As Seen On The Streets of NY

Sociological commentary? New downtown band? All around racist insult? Just another graffiti?

 Seen in Murray Hill.

Perfect Summer Music

 
Sunny day... driving in the car... windows down... and the Radio Dept. on, playing Heaven's on Fire.

Nike: Write The Future

Nike's has a new elaborate ad out for the World Cup. The commentary on soccer in each country is the most interesting though:

- In Italy, Brazil and Portugal there's personal glory for their players, but only in England does it affect the stock markets. Anyone who's been in England when the national team plays will know that this is not too far from the truth...

- France's Frank Ribery is in the ad but doesn't have a write the future episode. Is that because his future is written already thanks to his underage prostitute scandal, or France's relative indifference to footie compared to say, Brazil or Italy?

- And Brazil's Ronaldinho? Didn't make the selection... Oops...

Seen on the streets of NY

Last week on 23rd and 5th avenue

Ghost Recon Game Trailer: Cool Video, Weird Timing

Real actors and high production values promoting a video game aren't new. But the game Ghost Recon takes place in Moscow. And the movie-like trailer released on March 25th is about taking out terrorist warlords in the near future.

Near future? Four days later Moscow's subway terrorist are in the headlines... Eery timing. The lines between video games, hollywood and news are decidedly blurred.

Shout Out Louds. They're their own band now

I always thought The Shout Out Louds were a little too endebted to The Cure. On Fall Hard, they seem to have ratched up the production a bit and it works. With a weird video to boot.

New Work Diggs

On Monday we moved into a new office space at 11 Madison. It's a magnificent landmark Art Deco building with an interesting (albeit stunted) history.

 












It was built during the great depression and was originally supposed to be the soaring skyscraper seen in the sketch on the right. But the building ran into financial trouble and they stopped building at the yellow arrow, resulting in the smaller tower seen on the left sketch. 


There's a magnificent lobby and although security would not let me take pictures, I managed to sneak one in:

Best of all though is the stunning view on the Empire State Building directly from my desk:

Actually, best of all is that 11 Madison, one of my favorite NYC restaurants is in the lobby...

Kid Harpoon - A Take Away Show

Kid Harpoon plays acoustic versions of some of his songs in a Paris park (in the 12th arrondissement, incidentally my sister used to live around the corner from there). The first song is really great. I'd never hear of Kid Harpoon so merci la blogotheque... More on his MySpace page. It's sweet pop, but not sickeningly sweet.

Facebook Facts

Digital Buzz has a fascinating infographic illustrating Facebook's transformation from a bunch of guys coding a nifty application from a Harvard dorm room to a full scale Web platform with 400 mllion users worldwide. 

One stat that jumps out at me: 

The average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook.  

Based on that extraordinary level of user engagement, it seems that the missing link for Facebook is still how to make (serious) money from it. Facebook's finances are not made public, but most estimates figure 2009 revenues around $500-600 million. Not shabby for a six year old company that's still under VC ownership/funding...

Nevertheless, they still haven't found the way to convert this amazing level of engagement into the kind of money that an ABC or Google are able to extract. I'm really intrigued to see if Facebook is able to find a "killer advertising app" that taps into all this user information or if it's going to be several revenue sources (virtual currency, apps, advertising etc.). Whatever comes first I guess. Assuming one does of course...