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~ posted by Kassia St Clair, December 20th 2011

Remember the last time you shopped online? You may not, but your computer does. Some shops use the information about what you looked at on one site to generate banner advertisements on the homepages of other sites. I was looking for a potato ricer. The John Lewis site showed they had two types: Kitchen Craft and OXO Good Grips. I phoned up, reserved the first of these two and went to the shop to buy it. After that, each time I clicked on the Guardian homepage I saw an ad for the Kitchen Craft potato ricer. This week, after looking at a pair of All Saints boots, I keep seeing the same boots appear on sites I visit. The ad also shows me three or four pairs of boots that are very similar to the ones I looked at.
 
This doesn't seem very smart. Online shops tend to display items in groups. You click on "boots", a display comes up for the entire collection, you scroll through the collection and when you find one that you might like, you click on that to get details and more pictures. When these banner ads on other sites show you similar boots to the ones you have looked at they are almost always (in my experience) showing you something that you have seen.
 
If companies are going to use software that remembers what people have looked at, then they should do something with the information that's more useful to the customer. Why keep showing us items we've decided against or perhaps even own? Better to show us coordinating or affiliated items. If we've looked at Xboxes, show us some Xbox games. If we've looked at high heels, show us a cocktail dress, some knock-out earrings or the perfect red lipstick. That would be helpful.

Kassia St Clair is editorial assistant at Intelligent Life

"What comes to your mind when you think of Meissen porcelain?" asked Christian Kurtzke, the young, charismatic CEO of the Meissen porcelain manufactory near Dresden. Addressing a group of journalists on the eve of the company's 300th anniversary celebrations, he swiftly answered his own question: prim cups and plates covered in a flowery blue pattern (ie, the Blue Onion design, also known as Zwiebelmuster or "Saxon design", which the company invented in 1739). When I asked my son, his reply was more direct: "Porcelain? For grandmothers."

The formula for the first European hard porcelain was founded in January 1708 by a team of chemists and mining experts headed by Johann Friedrich Böttger working for the King of Poland, who was also the Electoral Prince of Saxony. They were commanded to recreate what the Chinese had originated centuries before. The Meissen Porcelain Manufactory opened its doors on January 23rd 1710, and has since survived several wars, various owners, communism and financial crises. (The latest hasn't had too dramatic effect on Meissen's bottom line, Kurtzke insists, even though the export market to Russia collapsed by two thirds.)

Three centuries on, the state-owned Meissen factory employs 800 skilled workers-potters, designers, painters-and continues to mine its own kaolin, quartz and feldspar. The formulas for its porcelain and paints remain top secret. Meissen table services are sold in limited editions, and its figurines are still popular gifts (the pug is the big hit among British customers; Italians prefer the harlequins).  read more »

At a time when everyone is fretting over the health of Steve Jobs, the Onion has decided to train its attention on something lighter: a laptop with no keyboard.  As one chap says about this fascinating new product: “I’ll buy anything if it’s shiny and made by Apple.”

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

True Apple devotees may also consider this product from the Onion's online store.

Unveiling a new shopping Mecca in the weeks before Christmas should have been a savvy move. But the timing now seems boldly inauspicious. And then there's the location.

Steptoe and Son’s famous junkyard was in the delicious but fictional Oil Drum Lane, Shepherd’s Bush. But who really lives in Shepherd’s Bush, London W12 now? Or White City? Or their hinterlands? The answers will define the fate of Europe’s largest urban—as opposed to suburban—shopping centre, the Westfield London, which opened recently in a strange no-man’s-land, a former exhibition site between Shepherd’s Bush and White City. It’s a monster, several streets long and wide, clad in slimy lavatorial green tiles.

The social ecology of the catchment is varied, with masses of inner-city ethnicities—highly evolved and unpredictable. It isn’t remotely like the catchment of the similar-sized Bluewater centre in suburban Kent, which is much more homogeneous, broadly white, middle and lower-middle suburban-aspirational. Hyper-rich Holland Park and hyper-smart Notting Hill lie to the east and Shepherd’s Bush media-land to the west, in those roads of half-gentrified artisanal semis off the Goldhawk Road.  read more »