Commercials As Content - 7 Places to Watch Ads On Purpose
Written by Josh Catone / December 6, 2007
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/commercials_as_content_-_7_pla.php
And there are plenty of places to watch Super Bowl ads. There's the aptly named SuperBowl-Ads.com
Never fear, there is a growing breed of sites dedicated solely to TV ads as content. Below are 7 places you can go to get your commercial watching fix.
Firebrand
American television network TBS created Very Funny Ads
AdForum
Visit4Info
YouTube
AdCritic Creativity
Have a hankering from some old school advertising? Retrojunk
Bonus Site
The most frustrating part of ads is not always just having to sit through them, sometimes it's hearing a great song, getting it stuck in your head, and then not being able to figure out what it is. Enter AdTunes
You know those handy mailers that you've been sending back to Netflix for ages as you eagerly await the next few flicks in your queue? Apparently, those buggers have cost the US Postal Service a staggering $41.9 million in additional labor costs over the past two years due to their "nonmachinable nature," and if things aren't changed, it could cost 'em another $61.5 million over the next couple years. In a letter from the Inspector General's office, Netflix is being, um, asked to rework its mailers or face a $0.17 surcharge per envelope, and if such a fee was tacked on, it would reportedly decrease the outfit's monthly operating income per paying subscriber by a whopping 67-percent. Not surprisingly, it sounds as if Netflix will bite the bullet and redesign the problematic mailer if the USPS is serious about the charges, so feel free to keep an eye out for a design change in the not-too-distant future.
At first glance an apple shaped remote may seem sort of ridiculous (and maybe it is) but there are certainly some interesting features to this concept device by Jason Roebuck. First off, the apple theme is more aesthetically pleasing than a standard remote —especially when arranged on its "bowl" recharging station. In fact, they actually add something to the decor.
If it weren't for my obnobvious headline, you'd all be wondering what the hell this is. Just 15 of these Champagne tower chillers, with room for a dozen magnums in individual, lit drawers, have been designed for Veuve Cliquot by Porsche Design. Want to see what it looks like open?
Almost six-and-a-half feet in height, expect to see these stainless steel monstrosities in the kitchens of F1 drivers in time for their Christmas parties. [
Zetix is a fabric so strong it will resist multiple car bomb blasts without breaking. It absorbs and disperses the energy from explosions thanks to an inner structure so adamantiumtastic it can be used in body armor, window covering, military tents and hurricane defenses—it might even be able to fend off my ex-wife. When not shielding from explosions, it can be used as medical sutures that won't damage body tissue. All of this is thanks to a property that apparently defies the laws of physics:
However, if you coil a line around the bungee cord, something that defies logic will happen: the whole structure will get wider as it stretches. As you can see in the image, the line around the bungee cord becomes taut, making the bungee itself flex outward. This principle is called helical-auxetics. When you put two of these threads together, you have what Reed Richards would call an auxetic structure.
When you take this to the micro level, you can create a fabric formed from thousands of these helically wound threads. The resulting global structure is so strong that it can dissipate the energies of multiple blasts without breaking, unlike other materials of this class. In fact, the expanding properties of Zetix give it almost miraculous properties.
According to Dr. Patrick Hook—the creator of the fabric and managing director of Auxetix Ltd.—this fabric is "a design that can save lives" and, more importantly, it can do so repeatedly. "Most blast defenses are only capable of coping with a single explosion event and, once deployed and used, all significant protection is lost," he told Gizmodo. You can see the difference in the first photo, comparing an helical-auxetic fabric with your usual high-strenght blast protective fabric.
Another advantage of Zetix is its low cost: other blast-protective textiles are made entirely of very expensive high-performance materials; Zetix uses them too, but in much smaller proportions. Zetix combines the good stuff with "cheaper bulk components" in a 1-to-100 ratio while maintaining it's blast-resistant properties. The cost difference only gets crazier when you remember that this can be used multiple times.
Remember that blisteringly fast channel bonding modem Comcast 
Boy Genius Report may have gotten their hands on early specs of the upcoming 
Earlier this year, 
Some tea connoisseurs are calling the Soropot the "sexiest teapot ever," but we just think it's downright architectural. There's function behind that form, too, where the arched handle is supposed to act as a heat sink to keep the tea from oversteeping. Its arched support straddles a burner on the stove, and the water in that horizontally oriented boiler acts like an old-timey locomotive, getting all hot and steamy until it's ready to pour over your favorite teabags. All this stainless steel and glass and design overload isn't quite available yet, but when/if it is, we tea drinkers at the Giz are even willing to forsake our gorgeous 
You never know when you might need to whip out a projector, and here's the smallest one you can buy so far, made by the Chinese company that calls itself Oculon. The 640x480 Hikari Pro920 is $299, giving you a 24-inch image from about a yard away, or a 12-inch picture from a foot away. If you're looking for a bit more resolution, you can get an 800x600 model for $399.
This winter, Vudu will give every Vudu owner and new buyer copies of both The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy, pre-loaded on their boxes in glorious HD. They will also have the opportunity to download The Bourne Ultimatum to own for $25. This is a sign that Vudu—and Universal—are looking past the current format war toward the increasingly inevitable download-only distribution.
Those eggheads at the Smart Cities group at MIT are a clever bunch, coming up with a design concept for an electric scooter that folds up into a package scarcely larger than a wheeled carry-on suitcase. In the Utopian vision for such bikes, you'd ride one to work, then fold it up and roll it right into the office, where it will take up very little space. But wait. This idea gets even more appealing:
All right you potheads, knock it off. This is not a special one-hit toker. No, it's the Tea Stick, a spring-loaded doodad that lets you place loose tea on its little retractable shelf, and then you stir it into some nice hot water, resulting in a tea connoisseur's nirvana. The stainless steel and plastic implement, formerly 
In addition to Micron's traditional solid state drives 
Memory maker Rambus has unveiled its Terabyte Bandwidth Initiative with the goal to develop a new memory architecture capable of achieving 1TB/sec bandwidth. The plan is to push the data rate to a whopping 32X—which can provide a 16Gbps signaling rate with a 500MHz clock. Compare that with to the 2bits/1Gbps provided by conventional DDR at the same rate. Add differential signaling an both the data and command/address channels and you have yourself one blazingly fast system. 
Forget 
Verizon Wireless today announced it would support "Long Term Evolution" (LTE), the super fast 4G technology currently in testing from Nokia and its European friends in the 3GPP group, and 
Even someone who has never set foot in a museum before can appreciate art like this. This "interactive" art installation by artist Hannes Broecker in Dresden, Germany, features wall-mounted containers filled with deliciously intoxicating cocktails for patrons to enjoy. The idea behind the work is that art should stimulate the senses. In this case, the sense of taste is being stimulated while all the other senses are being dulled. Call me crazy, but Broecker could be the next Picasso. [
Comcast confirms we'll see the rollout of 
Taking a lesson from Digg and similar sites, Google Labs is testing out a new reader response interface for search results (with only a select few users for a limited time). Essentially, your normal search results are enhanced with "like it" and "don't like it" buttons that would tweak the order of said results on your list. And you can also add URL results that you would have liked to receive given your search premise. Google explains:
Posts
