Expectation Shmexpectation

Flanking Apple, acoustic adventures, fashion you can see from space, ditchmail, temporal liberation, what a stranger, a grocery store and art have in common, and why Conversationality really is where the money’s at. Welcome to the Expectation Shmexpectation issue.

WHILE THE GIANT’S SLEEPING

Say what you will about the iPhone, but the sleek little bastard is a technology driver in and of itself — and, most importantly, beyond. Various competitors were already playing catch-up before the iPhone even launched. (Hello, Verizon’s LG Prada.)

But while Apple is drunk on its own brilliance, one serious competitor is silently building its digital war-chest to take on iTunes, the iPhone, AT&T, MySpace and Google all at once. Nokia, the global headsets leader with 35% market share, is adding products and services to its portfolio like there’s no tomorrow: it only makes sense that the company whose tagline is “Connecting People” gets in the business of doing just that — and doing it better than anyone.

Let’s take a peek at what they’ve got and why it matters:

• Nokia N95: multimedia phone featuring 2.8-inch display, 5 megapixel camera, WiFi, GPS, microSD, and more
• S60 Touch UI: direct competitor to the iPhone; one-ups the Apple gadget by offering video recording and sharing straight from the device, a Flash-capable browser, and richer sensor use (like flipping the phone over to silence an alarm)
• Ovi: mobile content and Internet service portal; Finnish for “door”
• intros: digital music platform that allows for wireless download to headset and two-way synchronization to host computer; comes after last year’s acquisition of Loudeye, a digital music platform and distribution company, for $60 million
• MOSH: social network that allows sharing of media online or from a phone
• N-Gage: gaming platform
• Enpocket: recently acquired Boston-based mobile marketing company
• Navteq: recently acquired (for $8.1 million) digital map supplier
• Video Center: deal with News Corp., Sony Pictures, CNN and others to distribute content straight to headsets

So while everyone’s gushing about the oh-so-wonderful iPhone, shortcomings properly blurred by those Apple juice goggles, Nokia is building a powerful army of tools to take on the digital business. And when the flanking does happen, just don’t say you never saw it coming.

TALENT KNOWS NO BOUNDARIES

Petty concerns like budget, production and media are no barrier for serious talent. Which is why we dig Fionn Regan‘s latest DIY video, “Be Good or Be Gone.”

And while the clamour of life drowns out the Irish singer-songwriter’s folksy vocals, it does so beautifully, enticing us into an extraordinary journey through the quiet charm of the ordinary.

As artists are starting to dump the record industry like week-old pizza leftovers, are video production studios next?

OH, THE POSSIBILITIES

We hate nothing more than pre-canned, standard voicemail greetings. (Okay, maybe there’s some stuff we hate more.) So we have to love YouMail, a nifty new service that lets you have custom voicemail greetings for each of your contacts. (Or however many you actually care enough about to custom-greet.) It also allows you to keep messages forever and have them sent as text to your email. Did we mention it’s all free?

You can choose ready-made greetings from a number of categories (business, humor, entertainment, sexy, politics, commercials, games, music, sports, even “ditchmail”) or record your very own.

For a sampling of the hilarious variety, listen to the “mental health hotline”, the postal service, God, or this casually homicidal caller repellent.

UNTRIVIA

Volumes have been written about the people who drive the word-of-mouth machine. They’ve been called anything from “influencers” to “mavens” to “brand advocates” to “conversation catalysts.” The latest term: “Passionistas.” MediaVest and Yahoo help shed some light over who these folks are and what earns them those labels. They:

• Spend 6 minutes online for every 1 minute the average Interneter does
• Dig brands related to their interests and passions, and are more likely than typical consumers to try such brands
• Are twice as likely as the average person to post on consumer-generated content sites, message boards and online content comment fields
• Do 184% more than average Internet search on stuff they’re interested in
• Are growing in numbers: 34.4 million such influentials are projected to populate the US Internet by 2011, up from 26.8 million in 2007

And influence they will. Turns out, 78% of people trust the opinions of other consumers more than any marketing and advertising messaging. (Hey, we’re on that boat, too: gotta love Amazon Askville.) Here’s how trust in other media compares, according to Nielsen:

• Newspaper ads: 63%
• Blogs: 61%
• Brand websites: 60%
• TV: 56%
• Magazines: 56%
• Radio: 54%
• Brand sponsorships: 49%
• Search engines: 34%
• Banners: 26%

Mobile text messaging tanks at the very bottom. Which explains why so many mobile marketer hopefuls’ hearts were crushed at the CTIA conference when Neilsen announced the finding that over 80% of cell phone users don’t even look at the ads, let alone respond.

LONG IS IN

Fendi went to great lengths with their new luxe collection. Finally, after months of paperwork and jumping through bureaucracy hoops, the LMVH Moet Hennessy-Louis Vuitton luxury arm has pulled off what seemed like quite a stretch: an elaborate Fall/Winter fashion show that used the Great Wall of China as the actual runway — a first for both Fendi and the Wall.

While the footage is kinda boring (that’s 1,500 miles worth of still-faced runway strutting), the show was nonetheless impressive, a majestic red-and-black affair masterminded by legendary designer Karl Lagerfeld.

As the fashion industry if finally starting to drool over China’s 1.3 billion consumers, it’s only fitting that such an enormous market would warrant such an enormous publicity stunt: $10-million-enormous, to be exact. (That’s 4 30-second Super Bowl spots.)

And on another note from the ridiculously unnecessary expenditures department, we sure hope all those light bulbs were CFL’s.

MINIMALISM FOR THE TIME-INSENSITIVE

Time. It’s all kinds of evil: it turns relatively fresh thinking into old news, it flies when we want it to limp, and it makes concepts like “late for work” exist in the first place. And for those of us who choose to take it more lightly, more loosely, or just outright ignore it, this week’s product pick is for you: the temporally liberated aesthetes.

The 900 ABACUS watch is a keeper. Not of time, necessarily, but of all kinds of cool. The ball, just like you, is completely free to do whatever it likes. But as soon as the watch gets in the horizontal position, magnets draw it to the actual time reading.

At just $153.47, it has all the makings of a watchy watch: made in Germany with premium quartz, sapphire glass face, luxury leather strap and stainless steel case. It’s also sweat- and water-resistant up to 30 meters (that’s 98 feet for the metrically challenged) — although, unlike Lance Armstrong, this one-ball wonder doesn’t seem quite like a winner in any athletic or aquatic pursuit.

AS SEEN IN PHILLY

Spotted in the lobby of The Fresh Grocer up on 40th & Walnut: a curious poster by the Slought Foundation urging people, just like we did last week, to look up: a gigantic portrait was plastered on the facade of the building’s 5-story parking lot. (It wasn’t there when we look, must’ve mistimed it.)

Turns out, it’s promoting the Slought Foundation’s October 11 event “Conversations with Braco Dimitrijevic’s ‘The Casual Passer-By I Met…’”

Artist Braco Dimitrijevic started a series of installations titled “Casual Passer-By” in 1971 and went global with it. He uses advertising media like billboards, banners and public transportation vehicles as a cultural gallery for his iconic portraits of random strangers he encounters and photographs in the street.

Interesting stuff.

The Bookworm Issue

The world’s first $430 million book, college admissions on steroids, the little bookshop that took the click-and-mortar universe by storm, agency all-stars, how print may solve the global warming crisis, and why Philly’s 30th Street Station needs the best a man can get. Welcome to The Bookworm Issue.

GUTENBERG’S GHOST

Yeah, yeah. Print is dead. We’ve heard more iterations of this eulogy than there are pages in War and Peace. But, the thing is, print ain’t dead. It’s just different.

We’ve been highly skeptical about audiobooks since they first came around. Visions of meditation-tape voices and a tone that stresses all the wrong words plagued the imagined experience. But seeking a fair verdict, we finally decided to suck it up and try it, getting a book we’d read before for comparison purposes.

The pick: Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point from Simply Audiobooks. And, in all honesty, it was a pleasant surprise.

The CDs arrive fast. (We wanted all judgement points available, so we went with the hard-copy mail-based rental club, but they also have a neat download club and a purchase option for those who don’t care for the restrictions of monthly or annual memberships.) And there are no Netflixy restrictions on what you can do with the content — ours got sucked right into our iTunes library, so the “rental” ended up as ownership. Best of all, our book was actually read by Gladwell himself — granted, in a rather meditative voice, but nothing beats hearing an author’s interpretation of his own work.

An added bonus: subtle print on the neat blue cardboard boxes CDs come in tells you they are made from 100% post-consumer materials and are fully recyclable and biodegradable. There’s no mention of it on the site, there’s not boastfulness about it — seems like an authentic effort by these folks to make a small, tangible difference. You don’t get that a lot in the fanfare-driven eco movement.

Then there’s print that’s actually printed and just as 2.0. Initiated by the World Bank and funded through the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, On Demand Books created the world’s first print-on-demand (POD) device last spring: the Espresso Book Machine. It takes this media shaker 3 minutes to print and bind a 300-page paperback from a digital file. Which, come to think of it, would work great with Google’s Library Project, an effort to digitize the world’s libraries and make them fully searchable, once it leaps over the self-serving, pointlessly bitter naysayers and takes off full steam.

On Demand Books and Google seem to share more than functional compatibility: just like Google’s do-no-evil, empower-people-though- information vision, the Espresso is out to solve a larger problem. From a sustainability perspective, the gizmo will eliminate the enormous global shipping and warehousing costs for books and reduce paper consumption (in which the U.S. is a world leader, at 715 pounds per capita a year and growing at about 10% each decade). Thanks to Uncle Gore, we all know what this has to do with them glaciers. And from a socioeconomic perspective, it will give that smart, hard-working but incredibly poor student in Mozambique access to the educational tools that will empower her to pursue her dreams and passions. It’s hard, after all, to ignore the powerful role education and information access play in socioeconomic status, driving the dynamic between education, employment and poverty.

The miracle printer is expected to retail for about $100,000 — much less than what the majority of national libraries, including ones in the developing world, spend on stocking every year. Plus, given the machine’s workhorse capacity, it seems like a sound investment. See it all in action and marvel.

BETA VERSION OF YOU

We remember the days when CollegeBoard.com was as high-tech as college application got. But it seemed intended to ease the process on the administrative end, not the student end. Not exactly a hook these days when kids are all about being in control. That’s where 2.0 startup Zinch comes in.

They cater to one of the most powerful, universal human aspirations — to be recognized as unique individuals. Because, really, who likes being reduced to a standardized test score, a bunch of acronyms (hello, GPA, AP, SAT, TOEFL, and others), and a bullet-point list of extracurriculars? Certainly not budding twenty-something hipsters.

Still in startup-classic Beta, Zinch was inspired by the simple observation that the current admissions process seems to favor those in already favorable positions. (Hey there, private school all-stars, alum kids, extracurricular whores and grade-grubbers.)

Combined with various research findings that test scores and high school GPA are poor predictors of how kids do in college (known to some of ous as the keg effect), a vision was born: to level the playing field, giving students an outlet for showcasing their individuality without the traditional expensive resources like essay-writing courses, test preparation services, tutors, and other get-in-bed-with-the-Ivies plots.

Here’s how it works: students sign up and create detailed profiles, or “portfolios,” where they showcase what they’re all about. Anything goes — blogs, obscure art, a garage band gig, you name it. Portfolios are then assembled into a sophisticated database, which colleges and universities across the nation can search based on whatever criteria they think matter.

Sure, it may take some time until the admission process recognizes the human factor involved in sifting through applicants to select those who’ll make the greatest brains of tomorrow. (Because, really, it’s the successful ones that shell out the biggest alum donations.) But we dig that someone out there is starting to nudge things in the right direction.

Plus, there’s the “i am more than a test score” tagline. Simple. Honest. And sadly revolutionary.

UNTRIVIA

A recent partnership between STORES Magazine and BIGresearch produced the Favorite 50, a survey in which consumers ranked their favorite e-tailers. If anything, it’s a useful snapshot of how the contrast between the brick-and-mortar and online retail landscapes — offline many of the rank-toppers are either B-grade or nonexistent altogether. Here’s a top-line of the findings:

1. Amazon.com — The interesting thing is that if you were to walk into a traditional retail store that carries all the products available on Amazon, you’d be so overwhelmed with the paradox of choice you’d either pass out or walk out. But the success of this search-based system enhanced by personalized recommendations suggests the future of shopping may just be in online stores that operate as sophisticated, algorithm-driven retail databases.

2. eBay — The Barry Bonds of vintage stores seems to be hitting a home run with shoppers.

3. Wal-Mart — Despite various questionably effective attempts to be, like, totally hip and catch the young set (including the latest merciless milking of the green cow), this retail giant is doing well as ever.

4. Best Buy — Eh, not really “Best,” but “4th Best Buy” doesn’t really have the same ring to it.

5. JC Penny — We’re talking massive dollars here, not pennies. And it’s quite a jump for this lovemarked (see appropriate snark below) retailer. Can they really be better liked than…

6. …Target? — All the multiplying pretty people, the swirly stuff and the poppy tunes seem to be paying off.

7. Kohl’s — We’re guessing quietly kicking up their posh quotient with the Vera Bradley line didn’t hurt.

Also of note: Google (#9) and Yahoo (#16) are sending clear signals that search engines play a big role in e-commerce beyond your grandmother’s basic search optimization.

But most importantly, unlike “objective” spending-based rankings, the Favorite 50 assessed how people feel, subjectively, about the retailers they shop with. And while the dollar can’t be neglected as a business driver, it’s brand equity and love that keep it coming year after year. Refreshing to see some commercial entity out there actually cares about how consumers feel, not how much and what they bought today.

GLOSSY VS. GRITTY

While we’re on the subject of brand love and the number-five ranker above, it seems like for lovemarker K-Rob there’s no shame in being one justifiably smug, smart SOB. (You may recall JC Penny’s unexpected, pitchless shift of business to Saatchi & Saatchi, allegedly after top execs were blown away by Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts’ Lovemarks. If this is the case, it makes it the world’s most expensive book, with a price sticker of the $430-million business.) Especially if he’s willing to put his money where his pen is.

Which he did, kinda. The lovemarketing campaign is a-rollin‘, replete with bouncy imagery, life-is-good cliches, and — our biggest gripe — commodification of formerly-indie acts in soundtracks. (To be fair, as much as we love Regina Spektor, we first thought she was showing symptoms of sellout after being prominently featured on the first season finale of addictive primetime soap Grey’s Anatomy, but this is a whole new level of commercialization.)

In any case, our biggest concern with K-Rob’s literary foray is that while it includes some superficially innovative gimmicks, it simply offers a glossy iteration of social and psychological research findings that have been around for quite some time. And while we have tremendous respect for the complex psychological principles behind it all, we’d have to go with the grittier, down-and-dirty reads on the subject.

And on that note, here’s a Brain Pickings rarity: a shameless endorsement and recommendation for those who care to dig deeper. Yep, we’re shamelessly endorsing and recommending Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence (and sequel Social Intelligence), an incredibly smart (yet very credible) foray into sociology, neuroscience, psychology and behavioral science that sheds light on why we ever care about anything. Bonus: Goleman is not an ad agency CEO and the book is not intended to be a new business hook.

ONLY IN PHILLY

Ever feel like you’re constantly climbing the (social, corporate, whatever) ladder to no avail? Philly, always the literalist, has taken that metaphorical concept to a verbatim level. Spotted on the concourse of 30th Street Station by a certain young lad is this architectural head-scratcher.

Of course, if we had a Gillette Mach 3 Turbo, that wall would be a piece of cake.

Gadgetry, Widgetry and You-name-itgetry

A shirtless Tiger Woods, a very ethical octopus, how the fabric of culture makes a great quilt, why you may be a municipal light fixture, and what possessed 8,058,860 people to hurl sheep at each other.

THE TENTACLES OF INNOVATION

Gone are the days of boxy, bland gadgets. These days, if peripherals don’t come built into your computer, they’d better come in great design that makes you wanna showcase them as much as use them. But how about a mashup of this new thinking about gadget design and the new green ideology?

U.K. sustainable development tech company United Pepper, in a partnership with digital technology group EuroTech, has just released two adorable oddballs: Lili (an octopus webcam) and Oscar (a starfish hub) who are just as green as they are functional and cute: they boast fully recyclable bodies made from cotton, sand, Kapok (a tree fiber) and paperboard, 100% recycled packaging, recyclable PET, and 70% of parts produced in a free trade environment. (C’mon now, even Mother Theresa couldn’t know what sweatshop the fabric for her glorious attire was weaved in.)

Lili’s top-notch 1.3 megapixel webcam and microphone go for £29.99 (or $59.95, but we’ll have to hold off until the U.S. release.) Oscar’s asking £19.99 for his four 2.0 USB hubs (or $7.99 per tentacle). Both come in red, green and blue.

We’d be temped to whine about the little quirksters not being Mac-compatible. But then, of course, we remember this. And proceed to feel really, really, really cool. And superior. Yep, definitely superior.

HANDS OF THE TIMES

We’ve started seeing it everywhere. From products to services to communication to culture. The first Mini Cooper racing stripes designs. The home-delivered diet systems. The user-generated ads. Etsy.com. Forget pre-canned and factory-sealed, it’s the age of personalization and customization.

All over America, millions of hands are busy making, creating, crafting things. Things driven by visions, things that have something to say. And one artist-filmmaker spent most of 2006 traveling 19,000 miles to document the phenomenon. Fifteen cities, 50 indie artist interviews and 80 hours of video later, Faythe Levine was ready to start splicing together Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY Art, Craft & Design, the first documentary to really delve into what drives some of the most creative minds in the nation. The film, a deep-dive into DIY, art, craft and design, is still in production, but the trailer gives you a pretty good idea of the scope:

True to the culture it explores, the project is a low-key production almost entirely by the artist’s Etsy shop. And although its budget may be tiny, its scope and mission aren’t. It pushes us to step outside our daily microcosms, outside our own creative heads, and see how other minds make sense of the world, from the grand creative visions down to the nitty-gritty of paying the electric bill.

Now that’s not something you often get to do on the couch questioning yet again why you even bother with primetime TV.

UNTRIVIA

If you’re like us, Facebook‘s 23-year-old CEO Mark Zuckerberg is your ultimate hate-what- he-does-to-my-ego-but-worship-him-anyway hero. Okay, maybe not that far. But, at the very least, unless you’re still not over big hair and leotards, you have the sense to acknowledge that when he opened up Facebook’s platform to developers a few months ago, he became the 2.0 mover-and-shaker of the year. Perhaps even of the decade. (And that only months after making the previously college-exclusive net available to anyone, .edu email or not. At that point, the social phenomenon that started out as a small online hub for a few Ivy League universities had raked up 24 million users, a toll growing by 150,000 a day.)

As a result, over 4,200 application widgets have popped up on Facebook, many of which ended up embedded in millions of profiles. Yep, profiles heaping with as much or as little demographic and psychographic information users choose to provide. But, unlike MySpace, the majority of Facebook users are not at all shy about sharing the info. (Because, after all, you only facebook-friend people you know or think you know, there’s virtually no spam, the interface is much cleaner and reassuring, and it still carries that insiders-only vibe from the pre-everyone-on-the-boat days). So you can get anything from a person’s age and location, to relationship status, to favorite music, TV shows and books, to intersts, to latest hangouts and even hookups.

Point is, all this embeddable apps and widgets are also heaping with advertising opportunities to people who actually welcome them. And thanks to a Bay-area start-up Adonomics (previously Appaholic), there’s now a very sophisticated app performance ranking and tracking system based on installs and active users. Think of it as Digg (who, by the way, just added a ton of super-cool features) for Facebook. Here are the must-know-about top 10:

1. Top Friends: 2,820,950 daily active users, 15,671,900 total installs

Lets you add a box of 32 of your best friends to your profile in a world where friend count is by the hundreds. Made by Slide Inc.

2. Video: 943,493 daily users, 9,434,930 total installs

Lets you publish personal video and tag your Facebook friends. You can even use your webcam to record and your cell to tag. This one’s a Facebook original.

3. My Questions: 516,474 daily users, 8,607,900 installs

Instantly poll your friends on whatever you’re pondering at the moment. Made by Jeremiah Robinson of said Slide, Inc.

4. Super Wall: 806,572 daily users, 8,065,720 installs

Upgrades your standard wall (the space in your profile where friends use to give you a publicly heard shout) to include photos, videos and more. Crafted by Stanford grad student Jia Shen. (Who, by the way, launched his first app, a photo slideshow, on MySpace, it caught on like wildfirewall, but because MySpace offered no monetization for developers, it ended up crashing Shen’s servers and costing him a fortune.)

5. iLike: 805,931 daily active users, 8,059,310 total installs

Lets you add music to your profile, check out where your favorite bands are playing next, see which of your friends are going, and get free mp3′s based on your music likes. Product of iLike, Inc.

6. SuperPoke!: 886,475 daily users, 8,058,860 installs

Makes the super-popular Facebook poke function (sorry, out-of-loopers, you’ll need this to get it) into a contact fiesta: pinch, tickle, hug, pin, throw sheep. Crafted by Stanford alumni Nikil Gandhy, Jonathan Hsu and Will Liu.

7. Likeness: 440,929 daily users, 7,348,820 installs

Another Jia Shen creation that lets you see which friends and celebs you resemble.

8. X Me: 651,650 daily users, 7,240,560 installs

It’s not uncommon for many apps to offer similar functions and compete with each other. So app-master Jia Shen (again) decided to take on the SuperPoke! people above with this action-based poke upgrade.

9. Movies: 780,949 daily active users, 7,099,540 installs

Dish on movies via ratings and reviews, check out showtimes, view trailers, and see how your friends compare in cinematic taste. Brought to the film-hungry by Flixter.

10. FunWall: 839,575 daily users, 6,996,460 installs

Another competitor to a different top-10 app. Adds vids, photos, etc. to your wall — you know the drill. Crafted by Daniel C. Silverstein and Bobby Joe (poor kid) of — you guessed it — Slide, Inc.

Other rapid rank-climbers: Grey’s Anatomy Quotes, My Chatroom, Fashion IV, My Ruckus Music, and Halo 3 Service Record. Our personal favorite: the last.fm music widget, which turns your favorite music into a playlist of full-length tracks and makes a cool collage of album covers based on it, all embeddable in your profile.

So the virtual social world is eagerly embracing this new generation of widgets. And these are some big numbers to easily dismiss. Even more amazingly, a good portion of the apps are branded, including top-tier ones (hello, Flixter, Ruckus and XBox 360), which is just about the ultimate form of those over-pounded buzzwords “engagement” and “permission marketing.”

And a number of companies are already cashing in: besides good ol’ Google Analytics, upcoming niche ad network Lookery is zeroing in on Facebook and will offer clients extremely sophisticated profiles of their user base. Talk about ultimate targeting. And Gigya offers tools to help developers better distribute widgets, then track their performance in real time. That’s as hand-on-the-pulse-of-the-young-and-savvy as it gets.

And it doesn’t hurt that Facebook’s said user base grew a sweat-inducing 270% last year (and congratulations to one contributing Mr. Haag who can finally sit with the cool kids at the school cafeteria), leaving 72-percent-growth rival MySpace in the social networking dust. Mark Z, wanna go behind the school gym and make out?

VIRAL EMMIES

And speaking of trivia and 2.0 phenomena, 1,358,348 viewers can’t be wrong: animated vid “Internet People” is the best way to play Trivial Pursuit with yourself and test your viral pop culture knowledge.

So how many of the referenced vids do you recognize? (Hint: if it’s less than 10, you’re either too old or a lamp post.)

RIGHT UP OUR ALLEY

Keywords shmeewords. We don’t talk using operators and booleans, so why should we search that way?

We’ve seen hand-curated search and “artificial artificial intelligence.” And now one progressive start-up brings us another revolutionary concept: “natural language search.” Silicon Valley company Powerset Inc. is opening up its beta version on Monday, allowing the public to test out their natural language processing technology. The product of three decades worth of research at the iconic Xerox Corp PARC research center, this new kind of search will allow users to search the web using natural language.

In the great words of Powerset CEO Barney Pell, “Search today is like talking to a 2-year-old.” So he put his doctoral degree in artificial intelligence to use and decided to put intelligent conversation (Conversationality, anyone?) back into the quest for relevant information.

Once the Beta site launches, you’ll be able to check out two kinds of demonstration on how the search works. In one, “Cases,” you’ll get to see how conversational questions like “Does Tiger Woods shave that manly chest that lies beneath his Nike polo shirt when he bursts through walls?” produce better results than the standard keyword subject/verb fare. The other, “Powermouse,” shows the back-end of the search process, letting you see how the algorithms break down your search into grammatical components, revealing the underlying data links used to produce the results.

Sure, we’re completely conditioned to use traditional caveman search language. So it may take some time until conversation claims the online info world back. But we think this stuff is pretty neat and definitely something to keep an eye on. If only to see the day count until Google A) snaps it up or B) outsmarts, outintegrates and outmonetizes it with a way cooler version.

Get the full scoop from Reuters.

ONLY IN PHILLY

From the depths of the West Philly ghetto to your desktop. This elaborate grafittied garage door speaks volumes about what moves the urban culture needle. Dark? Maybe. Fucking amazing? Hell yeah.

And we love that homie Homer S. shares our own sentiments about what appears to be Ozzy Ozbourne in profile.