Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Mashable
The Bloom Energy Box. It just goes to show you all of the non-traditional energy alternatives that are out there. Basically, a box that houses a stack of fuel cells can take different types of fuel and efficiently convert it to energy. Right now, the cells are about the size of a parking space, but they’ll get smaller pretty quick. They suggest that in the future, solar panels on your house will provide enough power to the cell to power your entire house (including your hybrid car of course). One can only imagine how vigorously energy companies will oppose technology like this unless they find a way to get in on it.
http://mashable.com/2010/02/24/jiwire-wi-fi-stats/
A person has to ride the technology wave. It seems that people with Internet Phones are no longer early adapters, it’s definitely moved mainstream as over half of the WI-FI spots are being tapped by mobile devices. Not surprisingly, most of the devices linking to these spots are Apple, but I was shocked to see the figure was nearly 98%.
http://mashable.com/2010/02/24/this-you-phishing-attack/
There’s a new phising attack taking place in Twitter. The link explains it very well and even has a video demo. It’s so important for people to remain vigilant against cyber attacks and identity theft. There’s so much of people’s personal information floating around out there. Abstaining from using the Internet may be the best way to combat identify theft, but that is becoming increasingly unrealistic in our day and age.
http://mashable.com/2010/02/22/toyota-brand/
I am fascinated with the Toyota recall and how it has effected the perception of the brand. It’s interesting to see how Toyota is handling this, they are really taking the whole thing head-on. They remain apologetic and focus on what they’re doing to fix the problem and regain consumer confidence. All this buzz about the brand has led to a lot of exposure and their position has prevented too much bad press. In fact, loyal owners are flocking to Toyota’s defense and they will be picking up some customers because of it.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Domino's Documentary
Sometime in January, I was eating lunch at my desk and checking the headlines on MSN. One of the stories involved Domino's and their new commercials. Usually, a commercial doesn't make the news so I was intrigued. The commercials made the news because Domino's aired some of the harshest criticism they could find in a documentary style video, then they tell you that have a completely new recipe. Turn out, this new recipe is something they have spent nearly two years and millions of dollars on. Then the genius of it all occurred to me; when a fast food chain, or other company not particularly know for high quality product, makes a big showing to tell everyone that their product is substandard, people are going to pause and listen to try and figure out why. By then, Domino's already has the consumer's attention and now when you say the new product is better, there's a better chance that they will take that to heart.
A big part of the ad campaign was their new website, www.pizzaturnaround.com. That is only place to find the full documentary ads. They also have live twitter feeds and I monitored them for a while and not all are positive, most are, but Domino's made a point of saying that customer feed back drove their new product and they are not going to turn away from that now. Here are some other video links from Comedy Central and CBS where they talk about this. Enjoy!
Monday, February 1, 2010
http://www.wpr.org/webcasting/audioarchives_display.cfm?code=hoe
Apparently, there really was a Voodoo ceremony to aid them in their fight for Independence. Voodoo is certainly not devil worship, but it makes sense that it would be portrayed this way. Think about it, a bunch of white Christian slave owners get beaten back in a bloody battle by a bunch of heathen slaves praying to someone that is not their God. Furthermore, this was about 50-60 years before America's Civil War and demonizing the Haitians was the best way to make their victory seem less attractive to slaves in the South.
It also mentioned how Pat received his highest ratings from that show. A TV Preacher used the media to spread his story and now Haitians and others sympathizers need to use the media to rebuff him and tell their own story.
Check out the link to the story on 1/25/10