Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Planes are standard in the aviation industry. It’s how you outfit these planes–from design to service–that makes a fleet an airline.

So in 2009, TAM Airlines approached design studio Priestmangoode with a particular challenge. The Brazilian airline wanted to establish itself as an international carrier every bit as prestigious as its competitors. The redesign included seats, galleys, cabin architecture, and even the UI of the video consoles. But in the realm of international travel, the first-class cabin is of paramount importance. It’s the ultimate litmus test of a carrier’s glitz (as well as a vital means to increase the margins of an otherwise uniform ticket).

The cabin’s theme was Home Away From Home. “The design moves away from hard finishes to create a softer, luxurious cabin more in keeping with high-end contemporary interior design,” Priestmangoode designer/director Luke Hawes tells us. Inspiration was struck in Brazil’s contemporary interiors, home trade shows, and the studio’s work in major international hotels like Marriott, IHG, and Accor. That’s probably not so surprising–my first reaction to the space was, this looks like a very nice hotel lobby. But while soft materials are a standard in homes and hotels alike, they’re of particular concern on an airplane.

“If the smallest button on a seat is broken, the aircraft can’t take off, which hugely inconveniences passengers, of course, but is a significant loss for the airline,” Hawes explains. “So striking the right balance between beautiful, soft materials, and ones that can withstand a bit of wear was important.”

If there’s one fairly ingenious use of all this plush material, it’s that the two central seats come with their own couch, allowing travel companions to sit face-to-face during meals as if sharing a table at a café. How could there possibly be room for this domestic extravagance? The couch takes the space normally dedicated to an ottoman, doing double duty for elevating one’s feet or creating a more social atmosphere.

Currently, TAM’s new first-class cabin is featured on flights between São Paulo and Europe. To experience the world’s first couch in the sky, it’ll cost you around $12,000–now how much did you pay for your couch again?

So you have a foosball table at work. And an in-house masseuse. And maybe even an ironic conversation pit. But do you have a chair shaped like a molecular model? An art installation made of guitar pedals? How about a nonsensical shade over your desk that says, “If this shade is down I’m not who you think I am”? You do not. But David Byrne does, and for those reasons, his office is cooler than yours.

Brooklyn-based Gil Inoue snapped photographs of the Talking Head-turned-bike evangelist at his expansive, whimsy-drenched office in an old sweatshop in Soho, New York, recently for the Brazilian magazine TRIP. Inoue spent a few hours there, photographing the space and Byrne himself. Originally, Inoue wanted to shoot Byrne riding a vintage penny-farthing on the cobblestone streets of Soho, but they decided against it. “It was too dangerous,” Inoue says. He snapped this instead:

Byrne is one of those polymaths who has remained remarkably innovative into the early evening of his life, excelling in everything from art to music to writing. Now we get a glimpse of the environment that fuels all that creativity.

Note to self: Buy a penny-farthing.

For an extended tour of Byrne’s office, narrated by Byrne himself, go here.

Virgin Galactic is already busily spearheading a whole new industry in space tourism with SpaceShipTwo. But today at the Farnborough airshow the British company revealed it’s also ready to disrupt a long-standing industry and take it in wholly new directions: It’s formally unveiled LauncherOne, a tiny cost-effective rocket system to put small satellites into low Earth orbit. It could change your life sooner than you think. Really.

LauncherOne leverages the expertise that Virgin Galactic has been building up with its space tourism business, and stands on the innovations made by Scaled Composites when it launched SpaceShipOne on its historic XPrize-winning flight. That’s because it uses exactly the same air-launched model for the rocket, with a carrier aircraft lifting the spacecraft high into the atmosphere before dropping it and letting its engines fire it into space. LauncherOne actually employs the same WhiteKnightTwo launch aircraft used for the space tourism flights–which is a proven, existing airframe that instantly reduces costs.

By flying like this, LauncherOne doesn’t need a big, expensive first stage rocket loaded with fuel to get it off the ground. Instead itr requires just two boost stages to take it from launch into space, and then into orbit. This simplifies the avionics and engineering needed to make the thing fly, lowering the cost and reducing the chances that things can go wrong. Ground-launched rockets have all sorts of complex range-safety matters to deal with, involving clearing airspace and, sometimes, the sea in the general launch trajectory because the rocket might fail during flight. Because LauncherOne is launched from an aircraft, it can avoid many of these logistical issues, and it also allows for payloads to be more easily put into unusual orbits–the aircraft simply has to point it in a different launch direction.

The upshot of all of this cost-saving is that according to Virgin, a LauncherOne vehicle can put 500 pounds of payload into orbit for “below $10 million.” That works out cheaper than its likely biggest competitor Orbital’s Pegasus XL–another air-launched vehicle–and Virgin intends it to be able to reach the “world’s lowest prices” for launches.

And that’s just for single-satellite launch scenarios. There’s no reason that LauncherOne couldn’t be configured to release a swarm of low Earth orbit microsatellites in a single launch, and this is one of the most promising areas of space science right now.

In fact when revealing the vehicle’s parameters, Virgin boss Richard Branson even remarked that with LauncherOne, “nations, states, cities and even universities and schools will be able to launch dedicated satellites that will answer their diverse needs.” Satellite launches have nearly always been massively expensive, risky and fall within the purview of government-backed operations, or via defense companies, and even recent commercial space systems have been very expensive–until Virgin’s effort.

Right there is the part where your life will be affected, although it’s difficult to predict how much things will change and how fast. But to see what this could mean, imagine if a news organization like CNN stumped up the millions necessary to fly its own small imaging satellite–or possibly even a small fleet of them. When a global disaster occurs, or a breaking news story hits, CNN may then be able to deliver live or near-time satellite imaging of the event. (And they may even get their facts right.) Because Virgin is a private entity, it’s even possible that other startups may leverage its potential to do their own climate change science, or space-based observations of almost everything on Earth from traffic congestion in cities to tracking ships, or selling very real-time imagery to companies like Apple or Google to drive the “satellite view” that we’re all getting used to using for navigating around with our smartphones.

And lest you think this is all just pop science mumbo-jumbo, VG has already signed up enough launch partners for “several dozen” launches and aims to be commercially operating by 2016.

Image: Virgin Galactic

Virgin Galactic has announced plans to enter the commercial space payload delivery business, with Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson making the announcement at the Farnborough International Airshow in England. Virgin Galactic will use the same aircraft designed to launch passengers aboard SpaceShipTwo on sub-orbital space tourism rides, to carry a small, two-stage rocket capable of delivering satellites into low earth orbit.

The announcement isn’t a huge surprise, as it’s long been assumed the WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft would serve as a launch platform for other space-bound vehicles beyond SpaceShipTwo. Keeping the naming of its space vehicles relatively simple, LauncherOne is capable of carrying up to 500 pounds (225 kilograms) to low earth orbit for less than $10 million.

“Virgin Galactic’s goal is to revolutionize the way we get to space,” Branson said at Farnborough. “Now, LauncherOne is bringing the price of satellite launch into the realm of affordability for innovators everywhere, from start-ups and schools to established companies and national space agencies. It will be a critical new tool for the global research community, enabling us all to learn about our home planet more quickly and affordably.”

Artist rendition of LauncherOne’s second stage separation.

Branson added that Virgin Galactic has already received deposits from four private companies intent on using the LauncherOne for “several dozen launches.” One of the companies, Skybox Imaging, is planning to deploy a constellation of high resolution imaging satellites. Another of the new customers is the recently announced Planetary Resources, the asteroid mining company.

The small satellite industry is growing as engineers are able to cram more and more capability into smaller packages. Virgin Galactic’s LauncherOne is competing with existing air launch provider Orbital Sciences, as well as small, ground-based rocket launch services. But air launch ideas aren’t limited to the small satellite industry. Scaled Composites – the company that designed and is flight testing WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo – is also working with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen to develop the largest airplane in the world, which will air launch a SpaceX Falcon 9-based rocket capable of carrying heavier payloads to orbit.

Both Virgin Galactic’s LauncherOne and Orbital Sciences’ Pegasus rocket feature small wings to aid stability during the drop from the carrier aircraft and turn the rockets make to their upward trajectory to orbit. By using a carrier aircraft, rockets can be launched from 50,000 feet, independent of weather conditions on the ground. And unlike ground-based rockets that are limited to a handful of launch sites around the world, air launched rockets can be carried almost anywhere to optimize the entry to the desired orbit.

WhiteKnightTwo has recently been busy with resumption of flight testing for SpaceShipTwo. The flight test team at Scaled Composites made eight flights with WK2 last month, the last two included releasing SS2 for glide flights.

Images: Virgin Galactic

When it comes to content creation–even in short bits and blasts on Twitter—the human touch is what will keep marketers relevant and real. A look at J.Crew, Wegmans, NASCAR, and other brands that are getting it right.

Last weekend I snagged a lounge chair at our community pool next to a friend and fellow marketer I haven’t seen in weeks. We’re both managing the demands of family and careers and rarely get a chance to catch up with each other or with our reading. I pulled out Runner’s World from my bag, she pulled out J.Crew. Before long we were swapping magazines, and, as like-minded marketers, our conversation quickly shifted gears to how J.Crew had snagged us (cynical shoppers that we are) to become advocates for its brand.

Consider the catalog–a source of poolside perusing–that is now called the J.Crew style guide. It’s less about the specs and more about the style. I had the opportunity to share a stage recently with Diego Scott, the company’s CMO. Our panel discussion was all about “moving beyond the ‘like’” to more engagement with stakeholders. He shared the story of J.Crew’s evolved thinking in this area and its recognition that the catalog is a catalyst for the brand to offer a point of view. The J.Crew created content, online and in print, shares ideas from in-the-know fashion and jewelry designers on current fabrics, cuts and fashion trends while remaining unmistakably J. Crew: polished and fresh and conversely, appropriately classic. The revamped catalog–disguised as a style guide–is an example of company-created content done right.

When it comes to generating compelling content, fashion companies may have it easy. But, every marketer can take a page from J.Crew’s guide on how to create and manage a lot of content while maintaining a consistent voice across multiple channels. And, oh yes, to generate interest in your content in ways that drive actions that benefit your company. It’s that new nuance of paid, owned and earned media singing Kumbaya together.

Help is available. At a time when it is imperative for brands to communicate 24/7, a growing number of tech and media companies make it possible to automate content creation and curation. A few keywords typed in here and there and—voila!–content. The Huffington Post, for one, offers to create web sites for brands and use algorithms to repurpose relevant HuffPo content. Meanwhile, there are tech companies that can generate articles that look as if they were penned by real writers.

Like many of my peers, we’re exploring these tools and doing so with an eye toward simplifying content management while maintaining an authentic and engaging brand voice. Algorithms can do amazing things, including suggesting topics of discussion and identifying popular issues that will resonate with a target audience. But they can’t put together a style guide, say, that motivates customers to engage regularly and meaningfully with the brand. When it comes to content creation–even in short bits and blasts on Twitter—the human touch is what will keep marketers relevant and real.

The companies that are truly winning over audiences and driving consumers are the ones that are experimenting with a balance of automated aggregation and human-directed curation. It’s a process of out-sourcing and in-sourcing.

I’ve been following Intel’s approach. It recently launched iQ, an employee-curated digital magazine created to connect with a younger audience and share with them the bigger, living brand story. Not only does the site provide original stories about tech, it also aggregates top tech stories from other sites that Intel’s audience will find interesting. Readers and employees dictate much of the moment-to-moment interaction on the site, but it is all closely watched by editor-in-chief Bryan Rhoades, who spurs conversations by judiciously placing some stories on the iQ homepage.

NASCAR, too, is experimenting in this space. A partnership with Twitter includes a site that compiles #NASCAR-related tweets from popular drivers, who send 140-character blasts from the track or wherever they may be– along with those from sports writers and other industry folks. They pull it off by using a search algorithm and human editors who understand narrative—and appropriate content.

My friends over at Wegmans (I call them my “friends” hoping the Wegman family will open a store in Fairfield County, Conn.), were among the first to the table in using relevant content to connect with consumers. In 2001, way before Twitter and Facebook and before actor Alec Baldwin proclaimed his mom’s love of Wegmans on the Late Show, the company created Menu magazine. It’s a “tuck-in-your-pool bag” food guide that is sent to consumers free of charge and features practical, balanced yet appetizing meal ideas that even the most harried of parents (that would be me) can make with the help of a Wegmans’ shopping list, of course. The company is connecting shoppers with relevant content–among the many reasons Wegmans was recently named one of 16 brands with fanatical cult followings.

Bill Gates was right in noting that content is king. Today, we are all publishers. It’s a daunting prospect. New content curation tools make automating the job easier–but easy may not always be as effective. It would be a mistake to let algorithms do the entire job for you. No one knows your audience like you do. And, keeping the human touch in the process is more real, which is really important to today’s info-overloaded consumer. This begs the question, which brands are serving up content to you poolside?

Image: Flickr user Gwen Vanhee

The SpaceX mission to berth with the International Space Station has successfully passed the first set of demonstrations with NASA. Dragon completed a series of maneuvers early this morning to adjust its orbit as it prepared for the first flyby of the ISS, passing just 2.4 kilometers (1.5 miles) beneath the station. In addition to the maneuvering, a series of tests was completed to confirm Dragon‘s onboard navigation and communication equipment was working properly before moving closer to the ISS on Friday.

Over the course of several hours all of the demonstrations went well, according to SpaceX’s lead mission director John Couluris, “all Dragon systems checked out, we look good” he said in a press conference following the flyby. “Dragon‘s go for berthing day tomorrow.”

Image: SpaceX

NASA’s ISS flight director Holly Ridings also said the first set of demonstrations was a success, comparing it to the numerous simulations completed by both SpaceX and NASA together. “Today went really very close to how we had trained it,” Ridings said. “There was no major deviation from our pre-flight plan.”

Today’s maneuvers were just the latest in several steps SpaceX has to make to to successfully demonstrate Dragon‘s capabilities as part of NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation System (COTS) before NASA will allow the company to deliver cargo to the space station.

Dragon as seen with its solar panels deployed from the ISS. Photo: NASA

Within hours of Tuesday morning’s launch, Dragon had successfully deployed its solar panels and opened the doors to its guidance, navigation and control sensors and began testing some of this equipment that will be used as the spacecraft approaches the space station.

On Wednesday, Dragon‘s GPS was shown to be working properly and the vehicle’s COTS UHF Communications Unit (CUCU, pronounced cuckoo) which will be used to communicate with the ISS was powered up and running.

In preparation for the maneuvers close to the ISS, some of Dragon‘s 18 Draco thrusters were demonstrated on Wednesday with both a series of short pulses, and a longer continuous burn simulating the vehicle’s ability to abort from its approach to the station.

A diagram of today’s flyby and the rest of the day’s flight as Dragon makes a loop around the ISS. Image: NASA

All of the activities during the first two days took place as Dragon was chasing the ISS in an effort to be in position for today’s flyby. Before the first maneuver, Dragon was in orbit about 60 kilometers (37 miles) behind and 9.5 kilometers (6 miles) beneath the ISS. At 12:58 a.m. PDT, the Dragon team at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, announced a successful  “height adjustment burn” giving Dragon the vertical push closer to the space station (an orbit further away from the earth).

Forty-five minutes after the height adjustment burn at 1:43 a.m. PDT, Dragon performed a “co-elliptic burn” to effectively allow the capsule to level off at the desired distance beneath the station. Initially the altitude was to be 2.5 kilometers beneath the station, but this was changed to an actual distance of 2.4 kilometers. A few minutes later the crew on board the station sent a command to Dragon that turned on the capsule’s strobe light to confirm the CUCU communication link between the ISS and Dragon.

SpaceX’s John Couluris said Dragon‘s maneuvers around the ISS were successful, and it ended up using 36 kilograms (79 pounds) less propellant during the Draco burns than planned.

Couluris said the extra propellant offers a bit of a cushion if any part of the mission needs to be extended, “if we need to take more time and come back around a second time.”

While Dragon continued to close the distance horizontally to the ISS (remaining 2.4 kilometers beneath the station), SpaceX confirmed the capsule’s relative GPS was operational. The relative GPS is what will be used tomorrow as Dragon begins its approach to the station before laser and thermal imaging sensors guide it in the final meters.

View from inside the ISS’ Cupola where astronaut Don Pettit will grasp Dragon with the robotic arm and berth it with the station. Photo: NASA

As Dragon approached the station, the ISS crew announced it could see it with a traditional “tally ho” while cameras onboard both the ISS and Dragon were able to capture the other.

At 4:26 a.m. PDT, Dragon passed directly beneath the ISS at the prescribed 2.4-kilometer distance before continuing in front of the station as part of the large loop it will fly over the next day before beginning its final close approach early Friday morning.

All of the Dragon operations are being controlled by the SpaceX team at its headquarters in Hawthorne, California. The company’s mission control center is located on the factory floor in a glass enclosure allowing employees to watch the entire mission projected onto large screens.

SpaceX’s Couluris says he has been working with NASA on this mission for more than five years. “We’ve been simulating for almost three years,” he said.

During that time, both teams have rehearsed the mission numerous times. “We have conducted almost 20 joint simulations with NASA” Couluris said, “and over 40 simulations internally here at SpaceX over the four shifts of operators we have working.”

Simulations are a mainstay of the aerospace community with everybody from airline pilots to spacecraft operators developing, practicing and refining all aspects of a flight on computers before flying the real thing for the first time.

“We fly by the mantra of, ‘train like you fly and then fly like you train,’” Couluris said, describing the long hours spent rehearsing. A former naval aviator, Couluris added the mantra is working, “so far the mission has been proceeding just like a regular simulation.”

Both Couluris and NASA’s Ridings reiterated the flight-test nature of the mission, adding that many difficult tasks still lie ahead. And despite all of the rehearsals and simulations there is still plenty that can go wrong with the massively complex systems involved, something SpaceX discovered after a small valve forced an abort of the first launch attempt as the rocket engines ignited on the launch pad.

Coverage of the next series of maneuvers will begin broadcast on our Open Space page beginning at 11 p.m. PDT today.

The crew aboard the ISS watches the launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket Tuesday morning. Photo: NASA

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik wondered if there’s a “sweet spot” for retro-nostalgia. He calls it the Golden Forty Year Rule: whatever was popular around the time you were born is what you’ll end up mimicking later in life. Gopnik’s rule holds up for a ton of cultural phenomena, including Mad Men, Fleet Foxes, and this ridiculous hair salon by Slovenian architects Kitsch Nitsch.

The architects, who self-identify as “aspiring commercial sluts,” were asked by a Slovenian salon chain to design the interior of their newest shop, Young Mič Styling (or YMS), which targets a younger clientele. Kitsch Nitsch responded by skewing really young–like, back to the time when the intended customers were still in diapers.

“We believe design is taken too seriously, life is taken too seriously and styling is not taken seriously enough,” say the designers, who have crafted the space into a veritable encyclopedia of 80s visual ephemera. Every surface is covered in a different pattern, collapsing space into an Atari-esque flatness. Some of these patterns look like MTV’s old logo, some look like David Hockney paintings, and still others are reminiscent of the sassy model decals you still find in older nail salons. Custom-fabricated mirrors seem referential to a lost era of clip art, where squiggles and zig-zags were it. Pastel supergraphics and furniture that only Charles Moore could love round out the space, which ultimately ends up looking like a three-dimensional GIF.

Speaking as a child of the ’80s, Kitsch Nitsch succeeds in doing a pretty dead-on caricature of the era. I can’t look at these images without feeling déjà vu. And true to their generation, the duo have this to add about their work: “We dabble in recent retro, which is still a hell of a lot better than the present. And we are genuinely afraid of the future.”

Thanks to Jason Falls, I just read this post about how many marketing agencies are closing down their blogs and tweeting and Facebooking instead.

“Nobody reads agency blogs, and there are so many out there it’s impossible for people to keep up anyway,” said Sam Weston, director of communications at digital agency Huge.

Nobody Reads ANY Blogs- If They’re Boring

I’ll tell you without even having to look why nobody reads a blog: because it’s boring. Because it’s poorly written. Because it’s utterly self-referential.

Nobody has time to read junk. Why would you? There’s so much great material out there.

What Should An Agency (or YOU!) Blog About?

An agency should blog about the space it serves, in some regards, but along with that, an agency (and YOU!!!!) should blog about those things you’re passionate about. My dad is passionate about poker. My mom is passionate about proving you can do it if you try. I’m passionate about keeping “human” in the digital business channel.

Write about passion, but write it in service to others.

If you did only this, you’d get more attention, more readers, more connections via your blog. What people want is to feel lit up, to feel like you and they are on the same page, like they can run with what you’ve shared, or they can add to it, or they can bask in it and feel it.

Mom blogs are so successful because there are billions of moms (actual number) who can commiserate when their kid will only eat beige and orange foods. Tech blogs are successful because nerds and aspiring nerds always want more ideas and information and new shiny things to touch and/or covet. The blogs that stay lit up, people like Mitch and Julien and Chris and C.C. and others, are based on working from a core of passion.

Keep At It

It took me 8 years to get my first 100 readers. I have several friends in this space who remember me from the way old days, even if their “way old days” starts back about halfway into that (around say, 2005). They saw me transition from someone writing about myself to someone writing ideas that would equip people around me to be successful. That was the nugget. That’s when things started taking off. That’s when I realized that I could write almost every day and have something to say, because people are always noodling over some part of the problem.

You want 5 quick things to make your blogging better?

1. Brevity. Cut posts to sub-500 words.
2. Structure. Write something others can USE.
3. Simplicity. Big words are pretty. Help people understand the point, instead.
4. Positivity. Writing angrily only works if you want to attract angry people.
5. Outward-facing. Write more about others than you ever do about yourself.

If you did just those five things, I bet your blogging results would improve after a few months. This isn’t how to get seen. How to get seen requires another whole other set of skills.

Want to learn more about blogging? Here’s a whole huge best advice about blogging post for you.

Stay writing. Don’t abandon your blogs. Get better at it. This kind of media can change your world, if you work to change the worlds of others.