A few days ago I was talking to a friend about the potential of Pinterest. I was in a “Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 mood”, going from Allegro to Maestoso, glorifying the role of inspiration in this (often visionless) world, singing the praises of visual content and colours and mood boards like a young and inspired Pavarotti, thrilled by the future of “social”. My friend pulled a bored/ not impressed/ thinking-about-the-laundry kind of face, then said ‘Don’t know what you&... [More]

‘A stiff apology is a second insult... The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.’ Gilbert K. Chesterton ‘No apologies, nah suckers I’m not sorry You can all sue me, y’all could be the case of me No apologies, y’all feelin’ the force of me No remorse for me, like there was no recourse for me.’ Eminem, “No Apologies” Chesterton and Eminem, finally together; a strange couple indeed, a ... [More]

Rainstar Boutique’s website is now live. A one page scrollable animated site - created using CSS3, HTML5, and jQuery - for a hot and dynamic commercial, corporate and fashion film production company based in Notting Hill. Here is the showreel. Rainstar Boutique Showreel from Rainstar Boutique on Vimeo. London Web Agency Appnova – keep following us on Twitter @appnova and “like” us on Facebook for useful news and tasteful digressions about geeky stuff.

‘The Devil wears Prada, but the people wear plimsolls’, reads a sign outside Blackman’s, an old footwear store on Cheshire Street, East London. How can luxury brands meet the plimsolls aficionados? They go social, relax a bit and try to engage, embracing the philosophy of “Less is More”. At the beginning, the company gave the impression that they were not interested in the social arena, while everybody else was there. Then, suddenly, this week they declared guerre nucleaire. And, judging from the start, it... [More]

Do you remember Baywatch? Gorgeous ladies running in slow motion, humble heroes with abs of steel and bulletproof hairdos, yes, that’s the one. It was entertaining, even funny at times, and it featured everybody’s idol, David Hasselhoff. But it was faker that fake. Too much of everything. So we went back to a simpler life, with real problems and real kids (supposedly), and came up with Dawson’s Creek. Still fake, but closer to reality. Every ten years, more or less, we need to go back to the tabula rasa, to start everyth... [More]

In Italy, if you expect too much they say you want ‘a full cask and a drunk wife’. You cannot have it both ways, according to popular wisdom. That is not true in the case of crowdsourcing, though. Recently, everybody has been talking about Yayoi Kusama’s installation at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, based on a elementary, genius intuition: build a domestic environment inside the gallery, then let the kids use it as a canvas, putting thousands of stickers everywhere – sofa, table, chairs, piano and walls. T... [More]

Social media is often a tricky matter for brands, especially when it comes to companies producing and/or promoting alcoholic beverages; rules and guidelines are getting way stricter, as we read just recently on Marketing Magazine, September 2011: ’The European Forum for Responsible Drinking has formed a partnership with the Distilled Spirits Council of the US to devise a set of self-regulatory guidelines for advertising on social-media sites. The guidelines include restricting Facebook users aged under 18 from accessing official alcohol b... [More]

Are you ready for the big celebration? Or will you stay in and eat pizza, wearing bear-shaped slippers? If you are planning to go out and lose the plot, you might find these apps very interesting. iToastU ‘Display a selection of 100 traditional, contemporary, fun and inspirational toasts whether you are toasting with beer, wine or champagne.’ Never quote German philosophers if you want to impress a lady, by the way. iYule Log ‘A Yule log is a large wooden log which is burned all over the world; whether... [More]

Kim Jong Il, the Dear Leader, is dead. Twitter, as usual, broke the news. Then, the rest of the web was flooded with memes, news, jokes, serious analysis of the situation and facetious points of view. Videos of a nation mourning in a way that reminded of over-the-top, oversaturated, over exaggerated Godzilla movies (the Dear Leader’s favourite flicks) went viral, as well as the ultimate masterpiece of the Tumblrsphere - Kim Jong Il Looking at Things, a collection of pictures of the Dear Leader, well, looking at things. The Internet a... [More]

“Fashion breaks my heart.” (Kanye West) “A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.” (George Bernard Shaw)
 The latest trend in Chinese fashion? Pretend you can afford expensive goods, by carrying around fake paper shopping bags featuring luxury brands logos. Just two days ago, China Daily reported: ‘A random search using the keyword combination of "paper bag" with any famous brand name will find dozens - sometimes more than 100 - of results on Taobao.com, the most widely used shopping we... [More]

The obvious – Give your website a look and feel the will never forget (at least in the next six months, when everything will change again). Users are now more aware of what’s hot and what’s not when it comes to web design. Perhaps, thanks to Apple, our conception of electronic/online/nerdy stuff aesthetics has changed forever, from a “must be functional, the rest is useless grooming” approach to the epiphany that appealing design, user-friendly websites, and smart branding can make a company’s fortune. ... [More]

iHobo. An app with a serious purpose, it is a sort of Tamagotchi that helps raise awareness about the homeless. An intelligent move from Depaul UK, the largest homeless charity in the UK.   Talking Fat Cat. Another amazing how-could-I-live-my-life-without-this? app about cats. Talking Fat Cat is, well, a fat cat that talks.  “Fun for EVERYONE! Kids, adults, friends, co-workers, and more. Everyone loves Talking Fat Cat!” Your boss is going to love it big time.   Porn... [More]

A friend told me, the other day: “now that I’ve got an iPhone 4s, I don’t need no girlfriend”; the Apple device solves many problems, he said, whilst a girlfriend creates many problems. Although I don’t agree with such a strong statement – partially inspired by the sixth pint of stout – I have to admit you can almost do anything with an iPhone, even find a way to speak to your cat, and other people/entities/deities.   Human-to-Cat Translator. Another cat-related classy app. We all k... [More]

I woke up this morning, with the usual tea + milk + genius idea: we should create an iPhone app for the end of the world, I thought, and we should call it APPocalypse. Then, as usual, I found out that it has been already done. But I kept looking for unusual apps, and found some interesting stuff. 2012 Apocalypse. Your device is going to tell you when it will be over. As you see, you can check predictions, videos and so on. When it comes to News, well, that’s an easy one: we are going to die.  Cat-O-Matic... [More]

To say ‘content is king’ is like saying ‘Martin Scorsese is a good director’ or ‘John Lennon was a singer with a nice voice’: it is just brutally reductive. The truth is content is EMPEROR, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Czar of the web and Summus Arbiter of the Internet. Let’s see why. Facebook changes its look more often than David Beckham – we know that, and we are almost getting used to it. But the last wave of changes is rather interesting: very soon we will be able to switch to Time... [More]

Shoreditch, East London, party at Keira’s post-post-no wave flat. I recently had a chat with a young lady belonging to the “OMGeneration”: ‘What do you do?’ ‘I’m a blogger’, she said, ‘it’s like claiming you’re a professional footballer’ I said ‘just because you kick a ball around on a Sunday, in a grassless traffic island in Mile End, with a couple of friends suffering from a monumental hangover’. She left. I knew there are “fashion bloggers&rdq... [More]

The printed magazine and TV ads still work as the immaculate wall of the Prado, the images evoking the allure of a world painted by Cy Twombly, in which kids never scream and your life is like a Boboli garden where you walk in slow motion, hand in hand with Kate Moss. When a brand tries to tell you the same story online, it does not work that well; in fact, it looks rather bad. Search ads and display ads work, but they sound like the coughing exhaust of a Tata Nano, instead of the melody gently sung by a Maserati Merak. Things are about to cha... [More]

A few days ago, on the bus to Goose Green, I overheard this sentence: 'What’s the matter with all them tablets? What’s the point in something that looks like a phone on steroids, but can’t be used as a phone and doesn’t fit in your pocket?' This is more or less the general feeling about tablets, at least on the 37 towards Peckham. But numbers tell a different story: tablet owners are generally male, 18-34 year-olds, with a good income (around $50k per annum). They are increasingly using the devices fo... [More]

Lifestyle is a word that can be found everywhere, nowadays; the sound alone it is believed to make any soup sound tasty. Most of the times, though, it is abused: ‘No, that is not a kettle, it is a crucial piece of the Byzantine mosaic we call “lifestyle”’, and so on and so forth. Since Alfred Adler came up with the word “lifestyle”, back in 1929, things have changed; the term, initially used to describe a set of behaviours we embrace every day, is now much broader and complicated. In simple words, in ... [More]

eBay India’s manager Muralikrishnan B. recently told the BBC: ‘The huge proliferation of retail malls has increased awareness of the latest brands and products…As a result, the Indian e-commerce market is growing rapidly; in fact it's exploding.’ 
He foresees that the nation will become one of the top ten online retail markets in the world, by 2015.         Amazon is considering entering India, as well, and this “Clash of the Titans”, according to Muralikrishnan, w... [More]