March 17, 2011
Kickstarter is an online threshold pledge system for funding creative projects, from indie film and music to journalism to consumer products, and food-related projects. One of a new set of fundraising platforms dubbed ‘crowdfunding,’ Kickstarter facilitates gathering monetary resources from the general public, a model which circumvents many traditional avenues of investment. It was founded in 2009 by Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler, and Charles Adler in Manhattan. Project owners choose a deadline and a target minimum of funds to raise. If the chosen target is not gathered by the deadline, no funds are collected (a provision point mechanism).
Money pledged by donors is collected using Amazon Payments, and initiating projects requires a US bank account. Kickstarter turns a profit by claiming 5% of the funds raised; Amazon takes an additional percentage (around two). Unlike many forums for fundraising or investment, Kickstarter claims no ownership over the projects and the work they produce. However, projects launched on the site are permanently archived and accessible to the public. After funding is completed, projects and uploaded media cannot be edited or removed from the site.
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March 15, 2011
Pininfarina is an Italian car design firm and coachbuilder in Cambiano, Italy. Founded in 1930 by automobile designer and builder Battista ‘Pinin’ Farina, the company has been employed by a wide variety of high-end automobile manufacturers, including Ferrari, Maserati, Rolls-Royce, Cadillac, Jaguar, Volvo, Alfa Romeo, and Lancia. It also has designed trams in France, high-speed trains in Holland, and trolleys in the USA.
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March 13, 2011
The ARM is a computer instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by ARM Holdings. An instruction set is a list of all the instructions that a processor can execute (e.g. add, subtract, move, load, store, etc.). It was known as the Advanced RISC Machine, and before that as the Acorn RISC Machine. The ARM architecture is the most widely used ISA.
In 2005, about 98 percent of the more than one billion mobile phones sold each year used at least one ARM processor. ARM processors are used extensively in consumer electronics, including PDAs, mobile phones, digital media and music players, hand-held game consoles, calculators and computer peripherals such as hard drives and routers.
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March 10, 2011
Arm & Hammer is a registered trademark of Church and Dwight, an American manufacturer of household products. The logo of this brand is a muscular arm holding a hammer. Originally associated only with baking soda and washing soda, beginning in the 1970s the company began to expand the brand to other products using baking soda as a deodorizing ingredient, including toothpaste, laundry detergent, underarm deodorant, and cat litter. The Arm & Hammer brand is one of the longest-running and most recognized U.S. trademarks.
The Arm & Hammer logo dates back to the 1860s. James A. Church ran a spice business known as Vulcan Spice Mills. According to the company, the Arm and Hammer logo represents Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and metalworking. Originally a stylized representation of the Greek god of fire and forge, the muscular male arm with hammer in fist was used prior to the American Civil War as a symbol of the labor movement.
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March 9, 2011
Moleskine is an Italian brand of notebooks. Moleskine books are typically bound in coated paper cardboard, with an elastic band to hold the notebook closed, a sewn spine that allows it to lie flat when opened, cream color paper, rounded corners, a ribbon bookmark, and an expandable pocket inside the rear cover. Among artists who used similar black notebooks were Oscar Wilde, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway and Henri Matisse.
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March 2, 2011
Al Jazeera (literally, ‘The Island,’ referring to the Arabian Peninsula) is an international news network headquartered in Doha, Qatar. Initially launched as an Arabic news and current affairs satellite TV channel with the same name, Al Jazeera has since expanded into a network with several outlets, including the Internet and specialty TV channels in multiple languages. The original Al Jazeera channel’s willingness to broadcast dissenting views, for example on call-in shows, created controversies in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. The station gained worldwide attention following the September 11, 2001 attacks, when it was the only channel to cover the war in Afghanistan live from its office there.
The original Al Jazeera channel was started in 1996 by an emiri decree with a loan of 500 million Qatari riyals (US$137 million) from the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa. By its funding through loans or grants rather than direct government subsidies, the channel claims to maintain independent editorial policy. Much of the staff came from the BBC World Service’s Saudi-co-owned Arabic language TV station, which had shut down after two years of operation because of censorship demands by the Saudi Arabian government.
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March 2, 2011
LVMH (Moët Hennessy • Louis Vuitton) is a French holding company and the world’s largest luxury goods conglomerate. It is the parent of around 60 sub-companies that each manage a small number of prestigious brands including Dom Pérignon, Belvedere Vodka, Marc Jacobs, and TAG Heuer. These daughter companies are, to a large extent, run autonomously. The group was formed after mergers brought together champagne producer Moët et Chandon and Hennessy, a leading manufacturer of cognac. In 1987, they merged with fashion house Louis Vuitton to form the current group.
Christian Dior, the luxury goods group, is the main holding company of LVMH, owning 42.38% of its shares, and 59.3% of its voting rights. Bernard Arnault, majority shareholder of Dior, is Chairman of both companies and CEO of LVMH. His successful integration of various famous aspirational brands into the group has inspired other luxury companies into doing the same. Thus Gucci (now part of the French conglomerate PPR) and Richemont have also created extended portfolios of luxury brands. The oldest of the LVMH brands is wine producer Château d’Yquem, which dates its origins back to 1593.
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March 2, 2011
News Corporation is the world’s third-largest media conglomerate (behind The Walt Disney Company and Time Warner). The company’s Chairman & Chief Executive Officer is Rupert Murdoch. News Corp was created in 1979 by Murdoch as a holding company for News Limited (which he inherited in 1952 following the death of his father, Sir Keith Murdoch). The main asset left to him was ownership of the Adelaide afternoon tabloid, The News.
News Ltd. made its first acquisition in the United States in 1973, when it purchased the San Antonio Express-News. Soon afterwards it founded the National Star, a supermarket tabloid, and in 1976 it purchased the New York Post. In 1981 News Corp bought half of the movie studio 20th Century Fox, buying the other half in 1984. In 1996, Fox established the Fox News Channel, a 24-hour cable news station to compete against Ted Turner’s rival channel CNN. In 2007 News Corporation reached an agreement to purchase Dow Jones, publishers of The Wall Street Journal, for an estimated $5.6 billion.
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February 27, 2011
Maoz is a chain of falafel fast food restaurants, serving purely vegetarian fare and promoting the ‘vegetarian lifestyle.’ The chain was founded by a husband and wife, Nahman Milo and Sima Bar-On, Israelis, who were living in Amsterdam. The first restaurant opened in 1991, and the first store outside The Netherlands opened in 1996. There are now 22 franchises globally, located in the Netherlands, The United States, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Australia, and India.
Originally, restaurants offered only falafel, but the menu in some locations has since been expanded to include other vegetarian items, such as pommes frites (Belgian-style french fries). Muma Vegetarian is a copycat restaurant in Los Angeles.
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February 13, 2011
SkyReel is a Canadian company that builds and operates unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) outfitted with camera systems for the motion picture industry.
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February 13, 2011
The Red Digital Cinema Camera Company manufactures digital cinematography cameras and accessories for professional and cinematic use. The company was created and financed by Oakley founder Jim Jannard with the publicly expressed intent to reinvent the camera industry. The company’s main product is the Red One, which can record at resolutions up to 4,096 horizontal by 2,304 vertical pixels, directly to flash or hard disk storage. It features a single Super 35-sized CMOS sensor and a cinematography industry standard PL mount.
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January 21, 2011
Pantone is a corporation headquartered in Carlstadt, New Jersey, best known for its Pantone Matching System (PMS), a proprietary color space used in a variety of industries, primarily printing, though sometimes in the manufacture of colored paint, fabric, and plastics. The idea behind the PMS is to allow designers to ‘color match’ specific colors when a design enters production stage—regardless of the equipment used to produce the color.
The company provides Pantone Guides, which consist of a large number of small (approximately 6×2 inches or 15×5 cm) thin cardboard sheets, printed on one side with a series of related color swatches and then bound into a small ‘fan deck.’ Pantone recommends that PMS Color Guides be purchased annually as their inks become more yellow over time. Color variance also occurs within editions based on the paper stock used (coated, matte or uncoated), while interedition color variance occurs when there are changes to the specific paper stock used.
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