1. DeAndre "Soulja Boy Tell'em" Way, rapper/producer
The 18-year-old Web wunderkind took a crazy song and dance, and propelled it via YouTube and MySpace fame into an Interscope recording contract and platinum record sales. And to prove he was no one-hit wonder, he returned with a chart topping sophomore set. Now he's branched out into a live-action animation series and an endorsement deal with Yums footwear and fashions. Next up: a video game for Xbox 360, and acting.
2. Tim Westergren, Chief Strategy Officer & Founder, Pandora
An award-winning composer, an accomplished musician, and a record producer, Westergren founded the Music Genome Music Project, a technology that uses over 400 attributes to describe songs and a complex mathematical algorithm to organize them and launched it with Pandora in January 2000. Nine years later, it's the world's favorite Internet and mobile radio station, with the best built-in system for music discovery ever.
3. Alexandra Patsavas, Owner, Chop Shop Music Supervision
She has a gift for matching the right song to the right scene in some of TV's most popular shows. The day after Snow Patrol's "Chasing Cars" played on Grey's Anatomy, it became the most downloaded song on iTunes, and the show's soundtrack was later nominated for a Grammy. After that, Atlantic Records gave Patsavas her own label.
4. Gregg Gillis, Mashup artist
The ex-biomedical engineer, also known as Girl Talk, layers unlicensed song samples and "performs" them live, with his laptop center stage. Last year, he released his fourth album, Feed the Animals, online, using Radiohead's pay-what-you-want model.
5. Pharrell Williams,
Musician
As half of the production duo known as the Neptunes, he has helped everyone from Britney Spears to the Hives land on the charts. He also fronts the funk-rock band N.E.R.D., produces a clothing line called Billionaire Boys Club, hawks a line of shoes under the Ice Cream Footwear brand, and designed sunglasses and jewelry for Louis Vuitton. Most recently, Limelight, an updated version of Fame that he created with film director McG, was picked up by ABC.
6. A.R. Rahman, Composer
He's the Oscar-winning composer behind Slumdog Millionaire's "Jai Ho," which has been downloaded more than 100,000 times on iTunes and was re-recorded as a hit collaboration with the Pussycat Dolls. Rahman also created the musical Bombay Dreams and has been testing new forms of music distribution; through a tie-up with Nokia, he recently released an album just for the company's music-phone users in India.
7. Jimmy Iovine, Chairman, Interscope Geffen A&M Records
In music, all roads lead to--and from--Jimmy Iovine. The resurrection of the New Kids on the Block. The exclusive Best Buy deal for Guns N' Roses. MySpace's music venture. Dr. Dre's high-tech headphones. Iovine had a hand in all these projects--and he's still thinking big, bold, and increasingly multimedia.
8. Bart Decrem, Chief executive officer, Tapulous
Three days after its release last July, Tap Tap Revenge--an iPhone game that's basically Dance Dance Revolution except that you tap your fingers to a song rather than dance to it--shot to No. 1 among free game downloads on iTunes. It was testimony to the appeal of playing along to bands such as Coldplay. Within a week, artists were reaching out to the game's developer, because the game links to purchase songs on iTunes. Decrem has partnered with labels (EMI) as well as individual acts to create band-branded apps.
9. Dave Stewart, Musician and record producer
The Eurythmics cofounder and a singer's songwriter--he's written hits for Tom Petty, Celine Dion, and No Doubt--also started the consulting company DeepStew with Deepak Chopra, acts as U.S. creative director for the Law Firm ad group, serves as president of entertainment for fashion designer Christian Audigier's brand-management unit, and is an official Change Agent for Nokia.
10. Brian Eno, Musician
On his recent collaboration with David Byrne, Byrne wrote lyrics in New York to the instrumental tracks Eno sent from London. Then they prereleased the album, "Everything That Happens Will Happen Today," online. Now he's curating a lights-and-music festival in Australia that includes his own light show projected on the Sydney Opera House.
In our February cover story, "Shaun White's Business is Red Hot," Fast Company Senior Editor Mark Borden, who wrote the article, told you that snowboarding gold medalist and skate boarder Shaun White had the creativity and authenticity to kill in the $150 billion youth market.
He wrote:
"White has sought out companies he truly connects with. Working with a tight team of advisers that include his 29-year-old brother, Jesse, and his agent, Mark Ervin of IMG, White sees these deals as a long-term investment portfolio, something that will outlast his knees. Each corporation meshes with a discrete slice of his actual life, and with each one, White dives in and takes a central role, from the design of specific products to pulling deals together among his various partners. Last fall, his street-wear line appeared in Target stores across the country. This year, he expanded his best-selling Burton collection of snowboarding gear to include a stand-alone extension for women. There are marketing deals with HP, Oakley, and Red Bull. He collaborated on a snowboarding video game with Ubisoft that went on sale just before the holidays. And whether it's the quirky commercials for Target, the reality-style video shorts in the back-to-school Web campaign for HP, or the high-energy ads for Ubisoft, the ecstatic look and feel of the White DNA comes through."
His Target clothing line's launch was so successful, the big box retailer has re-upped for a second season. The clothes are a collaboration with his brother Jesse and represent White's interests in music and travel. Similarly to White's line for Burton, brainstorming begins with hand sketches by big bro, and CoolHunting got a peek inside his notebook.
This sketch shows the design for a jacket:
The new Shaun White for Target collection will be available in the fall at all Target locations and online. See more sketches at CoolHunting.
Tonight I took a test drive on the Brammo Enertia electric motorcycle in Tribeca, but it didn't smell, feel, or sound much like a motorcycle: There were no exhaust fumes, the bike was light (though it weighs 285 pounds), and there was barely any engine noise--only a slight whirrr--even at a top speed of 50 miles per hour. "It's almost silent," says John Farris, Director-Marketing, Brammo.
Built in Ashland, Oregon, the Enertia will be available in Best Buy's Portland store starting July 5, and later rolling out in 1,200 other U.S. Best Buy locations, as well as 1,800 Best Buy locations in Europe via The Carphone Warehouse Group. "We do R&D, manufacturing, and design all in Ashland and can get up to 1,000s of production vehicles at a time depending on the demand at Best Buy," says Farris. Best Buy Capital was an early investor in the Enertia.
With the Enertia, Brammo is aiming at the urban consumer, as it combines reduced operating costs, environmental consciousness and the fun of a motorcycle. The plug-in Enertia has no clutch, no gears and no shifting, so it's simple to ride, reaches speeds up to 55 miles per hour, travels 45 miles on a charge and takes just over three hours to re-charge. "We want to make it as accessible and as approachable as possible," says Farris.
Selling at Best Buy instead of a motorcycle outlet was founder Craig Bramscher's idea. Looking at the Enertia without it's wheels and torque, it looked just like consumer electronics to him, so Best Buy seemed like a perfect match. The Enertia Standard motorcycle will feature an aluminum chassis, injection molded plastic body panels and fenders, plus a durable vinyl seat for $11,995, with a 12 months warranty and 10% tax credit for electric plug-in vehicles. Bramscher says they're also working on getting an additional 10% in some states, like New Jersey.
After my ride, some camera guys from CNET approached me to do an interview asking me to compare the Enertia to a regular motorcycle. I talked about the ride around Tribeca and my trying to top out on the West Side Highway. To sum it up, here's what I told them: Besides it not smelling, feeling, or sounding much like your everyday motorcycle, I also found it to be very easy. In fact, it was one of the easiest rides I've ever had in my life--it was just like riding a bike, well, almost.
"I wanted to do a series of photographs that was 100% pure form. When you look at things in the world everything is comprised of form and texture. Form is everything that takes up 3 dimensional space and texture is on the surface of it. The photography takes place virtually inside of the computer. You move the camera around in 3D space. Instead of standing there with camera you're doing it all inside of the camera.
It starts with a facial scan, a super hi-res scan of the face. Then a laser scan of the entire body. It takes a long time to render. It looks like clay because the lighting is super realistic. Some may think it's a statue, but it's a uniformed texture. In any CG model you see this is one of the layers of that model.
I'm always interested in using new technology and doing something no one has done before. But it's for the greater good of the concept, not just to show off."
Brains! That must be the secret to Hulu rocketing up to being the fourth largest video site in the U.S. in February, right? That's what Alec Baldwin told us in this creative Super Bowl ad, which may also have had something to do with the video site's healthy traffic bump last month. Of course, it could have been the high-quality content--from Fox and NBC, as well as TV shows and movies from more than 120 sources, from the Food Network to Paramount Pictures.
The site's viewership increased by 55% to 7.8 million during February with 332.5 million streams, according to comScore Media Metrix. YouTube still dominates though, with 5.3 billion streams compared to #2 Fox Interactive (MySpace) with 462.6 million streams and #3 Yahoo, with 353.5 streams for that same period. But Hulu shot right ahead of Microsoft and Viacom to become #4. Hulu first launched March 12, 2008, and in just a year has become a major onliine video player.
"Hulu's success is its freedom to operate essentially as a stand-alone company, largely safe from the turf battles that plague most joint ventures," said CEO Jason Kilar when we interviewed him for The Fast Company 50, where Hulu landed in our #3 spot for most innovative companies in the world. "Hulu is about the shows, not the networks. The shows are the brands that users care about," he said
Looks like the site's obsession with focusing on what its users want is paying off in a major way. But if you don't mind, we're sticking with the brains diet.
They came out in droves--all 1000-plus of them. They were men, women, boys, and girls. They came from all five boroughs, and some from afar, from the stretches of Westchester, Long Island, and even New Jersey. They formed a queue, one so long that it wrapped around like a Python from the front door of The Times Square Arts Center on Eighth Avenue curving through 42nd Street. And as this was Sunday in New York, not even an impending Nor'easter could stop them.
Collectively, they all wanted the same thing--to find a pair of rare, exclusive sneakers. And though they may already own several pairs, they all wanted more. But it wasn't even brand new sneakers they were after. Some would buy vintage--already worn--sneakers from vendors, and others would barter from their own collections, if they found a pair another attendee had that was of equal value. And the place where it all happened: Sneaker Con 2009.
Sneaker collectors like West Wing, who has attended events like this before, started his day at 12 noon. By 3:00 p.m., he sold four of the eight pairs of sneakers he brought out with him. And, he had even purchased two pair, both Nike: one the Nike SB Dunk Ferris Bueller and the other the Nike SB Mork and Mindy Dunk. While he admitted spending a pretty penny for those choice pairs, it wasn't as bad as the time he paid half of his rent for pair. "I ended up reselling them on ebay for $1500, so it was good," he said.
In its first year, Sneaker Con was founded by brothers Alan Vinogradov, 21, Barris Vinogradov, 28, and their partner Yu-Ming Wu, 30. The Vinogradov brothers are also founders of Gradient Magazine, a cultural and fashion publication distributed in New York City. They are also the founders of Osneaker.com, one of the few high-end sneaker resale sites on the Internet. Wu runs a network of sneaker blog/sites full time--freshnessmag.com, freshnessguide.com, kicksfinder.com and sneakernews.com. Like them, many of the 20 vendors, who all paid $100 for a table, were enterprising young men.
"Alan, Barris, and I have been talking about a sneaker convention for a few months, something that does not yet exist for sneaker heads. To jump start our vision we decided to do a buy/sell/trade event to test the market and see how effective our marketing is. Though there have been buy/sell/trade events in the past, nothing generated this much participation and buzz on the blogs," said Wu.
Because it's a buy/sell/trade event, it's not only the vendors who make money. Anyone who paid $10 to get in, and got a NYC Token stamped on the back of their hand, was a merchant. On the trade floor--boxes and shoes displayed in hand like a window front, sneakers dangling from necks like baby shoes tied around a rearview mirror--deals were made, hand-to-hand. The founders estimate that about $40,000 to $50,000 worth of goods exchanged hands at the event.
This underground sneaker culture may have found its home on Sunday, but Sneaker Con simply serves as an open market conduit to an industry that's been practiced for some years now. "There are also resell and consignment shops throughout the country where sellers bring their sneakers and let the store sell them, Flight Club is one of them here in New York," said Wu. But there's also ebay, that Wu estimates generates $100,000 to $200,000 worth of sneaker sales a day, with prices ranging from $30 to $1,500, and even up to $22,000 for the Nate Robinson All Star Game Slam Dunk Contest sneakers. Rare and classic shoes, especially those no longer available at retail, often bring in the highest prices. Besides ebay and events like Sneaker Con, there's also trades/sales on message boards, as well as resell sites on the Web. For real sneaker enthusiasts, an event like this is the ultimate, they get to see and feel the merchandise upfront and make a deal--often haggling--for the best price. It's a world where the shoes aren't made for walking, but instead for profiling, recycling, reupping, and then profiling some more.
If you visit YouTube often enough, you might end up watching Superman or Simba from the Lion King singing, "Crank That," a song made popular on YouTube by the rapper Soulja Boy for its accompanying dance and various user-generated videos that reinterpreted the artist's original. Or you may catch a view of one of the many remixes and spoofs of Beyonce's, "SIngle Ladies," that in and of itself is a remix of Gwen Verdon's "Mexican Breakfast," choreographed by Bob Fosse.
l. to. r. Lawrence Lessig, Steven Johnson, and Shepard Fairey. Photo by Peter Foley
These were just some of the examples of "Remix" that Lawrence Lessig, author of Remix, Making Art And Commerce Thrive In The Hybrid Economy, and founder of Law at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, showed during a discussion at the New York Public Library last week.
"The one thing we should recognize is that we can not kill this form of expression, we can only criminilize it. We can't stop our kids from being active in ways that you or i were not growing up. We can only drive them underground. We can't make them passive. We can only make them pirates. Is that any good?" said Lessig.
The discussion, which begged the question, "What is the future for art and ideas in an age when practically anything can be copied, pasted, downloaded or sampled, and re-imagined?" included Lessig, along with artist Shepard Fairey, and was moderated by Steven Johnson, author of The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America.
Fairey's own art, in the form of the Hope poster he created for the Obama campaign, recently came under fire for its remix properties. The poster illustrates a photo of the President credited to the AP and photographer Mannie Garcia. The AP accused Fairey of copyright infringement, to which the artist responded by pre-emptively suing the AP claiming his use of the image was fair use. His case is being handled by the center that Lessig founded at Stanford.
"I wanted to make an image that I felt represented Barack Obama as someone who was not outside the mainstream like the right wing was trying to potray him. Someone who had the characteristic of leadership. He could bring change and hope, and progress, and that he was a patriot. So the colors were very important. And the idea of the blue and the red blue states and the red states converging right there in the middle was very important to this image," said Fairey
"After i made that image and it got some traction on the Internet, i sent some out on my own dime, and the obama campaign said they really liked the style of that image and they had some images I could work from," he added. "So i did change, and then later Time magazine asked me to do something similar for their cover. The Obama photo was originally from a 2006 Darfur panel with George Clooney that acutally wasn't even relevant in terms of news anymore. It was an unspectacular, unexceptional photo, but after it became a poster the original gained more value.
Here are some highlights from the evening's talk:
The terrorists in this war [the copyright war] are our children. This wave of terrorism is threatening artists like Shephard Fairey. It's threatening kids. The RIAA is suing more than 28,000 kids for using material on the 'net illegally, according to the RIAA, but to no effect because the one thing we know about P2P filesharers is that they don't read supreme court decisions. - Lawrence Lessig
Remix had been a very impoartant part of my body of work. Drawing from references that a lot of people understand is a great way to establish where you are coming from in a piece of communication. As an artist I'm very much a populist and i believe that connecting with as many people as possible through acceptable metaphors is crucial to what i do. It's a really big part of my work. - Shephard Fairey
My view is it's clear we should be deregulating this form of expression. Remix should be free of regulation to facilitate it to flourish in the way that it already is. - Lawrence Lessig
i want to allow people to frequently use my images as long as it's something that's transformative and even if it isn't, if it's such small scale that i see something of myself when i was a kid in my mother's office running off copies of album covers to make stencils from to make my own T-shirts. The instance I will go after someone is if the work isn't transformative and it's made purely for exploitative profit. i actually went after some of the people that bootlegged the Obama image because I had given all the money over to the ACLU and the movement for Prop. 8 in California. One guy we knew bragged about buying a Mercedes with the profits from bootleg posters. If it's used as tool of communication and not for profit i'm never gonna have a problem with it. The things that inspired me to make art were about frequently being irreverent toward protected mark,s so it's all in the spirit of what I do. - Shephard Fairey
Our kids live in a time of constant prohibitions, constantly living life against the law. Normal behavior is deemed to be criminal behavior. That title is extraodinarily corrosive. It is extraordinarily corrupting. It is corrupting of the rule of law and the very ideals of a democracy. We have to do better if not for the RIAA or the MPAA, then at least for them. - Lawrence Lessig
My favorite Warhol quote : It's the duty of intelligent men (and I'd add women) to continuously restate the obvious. The idea there being that we're all so daft that the obvious isn't as obvious as it should be. In these kinds of communications we say the same thing over and over in subtly new ways. I don't think I ever had an original thought in my life. There may be some people aware of that on the Internet. However, i'm using that very tool to come up with art that I've charged gazillions of dollars for. There can be creativity even within elements of recycling. It has democratized this process that is incredibly powerful for people who were powerless before and I couldn't be happier. - Shephard Fairey
Here are some highlights from my tweetstream related to the evening's talk:
lynneluvah: @bigced sorry won't be able to. going to see lawrence lessig, shepard fairey, and steven johnson tomorrow night http://is.gd/kQfa
lynneluvah: @blogdiva aye paul wasn't there, he wrote in a question on a blog and it was the first they read. nypl event called remix http://is.gd/kQfa
This month's New York Android Meetup, held at the Fast Company office, and hosted in conjunction with Medialets, featured guest speaker Jamie Wells, lead mobile director for Omnicom Media Digital. Along with the usual 30 or so developer attendees, the month special guest, Bradley Horowitz, VP Products, Google also showed up.
(l to r: Rana Sobhany, VP, Marketing, Medialets; Jamie Wells; Lynne d Johnson, Senior Editor and Community Director, Fast Company; Irene Au, Director, User Exeperience, Google; and Bradley Horowitz.)
A highlight of Wells's talk was that developers--of either apps for iPhone or Android--build with advertising in mind. "Think about where ads might live," he said.
And while Horowitz's team doesn't deal with Android directly, he talked about their work on Latitude, as well as offline Gmail in mobile devices. "We're being aggressive about getting data wherever people want it to be," he said.
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Now that the Android Market has officially openend up to accept paid apps from both U.S. and U.K. developers, the race is on to see which developer can finally knock The Weather Channel out of its #1 spot. Since its launch on October 22, The Weather Channel, an app that offers hourly, 36-hour, and 10-day forecasts, as well as video forecast updates for your location, has dominated the Android Market. (See Most Popular Android Applications For November 2008 and Popular Android Apps and Games For December 2008.)
Given the gold that's been found in the iPhone App store, the rush to find gold in Android's Market shouldn't be far behind. For instance, consider Ethan Nicholas, the developer of iShoot, who quit his job when his app became #1 in the App Store. It was reported that he earned $600,000 in just one month. Or even consider nine-year-old Lim Deng Wen, whose Doodle Kids, an app that lets kids use the iPhone like Etch-A-Sketch, tracing their fingers across the screen to draw and then shaking the phone to erase. His app was downloaded 4,000 times in just two weeks and he's already working on his second, Invader Wars.
That the Android Market hasn't been as robust as the App store or grown as quickly, is perhaps merely a condition of developers having been unable to charge for their work. In fact, many members of the New York Android Developers Meetup cited this as a factor their slowness to launch their own apps. And now that they'll be able to charge for applications, the race has only really just begun.
Following is a letter recently sent to Android developers from the Market, announcing the acceptance of paid apps:
Hello,
I'm writing to let you know about a couple of updates to Android Market.
I'm pleased to announce that Android Market is now accepting priced applications from US and UK developers. Developers from these countries can go to the publisher website at http://market.android.com/publish to upload their application(s) along with end user pricing for the apps. Initially, priced applications will be available to end users in the US starting mid next week. We will add end user support for additional countries in the coming months.
We will also enable developers in Germany, Austria, Netherlands, France, and Spain to offer priced applications later this quarter. By the end of Q1 2009, we will announce support for developers in additional countries. You can find more information about priced applications in Android Market at http://market.android.com/support/
Google Checkout will serve as the payment and billing mechanism for Android Market. Developers who do not already have a Google Checkout merchant account can easily sign up for one via the publisher website.
Furthermore, I would like to let you know that Android Market for free applications will become available to users in Australia starting February 15th Pacific Time and in Singapore in the coming weeks. You can now make your applications available in these countries via the publisher website at http://market.android.com/publish.
Finally, if you would like to receive development and marketing information, please go to your profile page at http://market.android.com/publish/editProfile and select the "Contact me occasionally about development and Market opportunities" checkbox.
We look forward to seeing your applications on Android Market.
Eric Chu, Android Market
Google, Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043
