Is crowd sourcing the future of retail?

Everyone has heard of Threadless - but were you aware that Threadless has been partnering up with various well-known retail brands (such as Havaianas to crowd-source out the design for other products as well?

I found this infographic a few days ago and imagine that other companies will be following suit (if they aren't already):



Some companies I can think of right off the bat I'd like to see embrace this idea:

Nalgene or Sigg (water bottles)
Chrome/Timbuktu (bag companies)
North Face (or some other winter jacket company)
and any company that makes iPhone cases. Most of the designs are always horrendous.

Grumpy Bear, Volume 1

He does not like his travel arrangements:

Mario Brothers is a cultural phenomena

but so much more so in Japan:

OK Go is at it again

After their amazing Rube Goldberg machine video, they come out with this (as always, gotta pop youtube out - thanks blogger):



Specifics about the video: "The fastest we go is 172,800x, compressing 24 hours of real time into a blazing 1/2 second. The slowest is 1/32x speed, stretching a mere 1/2 second of real time into a whopping 16 seconds. This gives us a fastest to slowest ratio of 5.5 million. If you like averages, the average speed up factor of the band dancing is 270x. In total we shot 18 hours of the band dancing and 192 hours of LA skyline timelapse – over a million frames of video – and compressed it all down to 4 minutes and 30 seconds! Oh and don't forget, it's one continuous camera shot."

Star Wars meets Adidas

Polaroid's Comeback

Recently Lady GaGa was named the 'chief creative officer' or something of the sort (she evidently has given some 'quite good' suggestions for the brand).

I just wonder if anyone in today's society could produce Polaroid images that look like these.

Tropicana Commercial

nice commercial from Tropicana that brands their product pretty well