused controversy in the UK, similar images were being used to sell pasta in China. We never thought that the agency would be foolish enough to have not actually asked permission, or — if they hadn’t — that they thought that they could get away with such blatantly copycat work. Shanghaist now kindly alerts us to the fact Greenberg was neither involved nor was she asked permission.

According to Photo District News — which has reported on the story independently from us:

The O&M ad, credited to art director Ng Fan and photographer Connie Hong, according to the site AdsoftheWorld.com, shows a 2- or 3-year-old girl with angel wings, apparently distraught because a strip of hair has been shaved off her head. The ad’s tagline says, “Freshly made angel hair” (a reference to the pasta served by the restaurant). The photograph strongly resembles not only Greenberg’s “End Times” concept, but her shooting style. The images from Greenberg’s exhibit were widely published and reprinted both online and in print, and can be found on her web site.

Pursuing a copyright infringement claim in China can be expensive and difficult. Even if Greenberg pursued legal action, “she would probably have a difficult time making a case,” opines intellectual property attorney Nancy Wolff. Wolff explains that subject matter—in this case, crying children—is not protected by US copyright law, at least. And the ad may not be similar enough to any particular image by Greenberg to meet the threshold for infringement, even though it evokes Greenberg’s style. “Style is not something you can easily protect in terms of copyright,” Wolff says.

Greenberg declined to comment on this story.
Responding to an e-mail request for an interview, Michael Lee, managing director of O&M Advertising in Shanghai, said that the agency is “working with Jill for a solution.”

In our hyper-networked times, why do ad agencies think they can get away with this? There are even websites entirely dedicated to spotting when commercial interests rip off independent artists: check out You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice. Note to agencies: you will get found out.

Want to find some famous female inventors?

Try the query “she invented” in Google, and it will come back to you with a helpful

Did you mean: “he invented”

Sigh. This isn’t Google’s ‘fault’ — but it does sadly reflect that there are a lot more references and queries online to inventions by males than females.

[via Digg]

Isabella Blow was known for her glorious millinery and ardent support of young fashion talent: she famously bought the whole of Alexander McQueen’s graduate collection. The last words should probably go to Blow herself:

Hats make you look good and feel beautiful. You can wear them for lunch, a wedding or for breakfast. It is like taking drugs: it is more fun and less dangerous. You don’t have to look like an old bat. You can be a crow and look like a hen.