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This person is my hero. Why shouldn’t you be excited about the Blackberry ‘torching’ the iPhone 4 in to oblivion? Here’s why:

• iOS is too colorful and works too well. Why do I need fancy graphics? I’m more old fashioned and like the bland and dull look of the new Blackberry OS 6.
• I hate the high resolution 960×640 of the iPhone 4. Everything is way too detailed. I don’t care if it looks like reading from a magazine, I hate magazines! I like the retro pixelized look on screens. The Torch’s screen is beautiful, like an old original GameBoy.
• Who needs fun and useful apps anyways? BlackBerry already has awesome apps installed such as “social networking feeds”. I like hearing about my friends vague wallposts and stalking my ex’s on FaceBook searching to see if they posted any new photos with cleavage. Also i’ll get Twitter alerts when my friend Roger eats too much taco bell and needs to use the toliet.
• I don’t like the fastness of the iPhone’s processor. Engadget’s hands on review of the Torch said when they tried loading up webpages, it froze for a few seconds. I like that feature. It will give me more time to think about how boring my life is posting something like this on the internet.
• The iPhone 4 is too thin and looks too elegant. I don’t want to look like a snob. The BlackBerry looks exactly like the Storm. We all know how awesome that phone looks!
• Why would anyone want a front facing camera and video chat? My friend recently had to be re-deployed a few weeks early and didn’t get a chance to pop the question to his girlfriend. He used FaceTime to propose to his girlfriend. Dumb.
• I like the innovative mostly plastic body of the Torch. Its magical. I was nervous about BlackBerry making a phone that feels expensive like the iPhone. Even though the phone will be $199, the phone looks like its worth about $50. If I get mugged standing next to an iPhone user, they will go for the iPhone. You save money by not needing to buy theft insurance for this!
• 2 words: BlackBerry Messenger. Come on, you all know everyone uses this. I personally don’t know anyone but thats perfect, I’ll just send messages to myself and pretend I have friends that use it.
• My only complaint about this is they are using webkit for their browser. I like the old days of surfing the internet on the BlackBerry. Webpages took forever to load, and many times half of the webpage wouldn’t load at all. It made me a better person by practicing patience. I am now able to go to the DMV, post office on a Monday and hold on the line to reach my bank’s customer service rep without my head exploding.

Credits: jp700p (macrumors member)

Are you lonely? Is your social anxiety playing a big part in your inability to meet people? Now meeting people is as easy as clicking a button at RentAFriend.com where you can view more than 200,000 profiles and pictures.

The usual mantra in big cities is that people find it really difficult to meet new people or they feel socially isolated from the world because of the coldness that seems to appear from the average city person.

In the Internet age, we are able to do everyone online from ordering motion pictures to reading a book to finding a date. So it came as no surprise that a new business has started where you are able to rent a friend.

A website entitled RentAFriend, which has been in operation for about six months, now gives you the opportunity to have friends for lunch, have a friend to accompany you to a gala or have a pal to invite over when you feel lonely by simply signing up to their website and viewing tens of thousands of people.

However, it does cost you about $10 per hour but the site states “almost all of them are willing to negotiate or even waive their fees depending on the activity you are planning with them.”

This rental service is available in the US and Canada and has more than 218,000 friends for rent. All one has to do in order to rent a friend is to enter your zip or postal code to find someone in your area and if you like their photo or profile then you can hire them.

From the author: “Keep it clean. This is about proving that this is America and, in America, we don’t back down when threatened. Showing the world that we’re not afraid to depict Muhammad is the point, not use it for your personal/political/religious message.”

http://www.drawmuhammadday.com

Update: As of May 31, 2010 the domain name is no longer registered and does not show any content.

The headline implies that there is a “body” whose anatomy you can analyze. The whole point of cool is that it does not have a body available for analysis. It’s like a ghost instead of a corpse. That’s why it is cool.

Just like all comments on cool, our analysis is completely individual and ever-changing. Cool is whatever you like and want. Cool is subjective. It is an opinion. But that does not mean that we — as individuals, brands, media — are not interested in or influenced by others’ views of what cool is.

In this sense cool is a bit like fashion. You decide and choose for yourself what you feel is fashionable within your peer group, your culture, your age group, at your financial level. But someone somewhere has given you the initial clue. Marketers and media have brought out the type of sneaker, the kind of jeans, the brand of handbag that you now like and want. In addition, someone you admire is most likely also wearing it. You follow fashion.

But cool is also definitely NOT like fashion. Cool is more about what the norm is NOT. Cool is elusive, indefinable, covetable. It is original, desirable, and not accessible to everybody. If everyone has it, if the brand becomes saturated, it stops being cool.

Occasionally, a brand manages to remain cool and covetable, and becomes a classic. Of the world-wide brands, examples of this include Apple, Absolut and Mini. Many niche brands have also achieved classic status in their relatively small circle. The defining characteristic of these cool classics is that they keep innovating constantly.

Visual & instant

Cool is visual and instant. When you see it, you like it instantly. If it takes a lot of work to figure out, it is not cool. This does not mean that only simple or simplified things or ideas can be cool. What it does mean is that you need to be able to see it.

This is one reason why cool and coolhunting and trend forecasting became so important to marketers as soon as the internet gave everyone instant access to images. Magazines, TV or advertisers could no longer control what cool looked like. Marketers who were used to being the ones who decided what the next trend or the next fashion was going to be, suddenly had to face this uncontrollable deluge of messages, opinions and information that consumers were passing on to each other. Viral marketing, as opposed to just word-of-mouth, emerged, and it scared traditional marketers.

Today’s consumers are sick of mass marketing and the sameness of brands. They want to be delighted, surprised and wowed by something that is authentic, different and off the mainstream. One of the reasons www.thecoolhunter.net has become so popular and influential is that we do not sell, market or create cool. We just give it an audience.

We process an enormous amount of information and identify what’s hot, exceptional, interesting, covetable. It must have an instantly obvious x-factor. Detecting it is always intuitive. There’s no formula, no rules, no parameters. We do find patterns, parallels and trends, but we do not become stuck in them and start looking for similar things. The intuitive reaction, the ability to observe the world, and the skill to process massive quantities of unrelated information is what we are good at.

All major media outlets follow us at thecoolhunter.net and fill their pages with ideas we feature. When we post a piece about an idea or a brand or a product, it gets an immediate global reaction from traditional media. Brands come to us for ideas and consultation. Individuals enjoy the fact that we prowl the world and bring original ideas to them. And as soon as we gained an audience, marketers, PR people and brands started to send us their material. So it’s an endless cycle.

Indefinable & in motion

We are not in the business of defining cool, although I am asked to do that every day. Cool cannot have a definition.

But we do run into brands who seem to live under the illusion that if someone just defined for them what cool is, then they would be able to become cool, too. Then they’d know how to create it, market it, promote it, make money from it.

To a limited, impermanent extent, this is, of course, possible. We are regularly asked to come up with cool ideas, cool events, cool promotions — and we do that — but at the core there must already be a cool product, idea, cause, concept. You cannot make something cool by promo. And, if by the sheer brilliance of a cool promotion, you do succeed in creating a publicity or even sales boost for a brand, that does not make the brand cool. Coolness needs to be earned again and again.

To me, the essence of cool is motion. To become and remain cool, a brand must keep innovating constantly. It must remain in constant motion. This same is true for those of us who hunt for it.

While I don’t worry about defining cool for anyone else, I am always fascinated by how the people who follow us define it for themselves. They are such a perfect example of the fact that NOBODY can define it and EVERYBODY can. Here’s a sampling of the responses we’ve received. It shows that the definition of cool is always individual.

Bill Tikos

Eleanor Roosevelt

Apple
It was the favorite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was three months late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn’t suggest a better name by 5 O’clock.

Cisco
It is not an acronym as popularly believed. It is short for San Francisco.

Compaq
This name was formed by using COMp for computer, and PAQ to denote a small integral object.

Corel
The name was derived from the founder’s name Dr. Michael Cowpland. It stands for COwpland REsearch Laboratory.

Google
The name started as a joke boasting about the amount of information the search-engine would be able to search. It was originally named ‘Googol’, a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. After founders- Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel investor, they received a cheque made out to ‘Google’.

Hewlett Packard (HP)
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.

Hotmail
Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in ‘mail’ and finally settled for hotmail as it included the letters “html” – the programming language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective uppercasing.

Intel
Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company ‘Moore Noyce’but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.

Lotus [Notes]
Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from ‘The Lotus Position’ or ‘Padmasana’. Kapoor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Microsoft
Coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the ‘-’ was removed later on.

Mercedes
This was actually the financier’s daughter’s name.

Motorola
Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company started manufacturing radios for cars. The popular radio company at the time was called Victrola.

Oracle
Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the CIA. The code name for the project was called Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system to give answers to all questions or something as such). The project was designed to help use the newly written SQL code by IBM. The project was eventually terminated but Larry and Bob decided to finish what they started and bring it to the world. They kept the name Oracle and created the DBMS engine. Later they kept the same name for the company.

Sony
It originated from the Latin word ‘sonus’ meaning sound, and ‘sonny’ a slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.

SUN
Founded by four Stanford University buddies, SUN is the acronym for Stanford University Network. Andreas Bechtolsheim built a microcomputer; Vinod Khosla recruited him and Scott McNealy to manufacture computers based on it, and Bill Joy to develop a UNIX-based OS for the computer.

Yahoo!
The word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human. Yahoo! Founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos.