This document discusses the need for a new spherical basis for representing signals on the sphere that addresses deficiencies in spherical harmonics. It introduces spherical needlets, which are a tight frame constructed from spherical quadrature and Littlewood-Paley weights localized in frequency bands. Spherical needlets provide spatially compact representations with good localization properties compared to spherical harmonics. The document outlines key properties a good spherical basis should have and areas for future work in developing improved spherical representations.