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Filed under: Etc., Europe, Marketing/Advertising, Videos, Work

Sweden’s Flygbussarna Airport Coaches asked Acne Advertising to make the case for travelers to take a coach to the airport instead of a car. Instead of leading with price, comfort, or ease, Acne went for hot air and green – as in CO2 and the environment.

To vividly illustrate that one Flyggbussarna coach can hold about 50 people – as opposed to the typical Swedish passenger car, which averages 1.2 occupants – while emitting the pollution of just four passenger cars, Acne built a coach out of fifty crushed cars – primarily expired Volvos and Saabs.

The installation was placed next to the road to Sweden’s largest airport, and what ensued was lots of public awareness. And traffic jams. Which would have increased CO2, ironically. Follow the jump for a video on the campaign. Even if the resultant congestion made the earth a bit warmer, it’s still very cool.

[Source: Acne Advertising]

Continue reading Video: Sweden’s Acme Advertising creates arresting green motorcoach marketing

Video: Sweden’s Acme Advertising creates arresting green motorcoach marketing originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yet another sign that the housing recovery won’t be V-shaped (and might even be double-dipping) comes to us courtesy of the National Association of Home Builders.

The reading of 15 in January is below the 16 in December and 17 in November. This isn’t particularly surprising. Considering the monster housing hangover, it stands to reason that even if things come back a bit, it will be a long, long time before it trickles into steady business for the homebuilders.

The following chart comes from Calculated Risk, which notes:

The housing market index (HMI) was at 15 in January. This is a decrease from 16 in December and 17 in November

The record low was 8 set in January. This is still very low – and this is what I’ve expected – a long period of builder depression. The HMI has been in the 15 to 19 range since May.

Note: any number under 50 indicates that more builders view sales conditions as poor than good.

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See Also:

• The Evidence Piles Up That Housing Is Double Dipping
• Zillow Still Attracts Advertisers Despite The Tough Housing Market
• David Rosenberg: "Uh-Oh" It’s A Double Dip In Housing

John Coleman was on the BBC Digital Planet program a couple of weeks ago, discussing a recently-awarded grant from the (British/American/Canadian) “Digging into Data” challenge.  The proposal was submitted under the title “Mining a Year of Speech”, and also involves the British Library Sound Archive, and some researchers at Penn, including Jiahong Yuan, Chris Cieri, and me.  An Oxford University press release is here.

Last week, John was in Philadelphia, discussing plans for who’ll do what when.  On the U.K. side, the primary goal is to index the audio of the spoken part of the British National Corpus. On the U.S. side, we’ll be indexing a variety of other spoken materials, and working with our British partners on issues of pronunciation modeling across dialects, integration of diverse metadata from different sources, and approaches to web-based search and retrieval for various types of researchers.

One of the things that I learned during John’s visit is that during his time at Bell Labs, before he took the job at Oxford, he occupied the office that I had used during my last few years there. And as it happens, one of the other awards in the Digging into Data challenge was to a group involving Mats Rooth at Cornell — and Mats, I believe, occupied the same office during the interval between John’s time there and mine.

For an example of what can be done with this sort of text/audio alignment, take a look at the presentation on the oyez.org website of U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments (e.g. this one).  The techniques we’ll be using on the Digging into Data project were developed (mainly by Jiahong Yuan) for the SCOTUS application, under an NSF grant that just ended this past year.

Bruce V. Bigelow wrote:

San Diego’s Michael Robertson, who founded several startups since he sold MP3.com in 1997, offered some observations about online music providers and other aspects of the digital music business when we talked in late November. Today he offers more insights in a post for TechCrunch that explains why Lala, the Palo Alto, CA, digital music startup acquired by Apple last month, is crucial to Steve Jobs’s emerging music-in-the cloud strategy.

Robertson told me he’s pessimistic about streaming music providers like Pandora and Slacker, saying their likelihood for survival is inversely related to how much venture funding they have raised. He said that’s because “selling music is like selling gravel; it’s a commodity” and they have no way of making money. (Slacker, based in San Diego, has raised close to $70 million.)

Michael Robertson

Robertson, who founded San Diego-based MP3tunes in 2005 to enable users to store their digital music collections in the cloud, views cloud-based storage as a much more viable business model.

And, as Greg reported earlier this month, Apple’s recent Lala acquisition raises fresh challenges for competitors like Seattle-based Melodeo, a cloud-based music startup. Now Melodeo is rushing to provide the next iteration of its own technology (which it announced last week) that will let people put their iTunes collection into their own “private cloud” that can be accessed from their smartphone or Web-connected device.

None of Apple’s cloud-based music plan comes as a surprise to competitors like Melodeo. Reached by e-mail this morning, Melodeo’s vice president of business development, Dave Dederer, said, “This is the product we already have working in private beta and are prepping for commercial launch this quarter… Ours has the advantage of breaking Apple’s product vertical/ stranglehold. We can build ours to work with Apple devices but we’ll be focusing on Android and the rest of the market first.”

(Xconomy Seattle Editor Greg Huang contributed to this post.)

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Is it ironic that this $10,000 computer only sold 10,000 units? Released on January 19, 1983, LISA (Local Integrated Software Architecture) was a gigantic flop, but paved the way for the success of the Apple Macintosh, which paved the way for the success of the MacBook, which paved the way for the success of the iPhone, which paved the way for the success of the Apple Tablet!

Thanks Wired, for the reminder!

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In the intricacies of high-level European diplomacy, there’s two things Paris and Berlin can agree on: Conan is better, and you’d better not be using Internet Explorer. A French government agency is now advising citizens of the French Republic not to use Internet Explorer because of security concerns. It’s 2010, and we’re still writing “IE isn’t secure!” stories. Amazing.

The French agency, Certa, has warned against using all versions of Internet Explorer, noting that, even if you activate the highest level of security in the latest version of IE, you’re still at risk from some of the Web’s nastier elements.

Both Certa and Germany’s Federal Office of Information Security didn’t say what other browsers to use in lieu of IE, but you can safely assume they mean the usual suspects: Firefox, Chrome, and Opera. (See, Opera fans, we mentioned your favorite browser!)

But for all the security precautions you could take, the best safeguard against contracting an Internet disease is common sense. Don’t download shady files from 0daycoolwarez.tk, don’t click ads that say “HOT GURLZ IN [TOWN NEARBY] 4 U~!”

Seriously, common sense is worth its weight in gold, which clocked in at $1,647 per ounce yesterday.

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I could really write this post in all of about eleven words, and it would still have the same effect. It’d go something like this “Apple, leak, new iPhone OS, screenshots, multitasking, banshees, multi-touch gestures”. However, I’m from the Internet, and we’re paid by the word* around these parts.

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by Jay Inslee

Copenhagen may not have been a giant leap for mankind, but it was a step forward.

So as the Congress returns to work this year, its post-Copenhagen duty remains the same as its pre-Copenhagen responsibility:  to pass an energy bill that both jump-starts the United States’ economy and screws down the nation’s carbon pollution. There are two obvious reasons we must pass energy legislation, one pertaining to our self-interest, and the other to the world’s.

First, our economic self-interest demands action on energy, independent of any international framework on carbon reduction.  Job creation in clean energy remains job No. 1 for this country. Those jobs will not magically spring into existence; they will be created only if the United States Congress passes bold energy legislation. 

Did China abandon its plans for a massive buildup of clean energy technologies for lack of a treaty coming out of Copenhagen? Did it cancel its plans to build 30 gigawatts of wind energy in the next decade? Did it shut down its electric-car manufacturing plants in Tianjin? Did it shutter its efficient lighting research in Hong Kong? Did it reduce its development budget for lithium-ion batteries to power electric cars? Of course it didn’t.

Just three weeks after the world failed to reach a binding agreement in Copenhagen, China announced its intentions to build the world’s largest solar-powered electrical generating facility in western China, a plant capable of powering 3 million homes using a vast array of photovoltaic cells. The juggernaut of Chinese investment in these clean energy technologies rolled along without Copenhagen even being a speed bump. China continues to invest $12.6 million an hour in an effort to create whole new clean energy industries.

Why would a country continue on this path in the absence of a treaty out of Copenhagen? The answer does not lie in some noble and selfless Chinese effort to bail the world out of its predicament as recompense for China’s less than stellar performance at Copenhagen. The answer lies in China’s smart, insightful, and visionary recognition that there will be billions of dollars and millions of jobs to be had in the next several decades in the new clean energy economy. 

The Chinese recognize that the nation that gets a jump start in these fields will have the “first mover” advantage and that it will be difficult for the second players to catch up. The Chinese want to be first, biggest, and most globally competitive from the get-go. The Chinese recognize that the absence of a binding treaty doesn’t belie the fundamental economic facts; if you don’t move on clean energy now, you will be left at the starting gate, with a 20th century economy in a 21st century world.

Our national economic self-interest was the same both before and after Copenhagen. It is in our country’s best interest to lead the world in technological innovation, as it always has. The outcome at Copenhagen should not blind us to both the economic opportunity of action and the economic threat of inaction on the energy front.

We are fully capable of building a new domestic clean energy economy, something I learned while co-authoring Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy. The number of businesses in this country ready to take off in clean energy ought to give everyone confidence.

We should also recognize what really happened in Denmark. For the first time, the United States, long the world’s leading emitter, engaged with the rest of the world on climate. For the first time, other major emitters publicly declared their intentions to cut either their emissions or their energy intensity. For the first time, the developed and developing world had an honest discussion about mitigation.  We now can explore new approaches in bilateral agreements, or within assemblages of developing countries that now represent the bulk of the emissions.

All of us ought to hope the Senate is able to move forward and do the work necessary to forge a clean energy bill this year. I understand it is difficult. I know the Senate may be weary after dealing with health-care legislation. But the emerging clarity of the economic opportunities before us, and the urgent need for action on climate change, do not permit delay.

Given the terrifying new evidence of the increasing rates of climate change and ocean acidification, the question before us is the same one that melancholy Dane asked in Elsinore Castle years back, just a few miles from Copenhagen. As Hamlet said, the question is, “… to be or not to be.”

Only this time, it is all of us in deep trouble, not just an indecisive Danish prince.

Related Links:

An argument against Murkowski’s radical attempt to overrule EPA scientists

Copenhagen Accord is the priority, says U.S. climate envoy. But what about a binding treaty?

Who will make the first move toward a clean energy future?

When Ria Pell opened Sauced restaurant recently, she decided to gamble on a now-unusual business practice: the restaurant will not accept credit cards.

Pell has installed an ATM on the premises so that guests who find themselves stuck without enough green stuff after dinner can withdraw the needed cash.

“It’s an interesting way not to have Visa suck you dry,” Pell told me of her decision. By not having to pay credit card processing fees, Pell says she can pass the savings on to customers and keep her prices lower.

She got the idea when she was visiting restaurants in New York and noticed that the practice was becoming more commonplace there.

Here in Atlanta you might find cash-only policies at breakfast spots, such as Thumbs Up Diner. But most customers have the $10 in their wallets to front a breakfast tab. As far as I know, there aren’t any other places that serve full dinners and refuse to take plastic.

Pell says the policy is an experiment for now and will change it …

It’s no secret that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is interested in scooping up more startups in order to bring their talent on board. From Firefox creator Blake Ross’s Parakey (acquired in 2007) through Gmail creator Paul Buchheit’s FriendFeed (acquired in 2009), Facebook has made some very high-profile talent acquisitions already.

This Fall, Zuckerberg got early access to his old friend Adam D’Angelo’s new question and answer site Quora and used it to ask: “What startups would be good talent acquisitions for Facebook?”

Sponsor

Other users of the site offered suggestions and people voted on those submitted company names. Quora is a tiny new site chock-full of Silicon Valley stars – guess which company was voted the best acquisition target?

The winner? Apture.com, the provider of rich multi-media embedded pop-up windows for newspapers and blogs. Founder Tristan Harris is a former Apple engineer who built the first ad server for Wikia, the for-profit arm of Wikipedia, before launching Apture 3 years ago. We’ve given the product a positive review.

The next most popular suggestion? Austin, Texas location based social networking service Gowalla. Gowalla is run by CEO Josh Williams, who previously built and sold small business invoicing service Blinksale.

Those sound like good suggestions and both got votes from other Facebook team members on Quora. Remember, this isn’t about what technologies should be integrated directly into Facebook – FriendFeed has become little more than an occasional test bed for Facebook feed developments. The question is about scooping up teams of red-hot developers.

Other suggestions offered include Dodgeball co-founder Dennis Crowley’s new location based social network Foursquare (it’s only a matter of time until Facebook starts doing location check-ins, right?) and social question answering service Hunch, built by Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake and engineering whiz Chris Dixon.

Who do you think would make a good talent acquisition for Facebook? Mark Zuckerberg wants to know.

Discuss

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Not to be outdone by all of that iPhone tomfoolery cluttering up the rumor mills, Windows Mobile kicked up some dust today with a few juicy bits of leak/rumor info of its own. We’ve got Windows Mobile 7, we’ve got Project Pink (remember that one?) and we’ve got flagship devices from HTC and LG. Wowsers.

First up is word that WinMo 7 is going to be a major overhaul that looks, feels, and acts very little like the Windows Mobiles of today and yesteryear. While contradictory information is flying around – as it should be in the rumor mill – best I can tell it looks like WM 7 will come in two distinct flavors, neither of which will run very many legacy WinMo apps. I’m not sure how I feel about that last bit, nor how thousands of WM 6 owners will feel if their current software libraries in fact won’t run on the new OS, but such is life in the techno fast lane.

According to various sources, tipsters and NinjaConnects (or whatever the kids call them these days), WM 7 will be made available in “Media” and “Business” editions. As John Biggs put it, “Microsoft is about to get all Apple up in this piece,” with WM 7, and I’m guessing that means the Media version, which will look, feel and act like a Zune HD with some phone stuff thrown in there for good measure. The Business version will be super stripped down – that is, sanded and primed and ready for HTC Sense and other OEM customizations to be applied. 

WMExperts – by way of Engadget – have gotten all wacky and specific in taking going beyond the dual-platform rumors into hardware specifics. Specifically (see what I did there?), they’re saying that the Biz Edition will require higher baseline-specs while Media Edition will focus on HD media and networked services integration like Xbox Live and those social sites everyone from John Mayer to Gilbert Arenas can’t shut up about. To wit, WMExperts published some specs for two mythological – I mean, rumored – WM 7 Media Edition devices:

LG Apollo

• GSM/EV-DO/HSDPA world phone
• 1.3 GHz Qualcomm processor
• 3.8″, 1280 x 720 WXGA (HD) AMOLED display
• 10 MP camera with 720p HD video capture

Then there’s Project Pink, the Zune Phone/Sidekick thingy that I’d all but forgotten about in the past nine months. According to some analyst quoted on some Walt Mossberg-blessed blog, Microsoft is gearing up to pull a Google and launch their own mobile phone as soon as MWC or CTIA of this year. MWC is in, what, four weeks? That’s soon! Said analyst said the Microsoft Phone will be … wait for it … “Zune-like,” and feature a 5MP camera, 720p HD video capabilities, and support for subscription-based music services. Kind of like, you know, every other mid-to-high end phone out there.  Well, like everything except iPhone 3GS and its decidedly SD imaging features.

Hey, wait, did you just notice what I just noticed? Windows Mobile Seven Media Edition and Project Pink sound kinda the same? And the “Microsoft Phone” and the HTC Obsession sound kinda the same, too! So either one is the other and the other is the one, or MIcrosoft’s gearing up to confuse the bejeezus out of everybody by releasing two new versions of WM 7 and a Zune Phone, with two of those three flavors tasting an awful lot alike.

Hmm … A totally revamped Windows Mobile 7 sounds like a good thing. A consumer-friendly, media-centric version of WM 7 alongside of a business-centric version made to be skinned by non-MSFT phone makers also sounds like a good thing. But that business about legacy WinMo apps not being compatible with the new platform sounds like a very, very bad thing. For as much as I’m not really a Windows Mobile fan (I see you nodding your head, saying, “No kidding, Noah”) I am a fan of competition and consumer choice amongst high-quality offerings in the mobile marketplace. 

And so I leave you with a few more quoted words, again from Mr. Biggs, which I really hope don’t wind up ringing true:

As for developers, they’re kind of pissed. As far as we can tell they’re not quite sure they want to take the steps necessary to move over to the new platform. This is a Hail Mary pass and could mean huge changes in the WinMo ecosystem.

Ruh-roh. Say it ain’t so, Steve Ballmer. Without developers in tow, you’ve got nothing. And as awesome as Zune kinda sorta really is, ditching the enterprise for a full-on consumer media WinMo play would be risky business. 

[Via: MobileCrunch, All Things D, Engadget]

Filed under: Other Events, Apple Financial, One More Thing

The news that Apple is going to announce something on January 27th has the stock market in a tizzy. At one point this morning, Apple shares were up to $214.16, up $8.23 or about 4.0%.

Apple set a 52-week high with a share price of $215.59 on January 5, 2010, up 275.6% over the 52-week low set on January 20, 2009.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, by comparison, was up only .95% shortly after 1 PM ET today, and the NASDAQ index was up about 1.17%.

It should be noted that Apple share prices traditionally fall after an announcement, but it will be fascinating to see if AAPL is able to hit a new high prior to the January 27th event.

[via MacDailyNews]

TUAWApple shares jump on news of Jan. 27 event originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A few years back, we found out that the FBI regularly violated the Patriot Act, issuing “National Security Letters” to access information that they had no right to access. So it should come as no surprise that during that same period, the FBI was also regularly violating the law to get phone call records without following the proper procedures, even beyond the problem with the NSLs. In fact, it appears the FBI may have violated the law in about half of all of these cases. Basically, it sounds like the FBI just went to phone companies, said the magic word (“terrorism!!”) and the phone companies just handed over records — even without using NSLs, but instead using an “exigent circumstances letter,” which could be used even more easily than an NSL, but which required an NSL to follow it up eventually. The FBI is now basically admitting to screwing up and that using these “ECLs” without followup NSLs almost certainly violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The FBI’s excuse? They’re claiming that the process was “good-hearted but not well-thought-out.” Doesn’t that make you feel better?

The story heads into Keystone Kops territory, as some in the FBI pushed for actually following up the ECLs with real NSLs, but the FBI was pretty slow. Eventually, someone signed a “blanket NSL” supposedly to cover all of the previous ECLs that never had a followup NSL — except the guy who signed the blanket NSL later claimed that he couldn’t recall ever signing anything, and insisted that NSLs should be for specific cases only. Oops.

Of course, lost in all of the attention over the FBI’s process is the rather serious unanswered question of why the telcos didn’t seem to push back when handed a bogus demand to hand over records that did not match the official process and violated the law. Shouldn’t the telcos have some responsibility for actually making sure that a random FBI agent yelling “terrorism” has some sort of official basis to get information out of the them?

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For the past several months, talk has been heating up about the imminent creation of a bipartisan debt commission, seeking to reduce the deficit and national debt. Pretty much everyone is in agreement that Washington’s tab is like a runaway train. But almost everyone with any sense also agrees that trying to force that train a sudden, grinding halt right now would throw the economy into chaos. But some concrete plans of how to tackle the problem once the economy can handle it would be nice, and that’s why a debt commission sounds like a pretty good idea. But several challenges lie ahead.

The first is fundamental: who should create it? The Obama administration is ready to do so with an executive order. But some fiscal responsibility advocates in Congress don’t think that’s such a good idea. The Wall Street Journal’s Real Time Economics blog reports that a group, including Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH), is urging the President not to go the executive order route. RTE explains the worry:

The commission is expected to be the centerpiece of a fiscal 2011 budget blueprint, out Feb. 1, that will be swimming in red ink. Voinovich, along with more than a dozen other senators, wants to create the commission with legislation, not the stroke of a presidential pen. That way, the commission’s mandate would have the force of law, and that mandate can force an up-or-down vote on the commission’s recommendations in Congress. An executive order cannot force a vote, and therefore, the senator believes, will be toothless.

I think that’s right. There are a few ways to make this commission worthless. One way would be for it to be seen as having no Congressional authority. Why does President Obama want to go this route? If giving him the benefit of the doubt that he actually wants an effective commission, then the reason must be that an executive order is the only thing that he feels will work.

The article goes on to say that the White House believes Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi, David Obey and Charles Rangel will fight such a commission, because they won’t want their power watered down. After all, such a commission might actually (gasp!) force them to spend responsibly. Naturally, without a commission, they would exert little effort in striving to reduce the deficit.

And I don’t mean to single out the Democrats: the Republicans aren’t any better on the deficit front. They’ve developed deficit reduction as a major platform position — recently. You might remember that the Republican-controlled Congress under George W. Bush squandered the Clinton budget surpluses through tax cuts. They could have used that money to pay down the debt, but declined to do so. Then the U.S. became embroiled in a war in the Middle East and even more was spent, with less tax revenue to pay for it. That was all before the Great Recession added even more to Congress’s tab.

The problem is that Congress is a subprime borrower. They don’t make enough money (tax revenue) to pay for their spending, but continue to incur additional debt nonetheless. Unfortunately, the bankruptcy code for sovereigns isn’t quite as forgiving as it is for Americans.

I don’t mean to be melodramatic. The U.S. isn’t going bankrupt anytime soon, or probably ever. But the current path is unsustainable. Congress needs to see this unmistakable reality, authorize a debt commission and give it broad powers.

That commission should focus on a debt reduction plan that utilizes economic triggers. It should institute a mix of spending cuts and tax increases once the economy has certain characteristics. For example, it could say something like, “Once unemployment declines to 7 percent, increase taxes by x amount on y band of the population. At that time, also decrease all federal budgets by z percent.” When unemployment hits 6 percent, another trigger can hit, with more drastic debt reduction tactics. And by the way, the commission needs to figure out a way to prevent future Congresses from undoing its work here.

Instead, as Derek noted about a month ago, the commission is likely to take the opposite form: there’s talk that it would require a supermajority to pass the commission’s guidelines. Of course, getting those votes is a completely unreasonable expectation. So the commission’s findings and plans would probably end up collecting dust in the Congressional archives and would largely be ignored. So this is the sort of a constraint that would render a commission essentially useless.

Congress needs to show a little restraint when it comes to its usual love of spending and tax breaks and establish a commission that will produce a real, tangible plan to reduce the nation’s debt burden. If it doesn’t, then eventually its creditors will choose to stop providing the country with any more debt and will force its hand anyway. And that will be a very, very bad day.

Gregory T. Huang wrote:

Beaverton, OR-based Avnera, which makes chips for wireless audio and other consumer electronics applications, announced today it has closed a $10 million Series D financing. The money was raised from new investor Onkyo, as well as existing investors. This is part of the same funding round we reported on in November, when the company had raised $8 million of the $10 million equity offering. Avnera was founded in 2004, and has now raised a total of $52 million in four rounds of financing from Altien Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Best Buy Capital, DAG Ventures, Intel Capital, JAFCO Ventures, Onkyo Corporation, Panasonic Venture Group, Polycom Corporation, and Redpoint Ventures.

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Michigan Breast Augmentation – Whenever I think back to the silicone gel-filled breast implant scare of the early nineties, it reminds me of a cartoon showing a woman with a tiny chest and bare-but-bell-bottomed legs glaring at a scientist, implying that the filler from her implants had not only leaked but filtered down through her body to slosh around her ankles. Of course, silicone gel is more likely to remain in the shell or the implant pocket. In fact it may be difficult even to detect a leak in a silicone implant without an ultrasound or MRI scan.

A lot has been learned over the almost two decades since the FDA withdrew its approval of silicone breast implants (which approval was restored in 2006; silicone breast implants are currently available for augmentation in women 22 years and older). So many of the facts about breast implants are only applicable on a personal basis, based on the physiology of the individual patient, which makes your doctor consultation so important. Dr. Bazzi is a board certified Michigan plastic surgeon who can provide you the personalized information you need.

On Tuesday, Iconix Brand Group, Inc. announced that it has renewed its exclusive partnership with pop tart Britney Spears as the face of its Candie’s brand, which is available only at Kohl’s Department Stores and Kohls.com. Spears will appear in the Candie’s only at Kohl’s ad campaigns throughout 2010.

“I had a great experience working with Candie’s and Kohl’s last year and I am thrilled to be asked to sign on again for a second year,” Britney said in a statement. “We’re planning some very cool photo shoots and I can’t wait for my fans to see them.”

Photos of Brit’s Spring/Summer Candie’s campaign are expected in the coming months.

“We had such a successful year with Britney in 2009 that we wanted to keep the momentum going and offer our Candie’s customers new, exciting campaigns with Britney in 2010,” Dari Marder, Iconix chief marketing officer, said in a statement Tuesday. “Britney has been a great partner, truly embracing the brand, and we know her fans worldwide will love what we have coming next.”