Wednesday, July 30, 2008

The Mummy Olympics 2008





Did anyone see the marketing campaign combining the Olympics and the feature film The Mummy 3? At first you think it's a parody but I've seen it a few times now, both on tv and in taxicabs on their small screens.

The campaign, which capitalizes on the fact that both productions are set in China (and expected in early August.) The spot utilizes special effects that fuse Olympic footage with "Mummy" scenes. One such moment includes a backflip by Michelle Yeoh who morphs into a gymnast on a balance beam. In another, a fight between stars Brendan Fraser and Jet Li is transported to fisticuffs in a boxing ring.

Do you think this is funny? strange? 'The Mummy 3' (which looks like it will be a total flop) being associated to the Olympics a good thing??

check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnJL-uTik38

Monday, July 28, 2008

obama's wailing wall note revealed...


In time honoured tradition, the Democratic White House hopeful wedged a prayer note in a crack in the wall when he visited in the early hours on Thursday.

When he had gone, someone took it out again. A message intended by Obama for his Maker alone, could be read by Israelis over their breakfast, reprinted in full on the front page of a national newspaper.

"Worshippers could not resist the curiosity and pulled out the note," reads the caption on Maariv, unable to resist publishing it, either.

In the private note, handwritten on the headed letter paper of the hotel where he was staying, the presidential hopeful asks God to: "Give me the wisdom to do what is right and just" and "protect my family".

Predictably, the publication has ignited an unholy row.

The wailing or western wall, as it is also known, is the holiest place Jews can visit, because it is the remains of the foundations of the Second Jewish Temple, destroyed by Romans two thousand years ago.

Rabbis for the site have condemned the publication of the note as "disgraceful" saying reading any prayer note is forbidden.
More than a hundred people have complained on the newspapers' website.

Twice a year, religious authorities collect the thousands of prayer notes stuffed into the wall and bury them on the Mount of Olives.

In the digital age, making a western wall prayer note no longer requires paper or going there.

On the wall's official website, a free service allows you to send your own message which will then be printed off and stuck into the wall.

A more confidential service future high profile visitors may prefer to use, given what has happened to Obama.


thoughts??

Thursday, July 24, 2008

You've heard of Germany's famous Oktoberfest? Well this is like Obamafest.

Be Kanye??



check this new ad campaign for Absolut: haha

I first noticed it in the subway as an actual ad. At first I thought it was real but then noticed that it was completely absurd.



http://www.absolut.com/campaign/bekanye/

Enough Superhero movies already!



thoughts?

Thursday, July 17, 2008

summer in the big city

So I thought I would update everyone on what I've been up to internship-wise in the city. It's been quite the experience....
Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays I work at a creative imaging, branding and advertising agency called Paganucci Wolfington, (www.paganucciwolfington.com). Basically a couple runs the company, two very cool people, John and Monica, and then there's this guy Art who comes in now and then and bounces ideas around. it's quite a cool office, not in the best area though (right next to Mansion, the night club, and Scores, some strip club i believe haha, and a bunch of homeless shelters). Then there's this quiet but cool Japanese intern, who is in his 30s but looks like he is a late teen, came all the way from Japan to do graphic design on his own, and is taking english classes every morning before work. very cool.

then there's this freelancer laura who has many other clients and works mostly from home. she's also cool. and there's a girl Polly who well..i'm not sure what she does. ha. and on Mondays and Tuesdays I am joined by another intern Catherine, who is a rising junior at RISD. also very nice. All in all, cool place to work. SO far I've worked on an Old Navy campaign, working on page ads; a new logo concept for elite clothing brand Badgley Mischka; and currently working on a whole holiday concept for Joe Boxer (page ads, holiday icons, signs etc.) It's fun to brainstorm with the team and I'm really impressed that such a small group can work with such big clients. In any case, I enjoy it.

Then... Wednesdays and Thursdays I work for Conde nast. Up until last week I was working for Golf for Women magazine...but GUESS WHAT! it folded last monday..yes yes..it did. the editor-in-chief accepted a job for Oprah magazine and the execs decided to fold the magazine RIGHT before we would have published our 20th anniversary issue (which included some page layouts that I had designed. lovely.) haha The art director I worked under was super cool, Merv, a great chill guy in his 30s, married, has a daughter and just finished up his masters in design management at Pratt. thing is, now, he is out of a job. like most people who worked for Golf for Women. Can you believe it? One day you're working for the biggest publishing house in the world, and the next you're unemployed. most people i know have been having interviews, some internally within Conde, and are still waiting back. with the market and everything though, it is very tough.

So last thursday I interviewed for Golf World magazine. (PS. I have never played golf. ever) And they gave me an internship offer for the next few weeks until I leave New York. So yesterday I started there and it's fun. In this case the art team is a bit bigger since the magazine is much more successful and weekly (as opposed to 6 times a year). now i'm working for this cool girl, late 20s, who graduated from GW. seems like a cool job to have at that age. mmm wonder where I'll be in 5 years. so yeah. I've just been making email signatures, illustrations, invitations etc. it's been fun, but i do realise how cut-throat conde is. do i want to stay in publishing? hmmm..today consisted of working, going to a goodbye lunch for a girl who got fired, attending a birthday party on this mini golf course we have in the office with sangria and cupcakes, making a ritual trip to taste-d-lite at 3.30 with the art team, and yeah... i'm heading out to connecticut next wednesday for the Golf Digest publications summer social out at a country club in westport, where apparently there will be carnival games, even twister. haha should be interesting. loving the networking!

well that sums it up.. i've been thinking a lot about what i want to do after i graduate in may.. should i try and get into the Conde Nast world? should I freelance on the side? Should I do something more indie?...a lot could change in the next year i guess.

Monday, July 7, 2008

Heard of MyBo?

The Facebooker Who Friended Obama (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/technology/07hughes.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin)

By BRIAN STELTER
Published: July 7, 2008

Last November, Mark Penn, then the chief strategist for Hillary Rodham Clinton, derisively said Barack Obama’s supporters “look like Facebook.”


Chris Hughes, 24, a founder of Facebook, left the company to develop Senator Barack Obama’s Web presence.

Chris Hughes takes that as a compliment.

Mr. Hughes, 24, was one of four founders of Facebook. In early 2007, he left the company to work in Chicago on Senator Obama’s new-media campaign. Leaving behind his company at such a critical time would appear to require some cognitive dissonance: political campaigns, after all, are built on handshakes and persuasion, not computer servers, and Mr. Hughes has watched, sometimes ruefully, as Facebook has marketed new products that he helped develop.

“It was overwhelming for the first two months,” he recalled. “It took a while to get my bearings.”

But in fact, working on the Obama campaign may have moved Mr. Hughes closer to the center of the social networking phenomenon, not farther away.

The campaign’s new-media strategy, inspired by popular social networks like MySpace and Facebook, has revolutionized the use of the Web as a political tool, helping the candidate raise more than two million donations of less than $200 each and swiftly mobilize hundreds of thousands of supporters before various primaries.

The centerpiece of it all is My.BarackObama.com, where supporters can join local groups, create events, sign up for updates and set up personal fund-raising pages. “If we did not have online organizing tools, it would be much harder to be where we are now,” Mr. Hughes said.

Mr. Obama, now the presumptive Democratic nominee, credits the Internet’s social networking tools with a “big part” of his primary season success.

“One of my fundamental beliefs from my days as a community organizer is that real change comes from the bottom up,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. “And there’s no more powerful tool for grass-roots organizing than the Internet.”

Now Mr. Hughes and other campaign aides are applying the same social networking tools to try to win the general election. This time, however, they must reach beyond their base of young, Internet-savvy supporters.

By early April, Mr. Obama’s new-media team was already planning for the election by expanding its online phone-calling technology. In mid-May, to keep volunteers busy as the primaries played out, the campaign started a nationwide voter registration drive. And in late June, after Senator Clinton bowed out of the race, the millions of people on the Obama campaign’s e-mail lists were asked to rally her supporters as well as undecided voters by hosting “Unite for Change” house parties across the country. Nearly 4,000 parties were held.

The campaign’s successful new-media strategy is already being studied as a playbook for other candidates, including the presumptive Republican nominee, Senator John McCain.

“Their use of social networks will guide the way for future campaigns,” Peter Daou, Mrs. Clinton’s Internet director, said at a recent political technology conference. Mr. Daou called Mr. Obama’s online outreach “amazing.”

The heart of the campaign’s online strategy is a teeming corner of Mr. Obama’s headquarters two blocks from the Chicago River, a crowded space that looks more like an Internet start-up company than a campaign war room. During a visit in late May, a bottle of whiskey sat, almost empty, atop a refrigerator (there had been plenty of victories to celebrate lately, a staff member explained).

Sitting amid a cluster of cubicles, Mr. Hughes, whose title is “online organizing guru,” handles the My.BarackObama.com site, which is known within the campaign as MyBo. Other staff members maintain Mr. Obama’s presence on Facebook (where he has one million supporters), purchase online advertising, respond to text messages from curious voters, produce videos and e-mail millions of supporters.

Before helping build Facebook, the social network of choice for 70 million Americans, the fresh-faced and sandy-haired Mr. Hughes, who grew up in Hickory, N.C., went to boarding school at Andover, where he joined the Democratic Club and the student government. In the fall of 2002, he went to Harvard, where he majored in history and literature. He and a roommate, Mark Zuckerberg — now the chief executive of Facebook — shared a room that was “just about as small as my cubby at work is these days,” Mr. Hughes said.

Mr. Zuckerberg and another Facebook co-founder dropped out in 2004 to work on the site full time, but Mr. Hughes graduated in 2006 before venturing to Silicon Valley.

In February 2007, after showing interest in Mr. Obama’s candidacy and being reassured that the campaign’s new-media operation would be more than “just a couple Internet guys in a corner,” he left Facebook, where he has stock options that are potentially worth tens of millions of dollars, and moved to Chicago, where he lives — and dresses — like any other recent college graduate. “Cabs are a luxury,” he said.

As supporters started to join MyBo in early 2007, Mr. Hughes brought a growth strategy, borrowed from Facebook’s founding principles: keep it real, and keep it local. Mr. Hughes wanted Mr. Obama’s social network to mirror the off-line world the same way that Facebook seeks to, because supporters would foster more meaningful connections by attending neighborhood meetings and calling on people who were part of their daily lives. The Internet served as the connective tissue.

While many candidates reach their supporters through the Web, the social networking features of MyBo allow supporters to reach one another.

Mr. Hughes’s abrupt shift from Facebook pioneer to campaign aide was not easy. In the lonely months before the Iowa caucus, he grappled with the small scale of his new social network, measuring its membership by the thousands rather than the millions he was accustomed to. He had to learn mystifying political shorthand (VAN, for voter file management; N.P.G., for the donor and volunteer database) and figure out how campaigns operate. Eventually, he grew comfortable.

At first, his main focus was a single state. Throughout last summer and fall, the prevailing attitude was, “What can you do for Iowa today?” Mr. Hughes recalled.

Mr. Obama’s win in the Iowa caucuses drove new supporters to the MyBo site in droves. Using the campaign’s online toolkit, energized volunteers laid the groundwork for field workers.

So far, MyBo has attracted 900,000 members, although aides play down the raw numbers.

“The point is not to have a million people” signed up, said Joe Rospars, the campaign’s new-media director, although he does expect to have well over a million signed up on MyBo by November. “The point is to be able to chop up that million-person list into manageable chunks and organize them.”

In some primary and caucus states, volunteers used the Internet to start organizing themselves months before the campaign staff arrived. In Texas on March 4, Mrs. Clinton won the popular vote, but Mr. Obama came away with a lead of five delegates, thanks to a caucus win. Caucuses are a test of organizational strength, and Mr. Obama’s team used database technology to track 100,000 Texas volunteers and put them to work. This permitted campaign staff members to “skip Steps 1, 2 and 3,” Mr. Hughes said.

So maybe the Obama core does “look like Facebook.” Mr. Penn’s remark, made at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Iowa and reported by The Politico, was cited by both Mr. Rospars and Mr. Hughes in separate interviews.

Virtual phone banks greatly benefited Mr. Obama. During the primaries, volunteers could sign in online, receive a list of phone numbers and make calls from home. The volunteers made hundreds of thousands of calls last winter and spring. At the end of June, the Obama campaign began carefully opening up its files of voters to online supporters, making it easier to find out which Democratic-leaning neighbors to call and which registered-independent doors to knock on.

One goal is to drive online energy into in-person support. From January to April, for instance, the Obama campaign spent $3 million on online advertising to steer would-be voters to their polling places with online tools that tell people where to vote. The locators “are hard to build, but once you build them, they have a very high return on investment,” Mr. Hughes said.

Much of the technology in the Obama toolbox was pioneered by Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign. “We were like the Wright brothers,” said Joe Trippi, the Web mastermind of the Dean campaign. The Obama team, he added, “skipped Boeing, Mercury, Gemini — they’re Apollo 11, only four years later.”

Mr. Rospars and other former Dean aides formed a consulting firm, Blue State Digital, to refine their techniques. The Obama campaign purchased the backbone of MyBo from Blue State and has set out to improve it. “It’s still TheFacebook,” Mr. Hughes said, comparing Mr. Obama’s current site to the earliest and narrowest version of Facebook. “It’s still very, very rough around the edges.”

Last month, acknowledging that attacks during the general election are likely to be more vociferous, the Obama campaign tried to capitalize on its network by creating a Web page, FightTheSmears.com. Through that site, the campaign hopes that supporters will act as a truth squad working to untangle accusations, as bloggers have informally in other campaigns and as many did when CBS reported on President Bush’s National Guard service in 2004.

People who have posted on the site have already taken up five rumors, including that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States (a birth certificate was displayed) and that he does not put his hand over his heart during the Pledge of Allegiance (the site links to a YouTube video of him doing so).

Republican strategists say, wryly, that Senator McCain’s 2000 campaign was innovative in its use of technology. (The candidate held a groundbreaking virtual fund-raiser and enabled supporters to sign up online.) But that was back when Mr. McCain ran as an outsider; as the presumptive nominee, he is no longer an upstart. His social network, called McCainSpace and part of JohnMcCain.com, is “virtually impossible to use and appears largely abandoned,” said Adam Ostrow, the editor of Mashable, a blog about social networking.

By all accounts, Mr. McCain is not the BlackBerry-wielding politician that Mr. Obama is. But he has given credit to what he calls Mr. Obama’s “excellent use of the Internet,” saying at a news conference last month that “we are working very hard at that as well.” The McCain campaign recently reintroduced its Web site and hired new bloggers to broaden its online presence.

Patrick Ruffini, a Republican strategist who was the Webmaster for President Bush’s 2004 campaign, said that a campaign’s culture largely determines its digital strategy. The McCain campaign “could hire the best people, build the best technology, and adopt the best tactics” on the Internet. “But it would have to be in sync with the candidate and the campaign,” Mr. Ruffini said.

Mr. Hughes and other Obama aides say that their candidate gravitates naturally toward social networking, so much so that he even filled out his own Facebook profile two years ago. Mr. Obama has pledged that if he is elected, he will hire a chief technology officer; Mr. Hughes’s face lights up at the thought.

Other administrations have adapted to the Internet, “but they haven’t valued it,” he said.

Mr. Hughes has not decided whether to return to Facebook, and the decision does hinge in part on the fate of the campaign. But the lessons he has learned in political life seem to reinforce those learned in Silicon Valley.

“You can have the best technology in the world,” he said, “but if you don’t have a community who wants to use it and who are excited about it, then it has no purpose.”


http://my.barackobama.com/page/user/login?successurl=L3BhZ2UvZGFzaGJvYXJkL3ByaXZhdGU=

Carrying On





While riding on the new york subway, I am always looking out at any subway public art. Well recently I noticed the art at Prince St. station and thought I should look into it more.
Be sure to check it out if ever you are in the city!

Learn more about the project here: http://www.janetzweig.com/public/06.html

Goodbye CDs????

In the past, while paying for my drink at Starbucks, I usually would check out the music CDs that Starbucks was selling. I'm always curious to see what kind of music they recommend and play in their store...

However, the other day, I noticed that instead of a normal CD, Starbucks was selling the new iTunes album card, which basically replaces the physical CD with a flat card. I noticed the same thing in a Best Buy the other day. So instead of buying iTunes $15 music gift card, you pay to download just one certain album (see the picture).



So I was curious if this was related to the recent Starbucks cutbacks, and I found out that yes, in order to focus more on their lattes, Starbucks decided to cut back on their CD sales/entertainment.

http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=765193&spid=1314
http://seekingalpha.com/article/74209-starbucks-to-finally-focus-on-lattes-cut-back-on-entertainment
http://www.walletpop.com/2008/06/21/cutting-back-on-starbucks-its-not-really-good-for-you-anyway/
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/daves-download/2008/6/25/starbucks-pulling-back-from-cd-sales.html?s_cid=rss:daves-download:starbucks-pulling-back-from-cd-sales
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601213&refer=home&sid=axYHd26JSHI4

Is Starbucks just a victim of its own success? Or is the current economy causing this change? Gas prices?...What's next?

Thursday, July 3, 2008

Luck of a Goat...

OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Luckiest Girl

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: July 3, 2008

This year’s college graduates owe their success to many factors, from hectoring parents to cherished remedies for hangovers. But one of the most remarkable of the new graduates, Beatrice Biira, credits something utterly improbable: a goat.

“I am one of the luckiest girls in the world,” Beatrice declared at her graduation party after earning her bachelor’s degree from Connecticut College. Indeed, and it’s appropriate that the goat that changed her life was named Luck.

Beatrice’s story helps address two of the most commonly asked questions about foreign assistance: “Does aid work?” and “What can I do?”

The tale begins in the rolling hills of western Uganda, where Beatrice was born and raised. As a girl, she desperately yearned for an education, but it seemed hopeless: Her parents were peasants who couldn’t afford to send her to school.

The years passed and Beatrice stayed home to help with the chores. She was on track to become one more illiterate African woman, another of the continent’s squandered human resources.

In the meantime, in Niantic, Conn., the children of the Niantic Community Church wanted to donate money for a good cause. They decided to buy goats for African villagers through Heifer International, a venerable aid group based in Arkansas that helps impoverished farming families.

A dairy goat in Heifer’s online gift catalog costs $120; a flock of chicks or ducklings costs just $20.

One of the goats bought by the Niantic church went to Beatrice’s parents and soon produced twins. When the kid goats were weaned, the children drank the goat’s milk for a nutritional boost and sold the surplus milk for extra money.

The cash from the milk accumulated, and Beatrice’s parents decided that they could now afford to send their daughter to school. She was much older than the other first graders, but she was so overjoyed that she studied diligently and rose to be the best student in the school.

An American visiting the school was impressed and wrote a children’s book, “Beatrice’s Goat,” about how the gift of a goat had enabled a bright girl to go to school. The book was published in 2000 and became a children’s best seller — but there is now room for a more remarkable sequel.

Beatrice was such an outstanding student that she won a scholarship, not only to Uganda’s best girls’ high school, but also to a prep school in Massachusetts and then to Connecticut College. A group of 20 donors to Heifer International — coordinated by a retired staff member named Rosalee Sinn, who fell in love with Beatrice when she saw her at age 10 — financed the girl’s living expenses.

A few years ago, Beatrice spoke at a Heifer event attended by Jeffrey Sachs, the economist. Mr. Sachs was impressed and devised what he jokingly called the “Beatrice Theorem” of development economics: small inputs can lead to large outcomes.

Granted, foreign assistance doesn’t always work and is much harder than it looks. “I won’t lie to you. Corruption is high in Uganda,” Beatrice acknowledges.

A crooked local official might have distributed the goats by demanding that girls sleep with him in exchange. Or Beatrice’s goat might have died or been stolen. Or unpasteurized milk might have sickened or killed Beatrice.

In short, millions of things could go wrong. But when there’s a good model in place, they often go right. That’s why villagers in western Uganda recently held a special Mass and a feast to celebrate the first local person to earn a college degree in America.

Moreover, Africa will soon have a new asset: a well-trained professional to improve governance. Beatrice plans to earn a master’s degree at the Clinton School of Public Service in Arkansas and then return to Africa to work for an aid group.

Beatrice dreams of working on projects to help women earn and manage money more effectively, partly because she has seen in her own village how cash is always controlled by men. Sometimes they spent it partying with buddies at a bar, rather than educating their children. Changing that culture won’t be easy, Beatrice says, but it can be done.

When people ask how they can help in the fight against poverty, there are a thousand good answers, from sponsoring a child to supporting a grass-roots organization through globalgiving.com. (I’ve listed specific suggestions on my blog, nytimes.com/ontheground, and on facebook.com/kristof).

The challenges of global poverty are vast and complex, far beyond anyone’s power to resolve, and buying a farm animal for a poor family won’t solve them. But Beatrice’s giddy happiness these days is still a reminder that each of us does have the power to make a difference — to transform a girl’s life with something as simple and cheap as a little goat.

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/03/opinion/03kristof.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

Granny Peace Brigade