In it’s first year of existence, KicksOnFire.com has managed to carve out a nice Sneakerhead audience in a space already crowded with the likes of Freshnessmag and Hypebeast. However, with it’s daily updated content and extreme focus on just kicks, KicksOnFire is becoming the pre-eminent online destination for the finicky sneaker collectors out there. In just under one year, the site has grown deep with information and is establishing itself as an online encyclopedia for the Jordan, Air Max, Dunk, AF1, and Nike SB collectors out there. I just recently spent a few hours on the site and scraped a wealth of images into my PictoBrowser widget. Check out the visuals here, but make sure you visit KicksOnFire for the full behind the scenes scoop.
Archive for December, 2007
Overkill Berlin
Dec 28
Thanks to Thomas from Overkill for always keeping me up to date on what’s popping in Berlin. It’s been a busy holiday season for the crew at Overkill and they are stocking everything from the Bobbito Nike Air Force 1s to the Adidas Micropacer to the JB Classics “Leary Collection”. Peep the eye candy on my Flickr photostream via the very awesome and impressive Pictobrowser.
City Wall
Dec 14
[scraped from CityWall website]
The CityWall is a large mutli-touch display installed in a central location in Helsinki which acts as a collaborative and playful interface for the everchanging media landscape of the city. The content displayed on the CityWall is periodically organized into themes or events that are currently taking place in the city such as festivals, carnivals or sports events.
The CityWall is designed to support the navigation of media, specifically annotated photos and videos which are continuously gathered in realtime from public sources such as Flickr and YouTube. To contribute content to the CityWall please send pictures and videos via MMS or email to post@citywall.org. Alternatively, tag your media on YouTube or Flickr with ‘Helsinki’ and we will pick up your media and display it here on the CityWall.
Using a series of intuitive gestures users can navigate and arrange media as if they were manipulating physical pictures. The technology which enables this direct interaction has been specifically designed and developed by UIx so that several people can interact directly with display at the same time; the maximum number of people who can interact is limited only by physical space. The current CityWall installation measures 2.6 meters wide but the technology would allow displays that are theoretically 16 meters wide. The installation has three objectives; First it aims at creating Awareness and Presence of City Events in an engaging installation where passers by playfully manipulate media and learn about anniversaries, events and festivals. Second it is aimed at supporting active visitors and social media motivating users to actively and collaboratively make sense and play with media. Third CityWall proposes a platform for Media Literacy which can deliver rich media experiences to the widest audience. Anyone with the most basic computer skills can learn and use the CityWall in a few moments.
Theodore Watson and Emily Gobeille created the interactive installation, ‘Funky Forest’ which premiered at the 2007 Cinekid festival in the Netherlands. ‘Funky Forest’ is an interactive ecosystem where children create trees with their body and then divert the water flowing from the waterfall to the trees to keep them alive. The health of the trees contributes to the overall health of the forest and the types of creatures that inhabit it. The installation was made with openFrameworks.
IBM’s Many Eyes project is about the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. The goal of the project is to “democratize” visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. There are hundreds of visualizations to choose from on the site. The potential of data visualization to spark insight, to take an unwieldy, unyielding data set and transform it into an interpretable image on a screen is what the group is striving for. The hope being that the visualization will serve as a catalyst for discussion and collective insight about the data.
Urban Screens
Dec 6
[description taken directly from the Urban Screens website]
URBAN SCREENS is a concept developed by Mirjam Struppek. It investigates how the currently commercial use of outdoor screens can be broadened with cultural content. We address cultural fields as digital media culture, urbanism, architecture and art. We want to network and sensitise all engaged parties for the possibilities of using the digital infrastructure for contributing to a lively urban society, binding the screens more to the communal context of the space and therefore creating local identity and engagement. The integration of the current information technologies support the development of a new integrated digital layer of the city in a complex merge of material and immaterial space that redefine the function of this growing infrastructure.
URBAN SCREENS defined as various kinds of dynamic digital displays and interfaces in urban space such as LED signs, plasma screens, projection boards, information terminals but also intelligent architectural surfaces being used in consideration of a well ballanced, sustainable urban society – Screens that support the idea of public space as space for creation and exchange of culture, strengthening a local economy and the formation of public sphere. Its digital nature makes these screening platforms an experimental visualisation zone on the threshold of virtual and urban public space.
This event is currently taking place in Sao Paulo, Brazil and will discuss the use of mobiles (around 3 billion active mobiles worldwide) – for not only conventional communication but also for other activities like education, social inclusion, political intervention, entertainment, artistic production, news distribution, commerce and advertising. The Mobilefest Seminar aims to stimulate thinking about the multiple uses of these new communication tools for interpersonal connection. The key question that the seminar organizers are trying to drive home is: How can the mobile technology contribute to democracy, culture, arts, ecology, peace, education, health and the third-sector?
Mini Friday
Dec 5
Mini Friday is a small research project on virtual worlds on mobile phones. They are trying to find out if real-time virtual worlds make sense on mobile devices. Mini Friday is a very simple virtual world – a bar and a club with different language versions for now. The service is not actively moderated and you may be exposed to mature chat dialog. Please remember that people may not be who they claim to be. So if you plan to meet someone IRL, be careful and take a friend with you.
NASA Redesign
Dec 5
As reported by Creativity Magazine, NASA’s first major site redesign since 2003 recently launched to re-connect NASA with the ever elusive 18-25 year old target audience. The site redesign is intended to flex NASA’s educational and scientific acumen to 18-25 year old audience. Additionally, the new site now features streamlined news headlines, mission calendars and multimedia features which include streaming NASA TV, podcasts and blogs from NASA insiders.
