Continental wars. The World Cup edition.

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
AnasAbdin
noise dept.
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
No title available
trying on a metaphor
TVSTRANGERTHINGS

Product Placement
occasionally subtle

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
YOU ARE THE REASON
almost home

No title available
NASA

roma★
taylor price
RMH
Peter Solarz
i don't do bad sauce passes
d e v o n

seen from Brazil
seen from United States

seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from Italy
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from Netherlands

seen from Poland
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye

seen from Italy

seen from United States
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@counternotions
Continental wars. The World Cup edition.
Birdly.
The Facebook Oculus Dream.
Coming soon to a mall or a state fair near you.
Tell your friends in WhatsApp.
“mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make”
Fanboi
I'd hate to see what you'd do if you were a hater.
A tale of two stores
On an unusually warm day for New York City (~40°F) I found myself in a Samsung Galaxy store for a few minutes. A few retained observations:
It's called Samsung Galaxy, not Samsung or any other corporate permutation. The South Korean company knows how to ride a brand horse.
The store was about the size of the ground floor of the Apple SoHo store just a few blocks away, but broken up into mini sections.
One step into the store, there is an extremely awkward concrete step with yellow-black warning stripes for a grand entrance. This would have never happened if Steve Jobs were alive or Judge Judy Koh wasn't on vacation.
With no natural light, the store is quite dark, with dark floors and dark furniture sidings, except for the very bright artificial lighting.
The crowd was a fraction of what you'd find in a typical Apple store.
Plenty of staff walking around.
No merchandise is sold in the store.
There is 'complimentary' food in the center island and a mini cafe lounge in the back.
The white counters where the Galaxy product line is displayed reminded me of another store, but decidedly cheesier looking.
In fact, the whole store looked like a cross between a gaudy shopping-mall franchise and a giant CES booth.
It's an ideal venue for students of store design and merchandizing to study (and compare to Apple Stores) matters of attention to detail, purpose, focus, traffic management, customer care and, dare I say, profitability.
As you'd expect, the whole Samsung Galaxy experience is gamified. You get a check-in card (see above), NFC-activated on the spot via a Galaxy phablet, to harvest your contact info. If you get enough points (by familiarizing yourself with various store sections) you get freebies like food, t-shirts and "a chance to win Samsung products".
The unsurprising thing about the store was that I encountered absolutely nothing that failed to unsurprise me.
Maybe if I "come back daily" as my check-in card suggests, I might be redeemed.
New York Times re-designs
We can pretend balanced grids are for wussies, baseline alignment is passé, it's OK to use #000000 again and, for some reason, skinny left-hand column headlines are to be done in oblique type. But, in the year of our lord 2014, the logo of the world's premier newspaper of record is proudly displayed still* in a low-resolution bitmap?!
* Not that I haven't been bringing this up every year.
One, two, buckle my shoe…
Some people make New Year's resolutions to get into shape. Some even spend a few days in early January actually in the gym. Most never lift a finger.
If you perennially find yourself in the latter category, rejoice. Forbes, ever the journalistic innovator, now makes it even easier for you not to exercise those fingers for more than three simple clicks:
See that blue Twitter icon on the side of a Forbes article. Click it.
It will automatically select "the most quotable" passage for you, and highlight it.
Click it again and a pre-filled Twitter post form will magically appear, ready for you to post it.
No reading, parsing, selecting, copying, typing, or even understanding, is necessary. Pure engagement magic.
Evolution by design
The artist who painted this at age 16:
Also painted this at age 29:
And these at age 36 and 42:
We have to allow the notion that people can and do evolve, often in ways that are not always predictable.
Apple should just buy @siggieggertsson and add his trademark style as a camera filter on iOS 8/iPhone 6.
"Best Apps of 2013"
These are the "Best Apps of 2013" at the Apple App Store (non-game):
Curiously, the average of all Top 20 apps is $32.64, all Top 20 paid apps is $36.27 and all Top 20 excluding the 2 free apps and the most and least expensive paid ones: $28.24:
Fabulous execution, but the two questions of how to find a lady to wear one of these to a party and what happens when you get too close remain for another day.
Then and now.
I bet you didn't see this one coming: "Well-known entertainment personality and producer Ryan Seacrest" is now making a keyboard accessory for iPhones.
I wonder if FEWER hairsprays would have helped the kissingly-tight kerning of "Typos" in that promo video.
"On November 15, 2013, the US Patent & Trademark Office published Apple's latest trademark filing for their iOS 7 Newsstand icon."
A day of gross indifference.
Then: Hardware (Dell). Now: Software (Yahoo).
How does a newspaper that doesn't mind changing the official price of other companies' products at random get to spell "website" as "Web site" in late 2013?
I'm pretty sure these don't quite differentiate us from other animals, except perhaps getting in line to acquire them.