(* Source: World Sport Daily News *)



Thursday May 26th marked the launch of the Bodega x Nike Sportswear “Night Cats” event at Bodega in Boston. Over 350 people showed up for the launch event DJ’d by J.Rocc with an art installation weaving in the Footscape Collab Bodega shoe by SF Collective (Boston based group of artists). 

Nike Sportswear x Bodega's 'Black Cat, Good Luck — Bad Luck' trilogy of Footscapes brings a fresh look, a sense of superstition and continued evolution to a sneaker that remains a cult classic. Boston's Bodega remains one of the world's premier sneaker boutiques with a premium retail experience housed in a secret entrance within a fully functioning bodega. That sense of playfulness and innovation is the perfect match for the Footscape.

The trademark asymmetric lacing to minimize pressure and a foot friendly last was debuted on the original Nike Air Footscape in 1995 as an eccentric experiment in athleticis that swiftly amassed an audience in Asia, drawn to the fit and unique style of the shoe, making it a favorite with runners, collectors, connoisseurs and casual fans alike. Beyond running, the Footscapeʼs groundbreaking shape even entered the realms of ACG and Cross Training.

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(* Source: EuKicks *)



Nike and Jun Takahashi, founder and head designer of Japan’s coveted clothing label Undercover, will release the first Nike x Undercover Gyakusou performance running collection at selected retailers globally.

The design partnership fuses cutting edge Nike running innovations and design with the functionality of Takahashi’s Undercover—whose dedication to a less-but-better design philosophy mirrors Nike founder Bill Bowerman’s passion for the athletic benefits of minimalism. It amplifies levels of technical precision and intuitive function, delivering a unique and modern perspective on running by runners.

Gyakusou takes its name from a small but highly dedicated group of Tokyo-based runners—including Takahashi. The name Gyakusou comes from ‘gyaku’ meaning wrong way or reverse and ‘sou’ meaning ‘run or running’—a reference to the group running counter-clockwise while the rest of Tokyo’s runners run clockwise in the city’s parks.

The Gyakusou collection translates Nike’s performance design language by expanding on core appeal with products that deliver innovative, lightweight, waterproof, breathable fabrics and moisture management. This offered Takahashi new challenges and opportunities. “With Undercover we’ve utilized high-tech fabrics before, but through our design partnership with Nike, we were able to create a functional collection that uses cutting edge sporting innovations,” says Takahashi.

For the inaugural Fall/Holiday 10 collection, Nike and Takahashi also focused on colors. Wanting to provide an alternative to traditional running neons and brights, the result sees subtle colors that Takahashi describes “reflect a harmony with nature” fused with reflective safety details and a recurring red trim inspired by the artery vein — part of performance’s physical foundations.

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(* Source: PopSop *)



The jeanswear brand is starting to expand some of its initiatives launched previously on the U.S. market on an international scale now. Levi’s, which opened the doors of its first print workshop—the first in the series of such venues—in San Francisco a year ago as part of ‘Ready to Work’ campaign, is inviting creative talents to another themed workshop, now in Berlin.

In the past year, the brand has opened three temporary studios—print (San Francisco),photo (NY) and film (LA)—to celebrate the art of craftsmanship, engage community into a creative process and equip emerging talents with tools they need to create artwork. The Levi’s Print Workshop, which is open July 7–August 18 in Berlin’s central core, Mitte, in the city’s former mint ‘Alte Münze’ (Old Coin), “will provide free screen printing equipment and supplies, offer a range of daily hands-on activities, as well as host a range of exhibitions and instructional workshops dedicated to the craft of screen printmaking.”

Local public is offered an opportunity to create hand-printed T-shirts, postcards and digital art pieces with the help of the industry experts. To appeal to the target audience, young and creative people, who prefer to do something to improve the world around them (either by taking direct action or by making something visually beautiful that can impact on others emotionally), has worked with young Portuguese street artist Alexandre Farto, aka ‘Vhils,’ who created a series of street murals portraying today’s Berlin-based icons of pioneering spirit, who embody the ‘Go Forth’ philosophy—Fadi Saad, Joe Hatchiban, Ralf Schmerbergand design collective Klub7 to name but a few. These personalities will exhibit their own print interpretations at the venue as well, to prove that the talent means action, and they are constantly contributing to their city with their creative works.

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(* Source: Laura Feinstein *)



While it would be nice if you could bring your best-friend along every time you needed a second fashion opinion, the truth is that sometimes those whose opinions you value most aren’t always at your disposal. While photo-capable phones like the Droid or iPhone have made sharing digital dressing room pictures a breeze, what if your trusty style guru is indisposed?

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(* Source: Dave Pinter *) 

Anyone remotely interested in photography either in New York City or passing through over the next three months will want to check out the space. The gallery will feature a rotating exhibition of photographs, some shot right from the on-site studio. If you can’t make it, many of the special workshops and discussions will be broadcast online.

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Project Imagin8ion, a photography contest promoted by Canon, invites people to submit their imaginative photos for the chance to inspire a Hollywood short film by Oscar-winning director Ron Howard.

A one-minute TV commercial to promote the contest has been created. “Parade” features a city street full of visual effects as an astronaut, a little girl riding a huge diamond dog, a mermaid, firefighters, and a winged knight fighting a giant snake, all pass by Ron Howard’s apartment. He is seemingly unaware, as he gazes at a selection of photographs in search of inspiration.

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(* Source: Paloma Vazquez *) 

One aspect we couldn’t help but notice is the predominance of ‘Sartorialist‘ influenced street style photography on fashion and retail properties lately, including the Gap 1969 Stream, which we recently discussed. The shots are beautiful and celebrate the customer as the stylist – vs. the styles more traditionally curated and merchandised by retailers on professional models. We can’t help but wonder if the democratization of fashion also involves the ‘Sartorialization’ of fashion retail photography?

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(* Source: Giles Fitzgerald *)

Facebook announced a new addition to its photo tagging service yesterday (11th May), enabling users of the ubiquitous social network to tag Pages in photos. Facebook suggests that the addition of Pages tagging will help its users “to share richer stories with friends about the things they interact with in the real-world, such as businesses, brands, celebrities, and musicians”.

In practice this means Facebook’s 600 million users can now tag everything from the soft drink can in their hand to the jeans they are wearing, effectively becoming micro social brand ambassadors in the process.

The product placement opportunities are obvious, and we can no doubt expect to se a flurry of celebrities casually promoting brands in their photos. However, the really interesting part comes when user photos are issued publicly on the service, enabling them to land directly on the brand’s Facebook page.

Naturally this new opportunity can swing both ways, with many brands set to benefit from casual association and endorsement from the general public, while others may not want to be inundated with photos of consumers pictured with their product who do not fit their target audience.

The social media war rooms of major brands just got an extra employee – the photo analyser – forever hovering with their figure on ‘delete this update’.

As for the general public we await with baited breath – will, with mild interest at least – for the person who turns their next night out into the equivalent of Lady Gaga’s Telephone video, with an onslaught of obvious product references.

Juts how many brands can you fit into one picture? I think we’re about to find out…

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(* Source: Jennifer Van Grove *)

Name: Nachofoto

Quick Pitch: Nachofoto is a real-time image search engine with a focus on trending topics and rising search terms.

Genius Idea: Nachofoto is designed to return the most relevant and recent images for rising search terms, as determined by Google Insights for Search, Google Trends, AOL Hot Searches and Yahoo Buzz.

The site functions just like the search engines you’re already familiar with, but is much more convenient for searches related to widely discussed topics. So a search for “Miss USA” will return images of the newly crowned winner, Rima Fakih, instead of a barrage of older photos that aren’t relevant to yesterday’s pageant.

What makes Nachofoto remarkable is the freshness of its results, which can be seen in the company’s iPad case study. In this example, results for the “iPad” query were impressively timely on launch day, so results before 9:00 A.M showed images of eager Apple customers waiting in line, while searches after 9:00 A.M. highlighted happy iPad owners. As the day progressed, the “iPad” Nachofoto query zeroed in on unboxing photos.

In practice, Nachofoto really delivers when it comes to searches involving dynamic keywords and we recommend it for your current events image searches. Try it out for yourself and share your thoughts in the comments.

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(* Source: Mark Hefflinger *)

The founders of gadget news blogs Gizmodo and Engadget have teamed to launch GDGT, a gadget-focused online social network.

The site was launched on Wednesday by Pete Rojas, the founder of Gizmodo and co-founder of Engadget, and Ryan Block, the editor of Engadget.

The site will not produce original news content or reviews, as do Gizmodo and Engadget, but instead aggregate news and reviews, and allow users to post their own gadget reviews.

Users can also create profiles and list their stable of gadgets, as well as wish lists.

Block told The New York Times that the gadget blogs focus on only 5% of a device's lifecycyle, the "lust phase," while GDGT will address "the 95 percent of the time you own the product there is nowhere to go. We are building the place where you can live with your gadgets online in perpetuity." 

See site here

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(* Source: Roi Carthy *)

If there is one feature on Facebook which delivers “social utility” magic even to the most average of users, it’s Photos. In fact the feature is so popular that by Facebook’s own account 1 billion photos are uploaded every month—a staggering number that makes it the largest photo site on the Web. However, as with all good things, there are also drawbacks, and in this case discovery is high on the list. While Facebook makes it super easy to discover photos in which you were tagged, there is no chance that every one of those billion photos are tagged each month. And that leaves a big opportunity.

Let me put it another way: How many photos of you are there on Facebook that you’re completely unaware of? Israeli-based Face.com will help you find them with ‘Photo Finder,’ a Facebook app that uses facial recognition to help members locate untagged photos of themselves and their friends. We have 200 special access invites available to TechCrunch readers who will be granted first access to the app, as well as preference on the waiting list. Get your invite here.

Once installed, the app will begin scanning you and your friends’ photo albums, a process that requires a bit of time to complete, but the welcome screen will immediately display photos that were ‘Auto Tagged’. Users can either accept, decline or identify the correct individual themselves. The only users that have veto power to alter or decline a tag are the person who uploaded the photo and the person tagged.

Facial recognition technology is taking off. Competing technology can be found in both Apple’s iPhoto and Google’s Picasa, but those are limited to searching only your personal collection of photos (although iPhoto lets you upload them with the tags to Facebook). With Photo Finder, you are not limited to your own photo collection. Users can search manually for photos of friends or browse for recently tagged ones. Users can also track specific users by flagging them for the “Watch List”. Photo Finder will prompt hits via Facebook’s ‘Notification’ window.

The facial recognition technology was developed from scratch by the Face.com team over a year and half. It was designed from the ground up as a low-cost platform to meet two specific requirements: The first is recognition of “Faces in the Wild”. This applies to everyday photos that suffer from such issues as low resolution or bad lighting, or where faces are obscured with sunglasses, for example. The second requirement is to have the technology be scalable. In this respect Face.com claims to be able to perform facial recognition on all one billion photos currently uploaded into Facebook every single month using only a few machines.

Photo Finder scans the photos of users and all their friends, along with “other albums in your wider network where there’s a high likelihood of your (or friends’) appearances.” To understand the sheer volume of backend work required, consider the following statistics: The first 150 users in Face.com’s system required 20 million photos to be scanned, resulting in 30,000 identified faces. My personal installation of the app required it to scan 79,449 photos which resulted in 11,933 tags of myself and my friends. Photo Finder will then go back and re-scan the albums after its initial scan to identify newly added photos.

The social tagging feature within Facebook Photos gives Face.com a major boost because it can use those tags to train its system. It is important to note that Photo Finder does not add or alter Facebook’s own photo tags. Tagging that occurs through the app is stored in metadata accessible through the Photo Finder app alone. Also noteworthy is the fact that from a privacy perspective Photo Finder piggy-backs on the users’ Facebook settings and does not alter them in any way. Also, none of the photos are stored on Face.com’s servers. These only perform the heavy lifting required for the facial recognition and the storing of tags added through the app.

Even though this is an Alpha version of the app and there are occasional bugs, it works remarkably well. I was quite surprised that it was able to correctly identify individuals in side shots, backgrounds, or in extremely poorly lit photos. It all depends on the amount of photos available, but as a rule of thumb the Face.com team aims for 90% accuracy. It seems that they have some real technology on their hands as evidenced by their scoring first place in the “Labeled Faces in the Wild” experiment conducted by the University of Massachusetts’ Computer Vision Laboratory (Face.com are identified as ‘Hybrid descriptor-based’ in the linked paper).

It’s clear that Photo Finder was designed for mainstream viral appeal and I must admit that I found the app to be VERY addictive, spending at least ten minutes tagging people every time I played with the app over the course of the past two weeks. I have a hunch that once made publicly available the app is going to be incredibly popular on Facebook.

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(* Source: Erick Schonfeld *)

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(* Source: Jason Kincaid *)

Valentine’s Day is rapidly approaching, and while you’ve still got plenty of time to stock up on chocolates and other goodies, come February 14th there’s a good chance you’ll have forgotten about the big day entirely. That is, until your dearly beloved springs an incredibly thoughtful gift on you and you’re left wondering if you can somehow regift the Tony Bennett CD sitting in your closet without getting caught.

Fortunately, Animoto has you covered. The site has put together a new Valentine’s Day card that allows you to submit a handful of photos of you and your loved one to automatically a generate a great looking video-slideshow set to the music of an appropriately sappy love song. It only takes a few minutes to put together, but to anyone who hasn’t been exposed to Animoto before it’s pretty impressive - at least, it’ll buy you enough time to run down to the store and grab something a bit more tangible.

In conjunction with the launch, Animoto has also announced that users will now be able to include stock imagery in all of their slideshows (not just the Valentine’s ones) through a partnership with iStockphoto, which could come in handy if you don’t have pictures of roses and hearts lying around.

Check out a sample video here

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Jason says... 

Animoto, the impressive startup that automatically generates high quality music videos from a set of photos, has unveiled a new feature for the holiday season that will allow users to append any of their videos with a holiday intro/outro movie and a snow-themed backdrop, making for a perfect holiday eGreeting. To activate the special holiday look, just click on the ‘Santa’ button beneath any video. Of course, you’ll have to come up with photos suitable for the holiday season yourself - Animoto will just make them look festive.

We’re big fans of Animoto - the site may not offer an expansive list of products or features, but it does a great job of automatically spicing up photo albums, with little effort needed on the users’ part. For other holiday eGreeting options, check out MyPunchbowl’s eCards, which we covered last week.

To see a sample Animoto holiday video, click on the photo below.

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(* Source: Palin Ningthoujam *)

Palin says...

Sometimes viewing pictures in rows and columns can be dull. Luckily, there are a number of services dedicated to making the photo search and viewing experience more interesting. Here are 8 resources that provide a new approach to searching and looking at pictures online.

Which are your favorites? Let us know in the comments.

PicLens

PicLens is a neat Firefox addon that lets you search through thousands of images and videos on a stunning 3D wall or on full screen mode from sites like YouTube YouTube , Google, Yahoo, Picassa, Facebook, Photobucket Photobucket , Flickr Flickr , DeviantART, and more.

Once you launch the PicLens application on your browser, you can search for images and videos by keywords and by selecting the site you want to search. You can also simple click the ‘Discover’ button to let PicLens bring you the latest images, news, and videos from around the Web. You can zoom into pictures by clicking on an image or by using the scroll button of your mouse. There is also a new beta version of PicLens, rechristened Cooliris Beta, that lets you share pictures and videos from its 3D wall to your friends through email. For Wordpress bloggers, there is a plugin for creating picture and video slide shows on a blog.

Imagery

Imagery is an image search engine that displays search results in a whole new way. Whenever you search for something using a particular keyword, you will see the resulting thumbnail images in an online Web album gallery style and text free. Mouse over each picture and you get the option of going to the source page of that particular image or of opening the image in a new window. If you simply click on an image, it will open below the thumbnail gallery (see screenshot above).

You can set the number of image results Imagery will show you per page, or define the type of files like small, medium, large, black & white, grayscale, color, or on file extensions such as jpg, png, etc.

Zleek

Zleek allows you to create photo albums called Zleek Books, in amazing layouts and share them with your friends and family for them to comment on your pictures. What makes Zleek special and different from other online photo albums is that it allows you to go beyond the rows and columns positioning of your pictures and create collages in a manner that you choose. You can resize and rotate your pictures on the Zleek Book page, choose from multiple backgrounds, and set the album sharing permissions settings.

Interestingness

Interestingness, as the name suggests, creates stunning collages of up to 500 pictures from Flickr that you can feast your eyes on every day. Just keep the site as your homepage and rest assured you’ll be greeted with pleasant images every time you open your browser.

WebMynd

WebMynd is a Firefox addon that tracks the sites you visit and displays them in an attractive visual playback, whenever you want, online or off. WebMynd stores the screenshots of websites you visit on your computer hard drive and the text is sent and stored in its server. You can choose which websites WebMynd stores on your computer and which ones to ignore.

WebMynd provides a reel view in which you can see the screenshots of your visited sites one by one or the grid view wherein you can see the thumbnails of the various sites you visited. WebMynd also integrates into the Google search results page whenever you run a search and displays its results alongside the Google search results on the same page.

Compfight

Compfight is a Flickr search tool that displays images from Flickr without any frills. So if you are just looking for pictures without descriptions, Flickr user names, comments, and other details, you might just want to use this tool. You can search by tags or ‘all text’. The tool also has some features like filtering by Creative Commons or commercial use pictures, safe search, and displaying picture dimensions on mouse hover.

Blackr

Blackr is a neat bookmarklet that you can use to view a Flickr picture on a black or white background, without any of the text, comments, and other details that come with it on the Flickr site. You can choose to have a white or black border on the picture as well.

When you are viewing a picture on Flickr, just click the Blackr button on your browser bookmarks toolbar and viola, you will see just the picture minus everything else. If you want a search engine that displays pictures on a black background, try Flickriver.

Photoree

Photoree is to pictures what StumbleUpon is to websites. You can set your preferences about what type of pictures you want Photoree to show you. You can also rate the pictures and those that have been up-rated by you will automatically get included in your personal gallery.

More here:-

• Zoomr Adds Social Stream for Stalking Photo Friends
• Photobucket and Picasa on your TV with TiVo
• MeeVee Launches Free TV Episodes Hub
• Mostrips is a Mobile Photo Gallery Site
• PXN8 - Online Image Editing
• Picnik Leaves Beta, Now Officially Open
• Nielsen Launches Improved Video Tracking Tools

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(* Source: Erick Schonfeld *)

Erick says..

Founded by Tekin Tatar and Kemal Ozisikcilar, BeFunky offers two services: The Cartoonizer and Uvatar. The Cartoonizer lets you upload photos and give them a cartoon effect. Uvatar lets you create a more realistic avatar based on a photo. The startup is releasing a newly designed Website today, and upgrading its Uvatar service to make it more automated.

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(* Source: Michael Arrington *)

On the left is a picture of plain old Angelina Jolie. But on the right…well we’ve got Angelina after she’s been through the Taaz virtual makeover service.

The service, which launches today, uses some of the same tricks as many of the Flash-based photo editing tools we’ve covered in the past. Taaz has added proprietary facial recognition software so that it can, for example, figure out where your lips are when you want to put on lipstick. Taaz also differs from normal photo editing tools in that it is specifically set up to help users (mostly women) see how they might look with different hair, eyes, makeup, etc. Finished makeovers can then be shared with other users, rated, commented, etc.

The tools are dead simple to use (thanks, Adobe) and I had a lot of fun testing the service. See the image below for me with cool hair and a lot of red stuff on my cheeks. They’ve also included a number of original articles on beauty and style, and helpful hints like this one: “Contrary to popular belief, matching your eye shadow to your eye color enhances your eyes, making them pop.” Good to know.

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