So. Cute. Adfunture has teamed up with quite the lineup: DITA Eyewear, Staple Design, Suitman, Revelator, Black Cross, GUE and Puma, to create this 100 piece limited edition series of YOKA SC Edition. The 10-inch tall vinyl figure will be put up for sale on June 12th, 2008. $100usd each, and only 100 pieces will be available. All sales will be donated to Red Cross Society of China. It's absolutely beautiful, and a gorgeous gesture on all of their parts to help with the tragedy in China... i particularly like the puma branding on his feet. More images on the next page...

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Tags: animals - charity - nature - toys

One of the most inspiring things is still nature, between all the jaw dropping art and design i see daily, sit me at the beach and i could watch the birds and ocean for ages... you know exactly what i mean (if not, go rent some Planet Earth in HD or something, and i feel very sad for you). Anyhow, that being said, and just to mix things up a little here to regain some perspective before we go back to traditional design content... a few weeks back when i was over at the Revl Industries showroom, i met Toni Gorog and learned about this interesting project she's working on in Indonesia and below are some images of the photography from the event as well:

June 2nd, the Revel Industries showroom in SF was hodge podge of Indonesian dangdut music, great Mondavi wines, margaritas by Angelita, and spicy Mexican snacks. The hip workspace/office—home of Headline Shirts, Gytha Mander, and Revl—was transformed into a classy photo gallery of pix by Erick Danzer featuring the faces of Indonesia and the biodiversity of the world's largest island archipelago. The benefit fundraiser was held to support the work of the non-profit Health In Harmony in rural Indonesia. HIH's mission is to improve both human and environmental health in West Kalimantan, one of the country's poorest provinces. Using health care discounts at their new medical clinic as an incentive, the 501(c)(3) works with communities around Gunung Palung National Park, a stronghold for one of the few remaining populations of orangutans, to protect the park from illegal logging. The NGO also offers local people ecologically-friendly work opportunities, such as organic farming and reforestation, to cover health care costs. See Health In Harmony for more information and keep your eyes open for future events at Revel to support Health In Harmony's medical/conservation program in Indonesia.

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Tags: animals - charity - green

Ripple (beta!) - interesting idea... web ads for charity? This Australian company has set it up so that you can run ads and the advertisers donate to the charity of your choice for each view. And the whole site is quite fresh, pretty, and oh so web 2.0 ~ nice concept though. Currently you can give 6 days access to clean water, help a village feed itself, give 2 days access to education, or finance a 100$ loan for a day.

Tags: charity - website

Over hyped, then under hyped, then over hyped... following the saga of the PS3 the last year has been a rollercoaster. BUT this grey drizzly weekend, gave in and got one for fun... second to flow (more gushing to come on that later) ~ Folding@Home from stanford is one of the sweetest reasons to love a ps3. This is a project "people from through out the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world" in order to help in the study of of protein folding and protein folding disease. But why is it even better with the PS3? "This advance utilizes the new Cell processor in Sony’s PLAYSTATION 3 (PS3) to achieve performance previously only possible on supercomputers. With this new technology (as well as new advances with GPUs), we will likely be able to attain performance on the 25 gigaflop scale per computer. With about 40,000 such machines, we would be able to achieve performance on the petaflop scale."

What has WOW-ed me even more than the project itself are the gorgeous visualizations of the world (which you can spin and zoom, resembling the world at night nasa image meets the wii weather channel) and molecules in various 3d views.

Regardless of whether you are running it on a computer or your ps3, feel free to join our Folding@Home team (NOTCOT, team number 59465 - enter this when registering) ~ pics, youtubes, and more below...

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Tags: charity - playstation 3 - technology - video - video game

Another CES highlight - getting to see the 100$ "One Laptop per Child" machine over at the AMD booth. We've been hearing about it for a while all over the internet, but to actually play with it, it was impressive to say the least... and i am a big believer in saving the future one laptop per kid at a time...

(excerpt from their faq) What is the $100 Laptop, really?
The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, with a dual-mode display—both a full-color, transmissive DVD mode, and a second display option that is black and white reflective and sunlight-readable at 3× the resolution. The laptop will have a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, with 500MB of Flash memory; it will not have a hard disk, but it will have four USB ports. The laptops will have wireless broadband that, among other things, allows them to work as a mesh network; each laptop will be able to talk to its nearest neighbors, creating an ad hoc, local area network. The laptops will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data.

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Tags: charity - gifts - laptop - shopping - technology

We show a lot of "luxury waters" here on notcot... mostly because they tend to have stunning packaging and/or logo design. So it's with great pleasure that i show you Charity Water - gorgeous design, and brilliant concept...

If you were ever to spend 20$ on a bottle of water, this is the one. Buy a case. Flavorpill and Scott Harrison ("a flavorpill friend and former NYC club promoter, now global promoter of greater good") are building sustainable sources of water in Africa, and we can all help. 100% of proceeds from Charity: Water go towards building wells and creating safe drinking water sources. Flavorpill is donating $2,000 needed to build a well, and they are looking to the rest of us to pitch in to help raise the other $2,000. (via coolhunting)

Tags: charity - drinks