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I ran into Andrew, Bradon and Eric last night at the Rider’s Cup Launch Party and this blog came up. They didn’t say they liked it, but they did say they had read it. Good enough.

1. Let the Right One In - I saw this as part of the Toronto After Dark Film Festival  Opening Gala (thanks for the hook-up, Ben). This is a Swedish vampire film that is likely the best vampire movie I have ever seen. Although I would say it isn’t really part of the genre, it is less horror and more fantasy. There are so many points where the film could have gone wrong and fell into some familiar places, but it didn’t, making it one of the most original films I have seen this year.

   Here is the trailer, but it does not do it justice.

2. ColaLife
   “ColaLife is a campaign to leverage the distribution muscle of a multi-national corporate institution to save children’s lives in developing countries.”     

   It is an amazing cause with some very clever ideas behind it. If you would like to get involved or show support, a good place to start is their Facebook Group.

3. Batmobama and Robiden
      
4. Springfield Punx – Dean T. Fraser does up a host of pop culture figures, Simpsons-style (thanks Lucas).
    
    
5. FriendFeed operating in real-time.

A bunch of Silicon Valley’s tech elite including Brittany Bohnet of Google, Mike Hudack of Blip.tv, Dave Morin and Aaron Sittig of Facebook, Sam Lessin of Drop.io and Jessica Vascellaro, the Wall Street Journal’s Silicon Valley beat reporter jetted off to Cyprus for a little fun. Part of the fun was the production of this video.

Alot of people have been coming down pretty hard on these folks for letting this video slip in light of recent events. I do not feel any outrage at all. The only thing I feel is jealous (although I am a little weirded out by the fact that all the women are wearing matching bathing suits). I just see some people having fun in an incredible setting (if the video didn’t convince you, Google #campcyprus). As for the idea that the video is inappropriate, that depends on how you read into it. Don’t Stop Believing seems like the perfect song to me. All these people working at ad-supported Web 2.0 companies are going to need some faith in the coming months… or a new business model.

They should enjoy their vacations to Cyprus while they can.

On a side note, I couldn’t help but be reminded of this video.

Sequoia Capital recently made a presentation to their portfolio companies on how to survive the economic downturn. Even if that part of the presentation isn’t relevant to you, there is some incredible charts and data displaying how the economy got to where it is and how it has impacted different industries or verticals. 

So what do you do when you are given the opportunity to do a campaign for the button-fly version of Levi’s most iconic line of jeans, one of the few lines of jeans that has mainstream appeal and is respected by denim heads? If you’re EVB, instead of capitalizing on the cache and heritage of the brand and the 501 line you are selling (and its countless advocates), you make creepy, talking penis monsters.

The money wasted on this lame attempt at viral could have been much better spent on outreach and advocacy tools for the pre-existing 501 community, capitalizing on the 501’s heritage and timelessness. 

Instead… penis monsters.

Well done.

I was having beers with a couple of friends the other night and we were talking about digital distribution of music and one of my friends remarked on having heard Steve Jobs once say that he didn’t feel that iTunes was competing with CDs, but that it was competing with piracy. I responded that that wasn’t how it looked from where I was sitting as iTunes has competed very well with CDs, pushing them down the path towards obsolescence while music piracy (I was thinking strictly downloads) is still going strong.

This lead me to begin to think about what was competing with illegal downloading and the answer more or less hit me in the face- streaming. As someone who has a copious number of MP3s of questionable provenance on my various hard drives and listens to music on a regular basis, I was surprised to realize that I have only downloaded 3 albums in the last 6 months (for comparison, at one point I would say I was downloading about 5 per day). It was such a gradual transition that I hadn’t really considered the implications of it or had even really been cognescent of it. More than 95-100% of the music I listen to on a daily basis comes to me streamed from services ranging from the blatantly illegal (you know who you are) to the legally ambiguous (Seeqpod) to the fully legitimate (imeem). Online streaming has all but killed off (illegal) downloading in my life. While this revelation was a little slow in the coming for me (so slow in fact that MySpace beat me to it), it gave me something to think on.

As mobile bandwidth becomes increasingly more accesible, the idea of a music collection will cease to exist. All MP3 devices will have network capabilities. Who needs a 120GB iPod when all the world’s music is just a wireless connection away? So if the evolution of music consumption in recent years is as follows, CD, MP3, streaming, what comes next? If I knew the answer, I wouldn’t have time to write rambling blog posts, but if Steve Jobs or anybody who else who claims to be competing with pirates wants to win, they better figure it out first or remain flexible enough to adjust and adapt when someonelse does.

Just like everyone else with a pulse, I am a fan of IDEO so I was pretty excited to see that they have launched two new blogs:

• IDEO Labs – Various folks at IDEO are sharing some of the cool they are working on. They already posted on how they made their own multi-touch interface and posted the Flash API to Google Code.
• Design Thinking – Tim Brown is thinking about design thinking for an upcoming book on said topic. I found this post about what design thinking feels like to be particularly thought provoking. There’s also another post where he identifies himself as maybe the only person on the planet who loves (not just likes) Cuil.