Fenty beauty

Over the decades, cities develop fingerprints through their architecture–the triumphant Beaux Arts boulevards of Paris, the pastel Victorians of San Francisco, the suffocatingly dense high-rises of Hong Kong–and these built emblems come to define the images of a city that circulate. (How many friends’ vacation photos of the Painted Ladies have clogged your Instagram?) But photographer Daniel Everett isn’t drawn to the distinct side of cities; he’s in search of the sublime beauty of the mundane and nondescript. advertisement advertisement “I’m interested in order, perfection, and a pursuit of meaning in anonymous space–but in a conflicted and ambivalent way,” Everett tells Co.Design in an email. “I’m interested in the promise of utopian ideals as well as their inherent shortcomings. I’m also interested in blandness as a subject matter–the kind of mundane physical reality that contrasts the lofty … [Read more...] about This Photographer Captures The Strange Beauty Of Booming Cities

It’s been a nasty week for iPhone users. Apple has buckled to pressure from AT&T and denied Google’s Voice application from the App Store: a nifty service that helps you consolidate phones and manage your voicemail online. The app lives on at the BlackBerry App World and Android Market, making some of the technorati so angry they’ve vowed to ditch AT&T in protest–and their beloved iPhone with it. Here are seven reasons why you should make AT&T and Apple suffer for their sins. advertisement advertisement They’re anticompetitive. Sure, every business wants to edge out its foes, but AT&T and Apple are now under FCC investigation for their black-box app approval process. Regulators want to know who killed the app, and why Voice is different than VOIP apps like Skype. Check out the inquiries here. They’re targets. Heavy lies the crown; just ask Microsoft. When your software platform is the world leader, it earns a lot of … [Read more...] about Seven (More) Reasons to Ditch Your iPhone

advertisement The brown paper bags that McDonald’s hands out along with Happy Meals and fries are an unlikely art medium, but artist Yuken Teruya has managed to turn the grease-stained vessels into beautiful, delicate paper forests. In the Notice-Forest series, Teruya cuts one side of a paper bag in a tree shape. The cut-out tree is folded down so that it appears to be part of a diorama to onlookers who look inside the bag. According to Teruya, the diorama is meant to look like a real tree positioned against the shadows of other trees in a forest.  In other words, Teruya reclaims paper bags back into what they once were–trees. Teruya isn’t the only artist of late to take disposal fast food items and turn them into unexpected pieces of art.  Designer Scott Jarvie’s Clutch Light uses hundreds of plastic drinking straws to create a vibrant multi-colored lamp. [Via MNN] advertisement advertisement advertisement … [Read more...] about Artist Turns Fast Food Trash into Delicate Paper Trees

Rajiv JamkhedkarA fire policy to cover your precious home, office and shop or godown is simply a must. The real estate assets usually run into lakhs and crores, and the reconstruction of property is extremely expensive apart from being painful.As I write this, one of the major news updates of the week is a dramatic fire destroying the iconic Norte Dame Cathedral in Paris. The Notre Dame is one of the most recognisable monuments in the French capital. Tourists throng it, the locals take pride in it and immense pain, effort and money have been spent on preserving it, conserving the beauty of the gargoyles carved on the outside and the typical gothic architecture. Yet, when I watched it burn in huge flames going all the way up in the sky, I could not but remember the words of a very good insurance broker I know. He used to say, “The loss of property due to fire is more common than you think.”Close It bears repetition, again and again. In the housing society that I live in, a … [Read more...] about Viewpoint | Four important aspects of property insurance

Eddy Cue doesn’t look like a man in the midst of his toughest year in decades. Sporting an untucked apricot camp shirt and blue jeans over camouflage socks and a pair of blue leather racing shoes from Germany, Apple‘s SVP of Internet software and services pulls up a chair at one of the marble-topped tables outside Caffé Macs, the employee restaurant at the heart of Apple’s 23-year-old Cupertino campus. (The company will begin to move into its new “spaceship” HQ next year.) Cue dives right into telling me about his latest horror story: advertisement advertisement The collapse, two nights earlier, of his beloved Golden State Warriors in the NBA Finals, which Cue had the dismal pleasure of observing from a courtside seat. “Am I in mourning?” he asks of his team’s loss to LeBron James’s Cleveland Cavaliers. “You better believe it. I’m not watching ESPN, I haven’t gotten onto a sports website, I … [Read more...] about Playing The Long Game Inside Tim Cook’s Apple