Will the Art Market Crash. By Charlie Finch This week's perfect storm of bad worldwide economic news, including depressed growth numbers from India, China and the U.S., capital flight from Spain and continued stalemate in the European Union over Greece and the future of the euro, make one wonder whether the high end art market can continue its contrarian record sales indefinitely. A major sign that it cannot was the 32 percent drop in revenue at the Hong Kong auctions from the previous year, as the auction houses dissembled by blaming high consigner price demands, rather than the obvious slump in the Chinese economy. Looking ahead, I wonder if a deflationary spiral, such as the one that hit the Japanese real estate industry and its art market in 1990, might destroy the auction market before the coming November sales.
CHARLIE FINCH is co-author of Most Art Sucks: Five Years of Coagula (Smart Art Press). Checkthis. California Senate votes to allow self-driving cars. OMG This Exists: Inhalable Alcohol Gives An Instant Buzz. Humans have been inventing weird (and often unsavory) ways to get themselves embarrassingly drunk for centuries. But the makers of Wahh, a new inhalable alcohol mist, say their product is designed to do just the opposite. Wahh is the invention of David Edwards, the Harvard professor whose inhalable caffeine and smokable chocolate have appeared on this site before. Edwards’s line of “breathable food sprays” (yum!) Called Quantum Sensations includes Aeroshot, a vaporizing caffeine inhaler that received over $8.5 million in venture funding earlier this year. Edwards collaborated with French designer Philippe Starck to bring us the latest Quantum Sensation, Wahh, which debuted last week in Paris. About $26 will buy you a Wahh canister, which contains around 25 “puffs” of vaporized alcohol.
The science behind the vaporizer is pretty simple. “Everyone has an occasional need of light-headedness, distraction, and another place,” says Starck, but we tend to use alcohol as a “social placebo.” Mobile App Growth Led by Video Sharing: YouTube in the Crosshairs? Mobile App Growth Led by Video Sharing: YouTube in the Crosshairs? Posted by Peter Farago on Tue, May 08, 2012 With the frenzy created by the speed and price for which Facebook bought Instagram, app entrepreneurs and investors are excitedly looking for where consumers will next flock within mobile apps. In a recent report, Flurry quantified the dramatic increase in usage among social networking apps on smartphones. For the first time since the App Store launched in summer 2008, the Games category found itself rivaled by another category in terms of time spent in apps.
The rise in popularity of apps like Instagram, Path and Skout signals a new era of content consumption on mobile phones where consumers are finding new, compelling ways to spend their time beyond just games. This report reveals emerging trends in mobile app category usage. The above chart shows the top five app categories based on growth in minutes spent from October 2011 to March 2012. Trendspotting: The Instagram of Video.
A Swarm of Nano Quadrotors. 5 nieuwe media trends uit de States. South by Southwest Interactive vond afgelopen week plaats in Austin, Texas. Het duurde 5 dagen, die allemaal dik gevuld waren met in totaal 3.000 sessies. Ik ben bij zo’n 15 sessies aanwezig geweest. Tijdens het napraten met andere bezoekers en het lezen van verschillende blogs over het event, ben ik tot 5 belangrijke trends gekomen: contentcuratie, social-local apps, de veranderende business, big data en techstuff (bij gebrek aan een betere verzamelnaam). Ik licht ze hieronder toe. 1. Contentcuratie Curatie is een woord dat je de komende tijd veel zult horen. 2.
Twitter en Foursquare zijn afgelopen jaren ‘doorgebroken’ op SXSW. Highlight De social-local app Highlight De app bezit zowel positieve als negatieve eigenschappen: het is echt leuk om meer te weten over de mensen om je heen, zeker op een evenement als SXSW. Lanyrd Ik vond het fijn om tijdens SXSW oog in oog te staan met een aantal mensen die ik bewonder en daarom volg op Twitter. Meer apps 3. De muziekindustrie is veranderd. 4. 5. Tourism News: Top 10 Hospitality Industry Trends. TOY TRENDS INSPIRED BY POP CULTURE, TECHNOLOGY, SOCIAL CAUSES. Toy Trends Inspired By Pop Culture, Technology, Social Causes Melanie Shrefflereditor in chiefYpulse Essentials Archive. We were at the Time To Play toy showcase yesterday to keep an eye on the trends coming this spring and summer — and to have a little fun letting our inner child come out to play.
As usual, toy makers are putting out toys that are travel-friendly for summer holidays — including Crayola’s fold-and-go Dry Erase Activity Mat and Mattel’s WWE Money In The Bank play set that all folds up into a briefcase (like the one that hangs in the center of the ring for that event). There were also plenty of toys that take advantage of the heat — including Little Kids’ Limbo sprinkler set and the Nerf Supersoaker with the largest water capacity ever.
Amid all that, however, were some new trends we’ve been keeping our eyes on: Low-Tech Meets High-Tech 3D has been hot in movies, but not so much in sidewalk chalk...until now. DIY/Self-Expression Caring About Social Causes Retro Bows & Arrows. 4 Reasons Why The Future Of Capitalism Is Homegrown, Small Scale, And Independent | Co. Design. You won’t learn about it in business school, hear about it from Wall Street, or see it in Palo Alto. But if you spend time in Bushwick, Brooklyn, or on Rivington Street in Manhattan, you just might detect the outlines of an emerging “indie” capitalism. This new form of capitalism is not just about conventional startups and technology and venture capitalists. If you add up all the trends under way today, I believe we are beginning to see the start of something original, and perhaps wonderful. It may prove to be the economic and social antidote to the failed financial capitalism and crony capitalism that no longer delivers economic value in terms of jobs, income, and taxes to the people of this country.
It’s too early to define the exact shape of this latest iteration of capitalism, but what indie capitalism appears to have is a distinct sensibility. Indie capitalism is local, not global, and cares about the community and jobs and says so right up front. What do you think? Vimeo Co-founder Starts DIY.org, An Online, Social Scrapbook For Kids. Used to be, if your kid crayoned a portrait of the family dog, you slapped it on the refrigerator for all to see (“all” being, well, the rest of the household). But such small-time exhibition space doesn’t rate anymore, says Vimeo cofounder Zach Klein: Today, children live effortlessly on the world wide web. So too should their creative output.
Thus was born DIY.org, a digital scrapbook-cum-social network for kids. How it works: A child makes something, captures it using the DIY.org app on his parents’ phone (or digital camera), then adds it to a virtual portfolio. “What’s remarkable is that kids are aware of the possibilities when they share something on the web,” Klein tells Co.Design. And it isn’t just for the good of young minds everywhere; this is a business. Klein runs the site alongside Isaiah Saxon, Daren Rabinovitch, and Andrew Sliwinski--a bunch of self-described “makers and doers”--from a San Francisco storefront (complete with a paw print on the door). A DIY Kit For Doing Molecular Gastronomy At Home. If cooking shows are any indication, in order to prove yourself as a genius chef, you have to know some basic chemistry: How to make ice cream in a matter of seconds using liquid nitrogen, and transform just about anything into “caviar” with the help of such ingredients as agar-agar.
Masters of these techniques (think Wylie Dufresne and Feran Adrià) have been labeled molecular gastronomists, so named because they construct food with the tools (and oftentimes the studied nerdiness) of scientists. For those of us who watch Top Chef wishing we could turn tonight’s dinner into a science experiment, here’s reason to rejoice: There’s a kit with everything you need to make beet foam, balsamic vinegar pearls, and arugula spaghetti. Molecule-R’s DIY molecular gastronomy set comes with familiar lab equipment (pipettes, silicone tubes, and a syringe), a 50-recipe DVD, as well as packets of food additives, including sodium alginate, xanthan gum, and soy lecithin.
(Uh, yum?) 7 Ingenious DIY Designs You Can Make At Home | Co.Design. Samuel Bernier’s Project RE_ is a playful enigma. On the one hand, there is a clear aesthetic thread that runs through each project’s final form--it’s not hard to imagine spending far too much to buy these things at a high-end boutique. On the other hand, they are all made from household objects and the steps to making them are freely available online. It seems that Bernier is at home in this enigma.
Project RE_ is an academic work, part of Bernier’s graduation project at the University of Montreal. In keeping with the principles of open source design, step-by-step instructions are available online at Instructables and the 3D printing files and laser cutting data is available at Thingiverse. This is, in a funny way, big business.
In the meantime, page through our gallery of Bernier’s designs and see if you can guess what the final result will be, by looking only at the ingredients. Why 2012 will be year of the artist-entrepreneur. While 2011 was a big year for political unrest, another uprising was afoot in the world of content creators and artists. Everywhere you look, artists are taking more control over their own economic well being, in large part because the Internet has enabled them to do so. You see it in all forms of content, from books, to video to music. A few examples from this year: e-books: Probably the most active area in large part because there is huge shifts taking place in digital publishing.
From former mid-list writers like Barry Eisler to superstars like JK Rowling, writers are increasingly making waves in digital publishing. Video: The story of the year for artists-as-entrepreneur came at the tail-end, with Louis CK saying no thank you to corporate middlemen and putting his new concert video online for $5 a pop. So what is driving this movement towards the artist-entrepreneur that will give it huge momentum in 2012? The distribution chain is collapsing across content verticals. Dude, This Diplomat's No Stiff. You know the picture of Hillary Clinton on the plane, texting with shades on? The behind-the-scenes image became an Internet meme in part because it was so unexpected, speaking volumes about a new era of American power abroad: cool, technologically cutting-edge, and female.
Suzanne Philion, a 34-year-old who works under Clinton as Senior Advisor for Innovation in the Bureau of Education & Cultural Affairs at the U.S. State Department, embodies that new era. Foreign Service in the 21st century is far cooler than many people realize, she says, and thanks to ever-changing job assignments--not to mention an ever-changing global political landscape--it’s the perfect career for a Generation Fluxer who wants to serve her country and see the world, too. FAST COMPANY: In your Twitter profile, you describe yourself as a “bad diplomat.” What does a Senior Advisor for Innovation in the Bureau of Education & Cultural Affairs at the State Department actually do? Flagship Fluxers, Photo: Brooke Nipar. The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future - Alexis Madrigal - Technology.
After five years pursuing the social-local-mobile dream, we need a fresh paradigm for technology startups. Finnish teenagers performing digital ennui in 1996 2006. Reuters. We're there. The future that visionaries imagined in the late 1990s of phones in our pockets and high-speed Internet in the air: Well, we're living in it. "The third generation of data and voice communications -- the convergence of mobile phones and the Internet, high-speed wireless data access, intelligent networks, and pervasive computing -- will shape how we work, shop, pay bills, flirt, keep appointments, conduct wars, keep up with our children, and write poetry in the next century.
" That's Steve Silberman reporting for Wired in 1999, which was 13 years ago, if you're keeping count. The question is, as it has always been: now what? Decades ago, the answer was, "Build the Internet. " What we've seen since have been evolutionary improvements on the patterns established five years ago. That paradigm has run its course. When Will this Low-Innovation Internet Era End? - Justin Fox. By Justin Fox | 10:52 AM April 27, 2012 It’s an age of unprecedented, staggering technological change. Business models are being transformed, lives are being upended, vast new horizons of possibility opened up. Or something like that. These are all pretty common assertions in modern business/tech journalism and management literature. Then there’s another view, which I heard from author Neal Stephenson in an MIT lecture hall last week. Stephenson was clearly trying to be provocative. More prosaically, the 15 years since the Internet became a major part of our lives has been marked here in the U.S.
— birthplace of the Internet — by mostly disappointing economic growth. The most common response to such griping has been, just wait. Or, to look at it another way, until the prime example of an innovative major corporation ceases to be Procter & Gamble, we probably aren’t in a truly innovative era (Tide to Go is awesome, but it’s not exactly the transistor). The Next Big Thing - Umair Haque. What’s the next big thing? Is it 3D printing, personal genomics, cleantech, hydrotech, self-driving cars, augmented reality, wearable computing, microcurrencies, big(ger) data, faster drones? And now for something completely different.
What makes us human? In one word, preferably. It’s a question, that the other day, out of sheer orneriness, I decided to ask my Twitter followers. The most common answers were: empathy, consciousness, compassion, love. So here’s another question, given the results of my thoroughly unscientific anti-experiment. And yet few of us go the office, the classroom, the bank, or the clinic to expect, evoke, elicit, or enjoy anything resembling empathy, consciousness, compassion, love. Here’s how an organization designed for empathy might work. Now, you might — and probably do — object to some of my quasi-designs; and that’s fair enough. In the journey of human progress, there are still undoubtedly whole new continents — perhaps literally galaxies — to explore. To Create a Sustainable Business Find a REAL Problem to Solve. TechCrunch's latest conference, Disrupt, is live streaming from San Francisco this week. A battery of new, hopeful companies are launching there, hoping to solve problems.
But the companies I saw yesterday were not solving the many real problems we see around us: the scarcity of resources, the decline of public education, the high unemployment rate, the potential collapse of democracies, the inability of supposedly educated human beings to participate in civil discourse. Instead, they were trying--with great ingenuity and advanced technology--to solve manufactured problems: how to provide more rewards for consumers using Foursquare, (Gifi) how to track my behavior on Web sites I visit (One True Fan), These companies want brands to be able to reach me when I am in the super market and tell me about specials on shelves I might not want to visit, to buy things I may not want or need.
What's the technology they're using? Game mechanics. I am being manipulated. Bizcamp #6 - Howest, Kortrijk.