360 DEGREES Weblog

If you have a garbage pit that has no electrical outlets, and you really, really need to de-stench the place, apply these Air Aroma Aerologic wireless “scenting solutions” to that nasty problem. You won’t even have to go in there to freshen up the place. What do they mean, “wireless?” You place these diffusers in strategic places, and then you control a network full of them to manipulate intensity and variety of scents throughout certain zones.

Who knew scent control was so techno-advanced? And we thought that wall-mounted nose stencher was pretty radical. Going way beyond that, this could give a department store manager control over specific scents in certain areas to make you buy more. Maybe the smell of bacon in the housewares department might help skillet sales? It’s presented as a software-controlled way to alter scents in different hotel rooms. This is about the most sophisticated smell contraption ever. No pricing was announced yet.

McDonalds continues to surprise - and impress - us with its shameless and opportunistic ideas above its station…

Traditional luxury brand strategy depends on brands knowing their place, but increasingly the grammar of luxury brands is being used by brands far outside the luxury universe.

Nobody is working harder than McDonalds to investigate opportunities here…

Last year, they began a $1B to update the look of restaurants in Europe — (Via New York Times)

They recently took on a price war with Starbucks, whose hasty reaction with heavy discounting suggested that they had suffered a direct hit. Smelling blood, last week McDonalds launched their Unsnobby Coffee Intervention.

And now McDonalds appears to have upped the ante once again… British fashion designer, Bruce Oldfield, has just revamped the McDonalds uniforms, complete with Louis Vuitton-esque palate, and and an LV-ish logo…

It’s a particularly interesting ‘tribute’, since last year Dana Thomas described Louis Vuitton as the “McDonald’s of the luxury industry” in her book Deluxe.

Interestingly, at a time when logos are more visible than ever at Louis Vuitton, the designer for McDonald’s was asked not to use the iconic ‘golden arches’ for the new uniforms…

The pattern bears more than a passing resemblance to the Louis Vuitton logo, but Mr Oldfield insisted it was not deliberate. “I wanted to use the golden arches but I was told I couldn’t because of company policy, so I had to have a re-think. I think it looks chic and modern, and the girls look really good. — (Via The Telegraph, UK)

What’s next for McDonald’s? The Swarovski-inspired straw? The Goyard-esque burger box?

Perhaps the design collective JustAnotherRichKid were being prescient rather than ironic in 2005 with their golden McDonalds spoon

Thinking of leaving Europe for an island vacation? Save yourself some airfare and visit Germany’s Tropical Islands (€25/visit). Housed inside the world’s largest free-standing hall, the Islands feature a water park, a tropical village, and more, with perfect weather year-round. Use the money you save on great food, drinks, and gear, found at the Islands’ various on-site restaurants, bars, and shops, or simply relax at the spa. Island weather, atmosphere, and entertainment, without the headaches. Oh, ja  eine Reise nach das Vaterland, mit bradwurst und sauerkraut

Well-managed luxury brands are still bucking the economic downturn, and many are in very good shape…

Prada announces a sales jump of 66% — (Via Bloomberg)

Christian Louboutin - “the foremost shoe designer in the world” - prepares to open 6 new stores — (Via Time)

Dior jumps 11% in Q1 2008 — (Via Capital.fr)

Harry Winson jumps 22% — (Via Diamonds.net)

Champagne boom sends Krug prices soaring — (Via Telegraph, UK)

And the signs grow that Wall Street is turning into a luxury mall…

Luxury units dominate the building pipeline as the area’s occupants get older and wealthier. The median income for Lower Manhattan residents has increased 47 percent to $163,000 since 2004, and is now nearly three times greater than the median Manhattan household income. — (Via Portfolio<)

 

The NDrive G800 GPS Navigator is billed as the first sat-nav device to come with real photo navigation. From the look of the product shots this could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your – literal – point of view. Anyway, it also comes with goodies like a 4.3 inch screen, MP3 music player, e-Book reader, FM transmitter for sending music to your car stereo and Bluetooth. £314.90.

The NDrive G800 is the very first GPS navigator using real photos in perspective to show you the best way to navigate, experiencing something never seen before. This brand new navigator has a 4.3′ screen that allows to appreciate the aerial view in all its splendor, and comes with 8GB memory…. * MUltimedia features; plays music, videos, watch photos and read e-books, * FM transmitter; put your favorite songs in the G800 memory and listen to them on your car audio, * Bluetooth receiver; turn your NDrive G800 into a loudspeaker of your phone calls, * Games, * Calculator

For those who thought that UK yuppie culture was dead comes news that they are not dead, they just went away to work on worse acronym.

They have lately re-emerged …

No longer Yuppies, they are now “Arppies” - that’s short for asset rich, penny poor. They just traded in their Porsches for property, their freedom for families and their spendthrift habits for school fees… Where once they were young and upwardly mobile, now they’re middle aged and standing still. — (Via Daily Mail)

The acronym may be annoying, but the idea is interesting… conspicuous consumption is moving into asset preservation, and 2008 might be their year of reckoning. It’s a shift in behaviour which appears not to have been lost on the banking industry which seems to be fast reinventing its consumer relationship skills.

Question: What do Vivienne Westwood, Muhammad Ali and molecular gastronomist Heston Blumenthal have in common? Answer: Superbooks!

Despite the credit crunch, an entire industry has sprung up to cater to an increasing number of customers willing to spend thousands of pounds on luxury books from the shelves of the world’s most exclusive shops. — (Via The Independent)

At the heart of this trend are two key publishers, Taschen, and Kraken Opus

While Taschen has been well-known in this space for some time, Kraken Opus is an interesting new contender, moving from a specialty in super-luxury sports publications, to a much broader remit.

 

Breaking away from traditional faucet designs is Kohler’s Karbon, which essentially “articulates from a compact pole-looking thing into a long arm that reaches right where you need it.”

1970: Apollo 13 splashes down in the Pacific Ocean near Samoa, recovering from a barely survivable explosion in space.

Apollo 13 launched from Cape Canaveral on April 11, intended to be the third manned lunar landing. The crew — James A. Lovell Jr., John L. Swigert Jr. and Fred W. Haise Jr. — experienced a slight vibration shortly after launch, but things were going normally until 55 hours, 55 minutes into the flight.
Oxygen tank No. 2 exploded, causing No. 1 to fail and start leaking rapidly. Warning lights started blinking. The astronaut’s supplies of air, water, light and electricity were imperiled … 200,000 miles from Earth.
Swigert radioed Mission Control in Texas: “Houston, we’ve had a problem here.” The 1995 hit film Apollo 13 used a more dramatic version: “Houston, we have a problem.”
NASA had engineered some redundancy into the Apollo systems, but it was an extremely close scrape. The plan now was to scrap the lunar landing, swing around the moon and return home. The crew clambered from the Command Module into the attached Lunar Module as a lifeboat.
Oxygen: There was plenty in the LM, because more oxygen was available from the tanks that would have supplied liftoff from the moon’s surface.
Light and electricity: All noncritical systems were turned off, reducing power consumption to one-fifth of normal. But without the heat generated by those systems, the temperature inside the capsule dropped to 38 degrees Fahrenheit. LM power was used to recharge batteries in the CM for eventual re-entry in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Water: LM systems needed water for cooling. So the crew conserved water by drinking little and eating only wet foods. They became severely dehydrated, losing about 10 pounds each. But the water lasted.
Carbon dioxide removal: The LM had lithium hydroxide cannisters to remove the CO2 for two men for two days, not three men for four days. Under the guidance of Mission Control, the astronauts attached the CM canisters to the LM system with a pipeline made of plastic bags, cardboard and tape, all of which NASA had placed on board. Kluge city.
Getting home: The navigation system was transfered from CM to LM, but the alignment needed to be checked. Debris from the explosion made it hard for the astronauts to fix upon any distant stars. So NASA instructed the crew to use the nearest one: the sun. Precise navigation was essential, because returning to the Earth at too steep an angle would cause the CM to burn up in the atmosphere. Too tangential an angle could skip the module out into space forever. Fire or ice.
After four days of alternating terror and hope, the three astronauts climbed back to the CM for re-entry an hour before splashdown. Everything worked out.
The Apollo 13 Accident Review Board later determined the cause of the explosion. Improvements to the command module in 1965 raised the permissible voltage to the oxygen-tank heaters from 28 to 65 volts DC. But the heater switches weren’t likewise upgraded. The final launch-pad test ran the heaters hot and long. Wires near the heaters were cooked at 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit — enough, it was learned later, to “severely degrade teflon insulation. The thermostatic switches started to open … and were probably welded shut.” NASA also found that other warning signs had been ignored, and the oxygen tank was a potential bomb that became a real bomb.

Nintendo’s long awaited Wii Fit is finally set to be released on May 19th. Not surprisingly, demand is expected to be high, and orders are limited to 3 per household. You can pre-order now for $89.99 at Amazon.