Image Credit: Getty Images, Hunter Wilson Photography/Flickr

Image Credit: Getty Images, Hunter Wilson Photography/Flickr

No matter how complex and diverse our online communities are, and how sophisticated and evolved the new ways in which we interact with one another seem, buying and selling still remains at the fore of the online world. Though the basic act of commerce has not changed, many entrepreneurial minds have envisioned new ways to facilitate our transactions, and bring business beyond cash and coin.

The Renmibi

In China, the QQ Coin—a currency attached to the massively popular QQ chatting and social networking service—has broken out of the virtual world, and is increasingly used to pay for real-life goods and services. Use of the QQ Coin has become so rampant that it has begun to affect the value of China’s official state currency—to the extent that the People’s Bank of China is actively seeking to crack down on QQ misuse.

M-PESA

The idea behind the M-Pesa digital currency is to permit branchless banking in the third world—allowing for loans and money transfers in areas where many have no access to a physical bank. M-Pesa enables basic bank transactions executed entirely via mobile phone. The M-Pesa service has carried interesting sociological consequences; one university study has explored the role the service plays in granting women greater financial freedom, as well as allowing their husbands to keep mistresses paid in secret.

Ecopup

A concept by Ashwin Rajan, a student at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, about a green-loyalty scheme where earned points for environmentally friendly behavior can be used as currency.

Image Credit: Getty Images, Fursov Aleksey Photography/Flickr

Berkshares

BerkShares is a program supported by the E.E. Schumacher Society that has had success in the Berkshire region of Massachusetts. People can go to a participating bank and purchase BerkShare currencies at a discount and then use them to make purchases at local businesses enrolled in the program. Businesses can use BerkShares to make change (keeping them in circulation) or sell them back to the banks. The currency comes in several denominations and features designs by local artists.

The Totnes Pound

The Totnes Pound is a ‘real world’ currency that was created in a small transition town in England to support local business and keep finance from leaking out.

Threebies

Threebles takes the concept of a credit rating and applies the principles of a triple bottom line. The program uses external feedback loops to measure social and environmental impacts and then creates financial consequences. For example, if a company earns a poor environmental rating, it would have to pay a higher rate of interest to obtain a loan.

World of Warcraft Gold

In World of Warcraft, players earn Gold as they advance through the game. The currency has become so sought-after that it is bought and sold on a black market, experts said.

Low-wage workers in China are known to play the game for a living and then sell the virtual currency they earn to avid “World of Warcraft” players in the West. This despite the fact that the game’s maker prohibits such activities.

Pay With Facebook

Facebook has rolled out its much-vaunted “Pay With Facebook’ system, as an alternative payment method for in-app purchases. The system has the obvious advantage of starting off with a massive potential base, but it’s unclear what any Facebook user’s incentive is to pay via the platform as opposed to say, Visa or Mastercard.

e-Gold

The e-Gold system was founded on a general suspicion of the American dollar and a steadfast belief that currency should be grounded by the gold standard. Established way back in 1996, e-Gold was eventually felled by its popularity with credit card scammers, and its founder has been embroiled in a legal battle with the government—though he does promise to clear his name and restart the service.

By Piers Fawkes | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Featured Articles, Finance & Money, Gaming & Social Networks, Global Community, Web & Technology, Work & Business and alternative currencies, Local, Money, virtual currencies, virtual worlds

British designer Kyle Bean has created this impressive set of cardboard sculptures as a statement on the environmental impact of constantly upgrading to the newest tech gear.

[ via Design Crave ]

By Francisco Hui | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Arts & Culture, Design, Electronics & Gadgets, Environmental, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds and art, carboard, ipod, Nano, Nintendo, recycle, scuplture, sustainable, technology

There’s been a hell of a lot of chat recently about exactly how you can make money through social media. So far, the only ones cashing in have been the founding principals when they sell off a fraction of their site to a traditional media company, which immediately gives them an insane valuation in the billions. Right now the situation smacks of the late nineties, dot com “Field of dreams” model. The one that said if you build it they will come, then we’ll start making dumpster loads of money by selling lots and lots of really shitty and intrusive advertising on the site. It didn’t work ten years ago and billions of dollars worth of VC money went down the rancid tubes of hundreds of short lived Silicon Valley start-ups.

And it’s beginning to look like deja vue all over again. Because, recent research has shown that one of the major reasons for the exodus of people from MySpace to Facebook is that MySpace users are being increasingly put off by the amount of advertising on the site. Owner Rupert Murdoch – The Wizened of Oz – Is continually talking about switching from an advertising model to a pay-for-content one on all his digital sites. Just last week, Jonathan Miller, his head of digital properties, was shooting his mouth off expressing his violent disagreement with free internet content. Speaking at yet another digital gab fest conference, he said he’d like to see at least some Hulu content restricted to subscribers. Yeah, and we know “some” soon becomes fucking “all!” He even claimed it was a well known fact that ad-supported content “doesn’t work,” saying that web companies should start weaning users off the free content they’ve come to expect by sticking them with a series of micropayments. Funny thing is, when he was AOL’s chief executive officer, in 2006, he made the decision to deep six their failing subscription model and make it a free service, supported by ads. OK, so what the fuck changed, Jonathon?

Actually, nothing has changed, because apart from Google, no one else is making serious money. People are thrashing around trying to define exactly how you make money in a Web 2.0, social media environment. I would predict that the pay-for-content model will also fall on stony ground. Not just because we are dealing with an entire generation who have grown used to not paying for cable or satellite TV, Newspapers and magazines, and increasingly music and movies. But also because there is so much stuff out there that they are afflicted with what Linda Stone has called “continuous partial attention.” And I don’t mean that multi-tasking bullshit everyone loves to talk about. I mean the fact that people spend less and less time focusing on a single thing because they are so fucking scared they’ll miss something, they are constantly scanning way too many things. To the point where some of these douchenozzles get killed crossing the road, ‘cos they’re tweeting about the great donut they just shoved down their pie-hole…

I have news for the Wizened of Oz. These people will not pay for content, yours or anyone else’s. Back to the drawing board guys.

George Parker is the perpetrator of adscam.typepad.com, without doubt, one of the most foul and annoying, piss & vinegar ad blogs on the planet. His new book, The Ubiquitous Persuaders, has just been published by Amazon and is currently setting the ether ablaze. He will continue to relentlessly promote the crap out of it until you are forced to stab yourself in the eyes with knitting needles.

By George Parker | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Advertising & Branding, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds, Web & Technology, Work & Business and advertising, George Parker, marketing, Micropayments, social media

With the Internet’s ability to empower individuals, social media platforms have become powerful forces for change and community action. Social media interconnects millions of people at any given point providing everyone with a megaphone that can be heard far and fast.

While companies conventionally buy media and hire PR agencies to tell people about their charitable efforts, recently Adweek reported on a different kind of media tactic to help people discover and disseminate the good deeds of brands. More brands are tapping into people’s do-gooder impulses to spread their charitable messages through P2P endorsement. Giving the supported charity a donation is incentive for people to post about it in their personal feeds—the real-time “stream” of updates on Facebook & co.—creating word of mouth that comes close to a personal recommendation.

This tactic has the potential upside for brands to be more cost-efficient by offering donations vs. buying ad space to build awareness for the supported cause. And it allows them to redirect some of their media budgets to cover part of the costs of the cause initiative. But there is also risk if people see the efforts as promotional tactics and social media spam vs. believing the brand wants to genuinely solve a problem or effect real change.

Target

Target’s Bullseye Gives campaign found the perfect blend of social media and charitable giving. For two weeks in May, users could vote once a day for one of 10 charities on Target’s Facebook page, to determine what percent of Target’s $3 million each charity would receive. Votes were published on news feeds for friends to view and become fans of the brand. The campaign resulted in 167,000 Facebook members who voted over 291,000 times and a 3,000% surge in Target’s wall posts.

Kraft

Kraft has teamed up with Feeding America to create the Share a Little Comfort campaign that offers to donate 1,000,000 boxes of Kraft’s Blue Box Mac and Cheese to families in need. With a single click of the mouse, users can donate a free box and share their charitable ways with friends on Facebook and Twitter via Kraft’s helpful links that instantly update news feeds with a convenient prewritten message, informing and encouraging friends to donate. At press, the campaign generated over 73,000 donations.

Media Arts Mondays is produced by Media Arts Lab. You can subscribe to Media Arts Mondays here or download this newsletter here.

Add your thoughts about this topic in the comments section below.

By MAL | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Advertising & Branding, Featured Articles, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds, Web & Technology, Work & Business and branding, marketing, Media Arts Mondays

At the Creativity and Technology Conference,  Zoic studios presented their project for “Killzone: Behind The Bullet”. It’s a download-able demo on the PS3 which follows the path of a bullet where gamers can control the camera angle, playback speed, and audio elements. The video renders in real time from the game engine, appealing to the gamer’s needs to see what the graphics are capable of.

To make the video, Zoic used in-game elements and animations to create the set. Taking existing assets, such as characters, lighting, and textures used to create the game and re-purposing it to create the video. The implications affect animators, who might have normally been needed to create the animation seen inside the video. If we can create content from prefabricated assets, where does that leave animators?

The video below is a regular version without input from a player.

But didn’t someone need to create the animations inside the game to begin with? Ed Ulbrich’s presentation sheds some light into new animation technologies.

Ed Ulbrich and his company, Digital Domain, were in charge of creating the special effects for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Rather than manually animating a 3D rendering of Brad Pitt’s facial expressions as he ages, they developed a surface mapping technique to capture it. Traditionally, motion capture was done by tracking moving points on a surface. This limits to how many tiny tracking balls you can put on the actor’s face. Surface mapping involves painting the actor’s face and tracking everything at once rather than individual points, resulting in much higher resolution.

They then surface map Brad Pitt acting out 70 different facial expressions to form a database of animations. (As a side note, there’s a science to studying facial expressions called FACS.) Combining these 70 expressions creates the basis for all the animation used in the movie where the actor is aged. It’s a more efficient method than having animators capture his idiosyncrasies.

By Francisco Hui | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Arts & Culture, Electronics & Gadgets, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds, TV & Film and animation, benjamin button, CaT, digital domain, motion tracking, zoic

Broadcast on China’s CCTV national television, “Win in China” (????) is the world’s largest and most lucrative business plan competition. With over $5 million in prize money, the TV show pits 120,000 entrepreneurs competing to win $1.5 million dollars to invest in the winner’s business plan.

The documentary, produced by Robert Compton, follows the TV show of the same name and features entrepreneur celebrities such as Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba Group and Chairman of China Yahoo, who served as Head Judge and Liu Chuanzhi, founder of computer giant Lenovo.

CCTV host sums up the role played by entrepreneurs in China: “Today, entrepreneurs are the biggest heroes in our society.”

By Sean Leow (PSFK Shanghai) | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Finance & Money, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds, Trends In Asia and business plan, china, WIN IN CHINA

Recently there has been a rash of cautiously critical opinions in the advertising blogosphere about augmented reality. Commentators at Advertising Lab, and Supercolider all believe augmented reality to be this year’s “Second Life”: over-hyped, under tested, and, at worst “disposable eye-candy”.

We fully acknowledge the potential for this technology to be merely an addition to the marketer’s arsenal of gimmickry. And, also see that there are still many kinks to iron out with it: the process of getting AR to work with your home computer/webcam can be cumbersome, and even when you’ve got it to work properly, you’re oftentimes peeking around a sheet of paper to see the generated image. Yet, in the right context, AR executions can add an incredible layer of interest.

We previously reported on Mini and Lego whose AR ads enable a more intimate experience of the products’ scale.

Ray Ban and Coraline’s AR endeavors allow for a personalized experience of product communication.

Furthering personalized experience is a campaign Adverblog points us to that Doritos has launched in Brazil to promote their Sweet Chili Flavor: A Pokemon-style online critter collection game that is activated through AR.

Is augmented reality doomed for crashing the hype cycle? The verdict is still out. At present we’re still seeing a handful of interesting applications for the technology.

By Ruben Sun | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Advertising & Branding, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds, Web & Technology and augmented reality

At this week’s E3 exhibition in Los Angeles, Microsoft is showing off a device they’re claiming will both revolutionize video gaming and render obsolete its hitherto requisite accessory—the controller. Dubbed “Project Natal,” the peripheral is an array of microphones, an RGB camera, and a depth sensor, that work in concert to pull off sophisticated face, voice, and gesture recognition that allows full-body movement to translate into intricate on-screen commands. Microsoft is proclaiming the device not just a quantum leap in gaming, but also the next step in making its Xbox the pinnacle of home entertainment, allowing Natal to hook up with online shopping and video content browsing with only the use of one’s hands.

[via Kotaku, Playfeed]

By Sam Biddle | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Electronics & Gadgets, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds and e3, Facial Recognition, Microsoft, xbox

Nascent online service Quirky is hoping to eliminate the opaque process of product research, industrial design, marketing, and manufacturing that stands between inventors and consumers, collapsing them into a streamlined, democratized online discussion they’re saying takes only days from start to finish.

Anyone with an idea and $99 can pay to pitch their proposal to Quirky’s users, who after deciding whether or not the idea is viable, will then provide feedback as the idea approaches manufacturing, voting on potential names, logos, and product design choices. Once the product begins selling, those in the Quirky community who contributed most to the feedback process are compensated proportionately, with the idea’s originator receiving a guaranteed a minimum 40% cut.

For those apprehensive about parting with $99 without a guarantee that their vision will go anywhere, Quirky touts the feedback process as beneficial even for those who are rejected:

We’ll give you in-depth analytics regarding your idea that will help you understand the type of people that are klustering around your idea. Through analytics, you can see how factors like age, gender, income, interests and more impacted the trajectory of your product idea.

Quirky’s first product—a universal wire retractor—is already available, with others currently in gestation.

By Sam Biddle | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Design, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds, Web & Technology, Work & Business and Crowd Source, Design, Industrial Design, open source, Product Design, Quirky

Social media is revolutionizing our lives as individuals and as marketers. In the last year, Facebook exploded globally and Twitter grew by a staggering 1382%. Last week Google launched the ‘Wave’, a new in-browser collaboration tool, ushering in the era of real time, aggregated communication.

Leading corporate brands are responding. The list of Fortune 500 companies using social media reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ including Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, Intel, Nike, Motorola, Pepsi, Starbucks, GM, GE and IBM. Yet even as social media goes mainstream, what it means for us as individuals and how we speak as marketers is not yet clear.

To dramatize the impact of social media, I’m going to visualize the growth of our interconnectedness using the concept behind the Charles and Ray Eames, IBM film called ‘Powers of Ten’. So I’ll start with home computers,  expand out across social networks, up through our community, city, country and the globe until we arrive at the Twitterverse and look to the future.

Obviously technology connects us in many complex ways, each one worthy of lengthy study. For brevity’s sake, I’ve assembled powerful visual snapshots of each level of connectivity thanks to many wonderful thinkers, companies and artists, each of whom are credited. The list is not meant to be exhaustive, but it aims to provide an overall sense of our multi-faceted connectedness so that we may better understand our changing roles as individuals and marketers.

x1 Visualizing Networks on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace
Building on a study by The Social Computing Laboratory at HP Labs, Brian Solis wrote a great post in which he visualized his Twitter network. The image on the left shows his outbound communication network at a given moment, while the image on the right shows the inbound. So complex and fluid are these networks that they are only measurable in snapshots as new ideas, content and context constantly morph the network in all directions.

Outbound

Inbound

x2 Real Time Aggregated Dialogue Across Social Networks
Whether it’s Tweetdeck that combines your Facebook or Twitter streams, or the more sophisticated Google Wave that aggregates email, web chat, IM, and project management software, new communication platforms allow you to combine your social networks and tools so information can flow between them. The Wave even gives you the ability to watch conversations live or replay them, as it records each sequence of communication character by character potentially revolutionizing email.

x3 Mapping Community Emotion using Social Media
Since 2004, Christian Nold has been orchestrating Biomapping – a crowdsourced, community mapping project - which wires people up to Galvinic Skin Response (GSR) devices to record their emotional states. The resulting maps are revealing visualizations of communal emotion. These serve as a dramatic illustration of a new phenomenon created by social media – an increasingly real time awareness of the emotion of our community and how it affects our perception of it.

x4 Visualizing the Hidden Networks within Cities
Korean Artist, Jee Lang Sub, created these stunning images that reveal the hidden networks or circulatory systems of our cities. As we commute from home to work, or simply move about a city, communicating remotely on computers or phones with social networking apps, we constantly inject our moment to moment experience into the information flow of our networks. A simple example is the way Twitter beat all other news sources to report the most recent Los Angeles earthquake.

Rome

Paris

Moscow

x5 Using Emotional Cities to Chart the World’s Emotional Pulse
‘Emotional Cities’ is the work of Swedish artist, Erik Krikortz that creates multi-layer, visual reflections of the world’s emotional pulse. You simply pick your current emotional state on a seven-level scale, allowing Erik to calculate and plot the average values for different cities, countries and the world in real time. In some cities, their emotional state is even projected on to a light installation, so you can know the emotional temperature of a city as you fly in on a plane. The social potential for this is staggering as it allows individuals, networked groups, entire cities and even countries to track their emotional states and virally affect others.

x6 Wireless Global Shared Experiences
MIT’s senseable City Lab recently released an incredible visualization of the mobile cell phone use during President Obama’s Inauguration. Called the ‘The City Project’, we witness the anticipation of the Oath of Office, the drop in call activity as people listen to his address and the celebration of his inauguration as President, all around the country. The two videos dramatically illustrate how social media such as texting, Facebook or Twitter enable shared experiences to generate collective consciousness, not just among groups of individuals, but across countries (first video) and around the world (second video).

x7 Ceaseless Global Information Flow
Again from MIT senseable City Lab, this visualization tracks the volumes of IP (Internet Protocol) data flowing between New York and cities around the world in real time. The size of the glow on a particular city location corresponds to the amount of IP traffic flowing between that place and New York City. A greater glow implies a greater IP flow. Like blood in our circulatory system pumped by human curiosity, information feeds our appetite of dialogue across all social networks.

x8 A Living History of Social Media
This chart plots many of the most significant moments in Internet history. Those related to Social Media, Web 1.0 and 2.0, are colored orange and pink (click to enlarge image). When envisioning the complexity of our interconnectedness, you cannot ignore the cumulative effect of all these tools, from email to Wikipedia to Twitter, that serve as a foundation of dialogue for all emerging social media and tools layered on top of them.

x9 Glimpsing the Twitterverse
Brain Solis and Jesse Thomas produced this wonderful alpha version of Twitterverse that charts the most important tools used by communications, service, marketing and community professionals to manage their Twitter groups (click to enlarge image). In total, apps number over 1000 and together create their own ecosystem. Impressive in its own right, Twitterverse is just one of thousands of social networks (see Ning) that constitute the enormity and complexity of our new connectedness. (Steve Rubel also offers a wonderful visualization of the future of Twitter he featured at TWTRCON.)

x10 The Future March of Social Media
According to Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law the internet ushered in a period of double acceleration and double instability, driven by the doubling of chip processing power and the squaring of the number of people on the net. Now, that same awe-inspiring potential has transferred to the web. The impossible is increasingly commonplace, and as the chart below shows, the pace of web platform development and hence the sophistication of our social communication, is only accelerating. As Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra stated in his keynote at Google I/O, “never underestimate the power of the web”.

As Joshua Cooper Ramo states, the next decade will be characterized by constant newness, the previously unthinkable, and an accelerating pace of change. While this makes the future more unpredictable than ever, there is no doubt the tireless march of technology will continue to connect us in unimaginable ways in real time. As our collective identities are enhanced, our sense of distinct individuality will be affected. And as our virtual and real life personas become equally complex and connected, each individual will be forced to define a personal balance between the two.

For marketers such connectivity means brands must appeal to individuals not through demographics or as target audiences, but as latent communities. Connection within social networks turns on emotions expressed through ideas, content and dialogue, not because of similarities in gender, age or location.

As Mary Shapiro noted in AdAge after returning from the Web 3.0, marketers are currently struggling to reconcile targeted ad spending with a consumer’s need for privacy. Increasingly consumers must be given the choice as to what marketing they invite into their organically-driven networks (a ‘pull’ vs. ‘push’ approach of the past). As more social networks flourish and grow, they will cease to be passive landscapes for marketing messaging (from spam to DM’s to brand offers), and become proactive forces that dictate conscionable brand behavior and bring about social change.

The original ‘Powers of Ten’ film served as a timely reminder of our relative insignificance as human beings. The Twitterverse version dramatizes the growing significance of social media. As Kevin Kelly wrote in Wired, we should “never underestimate the power of tools to reshape our minds”. With each passing day, social media is fusing our hearts and minds together in a powerful, shared experience to create a collective consciousness that redefines our lives as individuals and marketers, and serves as a powerful signpost for our future in a global community.

Thanks to Pete and Ben of Mashable fame for their great coverage of Google Wave and to Maria Popova and her fantastic site Brainpickings for bringing Jee Lang Sub, Christian Nold and Erik Kritkortz to our attention.

By Simon Mainwaring | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Advertising & Branding, Design, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds, Web & Technology and Design, internet, social media, Social Networks

Later this year EA will release a Beatles version of the sing-and-strum-along video game Rock Band. It looks like you can play with the band in some of their classic concerts. Here’s the just-released trailer:

RockBand

By Piers Fawkes | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Electronics & Gadgets, Entertainment, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds, Music and beatles, Music, the beatles

Virgin is teaming up with Google to promote cloud computing. On June 24th, the Day in the Cloud Challenge, lets players compete versus others either on the ground or while flying in one of Virgin’s flights through WiFi. If you’re flying Virgin that day, you’ll receive free WiFi to join the challenge. But if you have work to do, you can opt to share documents, email, browse websites or anything you normally do back at the office.

Whether you can teleconference is not clear, though it might be fun to collaborate on solving a puzzle while flying.

By Francisco Hui | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Advertising & Branding, Arts & Culture, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds, Telecom, Transport & Travel, Web & Technology, Work & Business and behance, challenges, cloud computing, Competition, games, Google, puzzles, virgin, wifi

Webdesigner Depot has compiled an exhaustive list of 50 different data visualization examples from around the web. All bases are covered here, from social media ecosystem mapping to music visualization. There are hours of really interesting stuff to wade through.

Seen above: The Hierarchical Structure of the Internet and Arc

By Dan Gould | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Design, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds, Web & Technology and data visualization, info graphics, web

Minsch is a unique site that visualizes Twitter users as fish in a 3-dimensional, underwater world. Schools of fish gather based on their tweets. The site is in Alpha now with the Alpha 2 version to be released on July 13, 2009.

Richard Banks explains:

The concept behind the virtual world is that the social behaviour of fish will represent what people are talking about online. In the world of Minsh, people writing about a given subject find themselves swimming in the same school. When a person updates his or her Twitter status, the fish swims away to join people with similar thoughts on their minds.

Check out their site or stay updated with their blog.

[ Richard Banks via Infosthetics ]

By Francisco Hui | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Arts & Culture, Design, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds, Web & Technology and 3D, minsch, second life, Twitter, Visualization

Boing Boing points us to a very interesting Wall Street Journal Article that explores how homeless people are using the Internet. Corey Doctorow also predicts that within five years, network access will be declared a universal human right. Lots of great brain food all around.

The WSJ reports:

Like most San Franciscans, Charles Pitts is wired. Mr. Pitts, who is 37 years old, has accounts on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. He runs an Internet forum on Yahoo, reads news online and keeps in touch with friends via email. The tough part is managing this digital lifestyle from his residence under a highway bridge.

“You don’t need a TV. You don’t need a radio. You don’t even need a newspaper,” says Mr. Pitts, an aspiring poet in a purple cap and yellow fleece jacket, who says he has been homeless for two years. “But you need the Internet.”

Mr. Pitts’s experience shows how deeply computers and the Internet have permeated society. A few years ago, some people were worrying that a “digital divide” would separate technology haves and have-nots. The poorest lack the means to buy computers and Web access. Still, in America today, even people without street addresses feel compelled to have Internet addresses.

Wall Street Journal: “On the Street and On Facebook: The Homeless Stay Wired”

By Dan Gould | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Electronics & Gadgets, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds, Web & Technology and culture, Homeless, internet, Society

For the 62nd Pecha Kucha Night in Tokyo, game developer Mark Cooke presented the results a challenge he set himself to: create 10 games in 10 hours. In that time he made games for the iPhone, the web and the Mac. His presentation takes us on a tour of each experiment, revealing exactly what an hour of development time will allow you to design. Fascinating even if you’re not a game designer.

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“10 games in 10 hours” Screencast from Mark Cooke on Vimeo.

PechaKucha also have a video of Cooke presenting his work but (as usual) there’s a quality issue with the visuals and sound.

Pecha Kucha
Mark Cooke

By Piers Fawkes | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds and iphone, iPhone App

Apparently Google has designed a Holodeck. Revealed at the Google I/O Conference yesterday, the Holodeck projects animated StreetView images on screens surrounding a single viewer. The images of the reality simulator make it look like it provides a decently realistic experience of moving through the world. Watch a short video of the Holodeck below, and head over to Search Engine Land for more details.

[via Google Blogoscoped]

By Dan Gould | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Electronics & Gadgets, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds, Web & Technology and Google, Holodeck, StreetView, Virtual Reality

Microsoft have launched the next generation of their media player Zune. Available in the Fall, the Zune HD offers owners high definition radio, high-definition (HD) video output capabilities and the usual media management. The big update seems to be how they’re connecting the Zune service with Microsoft’s Xbox environment. The press release reads:

Zune will be a premium partner in the Xbox LIVE Video Marketplace, bringing an exciting catalog of TV and film to the platform. Zune will occupy the first slot within the Xbox user interface in the Xbox LIVE Video Marketplace, exposing the Zune brand experience to millions of new consumers for the first time. At the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) next week, attendees will see firsthand how Zune integrates into Xbox LIVE to create a game-changing entertainment experience.

We’ll see whether this move really is game-changing or just a rush for the Xbox user-base later this year.

Microsoft Zune

[Via DVICE]

By Piers Fawkes | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Electronics & Gadgets, Entertainment, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds, Music and Microsoft, Music, xbox, zune

You have to laugh when you read the piece in Saturday’s New York Times about how Ad Revenue on the Internet is no longer the Holy Grail it has been promoted as for the last few hundred years or so. Remember, ever since the immortal dot com implosion, we were incessantly bombarded with the “Field of Dreams” scenario? Build the world’s wankiest Web site, give free access, free content, Jesus, even offer them your girlfriend for free. That way, you’ll generate a huge audience, then years down the road you’ll be able to milk the shit out of these cretins. Unfortunately, for 99.999% of these sites it never happened. The good news is that this left legions of Stanford MBA, Palo Alto based venture capitalists with massive amounts of egg all over their Botoxed faces. It also left many Big Dumb Agencies, who should have known better if greed hadn’t got in their way, with lots of unpaid media bills because they had booked multiple thirty second television spots for Ma Kettle’s micro-wave-able home cooked, hominy grits.com on the Super Bowl. To which I can only say… Ha… Ha…Serves the fuckers right!

Now, as advertisers are cutting back on their spending, all the media is being hammered. Even the so-called el-cheaper version… Digital, is getting its share of misery. So now we are hearing from the pundits all these cautionary tales about how Web start-ups must consider other revenue streams, rather than simply selling advertising on their sites.

You have to love some of the statements from the VC douchenozzles. Here’s a great one from Roger Lee, a partner at Battery Ventures (Hens… Eggs… WTF?) who invests in digital media start-ups… “Current troubles in the advertising economy are forcing people, out of necessity, to ask really hard questions about how to build a profitable business.” Roger, Roger… Fuck the current troubles… Shouldn’t you be endeavoring to build a profitable business, even in the good times?

One of the case studies featured is for a Web site design company by the name of WetPaint, which now intends to make gazillions of dollars by offering their customers such exciting paid-for services as, additional storage for big files, (yawn) personalized domain names, (yawn) And the sale of virtual goods on its sites. (Oh my god… triple yawn.)

Speaking of which, World Golf Tour, an online golf game with high-definition graphics, makes money from 5 percent of its 250,000 players, who are fucking dumb enough to pay for things like $1 putters in the virtual pro shop or an $18 tournament entry fee. Obviously these people are MBA wielding venture capitalists with shit for brains. But, as they say, if you build it, the fucktards will come. Oh, pardon me… Yawn, fucking yawn!

George Parker is the perpetrator of adscam.typepad.com, without doubt, one of the most foul and annoying, piss & vinegar ad blogs on the planet. His new book, The Ubiquitous Persuaders, has just been published by Amazon and is currently setting the ether ablaze. He will continue to relentlessly promote the crap out of it until you are forced to stab yourself in the eyes with knitting needles.

By George Parker | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Advertising & Branding, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds, Web & Technology, Work & Business and advertising, George Parker, Opinion