Product

Fake the fake!

This high-end designer boutique in a trendy part of Seoul sells these bags at higher than Louis Vuitton's full prices, which is not nearly as hilarious as Louis Vuitton's unique methods in fighting back counterfeiters these days. Just look at this fake set-up of a fake bag seller that sells real bags during a recent exhibit launch party in New York. (via Notcot)

Democratic exclusivity: micro-dining

After reading and talking so much recently about the concept of "democratic exclusivity" (first coined by Ed Cotton on the Influx Insights blog and then promoted by the relentless Piers Fawkes), I was delighted to finally experience it myself when I was strolling the streets of Paris last week. I spent a day (a micro-vacation!) in the not-so-touristy 6th district around Metro Vavin in Montparnasse (in fact, I rarely left it, which was a much more satisfying experience than zig-zagging from the left to the right bank all the time as I used to) and discovered "Le Timbre,&… Read more

The world's 50 most innovative companies

BusinessWeek has published its annual The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies list, a survey put together in collaboration with the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Of course Apple is the no.1. Yet there are some surprises:

- Two Indian companies made the top 20: Tata is #6 and Reliance came in at #19.

- General Motors made it on the list (for "products"), thanks to "concept cars like the electric Chevrolet Volt and the Detroit auto maker's renewed focus on design."

- For the first time, a Wall Street firm made the top 25: … Read more

Earth Day: What's missing from CE devices today

In honor of Earth Day, let's look at a once-commonplace feature that has almost entirely disappeared from today's consumer electronics. To illustrate my point, here's a picture from my gadget archive, a perfectly ordinary Sony radio Walkman of mid-90's vintage:

Now let's look at the back:

Notice anything? No? Let's look closer:

What's that...a screw? Remember those? Yes, indeed, thanks to the constant drive for sleekness and cost-cutting you never see screws on CE devices any more, especially portable ones.

What does this have to do with Earth Day? A couple of … Read more

Philippe Starck and "design is dead"

Philippe Starck had an epiphany, after all these years: "Everything I have designed is absolutely unnecessary," the French star designer admitted in a recent interview with the German weekly DIE ZEIT. I had the dubious pleasure of hanging out in the Starck-designed Volar club in Shanghai last weekend, and my initial reaction to his statement was: yeah, right! I've never really liked his pompose celebrity design. But then I read his quote again in the context of the whole interview and realized: he is right, actually. In fact, his thoughts are so poignant and humbling that it … Read more

Chinese social network QQ outperforms Facebook & Co.

I just returned from a trip to Shanghai, and in case you didn't know anyway, here's my No. 1 insight: China scales.

Let's take QQ.com as an example, the leading Chinese online social network. The site is reported to have more than 300 million active accounts. That is eight times the member base of Facebook--and it's the same size as the U.S. population.

What's also remarkable (and different from the Western social networks) is QQ's monetization. Facebook posted revenue of $150 million for 2007 (and according to Plus8star a loss of $50 million); … Read more

Design Green Now

I was part of a panel discussion at Western Washington University yesterday for Design Green Now, a series of talks about sustainable design taking place on the West Coast. Together with my fellow panelists Sophia Wang Traweek, Marc Stoiber and Arunas Oslapas I think we covered a pretty good range of topics with our short presentations, but the real heart of it was Q&A with the 70 or so students attending and some questions submitted via a website. It was also good to see a presentation about the various sustainability efforts going on at the WWU campus.

As … Read more

Has crowdsourcing jumped the shark?

Crowdsourcing has entered the mainstream big-time. It has become daunting to find a brand these days that does NOT have some crowdsourcing program in place.

My Starbucks Idea is just the latest example: Starbucks asks its consumers for advice, and besides certainly receiving a lot of good ideas, the troubled coffee chain makes consumers feel part of the brand remake.

It's the same template as usual: engage your community, harness its creativity, and let it create the content for you.

It works, sure, but it's getting stale. For some reason, marketing trends take two to three years before … Read more

Sony flagship Alpha 900 DSLR breaks cover

Continuing their march upward in digital SLRs, Sony has for the first time allowed a hands-on look at a prototype of their Alpha 900. They had previously shown it "under glass" at photo shows.

There are a few noteworthy things:

Sensor: Holy moly, a 25 megapixel full frame sensor! Be sure to bring lots of memory cards, because you are going to fill them up fast, especially if shooting RAW (and as a pro, why wouldn't you be?). This is twice as big as the 12.2MP sensor in the competing Nikon D3, currently the darling of … Read more