Konichiwa, Muji

Japanese retailer Muji opened its first U.S. store yesterday, bringing its practical yet well-designed line of housewares, stationery and clothing to New York City. The first store is in SoHo on Broadway, just a few blocks away from another Japanese retailer, Uniqlo. A second Muji store reportedly opens next month in the office tower Renzo Piano designed for the New York Times. Gothamist and Racked weigh in with their takes on – and pics of – the downtown outpost.

Muji’s products are free of logos; the company’s name is a shortened version of “mujirushi ryohin” which translates as no-brand, quality goods. Catering to a well-traveled, international crowd, the store has just about every size of vial for all your emollients, collapsable travel bags, slippers as well as shirts and socks made of recycled yarn. (It’s not as gross as it sounds. They’re made from scraps.)

Prices on dishes, kitchen utensils and paper goods were reasonable while clothing seemed more expensive than what one would expect. (Perhaps a result of the weak dollar?) One curious item: a pair of men’s corduroy pants that seemed perfectly normal, except around the waist. Where beltloops would normally be, there was a large piece – about three inches tall – of forgiving elastic, like you’d find in a pair of pregnancy jeans. The price for these “Thanksgiving Dinner” pants? $89.50. (Write your own MasterCard “priceless” punchline in the comment section.) They’re probably just some comfortable pants for a long-haul flight.

Philanthropnology

Last year, this blog covered the expected specs for the XO computer developed by the One Laptop Per Child foundation. Well, the price has gone up a little, and it's not solely for export anymore. This week the XO hit the U.S. and Canadian markets in a special give-one-get-one offer that runs through November 26.

“For a donation of $399, one XO laptop will be sent to empower a child in a developing nation and one will be sent to the child in your life in recognition of your contribution,” according to OLPC's web site. And for the laptop you keep, T-Mobile is providing free wi-fi service at its HotSpots for a year. Or, if you'd prefer to just make a donation, $200 will pay for one laptop.

Check out Leslie Stahl's excellent 60 Minutes interview with OLPC’s Nicholas Negroponte and visits to children using the laptop here. (Sorry, there's pre-roll and CBS doesn't release embedable code. But the piece is good, so hang in there.) Masi Oka of Heroes introduces the reverse B.O.G.O. offer in this commercial that's on the air now. Watch it here.

Best Inventions of 2007

The Halloween candy isn't even stale yet, and Time has already published a “Best of 2007” list. The magazine ranks the best inventions of the past, er, current year, and at the top is the iPhone. (Yes, it's an obvious pick, but thankfully less quirky than last year's choice for Person of the Year.) Staff writer Lev Grossman explains how the magazine makes its selects in this video.

Not so surprisingly, many of the innovations involve transportation and ways to make it more efficient and eco-friendly. The Venturi Electric car runs on sun and wind power, while MIT's electric City Car stacks up like luggage carts at the airport. A gas-steam hybrid engine, which makes use of the heat it generates, improves fuel economy 40%. A dual-mode vehicle from HJR Hokkaido Railway Company runs on rails to the end of the line and then the tires take over. A bioethanol concept car from Sweden doesn't have doors but does have a 3-D dash.

French and Indian companies have teamed up to build a car that runs on compressed air. (The same Indian company is also launching a $2,500 car that New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman predicts will wreak even more havoc on infrastructure and the environment. So – just thinking aloud here – how about working on dropping the price of the compressed-air model?) Boeing's 787 Dreamliner, which uses composite materials to lighten its load, also made the list.











Elsewhere on the newsstand, I.D. magazine included the iPhone in its current New + Noteworthy issue. (Sorry, no link available yet.) Other highlights include: some fancy New Balance kicks designed by DDC; Catherine Hammerton's ginko-inspired wallpaper; and Sebastian Wrong's font clocks from Established & Sons. The magazine is also giving away 19 of their picks in a very classy sweepstakes.

Need an album? (Part 2)

Some numbers are trickling in for Radiohead's pay-what-you-want experiment. According to the British version of PaidContent.org, just 38% of downloaders paid for the album. The other 62% took the album as a freebie, paying only the handling charge. PaidContent crunches the numbers further:

The average price paid was $6 (£2.88) [globally] but Americans were more generous, coughing up $8.05 (£3.87)...factor in the freeloaders, however, and it’s more like an average $2.26 (£1.08) on a worldwide basis and $3.23 (£1.55) from Americans. The most common amount offered was below $4 (£1.92), but 12 percent were willing to pay between $8 (£3.84) and $12 (£5.77), around the typical cost of an album from iTunes.

So how much did the group pull in? Well, the band hasn't released any official numbers yet. But Gigwise reports that just a few days after the release, Radiohead moved 1.2 million albums at an average of £4 each, for a total of £4.8 million.

Now, this is money earned with just basic overhead costs but without a label. How much did the band take in when Yorke & Co. were with EMI? CNET did some digging and spoke with an attorney who worked for A&M and has repped Sheryl Crow.

Chris Castle…offered an educated guess about what the British band was earning at the label…He guessed that when royalties were combined with money earned from publishing, Radiohead saw between $3 and $5 for every album sale…Castle also estimates that the band typically sold between 3 and 4 million units worldwide. That would mean Radiohead hauled in between $9 million and $20 million per album.

But Castle cautions that “it's way too early to try and assess whether Radiohead's experiment has failed or not.”

Monster Mashup

At the corner of Smith and Pacific Streets in Brooklyn last night, anyone with a cell phone was a screenwriter, thanks to TXT of the Living Dead. It’s a condensed version of the zombie classic Night of the Living Dead, projected onto a blank wall with dialogue supplied via text messaging.

The brains behind the operation is Paul Notzold, who took about 500 frames from the thriller (relax, it’s in the public domain) and then created speech bubbles for about 150 of those frames. As Notzold explains on his web site, “Text messages sent in from participants show up in those frames in the order that they are received. The movie moves forward when a new message is received. The other frames are action frames that play through automatically until they hit a speech frame. Once all the speech frames have been filled the movie can then be viewed from beginning to end with the new audience generated dialogue.”

The project is part drive-in, part comic book, part Lichtenstein pop-art, part Mad Libs, part New Yorker caption contest and part flash mob. Although the project is uncensored, texters kept it relatively – and surprisingly – clean. There were the made-in-jest marriage proposals, variations on “all your bases are belong to us” and generic greetings (“Hi, Joe”). But there were also plenty of pop culture references (Geico, Ellen DeGeneres and Oprah) out of sync with the narrative, upping the comic effect.

Gothamist.com gave the Halloween-night project its seal of approval. And Wired recently detailed a showing outside Paris. “Notzold's road kit is deceptively simple: a Mac, a projector (and something to stand it on), a camera and a generator. Helpers distribute a cell phone number on pieces of paper -- Notzold always gets a number for the country he is in, making it easy for locals to participate.” Below is footage from the event in France.



What’s next for Notzold and his SMS project? That bastion of inane banter: the 30-minute local news broadcast. Back to you, Bob.