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katamaran78 created “Galactica: Sabotage”, a remake the music video for “Sabotage” by Beastie Boys using footage from Battlestar Galactica.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the edit.

via Matthew Williams

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photo by Scott Meinzer

Scott Meinzer shot a beautiful HDR photo of a rainbow over San Francisco after yesterday’s rain.

via Ryan King

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Todd Lappin spotted this awesome Mondrian Cake on sale at the SFMOMA Caffè Museo.

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photo by Scott Beale

Over the years I’ve noticed how the coffee situation in New York City has been steadily improving in New York City. Not long ago it was all Starbucks and Duncan Donuts, but now there are quite a few cafes serving great coffee. Oliver Strand of The New York Times takes a look at the top 30 places to find good coffee in NYC, including a super handy interactive map.

The article mentions how San Francisco’s Four Barrel Coffee will be roasting in NYC soon. In the last year San Francisco’s Blue Bottle opened a cafe in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and Portland’s Stumptown Coffee opened cafe at the Ace Hotel in Manhattan, along with a roastery in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

via Buzz Andersen

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Got credit card debt? If so, good news: the card issuer can no longer hike your interest rate without warning or raise rates on an existing balance. They have to send your bill at least 21 days before it’s due (up from 14 days). And each bill has to show how long it will take to pay off the balance if you make the minimum payment–and how much you’ll pay in interest if you do that. Call it the credit card equivalent of the Surgeon General’s warning.

These reforms–and many others–are due to a single new law, the Credit CARD Act, which came into effect last month. Great! Who hasn’t been surprised by one or more of these practices?

“This new law is good, and it does stop a lot of bad things,” says Kathleen Day of the Center for Responsible Lending, a consumer watchdog group which published a handy guide to the new law. “But it doesn’t stop everything, and you know they’re going to find new ways around it.”

Why do the card issuers play these games? It’s not because they’re jerks and like watching you suffer. (That’s a side benefit.) They do it to make money. Take away these revenue streams, and the card companies aren’t going to roll over. Right now they’re rubbing their hands together and coming up with new schemes.

Let’s be like the writers on 24 who sit around coming up with hypothetical terrorist attacks, and figure out what the credit card issuers are going do next.

A crackdown on deadbeats

A deadbeat dad is one who never pays his child support on time. But to a credit card issuer, a deadbeat is just the opposite: a customer who always pays on time and therefore never pays any interest.

Interest is the single biggest chunk of credit card profits. The card issuers have always done their best to turn deadbeats into debtors. Got a pesky customer who always pays on time? Make sure their bill arrives a few days before it’s due, then, when they pay late, slap a 30 percent penalty APR on their entire balance.

The CARD Act makes it harder to pull this maneuver off: they have to send you the bill earlier, and you have to be 60 days late before they can jack your APR. But you can still blow it the old-fashioned way: occasionally pay less than the balance due.

“The house is making a bet that you will not live up to your intentions,” says Chris Farrell, author of The New Frugality and economics editor at American Public Media’s weekly radio show Marketplace Money. “If you will pay it off at the end of the month, and you can pay it off at the end of the month, and you actually have that discipline, it’s a really good deal. The strategy doesn’t work if it turns out you do it every other month.”

If you do show steely discipline and pay in full consistently, the card issuer is now likely to reward you by lowering your credit limit or canceling your account. Happy trails.

Here, have some rewards

That’s not to say that reward cards are going away. In order to explain why credit card issuers love reward cards, I have to use a term that will make many of you close your browser in disgust. It’s not dirty, it’s boring: interchange fees. Although, when you think about it, it does sound kind of dirty.

When you swipe your card for a $100 purchase at Urban Outfitters, the store doesn’t receive the full amount. A few pennies go to Visa (or MasterCard or Amex). A much larger chunk, 1 to 3 percent, goes to the bank that issued the credit card. This is the interchange fee.

The interchange fee isn’t the same on all transactions. It depends on a lot of factors, one of which is whether you’re using a reward card: reward cards carry higher interchange fees.

So, thanks to the CARD Act, you’ll be receiving more junk mail advertising reward cards (especially if you have a high FICO score). They’re a great deal for the banks: higher interchange fees; reward cardholders charge more than the average person, to maximize the reward; and a significant percent of the rewards go unredeemed. Got some useless air miles sitting around? Join the zero-mile-high club.

Oh, they’ll surely be hiking interchange fees, too. And since merchants aren’t allowed to charge customers extra for using a credit card, everyone will pay more–even cash customers.

Fees, fees, fees

“People are going to see many more fees,” says Kathleen Day. Here are a few favorites:

• Annual fees. The classic, and more popular than ever–especially for cardholders with low FICO scores.
• Inactivity fees. Some banks charge you an annual fee for not using your card or not using it enough. Damned if you do, et cetera.
• International exchange fees. As the New York Times reports, card companies charge up to 3 percent every time you make an international purchase–even if the purchase is in US dollars.

Payday…for the banks

Subprime mortgages are over. Credit card profits are down, thanks to debt-wary consumers and new laws. Even overdraft fees, a bank’s bread and butter, will be curtailed later this year. What’s a poor bank to do?

How about payday lending? As BusinessWeek reports:

Banks including Cincinnati-based Fifth Third Bancorp, San Francisco-based Wells Fargo & Co., the fourth-largest U.S. bank, and U.S. Bancorp, based in Minneapolis, are already making such loans, usually from $100 to $500, at annual rates of 120 percent if repaid in 30 days. They’re known as “checking advance products.” That puts them in competition with so-called payday loan stores.

Lovely. h2. Opt out In short, the CARD Act is good news, but credit card issuers still want to stick their hands far enough into your pockets to untie your shoes. What to do?

“Reward companies that provide a good service at a good price, and don’t do business with the ones who don’t,” says Farrell. “I hope credit unions and community development banks, which offer credit card products that are pretty simple and straightforward, take market share away” from the big banks. My credit union offers a simple, no-fee credit card at a competitive rate, but I don’t actually carry it. I did, however, sign up for their overdraft line of credit. If I ever were to need emergency cash–up to $1000–I can dip into the line of credit at a fixed 8.9 percent APR using my debit card. There’s no additional overdraft charge. (I’ve never used it.) The watchword with credit cards is the same as it ever was: check your statement for surprises and your back for knives.

Cyriak creates some of the most bizarre animation out there, for example his latest video “Cycles”.

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Japanese designer and inveterate snowboarder Taro Tamai has been hand-shaping his eye-catching Gentemstick boards for over a decade. An answer to the homogenization of board shapes that happened as snowboarding gained mainstream appeal, Tamai's goal is no less than to "perfectly blend into the terrain miraculously made of snow and wind, just as if birds flying in the sky or fish flowing in the stream." The upshot of his philosophical approach to the sport (he calls it snow-surfing) is a line of boards renowned for their flexible fins, oversized sized fish tails and rideability in almost any snow condition.

The Taro Tamai custom line includes the Rocket Fish, Big Fish, Super Fish and the bamboo-core Giant Mantaray (pictured below, from left to right).

Previously only available in Japan, Gentemsticks made their U.S. debut last year, yet you can still only get a glimpse at a couple that live at San Francisco, CA's Mollusk Surf Shop. Otherwise, they sell from their online store, or by making a direct email request. As long as you place yours before the July cut-off, they'll hand-make it to your specifications.

Sales and marketing are not the same thing. It's true they both deal with relationship management and it's true that neither of these job descriptions require hardcore engineering, but just because they're both in the realm of words over code does not mean that they are the same. At the risk of muddling your mind with HR jargon, the core competencies of a marketer are very different from those of a sales person. Surprisingly, many startup CEOs insist on hiring for a VP of Sales and Marketing position.

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If you're the VP of sales and marketing for your company, this article is not about how you aren't doing your job properly. In fact, it's about how you're doing the job of two separate people and shouldn't be. Interwest investor Bruce Cleveland recently wrote an article entitled, In Search of the Mythical VP Sales and Marketing where he defines the separate domains of sales and marketing.

Says Cleveland, "Sales and Marketing are vastly different functions that require substantially different personalities, skills, and decades of experience to master...A CEO who doesn't understand this basic fact, or doesn't believe it, is not a CEO I want to invest in."

Explains Cleveland, a sales person understands the inner workings of B2B deal probabilities and the short term requirements to increase deal flow. Meanwhile, marketing people look at the landscape from a longterm perspective and lay the groundwork for sales through analyst, media and web leads generation. Essentially, sales people are great oral one-on-one communicators and marketers are great written mass communicators.

He writes, " I have found that the CEO who makes this serious mistake hasn't worked with someone who is an excellent Marketer and therefore discounts the role it plays." With expertise in the Software as a Service space, it's interesting that Cleveland believes the marketing role is the one that gets tacked on at the last minute. While sales offers obvious measurement through direct revenue generation, marketing tends to have a less clear set of metrics.

Cleveland explains that "today's head of Marketing must be an excellent demand creator (the "owner" of future revenue) through sales-ready leads." Essentially he believes that the marketer's job is to increase perceived value and generate demand on a massive scale in order to grease the wheels of the sales team.

Discuss

Academy Award Winning Movie Trailer by BriTANicK

via Ze Frank

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Mauricio Balvanera put together a really great video from last weekend’s Urban Iditarod 2010 in San Francisco. He shot it at 60fps on a Canon 7D.

The music in the video is “Pursuit Of Happiness” by Kid Cudi.

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Bangkok-born artist Korakrit Arunanondchai originally created his wildly-colorful, limited-edition clothing label Kora-Krit as an extension of his digitally-influenced art. Working chiefly with silkscreen printing, Arunanondchai intended for visitors to his gallery shows to wear the pieces for a fully immersive and visually seamless experience.

The RISD grad (now based in Brooklyn, NY) takes up various themes in his work, but considers them all to have a shared feeling. He sees his layered compositions as a fortunate glimpse of a fleeting moment, like "a bunch of kids playing basketball" who appear to fight and dance as they bump into each other on the court. But in Arunanondchai's amped-up world, the scene plays out at an even faster tempo and is possibly "happening in the sky."

The current collection borrows strong graphic shapes found in video games, particularly the letters X and O, as well as triangle and square shapes. Printed on neon fabrics, the choice links the apparel back to his black light art installation on the same subject.

The forthcoming project, dubbed "Thrs" for the typical gallery opening night, takes Arunanondchai back to a simple black, white and gray palette for series of intricate prints that explore computer-generated gallery spaces. (Pictured above.)

A fan of Hieronymus Bosch, the phantasmagorical world Arunanondchai creates has something in common with contemporaries like Ryan McGinness, who similarly makes densely-layered imagery that toes the line between organization and chaos. On the fashion side, the artist's futuristic prints connect him to those seen in the most recent collections by Proenza Schouler and the late Alexander McQueen (also a fellow Bosch admirer). His passion for creating an unabbreviated universe has led to multi-media installations that transcend physical boundaries, as well as projects as tangible as a laptop for Dell.

Kora-Krit sells online or from La Forêt in Tokyo with prices starting at $29.

Shantell Martin will be one of the speakers at our upcoming PSFK Conference 2010. Shantell is an illustrator & VJ who uses both modern technology and traditional mediums to create evolving experiences based around simple drawings.

If you happen to be in the neighborhood you might want to attend the Next Nature lecture I will be throwing at the Transnatural symposium this Saturday 13-03-2010 at the Trouw Building in Amsterdam. Among the other speakers are Elio Caccavale (UK), Tobie Kerridge (UK) and Rachel Armstrong (UK).

The Transnatural exhibition celebrates some of the more successful love affairs between the made & the born. Until March 19th you have the opportunity to see works like Bitfall, Biojewelery and Mudtub, whom you might know from the blogosphere, but are more than worth experiencing in real life. Thus recommended. Hendrik-Jan wrote a more extensive review in the local language.

1. Mud Tub
2. Wild birds illegally immigrating to City Zoo
3. Your grand-grand-parents new media

Early stage startups in Europe will be the primary beneficiaries of a new €6 million seed fund just announced by Berlin-based Team Europe Ventures. In the past we've talked about Europe's entrepreneurial woes, most notably a dearth of seed funding due to having a culture largely averse to taking risks financially. This new fund is a good step towards changing that trend and keeping more startups from looking for funding elsewhere.

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The €6 million fund (over $8 million) will provide up to €500,000 to early stage startups in the Internet and mobile Internet spaces over the next three years. Team Europe plans to selectively choose four to five startups each year to receive the funding, rather than quickly spreading the wealth around to any worthy recipient.

"If we feel that a business will succeed without us, but will be quicker, larger, nicer with us - than it's a case for us," said Team Europe partner Kolja Hebenstreit in a press release Tuesday. "Experience shows that decisive decisions are often made during the foundation phase, so we think it's good to speak with experienced potential partners as early as possible."

Team Europe has also rounded up entrepreneurs from past investments and active angel investors to assist in the disbursement of the funds, including Matthias Spieß of Leipzig-based Spreadshirt, and angel Günther Faltin.

"These are all people who are active in the Internet space and with whom we have successfully worked together in the past," said partner Lukasz Gadowski, explaining the "tightly-knit network of experts" that will help Team Europe pick early stage companies to fund.

Hopefully this fund will start a trend among European venture capital firms. As we mentioned in February, many European startups have been looking to American incubators to help them get off the ground. If funds like these succeed, we could see these numbers go down over time, and more successful startups could emerge from Europe. Most VCs in Europe look for proven models and a solid financial foundations, so seed funds like Team Europe's and organizations like Seedcamp can help startups get a boost into the line of sight of VCs providing second, third and fourth round funding.

Discuss

In a triumph of art, science and architecture, Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno's site-specific exhibit "14 Billion" scales a Black Widow's web up to magnificent proportions. Currently on display at Stockholm's Bonniers Konsthall, 14 Billion is an extension of the work he showed at the 2009 Venice Biennale called "Galaxy Forming along Filaments, like Droplets along the Strands of a Spider's Web."

The Frankfurt-based artist worked in collaboration with astrophysicists, architects, engineers and spider researchers to create a stimulating series of installations with 14 Billions as the focal point. A massive undertaking, the project took two years to complete with the black rope spanning 400 cubic meters, consuming much of Bonniers Konsthall main gallery.

Saraceno's work looks to scientific study which uses the imagery and structure of spider webs to map the origin and structure of the universe. Referencing these studies, the sculptural pieces explore the delicate balance between ourselves and the earth.

To compliment the installation, Saraceno also exhibits essays and research texts that reveal the development behind 14 Billions and other key pieces from the series, including "Garden/Air-Port-City/Iridescent" and "Cloudy House" among the 15 additional artworks.

While deeply philosophical and laden with scientific study, Saraceno softens the academia with interaction—encouraging viewers to participate with his discoveries. Nimble visitors can explore the web installation, while children and adults alike can create their own additions to his Cloudy House.

A fantastic exhibit—igniting the same level of curiosity which inspired it in the first place—the show remains on display through 20 June 2010.

SocialDesignSite, the non-profit organisation aimed to create awareness on social design, recently launched a community platform on Ning. This platform was created in response to the valuable feedback of their participating projects. Through this platform they seek to offer a convenient and lively communication environment, enhance connections between the members of the community and provide opportunities for sharing, participation and collaboration. Members can share any kind of information, network with the people you like, provide content, engage in discussions, join and create groups.

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Penguin gives us an imaginative look into the potential of books on the iPad.

PSFK curates a daily selection of relevant and noteworthy news headlines from around the world.

"Envelopes" is an ongoing exhibition at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery that explores architecture at the intersection of sustainability and "living" systems.

Telephone networks have been redesigning telecom masts as trees for a while now but we were curious to notice the urban version of this camouflage strategy in New York's Murray Hill a few days ago.