Android vs. Apple. Gartner reports that Android’s share of the smartphone market has jumped to 17.2% from 1.8% a year ago. Apple’s share is 14.2%.
Beauty behind the Veil. Saudi women spent almost SR9bn (£1.6bn) on cosmetics last year, among the highest per capita spend in the world. Analysts forecast that the market will grow by 11 percent this year.
Half a Billion Faces. Facebook reaches 500 million users. It is now the biggest social network in every country except Russia, Japan and China.
The eBook Era. Amazon has sold 143 digital books for its e-reader, the Kindle, for every 100 hardback books over the past three months. The pace of change is also accelerating. Amazon said that in the most recent four weeks, the rate reached 180 ebooks for every 100 hardbacks sold.
Tags: Amazon, Android, Apple, cosmetics, datageist, ebooks, Facebook, Google, Saudi Arabia, smartphones, social networking, women
‘By 2020, nobody shall be seriously injured or killed in a new Volvo.’
It sounds fantastical but — according to Volvo — it’s true. According to the Volvo site:
‘This statement from 2008 clearly formulates a long-term vision to create cars that will not crash. Volvo Cars’ strategy to achieve Vision 2020 includes cooperating with social partners, integrating preventative and protective safety systems into the car and, in particular, to better understands people in traffic situations. Driver behaviour is a contributing factor in over 90 percent of all accidents.
“The goal is unique in that Volvo Cars has designated a year and is showing a social responsibility that also extends to people in other vehicles and pedestrians,” says Anders Eugensson, safety expert at Volvo Cars. ”We are very clear about the fact that our cars should not negatively affect other people at the moment of an accident. In addition, no unprotected roadusers should be seriously injured or killed.”
Whilst other car companies have also hit on the potential of future tech for safety, no one brand has been so bold as to turn it into a PR-able brand story. Which is what Vision 2020 is. And — vitally — it’s entirely credible.
According to Ed Kim, an analyst at automotive research firm AutoPacific, the zero-fatality goal is achievable. Within the next ten years, the confluence of safety technologies such as road sign recognition, pedestrian detection and autonomous car controls will produce far safer cars. Vision 2020 is a Utopian vision which suggests that the auto wreck – that horror symbol of the 20th Century – could be consigned to the past. A vision that Volvo now has the potential to own.
Story stolen with glee from Slashdot.
Image: Car Crash by Andy Warhol.
Tags: cars, data, future, PR, safety, trends, Utopian, Volvo
Virgin Atlantic‘s community site, vtravelled, has won the NMA Effectiveness Award for Travel 2010.
The New Media Age awards aim ‘to provide a benchmark of excellence from which the industry can learn and build’ and are awarded to websites and other interactive propositions in recognition of creativity, innovation and experimentation in delivering genuine business benefits and real value to the consumer.
Vtravelled won because the judges found the site ‘really engaging’ and that it ‘resonated with the target audience’. In short, it does everything a brand community site should do. Since launch, the site has seen a 64% increase in membership and revenues have increased 20% over the last six months.
ATTIK Leeds helped design and launch the site last year and we’re delighted that it has been recognised in this way.
Tags: ATTIK Leeds, awards, clients, community, effectiveness, NMA, Virgin Atlantic, vtravelled
Fashion designers are increasingly seeking new, innovative – and more cost effective – ways to display their collections. The growth of online has also meant that catwalk shows are no longer just for the privileged few. The cost and effort is increasingly being redirected into experimentation, and in particular, into formats that can proliferate online. For instance, numerous pret-a-porter designers have experimented with online video, with Prada and Halston producing some particularly inventive short films for their brands. Others – such as Dutch designers Viktor and Rolf have gone even further, producing online-only fashion shows.
Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy has just dialled such accessibilty right back, producing a static couture collection that was physically viewable only to a select few. Tisci’s notion was to re-elevate couture, to take it back to its roots as craft, spectacle and art .. and tactility. Tisci says of the collection:
‘It is a celebration of craftsmanship, which you must see and feel and touch. The women in the Givenchy atelier are like engineers, finding solutions to impossible things, and bringing my dreams and fantasies to life. This is the most ‘couture’ couture I have ever done.’
Tisci’s decision to exhibit just ten pieces is indicative of the new luxury movement towards focus, but emphatically not compromise. After all, each of the pieces shown is worth thousands of euros.
Tags: austerity, couture, fashion, frocks, Givenchy, luxury, noises, trends
Game-changing data from the last month.
East meets Luxe. Chinese tourists rapidly becoming the most lucrative market for Japanese retailers.
Welcome to the Senior Web. Nearly two million more Britons have come online during the last year, over half of which are over 50.
Commodity Crunch. Food prices to rise 40% over the next decade.
Tags: China, data, datageist, digital divide, food, global, Japan, noises, seniors, UK, UN
Swatch is a great brand: iconic, meaningful and with a long heritage. But like many brands on the fashion/youth axis, it suffers a relevancy problem. And like that other iconic youth brand Dr Martens, Swatch experiences peaks and troughs in fashion but its design – in essence – has remained consistent. It’s sad, then, that it rarely get the kind of advertising it deserves. Case in point: the above ‘badvertising’ spotted in Hoxton (where else?), which also seems to have no relationship with the current advertorial running in the style press (and which we actually quite like).
Not only does this kind of execution belittle the design of the brand, it doesn’t communicate anything other than a URL. It’s also badvertising in that it’s a pollutant, bringing the brand into disrepute. There’s also nothing *fun* or inspiring about it – something as intrinsic to the brand as great design. Compare and contrast with this Swatch box from the 80s – Point Of Sale that does its job brilliantly. Why not bring that design ethos to the ads?
Note: Swatch’s founder, Nicolas Hayek, sadly died recently, sparking a number of articles eulogising both him and his company. This one from the Telegraph is particularly informative, not least due to the fab photograph of him with a Swatch wall clock.
Tags: advertising, badvertising, design, Hoxton, Swatch, watches
More iterations of our VIS for Coca-Cola’s sponsorship of the World Cup. These shots are from the Netherlands where some 20,000 fans came to watch the match.
Game-changing global data.
Mobile-TV nation: In South Korea, 27 million people — 56 percent of the population — watch free-to-air mobile TV regularly.
Farewell to youth: The UK youth market is set to diminish over coming years. By 2017 there will be 4.9m teenagers in Britain, down 9 per cent from 5.4m today, according to analysis by the Financial Times of projections from the Office for National Statistics. The numbers of young people aged 15-24 are set to drop by 5 per cent in the next five years.
Android rising: Global sales of smartphones using Google’s Android operating system have overtaken Microsoft’s Windows mobile phones for the first time. Android phone sales have also overtaken Apple’s iPhone in the North American market, accounting for 26.6 per cent of units sold, compared with 22.1 per cent for the iPhone.
Tags: Apple, data, demographics, Google, mobile TV, noises, smartphones, South Korea, trends, youth, zeitgeist
ATTIK are featured in Fast Company magazine again this month. James Sommerville is interviewed in an article looking at the design around the FIFA World Cup Trophy Tour, which travels 151,217 kilometers, over 225 days, across five continents and is seen by at least half a million people.
In the article, James explains a bit more about ATTIK’s VIS for Coca-Cola‘s sponsorship of the football tournament.
‘The symbols are unique: the vuvuzelas (the popular long, trumpet-like instruments), the peace symbols, and the mouths representing singing … While the game is on the field, there’s an enormous amount of patter in the stands. The atmosphere is loud, vibrant. Most people aren’t even watching the game, they’re just having fun. The visual identity language was created to capture of the joy of every fan’s ‘inner African.”
Tags: Coca-Cola, Fast Company, FIFA World Cup, press, VIS
The legendary information design theorist (and advisor to the Obama administration) is in London to promote his latest tome, Beautiful Evidence. We were lucky enough to get tickets for his talk at the Royal Geographical Society (along with apparently most of London’s geek population – talk about preaching to the converted).
Others have already transcribed his talk much better than we could have done, so we’ll stick to a few salient points. [Note: this is *very* hacked down for pertinence to this blog, hence the links to fuller notes and the full presentation at the bottom of the post].
Tufte on design …
The essential test of design is how well it assists the understanding of the content, not how stylish it is. You must understand the meaning of the content to design it. ‘Content indifference’ is the result of teaching that only design matters … Content matters! It’s a shame we live in a world where that counts as an insight.
On presenting and presentations …
There are two things you need to get across in a presentation – what the story is and why the audience should believe you.
On web design …
91 percent of pixels on the screen should be information.
On data visualisation …
It’s not a surface, it’s a depth.
At the end of the talk, we plucked up the courage to ask the great man a question. Asked what he thought about the current vogue for artists interpreting data with animations and so on, Tufte said, ‘I think they can do exactly what they please … one reason it’s alright is they’re not making other claims about the content, just using it as a found object. … I’ll stick with Matisse.’
Note: Lucy Spence’s brilliant sketch notes of the talk are on flickr whilst Intelligence Squared – who hosted the event – have a pay-per-view stream.
Tags: data, Edward Tufte, heroes, information design, talks, theory
Teen(y) fashion blogging sensation Tavi is now so famous that she’s presenting at luxury conferences. At the recent Generation Next conference she uttered what we think is a bit of a teen truism.
Even though her blog is about self-expression through fashion, this particular teenager believes her peers to be inherently tribal. She says, ‘Teachers, parents and TV shows are always telling us to be ourselves. But what we want more than anything is to belong, to feel like we’re in a clique.’
In Japan, the tribalism of teen culture is explicit. In Tokyo, Marui‘s teen store even sells clique-appropriate clothing by floor.
Tags: blogging, cliques, fashion, Japan, noises, Tavi, teens
