Damn These Computers Are Getting Smart!
We’ve long been used to computers pulling off amazing stunts but every so often they manage to turn a new trick that makes us feel like we’re kids watching Tron again. This time it’s 411-Song, which you dial when you are a song whose name you do not know. A computer picks up the call, listens for fifteen seconds, and names the tune for you via text message. Price? 99 cents, and if it lets you avoid a humiliating encounter with an aloof record store clerk, we say it’s well worth it.
My Name is Saatchi & I’m Here to Say, I Love My Fruity Pebbles in a Major Way
Why pay Busta Rhymes thousands of dollars for dropping the names of brands into lyrics that may be completely unintelligible when you can just start your own hip-hop brand, own the rappers, and force them to say whatever you want them to say? Saatchi & Saatchi has decided to build their own rap group instead of bribing existing ones. Clients will be able to pay Saatchi for placement in the yet-to-be named all-female group’s lyrics and music videos. Ever since L.L. Cool J dropped “For Us, Buy Us,” into that Gap ad this was bound to happen. The venture will be part of Saatchi and Saatchi’s new GUM division, devoted to making advertising disguised as sticky, sweet entertainment.
VIP Delphis to Divine Future at Top Secret Googlefest
While the Vulture tries to stay up to speed on the ever-unfolding future, we don’t bring the same resources to the task as Google. Which is to say we don’t have the budget to gather the country’s 400 most highly esteemed prognosticators in a single room, liquor them up, and commence seventy-two hours of off-the-record yammering. This is exactly what Google’s doing at an event called the Google Zeitgeist, set to take place at their Mountain View headquarters at the end of October. On the surface the event looks to be an elite summit or seminar but really it is an advertising junket, a way to reward Google’s top Adwords and Adsense customers with some unscripted hours of facetime with Barry Diller, Malcolm Gladwell, Sergey Brin, and other slicks who like to play Delphi for dollars. So it may be time to retire “organizational silo” and “sticky-ness” from your nonsensical business vocabulary. This event is sure produce a moat of new words that we must learn to cross the drawbridge into the Castle of Tomorrow.
Let the Games Begin
The lack of quality, free online gaming is no longer. Now every 8-bit Nintendo and Sega game is available for instant Java-based play from any computer terminal in the world. Thank goodness we can stop wiling away the hours on half-hearted Yahoo! blitz chess matches and romp in the forgotten fields of childhood joy.
Faux Grit Hits The Mall
We’ve known for some time now that malls are what cities once were: The forum. The agora. The place of seeing and being seen and generally hanging out. When everyone left the city and went to the mall the city became a desolate, ugly, crime ridden place. Then cities started trying to imitate malls with private security guards, retail districts, food courts and the like. The old gritty city, such a nasty place to experience in the present tense, became a glamorous memory. Now, irony of ironies, malls are learning to look like streets with faux graffiti, bricks, diamond metal plates, and even fake loading docks bolted onto their facades. We took these shots at the Deptford Mall in South Jersey before two security guards in wide-brimmed state trooper hats came up and accused us of being terrorists. On further questioning they revealed that the real reason the mall doesn’t like folks taking pictures is because tabloid Fox News journalists are always snooping around for rats, roaches and other hygienic failings. Strange—you’d think they’d want such pests around to round out the authentic urban decay retail experience.
Rhodia Notebooks: The Nerds Know Best
You’ve seen them. The undergraduates, the MFA students, strolling around with an orange notebook in their back pockets. They take it out occasionally and write down a sublime thought, just as it occurs to them. These moments of genius are like butterflies, you know, you have to capture them before they wing away. We hate these poseurs but we love their orange notebooks. They’ve got this neat little crease along the top that makes it so damn easy to fold back the cover and make yourself an open-faced pad. They’re available with graph paper, and we love graph paper because we love charts and hate having to wait until the end of the page to move over a line and feel like you’re making some progress. They’re made in France and we’ll buy them anyway because we love things of quality no matter their country of origin.
Nano Haters Unite
Please, just say no to the Nano, Apple’s latest bid to make us lighter in the pockets. The iPod already gives us the sweet oblivion of believing, falsely, that we are the stars in a film with a soundtrack of our own devising. Just because it has a few fingerprints and scuffs on it doesn’t mean we need a brand new one. Furthermore there is a point after which smallness is no longer a virtue but becomes a nuisance. The iPod has hit that point. Once you’re smaller than a credit card you’re too damn easy to lose. We’ve already heard stories of Nanos being sucked up by vacuum cleaners and stolen by crows. We would rather save $199 than another couple of ounces.
MTV Knows The Fans Will Work For Free
In Britain, MTV’s Starzine claims to be the world’s first magazine to be created by its readers. Bored fans can submit photos and captions about their lives, which the editors then turn into Flash-enabled layouts, which are then voted on by other bored fans. The result is something like MySpace, except everyone gets to vote on who has the most interesting life and the most interesting life of all gets put on the cover. This is worth paying attention to because it’s one of the first times someone has taken the Wikipedia model of self-aggregating, self-editing content and used it for commercial ends. Like all first attempts it is sloppy and hard to use and only slightly more enriching than pornography but nevertheless the form itself is a promising one and we advise that you continue watching.
Telephonic Disguise
So you’re starting a word-of-mouth marketing firm in Voorhees of all places but you want to front like you’re from New York as there are no mouths worth seeding in the Pine Barrens. Solution? Get VOIP. It usually comes with a handy Manhattan 646 cell prefix to conceal your dark Jersey roots better than a bottle of peroxide. Alternately you can go to www.spoofcom.com and pay 20 cents a minute to show up as anybody you like on Caller ID. For example, you could call up Dick Cheney’s office, pretend you’re the President and say “Whasssssup?” just like the Budweiser commercial. The possibilities are limited only by your imagination.
Computers Have Feelings Too, You Know?
I hate to break it to you chief, but computers ain’t going nowhere. They’re staying right where they are. Your fantasies about moving to a log cabin in the woods and communicating exclusively via “snail mail” are just that, fantasies, pie-in-the-sky fairy tales that you tell yourself to get through another hour of being trapped in the cube. So why not make things a little easier on yourself and give your beige byte-chomping buddy a suitable nesting place? In Russia they’ve got this guy who will make a wooden cabinet for your monitor, as though it were an old-school radio or television set. And in New York City there’s this lady, Kimora Lee Simmons, who will give your Playstation Portable a $35,000 sleeve of solid gold. ($35,000 may seem like a lot of money but if you’ve ever had people staring at you on the bus in pure hateful envy, brother you know it’s worth it.) The computer is a tool and we predict more adornments coming down the pike to make work seem like more of a pleasure. Adorn thy tools and work becomes a pleasure.
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