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Timed to coincide with Title IX’s 40th anniversary, Nike and Wieden + Kennedy have created this “Voices” ad paying tribute to female athletes who triumphed in the face of locker room sexism and traditional gender role enforcement. Several incredible women provide the stories for the spot: Olympic boxer Marlen Esparza, pioneering women’s basketball star Lisa Leslie and fellow WNBA icon Diana Taurasi are all compelling. But the clear star here is Joan Benoit Samuelson, who won the world’s first gold medal for women’s marathon at the 1984 Olympics. Her poise and intensity create the emotional center of this spot, which left me confident that she’s probably still in good enough shape to kill me by raising an eyebrow.

Sportwinkel Foot Locker haalt internationaal acht procent van zijn omzet uit online verkopen. De digitale omzet groeide afgelopen kwartaal twee keer sneller dan vorig jaar.

One of my earliest memories of the power of information and the hold it can have over people dates all the way back to fourth grade. That was the year for me that two things happened. First, we were required in English class to read Louise Fitzhugh’s book Harriet the Spy, in which a young girl spends most of her time gathering information on her classmates and writing it down in a journal. Our teacher, as part of an assignment to help us encourage writing, asked everyone in the class to do the same.

It turned out that I was particularly good at that assignment, so much so that when we were asked to read our journals to the class by the end of the assignment a month later, the teacher asked me to stop after just a few entries because it was visibly upsetting to the rest of the students. I’d diagrammed out who was friends with whom, who wasn’t, who was pretending to be friends, where people lived, how they got home, who their parents were and what they did, what their school locker combinations were. Those few folks who remember me from way back when probably still look back on that assignment with a mix of dread and annoyance.

The second memory from back then was my first exposure to banned books. There was one particular book that wasn’t supposed to be in our school library, Graham Yost’s Spy Tech, which was a look at the tools and methods of espionage. The first half wasn’t particularly applicable to daily life – after all, there’s limited usefulness in knowing about the SR-71 Blackbird or the KH-11 satellite. No, what got the book banned (but curiously not removed from the shelf), and what captured my mind back then was the second half: tools and tricks of the trade for individual operators on the ground.

In that second half of the book were methods for building traps and snares, lock picking, and a functional set of recipes for improvised munitions and explosives. Our school had a well-stocked chemistry lab typically only used by 7th and 8th graders, and you can imagine the trouble that I got myself into, book in one hand, assorted chemicals in the other. My fondest memory – and the thing I got most in trouble for – back then was following the recipe in the book for creating thermite, which proceeded to burn its way through not only a glass beaker, but part of the lab counter as well. I was thankfully lucky enough not to injure myself or anyone else.

Fast forward a quarter of a century later, and today we’re swimming in information. Amazingly, the lessons learned back then are still very much a part of my life today. Information has incredible power over people, and nowhere is this more true than in the profession of marketing technology. Email marketing systems, search engine optimization, neuromarketing – all of these methods are rooted in understanding people and the information about them. The difference between today and fourth grade is that instead of me having to covertly watch people dial in their locker combinations, we volunteer all of the intimate details of our lives to Facebook and Google. It sure does make things easier for marketers.

The second lesson is that if you know how the recipes work, you can do great – and dangerous – things with them. All you need is a working understanding of how and why things work together. Aluminum and iron oxide (rust) combine at absurdly high temperatures to form thermite. Today, the potent combinations are different tools and technologies in the digital realm. Understanding how MySQL works and how PHP works lets you combine them in powerful ways that result in systems like WordPress. Understanding how APIs work lets you tie different, disparate systems like Salesforce.com and email marketing software together in new, unforeseen ways.

The greater lesson here that wraps all of this up is that there are threads in your life, traits and habits from your very early years, that are still with you today. My innate curiosity about both information and technology may be evident now in digital marketing, but they’re from the same internal drive that caused me to burn through a chemistry lab counter more than 25 years ago. What are the threads in your own life that keep showing up in different forms?

Here’s one of the great secrets I’ve discovered about professional success – if you know what these threads are and you align your career with them, you will be incredibly successful. The reason why is simple: you are being today who you’ve always been. It requires almost no effort on your part to be yourself and simply express those traits and habits from early childhood in a productive, professional context today. The awkward but deeply curious 4th grade boy is still inside of me, still very much a part of me, and the profession of digital marketing caters incredibly well to him.

What were the things that were second-nature to you when you were 10 years old? Is what you’re doing for work today working in tune with or against your nature? I would challenge you to think about that, and if your work and your inner 4th grader are at odds, either find a way to get them to work together, or consider changing work so that you can resume being who you’ve always been, but better.

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When you ask someone on a date, maybe you are a gentleman that likes to offer some flowers to make it official. This is where Ticlr, a startup showcased at DEMO Spring 2012, comes into play. You can send a date idea for a nice dinner at a French restaurant with yes/no answer options. If the recipient agrees, some flowers will be sent to his or her home. This is called “tickling” and can be used in many different scenarios.

Ticlr is creating another way to send gifts that claims to be easier, less stressful and more creative. Gifts can be both personal gestures (I’ll cook a nice romantic dinner) and paid gifts such as gift cards, a donation to a charity or an object from one of its partners. It fosters spontaneous gift-giving because of the inexpensive personal gesture option — a new take on gift coupons — and the motivational aspect of conditional gifts.

“I began thinking about this idea a little over a year ago when I bumped into a friend I hadn’t seen in quite some time,” founder and CEO Chuck Digate says. “We caught up and chatted about a mutual friend neither of us had seen recently either. It occurred to me that there really hasn’t been a social relationship platform for expressing gratitude or acknowledging relationships,” he continues.

On the website, you can find a public gift locker where users save their gift ideas. Other users can browse the locker to find a good gift idea. Ticlr also publishes gifts in the locker, and of course some of them are the products sold through their partners.

Ticlr plans to have different streams of revenue: they will mainly monetize the service by taking a small margin on every product sold through Ticlr and commissions on donations to a charity. Down the road, they want to leverage their platform to allow brands to launch new products.

When I asked who Ticlr’s ecommerce partners were, the answer seems to indicate that the company is still actively building its partner list. “Our initial set in a few weeks will include FTD, Hammacher Schlemmer, Gold Medal Wine Club, Zinio, DiscountMags, Golfsmith, zChocolat, Hulu Plus and a few others,” Chuck Digate says.

Ticlr isn’t the only one working on improving the gift-giving process. Evidence of this lies in the competitors that already exist: GiftWoo creates gift suggestions, and Karma and Wrapp are mobile apps that make gift-giving social and a pleasant experience.

The startup, which is based in Boston, Massachusetts, has received an undisclosed amount of angel investment and is looking to raise additional funds.

If you want to tickle someone today, you can sign up on Ticlr’s website right now.

I had a feeling that Pinterest was sort of Stepford Wives goes FFFound:

Pinterest is all pink, puppies and pretty ponies – Lisan Jutras via Macleans.ca

Remember how girls in high school would paper their lockers with pictures of heartthrobs, puppies in baskets, minidresses they wanted, red, fruity cocktails they’d like to get hammered on? Imagine looking in that locker, then being shoved in it and having the door slammed closed on you. That’s a visit to Pinterest.

And that’s why I find it so bleak. Here is a world devoid of science, of politics, of dark humour, of a social conscience. It’s a world where orgasms don’t exist but babies are everywhere. Where “you go, girl!” affirmations rub shoulders with Mountain Dew cupcakes. This domain is sort of like a girls-only clubhouse, but it’s not about expressing innermost desires, just surface desires—for hair, shoes, nail art, a boyfriend that exists in soft-focus black-and-white.

It’s not a subculture, either. It’s the same idea of femininity that the two biggest female entrepreneurs of the past decade—maybe ever—Martha and Oprah, made their fortune selling. And it infuriates me because it’s so damned archaic—Pinterest circa 1912 would be fundamentally the same.

It’s easy to say that my anger stems from being on the outside of this group, and I wouldn’t deny it. This easy how-to guide to being a woman, engineered by a bunch of other women, makes me not only feel like an outsider (sure, I love cute animals and cake but I also love The New Yorker, talking about bodily functions and looking at cross-sections of sea lampreys’ faces) but also like a jerk for being mean about them.

I can’t really justify wrapping this up with a big huff about how Pinterest oppresses me, because it doesn’t. I have many female friends who share my interests. There are lots of squalid places on the Internet for men and women alike to hang out. But what it says about how women see themselves is slightly depressing. Milan Kundera once famously wrote that, “kitsch is the absolute denial of shit.” He was talking about totalitarian regimes, which brook no dissent, no expression of anything authentic and challenging, because why would anyone want to change the status quo when it’s perfect?

Pinterest isn’t exactly a totalitarian regime, but it is kind of like the Army of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Dissent at your peril.

But there is real money to be made pandering to superficial interest in all that is shiny.

Here are some recent posts from TechCrunch Gadgets:

Tabber Adds An LED Light Show To Any Guitar

The Tesla Bricking Story? It’s Nonsense

Here’s The Epic Borderlands 2 Launch Trailer

UltraViolet Hits 800k Digital Media Locker Accounts, Added 50k In The Last Six Weeks

Asus To Transformer Owners: “Here Is Your Unlocked Bootloader. Happy Now?”

There’s a feature war brewing in the synchronous listening space. Turntable.FM-competitor LetsListen today added video chat to its music locker web app so you can listen to a song at the same time as a friend, but also chat with them via text, audio, or video.

It’s a more intimate shared experience than just watching avatars dance around, but will video chat convince you to spend all day staring at your music player?

Here’s how I see LetsListen, Turntable.FM, and Facebook tackling synchronous listening from different angles.

• LetsListen - A primary experience where you actively video chat with friends as you play songs for each other, as well as a music locker where you can store, manage, and access MP3s.
• Facebook’s “Listen With” – a passive experience seamlessly integrated into Facebook’s Chat feature and music partner apps like Spotify, with notifications and its unified message product making it easy to leave on in the background and just check in when friends are talking.
• Turntable.FM – Somewhere in between, where public rooms fill with head-nodding avatars to grab your attention but you don’t see your friends’ faces. If you’re not looking you might miss chat messages.

When I spoke at Social Media Week with Turntable.FM founder Seth Goldstein about the future of music. I asked whether he thought of his product as a primary or passive experience. RadioSurvivor transcribed how Goldstein lamented,

“I wish it was more background. I think there are a lot of passive services that aim to be more engaging. We have the opposite problem. It’s really engaging for a small community. You go in and you get addicted, and spend four days of your life not doing much of anything else. And then you say, ‘I just can’t do this any more. I’ve got to get back to my life.’”

I worry LetsListen could have the same problem. Video chat is fun to play with occasionally, but the service needs to work great without me looking at it to become something I use all day, everyday. Turntable.FM’s first-mover advantage means it could overshadow LetsListen by adding its own video chat.

If LetsListen is going to win this war, it needs to marry the passive and primary experiences. Most critically, it should add browser tab notifications to show when you’ve received chat messages or a friend starts video chatting with you. The existing audible notifications annoyingly interrupt the music. Then I can passively groove with LetsListen, but pop back in when friends are throwing me Ozzy Osbourne devil-horns over video chat.

When Google Music launched a couple months ago, there was some criticism regarding how the service was promoted. What many saw as just another music locker and streaming service (albeit a perfectly good and free one) others saw as a great new vector for music sales and distribution. But the music locker portion seemed to hog the spotlight, and the cool Band Camp-esque new artist hubs lurked in the gloom.

Busta Rhymes seems to be a fan of the latter, and not just because he’s in an official partnership. In an interview on MTV, he was positively effusive about Google’s new platform. Check out the short clip, from MTV’s Sucka Free:

I think he’s being truthful when he says that “with that power that they have, that it was almost blasphemous for them to not have their hands in music as well.” Google, via YouTube, is the world’s foremost player in video distribution on the web (though as far as purchased content goes, Netflix is king). One almost wonders why music didn’t come first.

In case you were wondering that, the reason is that the user-focused structure of YouTube makes it a platform for viral videos and self-expression, not studio-produced content. They’ve been trying to change that, but it hasn’t been very effective (people don’t think of YouTube that way, for good reaosn). Google Music lets them start fresh and try to build something that works both from the top down and the bottom up. So whether they “sign” guys like Busta or a dude recording on an 8-track in his living room, they can provide an end-to-end buying, listening, and sharing solution.

“Google ain’t really trying to just sell music” is about as capsule-sized a summary as you can get, and it’s true. Google hates selling things, in fact. And in the music world, it might be that in a few years, selling things like music tracks just won’t be something you do, and Google will have positioned itself well to be a non-purchase solution.

According to In Defense of Animals, approximately 5 million family pets go missing each year. No wonder, then, that a pet “locker” has popped up outside a Norwegian grocery store, offering pet owners a way to keep their canine companions safe and dry while they get their shopping done.

Spotted by Swedish designer Henrick Eriksson recently outside an Oslo grocery store, the Hundehiet (translated roughly from Norwegian as “dog burrow”) gives consumers a safe, lockable place in which to keep their dog while they shop. Pricing, according to Eriksson, is NOK 10.

How the Hundehiet units are kept clean and disease-free isn’t entirely clear, and a search for other details about the shelters — including who operates them or how they’re kept cool in summertime, for example — was fruitless. Nonetheless, it’s an intriguing premise, particularly as pet theft becomes an increasingly common problem. One for inspiration!

Website: www.henricks-tankegangar.com/2012/01/hundforvaring-pa-shoppingturen.html

Related Ideas:

1. RF-enabled app locates lost objects or children
2. Mobile catering truck serves gourmet dog treats
3. In Munich, butcher shop for dogs serves up organic, custom-made food