Money. Death. Alexander McQueen. Some suicides. An economy.

Midway through 2009, we got word that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame would be be throwing a huge concert event to celebrate their 25th anniversary. They were understandably secretive about the artist list, so when we got the final bill, our jaws dropped. Stevie Wonder. Aretha Franklin. Simon & Garfunkel performing together. Metallica with Lou Reed and Ray Davies. U2 performing with Bruce Springsteen and Mick Jagger. Woah.

So we got on the ball and built a fitting site. It’s simple and smooth, but packs a lot of content into a small space. It features artist biographies, iTunes playlists hand-picked by the Rock Hall, merchandise, video, and unique artist pages. The show happened back in October, but much of the site is still up at rockhall25.com.

You may have heard of her – the singer/songwriter/dancer/humanitarian/superstar. It turns out when she’s not going platinum, she’s starting and contributing to foundations that hugely vastly enormously improve the lives of kids around the world. She’s pretty amazing, that Shakira. And it was time to have a website to match.

It’s so easy to buy TV media these days even a child can do it. My son Brian spent $2 on Google AdWords to promote his webseries Guitarings (a collaboration with Kyle Gass of Tenacious D) and, after picking his programming schedule and demographic mix, sure enough, on Monday night at 3:19am on Versus, his 30 second TV spot ran, nationally. Haha. Awesome.

Here’s the spot:

I wonder at what point clients are just going to set up an account with Google and make their own media buys?

And ok, so at 24 my son’s not exactly a “child.” But it made for a better opening line to this post.

You know that Red Bull makes an energy drink. You may even know that Red Bull puts on those wild events where people drive shit off a dock into water. BUT did you know that Red Bull invented it’s own sport (Red Bull Air Race) or a helicopter that can do a back flip? Has two Formula 1 teams? Hosts a Cliff Diving world series? Could definitely take your dad in a fight? Throws the biggest world wide break dance competition? Made downhill full contact ice hockey racing a real thing? Probably not.

That was the problem for Red Bull online: diffused presence, minimal cross-pollination of their awesome properties, poor search, and no clean way to show off and share their sickness. The truth is, Red Bull is everywhere, and they wanted to show everyone who has ever taken a sip of their magical beverage what they mean by “Red Bull Gives You Wings”.

We spent the last few months working with Red Bull and just launched the new Redbull.com! It’s pretty fabulous really. We took all their different properties across the globe, housed them within one awesome CMS, made the site content driven, and got out of the way of all the sick content that you really want to see. Oh yeah, and it’s built in HTML (unlike their previous sites that had heavy use of Flash) so it’s now search friendly and easily shareable and trackable. Bitchin, right?

Take a look at the homepage. It’s built to be modular and highlight the best of the best. It even has a feed that is sortable by media type.

As a result, my posts may be numerous, terse, nonsensical and/or random. Also, since I’m usually not using Tumblr itself to “reblog” content, items may not always properly attribute a source, but I’ll do my best to resolve that where it seems warranted. Otherwise it’s probably safe to assume that anything awesome or funny comes from Benjamin, Rick, Noah or some other Barbarian, and anything transit-related comes from Streetsblog.

Sorry in advance for the additional clutter. But hey, if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em, right?

I made a cool music discovery last night. Actually I can’t really take the credit for it as my husband pointed it out to me over a Gossip Girl rerun last night. He is the music snob in the house, I am lucky if I listen to anything besides Dan Zanes these days. Anyway, he showed me this iPhone application that is similar in concept to the site we launched for Getty last year, Moodstream.

It is essentially Moodstream for music and as an iPhone app. Not saying they ripped us off or anything because we can’t claim rights to the use of moods and dials. It just made me recall what I liked so much about the Moodstream concept. It was so simple and elegant that you couldn’t help but play around with it. The same is true for this application from Ghostly International. This might be just what I need to help me explore some music outside of the kiddie world.

So I had dinner with my friend Liane last night, and I realized that we never actually blogged on the site here about the amazing project we spent a good chunk of last year doing for Liane Mullin and her partner Desiree Gruber. And in talking about the project last night, and all that they’ve been accomplishing since launch, I was totally impressed, and realized that I SHOULD TOTALLY TELL YOU ABOUT IT.

So, in early 2008, we met with Desiree and Liane, who were, at the time (and still are) working at a company called Full Picture Entertainment. Full Picture is best known as the creators and producers of the hit show Project Runway. Full Picture is also a PR and marketing company, and their clients include Heidi Klum, the host of Project Runway. We also had the joy of meeting Jane Cha, the showrunner of Project Runway and another Full Picture team member. They had a vision for a new fashion and beauty site and community, as viewed through the prism of models. The top model’s inside secrets into fashion and beauty, as well as a compendium of their likes and dislikes. It would also include information about all the top models. Famous models would participate on the site.

When we met Liane and Desiree, they hadn’t gotten funding for their new startup yet, so off they went. They quickly met the people at Polaris, and they entered into a partnership. We re-bid for the work, introduced ourselves to Polaris, and got the gig. And by mid 2008, off we went.

We finished up and launched the site in time for spring fashion week in March of 2009.

Since then, the site’s been growing and the Modelinia team has expanded.They’ve built full content team, found themselves a CTO and a marketing exec. It was a joy to watch all of this, of course. As an entrepreneur, it was highly-rewarding to watch the modelinia team grow from 2 to where it is today. And it’s been fun, over the last 4 months, watching them improve the site, and the content, and learn what works and what doesn’t. Watching them acquire sponsors and grow their traffic, and improve their content. It’s been a fascinating look into online entrepreneurialism, and we’ve enjoyed it immensely.

Liane and Desiree have become great friends of ours, and we’re proud to have helped them fulfill their vision, building the initial build of the site, branding the company, designing the site, and offering a ton of flash and tech development.

They’ve brought it in house now, of course – many of our startup clients use us as a virtual team until they can get a dedicated team in place. It allows them to get going on development even before they’ve found a CTO. It’s never a perfect transition, but it allows for progress even in the face of daunting HR challeges. We think it worked pretty well here.

In any case, if fashion, beauty or beautiful models are your thing, check out Modelinia, or follow them on Twitter or any of the other social networks.

And thank you, Liane and Desiree, for letting us meet so many beautiful models. I think Toby’s stakeholder interview of Iman may be one of the best things we’ve ever done.