New New Media



Personal-finance website Mint will be picking up not one but two 2009 Webby Awards.


Mint absolutely deserved the awards - as well as the praise it has received from just about every quarter. The site helps you track how much money you have, how much you spend and how much you owe. Artfully designed, it comes off like a patient and discreet friend who knows your awkward financial secrets and stands by you anyway. Once you slip Mint the user names and passwords for your online accounts, the site collates your mortgages, bank accounts, credit and debit cards, I.R.A.'s, 401(k)'s a

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Let them eat tweets

24 May 2009 | 15:19 - By Stefano Boscutti

Twitter can be entertaining, and useful - and, really, who doesn't like the illusion, from time to time, of lots of company?


It's only lately that Virginia Heffernan has begun to wonder whether she'd use Twitter if she were fully at liberty to do what she liked. In other words, she's not sure she'd use Twitter if she was rich. These worries started to surface for me last month, when Bruce Sterling, the cyberpunk writer, proposed at the South by Southwest tech conference in Austin that the clearest symbol of poverty is dependence on "connections" like the Internet, Skype and texting. "Poor folk love their cellphones!"

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As books make the leap from cellulose and ink to electronic pages, some editors worry that too much is being lost in translation.


Typography, layout, illustrations and carefully thought-out covers are all being reduced to a uniform, black-on-gray template that looks the same whether you're reading "Pride and Prejudice" or the budget papers. "There's a dearth of typographic expression in e-books today," says Pablo Defendini, digital producer for Tor.com, the online arm of science fiction and fantasy publisher Tor Books. "Right now it's just about taking a digital file and pushing it on to a e-book reader without much consi

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How gadgets lose their magic

24 May 2009 | 15:15 - By Stefano Boscutti

Steven Levy muses on Arthur C. Clarke's riff that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.


All while playing with a Flip MinoHD camcorder. It's a stripped-down device with a footprint smaller than an Altoids tin, yet it holds an hour of video (in high definition!) and even has 2X zoom. It sports a clear 1.5-inch screen for shooting and playback. Its controls are so simple that even an adult can master them on the fly.

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Intel's Moblin 2.0 OS is designed specifically for netbooks, and marks the first time Matt Buchanan has ever been tempted to utter "wow" and "netbook" in the same sentence. Just watch.


It's completely re-designed from the original Moblin, which was way more Linux-y. It's not just really modern and awesome looking, it seems like the first OS and UI really designed just for netbooks. And it makes a lot of sense for netbooks to get their own OS and interface: Every hardware platform - which you can basically break down by screen size and input method, from desktop/laptop to mobile-works best with an OS and UI designed for it. It's why the iPhone OS, Android and Pre (theoretically

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As storefronts become vacant, ads arrive

12 May 2009 | 21:15 - By Stefano Boscutti

Almost every category of advertising is declining precipitously in this economy, but there is one that is thriving.


Taking advantage of all the abandoned retail spaces in urban areas, marketers are leasing them at cut-rate prices and filling them with their ads. At first, advertisers saw storefront advertising as a poor man's billboard - that is, a bad thing. Now, they see it as a poor man's billboard - that is, brilliantly frugal. Ads for Intel that went up on Monday capitalized on the bankruptcies of stores like the Disney Store, Domain Home and Comp-USA, filling their former shops with digital billboards.

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Until about a year ago, Joe Sharkey used to scoff at the assertion, long made by the videoconferencing industry, that its high-end technology negated the need to get on an airplane and travel to a face-to-face meeting.


But starting early last year, sales began to rise, offering evidence that videoconferencing was, in fact, being used more often to replace some business travel. He now regularly uses videoconferencing. Often, his wife has to stay back East while he has the luxury of working in Arizona. They use a simple Skype Internet connection - little cameras and microphones hooked to our laptops - to hold nightly videoconferences, in which their two pet parrots in New Jersey also participate.

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Kutiman remixes YouTube through Thru-You

12 May 2009 | 21:10 - By Stefano Boscutti

Thru-You is the new album by Israeli funk musician Kutiman.


All of the album's sounds were painstakingly culled from YouTube videos and masterfully mixed into 7 fantastic tracks. It's like the "Entroducing . . ." of the internet! Hurry over to Thru-You.com to watch these amazing videos. Personally I dig track 03 "I'm New". But then I would, right. (Pass the link on to all your fiends. Play loud. Real loud. Hey, and if you've ever dropped a note or a beat on You Tube you might even be in the mix. Be sure to check the credits.)

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About this Blog

New New Media looks at how our mediascape is exploding to bits. How the latest technology and the internet are changing the way we live, work and play. How the latest media is shaping us all.

Stefano Boscutti is an executive creative director and strategist. He's like a better looking version of Todd Sampson. He also has an abiding faith that stories and wordplay (and not powerpoint presentations) will change the world.

 
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