friday lost and found: the coming classico edition
By: David Connell
Tags: Nike, Email, Nonprofit, Soccer, Technology

(A quick Editor’s Note: This column used to be called “Hot Friday Link Action.” The title was meant to be a cheeky dig at blog headlines that are all tricked out for SEO. I’ve changed the name to “Friday Lost and Found,” because frankly I think it sounds cooler and less douche-y. Also, I think most people weren’t getting the joke and just thought I was lame. So, from here on out we have “Friday Lost and Found.”)

Just in time for Gold Cup, we start today with a cool collaboration between soccer-t-shirts-for-hipsters clothier Bumpy Pitch and Nike on a set of US and Mexico rivalry t-shirts. The shirts take the design of the current US National team jersey and — for the US — add in some Mexico-digging elements, like an Eagle crushing an El Tri pendant and squeezing a prickly pear. The Mexican version comes in black with green detailing and shows a pink Eagle (there’s a reason its pink, but you need to read the post) ripping apart a US crest and eating the Don’t Tread on Me snake. Since the tea-baggers have co-opted the DOTM logo, I don’t mind that last bit at all.

Speaking of the hoped-for US v Mexico Gold Cup final, five Mexican players, including starting Guillermo Ochoa and defender Francisco Rodriguez, have been suspended from the Cup for doping. Unfortunately Chicharito was not one of them.

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Facebook just acquired some serious design chops, buying design firm Sofa. Sofa will be familiar to most Mac users as the designers of icons for AppZapper, Transmission, Awaken, Coverflow and others. They’ve also done icon design for Nike, Mozilla and Tom Tom and created apps for Mac including Kaleidoscope and Versions. It’s unclear what the Sofa team will be charged with at Facebook, but they are moving from Amsterdam to Palo Alto. What is clear is that Facebook may be getting a lot prettier in the coming months and years.

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Posterous has just rolled out an API opening the platform to third party developers. The new API will “allow developers and others to build upon the Posterous platform, including the ability to create users and sites on one’s own domain.” What I really love about this is that Posterous has chosen a non-profit partner, Oxfam, to be the first showcase user of the API. Oxfam will be hosting a network of Posterous blogs as part of their new Grow campaign — a campaign aimed at raising awareness around food shortages around the world.

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TEDxMidAtlantic, or as I like to call it, “TED for the hopelessly uncool and unhip,” has been scheduled for October 29 in Washington, DC. MidAtlantic is one of the more developed TEDx events out there and the 2010 version pulled in some pretty heavy hitter. The conference moves to DC from backwater Baltimore this year, so I’m sure it will be even better.

Speaking of TED, Chris Anderson has had enough of emails and he’s crowd-sourcing an email charter to help fix it. Do you have a particular email annoyance? Let Chris know.

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Finally today, Steve Jobs is really taking this whole James Bond villain persona a bit too far. The Apple head showed up at a Cupertino City Council meeting the other day to pitch plans for a new Apple campus that literally looks like a damn spaceship landed in the middle of Silicon Valley. The ringed campus literally doesn’t include a single piece of straight glass. Plans include a central courtyard, 6,000 trees and a site specific natural gas power plant. Apple will only use energy from the California grid for backup and to power their giant laser.

(Image from The Original Winger.)