New Legos Inspired by Arts & Crafts

With a little help from Japanese home goods company Muji, Lego is introducing an innovative new line of craft-inspired toys. Sets include some bricks pieces from Lego and some colored paper sheets and stencils from Muji. A special hole punch then lets fit your pieces together and build.

Looking to the world of arts and crafts for inspiration seems like a "back-to-basics" move by Lego, and is an example of companies extending themselves backwards to capitalize on the world of products they first leveraged. I think these basketball hoops and pitching machines from EA Sports fall into the same category.

(via PSFK)

How Rock Band Almost Got Rocked

Coincidental timing that I'm stumbling upon this article the morning after I spent a long night listening to my upstairs neighbors bang out John Bonham-like solos on a Rock Bank drum kit. It's another example of how valuable it is to watch actual consumers interact with your product, even if that means hours of studying karaoke!

And never mind the bags under my eyes, I'm glad the boys from Harmonix stuck it out.

Anything but a Stock Quote: Pro Videogamer

"I’m sleeping in my business partner’s guesthouse right now. It’s the same way with the big rock ’n’ roll stars. You think it’s all glitz and glamour, but it’s a lot of time on the road, away from your family, sleeping in strange places. It’s fun for now, but it’s also a lot of work. But, nobody can say videogames are a waste of time anymore. I’m living proof of that."

~JOHNATHAN WENDEL, A.K.A. “FATAL1TY,”
The top professional videogame player in the West and the first to be considered full-time

Source: Video-gaming Strives for Respect. Is It a Sport? Definitely worth a read.