Tag Archives: marketing

This wind turbine has no blades — and that’s why it’s better

by JurgenCorones Posted on May 20, 2015

blade shunner

This wind turbine has no blades — and that’s why it’s better

By on 20 May 2015commentsShare

What do you get if you take the blades off a wind turbine? A better wind turbine.

That sounds like a joke, but that’s actually more or less the model of a new wind turbine prototype. Instead of blades that turn in the breeze, the turbine is just a hollow straw that sticks up 40 feet from the ground and vibrates like a guitar string when the wind thrums by.

The Spanish engineers who founded Vortex Bladeless in 2010 said they were inspired by the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster (maybe not the best pitch for clean energy to a disaster-wary public, but I’ll leave that to their marketing department). Here’s how it actually works, from Wired:

Instead of capturing energy via the circular motion of a propeller, the Vortex takes advantage of what’s known as vorticity, an aerodynamic effect that produces a pattern of spinning vortices. Vorticity has long been considered the enemy of architects and engineers, who actively try to design their way around these whirlpools of wind. And for good reason: With enough wind, vorticity can lead to an oscillating motion in structures, which, in some cases, like the … Tacoma Narrows Bridge, can cause their eventual collapse.

…

At the base of the cone are two rings of repelling magnets, which act as a sort of nonelectrical motor. When the cone oscillates one way, the repelling magnets pull it in the other direction, like a slight nudge to boost the mast’s movement regardless of wind speed. This kinetic energy is then converted into electricity via an alternator that multiplies the frequency of the mast’s oscillation to improve the energy-gathering efficiency.

The result is a turbine that’s 50 percent less expensive than a bladed one, nearly silent, and, as one of the turbine’s engineers put it, “looks like asparagus” (sorry, Quixote). And while each Vortex turbine is also 30 percent less efficient at capturing energy, wind farms can double the number of turbines that occupy a given area if they go bladeless. That’s a net energy gain of 40 percent for you non-mathletes out there.”

Plus, the turbine has no gears or moving parts; theoretically maintenance could be much easier than a traditional bells-and-whistles spinning one. No shade to my three-bladed friends, but I can’t complain about a cheaper, more accessible wind-powered future.

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The Future of Wind Turbines? No Blades

, Wired.

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This wind turbine has no blades — and that’s why it’s better

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No Wonder Teens Are Huffing Nicotine

by IvaHartigan Posted on April 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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You thought Big Tobacco was on the wane in the United States?

(Insert cartoon villain voice:) “Mwa-ha-ha-ha-haaaaa!”

Not. Friggin’. Likely. In fact, the domestic tobacco industry is on the rebound thanks to its heavy investment in smoking “alternatives”—a.k.a. e-cigarettes, a.k.a. nicotine-delivery devices marketed in a variety of kid-friendly flavors. (Marketing flavored tobacco cigarettes has been banned since 2009.)

Kevin had a post on Thursday about the soaring numbers of kids who’ve tried e-cigs. On Friday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officially announced the results of a new CDC study in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Control.

From 2011 to 2013, the researchers reported, the number of middle- and high-school students using e-cigs tripled. In 2013, more than 250,000 kids who had never smoked tobacco reported using e-cigarettes, and 44 percent of those kids said they had “intentions” of trying regular cigarettes in the next year. (About 1 in 5 American adults currently smoke.) Not surprisingly, kids who had more exposure to tobacco advertising were more likely to say they intended to try smoking.

You’ll often hear vaping proponents argue that e-cigs help smokers kick the tobacco habit, thereby saving lives. And that may be true: Inhaling tobacco smoke, which still kills more than 400,000 Americans every year, is almost certainly more deadly than huffing nicotine vapors.

The one group you won’t hear the smoking cessation argument from is e-cig manufacturers. That, ironically, is because products intended to help people quit tobacco products are regulated far more strictly than the tobacco products themselves. The same goes for drug-delivery devices, which is why manufacturers fought very hard to make certain the FDA didn’t put e-cigarettes in that category.

Not that the agency didn’t try. The FDA initially sought to regulate e-cigs as drug-delivery devices, for what else could they be? But the manufacturers promptly sued, and were handed a huge win. Tobacco-friendly judges bought the industry’s argument that, under the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, any product that contains nicotine derived from tobacco and makes no therapeutic claims must be regulated as a tobacco product—which makes it, presto, not a drug delivery device.

Just think about how crazy this is: Nicotine is highly addictive. At low doses it’s a stimulant, at higher doses a serious poison. (The tobacco plant and other nightshades actually produce it as an insecticide, and it’s sold for that use, too, with a stringent warning label.) If nicotine were sold as medicine—which it can’t be because it has no medical value—you couldn’t just buy it at the corner store in a dozen alluring flavors. Yet because the manufacturers make no medical claims, they can do what they want. Never mind that the 2009 law was written before e-cigarettes were invented.

Ah, screw it. Just give me the Piña Colada.

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No Wonder Teens Are Huffing Nicotine

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McDonald’s Creates Worst Marketing Campaign in History of Marketing

by CarleyFreehill Posted on February 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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This morning, Kate Bachelder went into McDonald’s to get an Egg McMuffin. When she tried to pay the cashier, however, things turned weird:

I wouldn’t need money today, she explained, as I had been randomly chosen for the store’s “Pay with Lovin’ ” campaign, the company’s latest public-relations blitz, announced Sunday….Between Feb. 2 and Valentine’s Day, the company says, participating McDonald’s locations will give away 100 meals to unsuspecting patrons in an effort to spread “the lovin’.”

If the “Pay with Lovin’ ” scenario looks touching on television, it is less so in real life. A crew member produced a heart-shaped pencil box stuffed with slips of paper, and instructed me to pick one. My fellow customers seemed to look on with pity as I drew my fate: “Ask someone to dance.” I stood there for a mortified second or two, and then the cashier mercifully suggested that we all dance together. Not wanting to be a spoilsport, I forced a smile and “raised the roof” a couple of times, as employees tried to lure cringing customers into forming some kind of conga line, asking them when they’d last been asked to dance.

The public embarrassment ended soon enough, and I slunk away with my free breakfast, thinking: Now there’s an idea that never should have left the conference room.

Speaking personally, I can say that the Pay with Lovin’ scenario did not look touching on television. It looked horrifying. And I suspect very strongly that in real life it’s even more horrifying than my feeble little imagination can imagine.

And for what it’s worth, when I saw the ads, it actually wasn’t Mickey D’s guinea pig customers who I initially felt sorry for. It was the cashiers. Those are the poor folks who have to execute this marketing monstrosity. Every morning they have to paste on a smile and pretend to be thrilled at the opportunity to force some sleepy customer to write a poem or declare who she loves or perform a jig or whatever. Isn’t it exciting!?! You get to pay with lovin’ today!

Somebody needs to be fired at McDonald’s. Maybe a whole bunch of people. I don’t know who, but someone has to pay. Right now.

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McDonald’s Creates Worst Marketing Campaign in History of Marketing

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After a Year Off, the Triumphant Return of My Annual Black Friday Post

by oraglobcvz Posted on November 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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According to the retail industry, “Black Friday” is the day when retail profits for the year go from red to black. Are you skeptical that this is really the origin of the term? You should be. After all, the term Black ___day, in other contexts, has always signified something terrible, like a stock market crash or the start of the Blitz. Is it reasonable to think that retailers deliberately chose this phrase to memorialize their biggest day of the year?

Not really. But to get the real story, we’ll have to trace its origins back in time. Here’s a 1985 article from the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Irwin Greenberg, a 30-year veteran of the retail trade, says it is a Philadelphia expression. “It surely can’t be a merchant’s expression,” he said. A spot check of retailers from across the country suggests that Greenberg might be on to something.

“I’ve never heard it before,” laughed Carol Sanger, a spokeswoman for Federated Department Stores in Cincinnati…”I have no idea what it means,” said Bill Dombrowski, director of media relations for Carter Hawley Hale Stores Inc. in Los Angeles…From the National Retail Merchants Association, the industry’s trade association in New York, came this terse statement: “Black Friday is not an accepted term in the retail industry…”

Hmm. So as recently as 1985 it wasn’t in common use nationwide. It was only in common use in Philadelphia. But why? If we go back to 1975, the New York Times informs us that it has something to do with the Army-Navy game. The gist of the story is that crowds used to pour into Philadelphia on the Friday after Thanksgiving to shop, they’d stay over to watch the game on Saturday, and then go home. It was the huge crowds that gave the day its bleak name.

But how old is the expression? When did it start? If we go back yet another decade we can find a Philly reference as early as 1966. An advertisement that year in the American Philatelist from a stamp shop in Philadelphia starts out: “‘Black Friday’ is the name which the Philadelphia Police Department has given to the Friday following Thanksgiving Day. It is not a term of endearment to them. ‘Black Friday’ officially opens the Christmas shopping season in center city, and it usually brings massive traffic jams and over-crowded sidewalks as the downtown stores are mobbed from opening to closing.”

But it goes back further than that. A couple of years ago I got an email from a Philadelphia reader who recalled the warnings he got from the older women at Wanamaker’s department store when he worked there in 1971:

They warned me to be prepared for the hoards of obnoxious brats and their demanding parents that would alight from the banks of elevators onto the eighth floor toy department, all racing to see the latest toys on their way to visit Santa. The feeling of impending doom sticks with me to this day. The experienced old ladies that had worked there for years called it “Black Friday.”

“For years.” But how many years? Ben Zimmer collects some evidence that the term was already in common use by 1961 (common enough that Philly merchants were trying to change the term to “Big Friday”), and passes along an interview with Joseph Barrett, who recounted his role in popularizing the expression when he worked as a reporter in Philadelphia:

In 1959, the old Evening Bulletin assigned me to police administration, working out of City Hall. Nathan Kleger was the police reporter who covered Center City for the Bulletin. In the early 1960s, Kleger and I put together a front-page story for Thanksgiving and we appropriated the police term “Black Friday” to describe the terrible traffic conditions. Center City merchants complained loudly to Police Commissioner Albert N. Brown that drawing attention to traffic deterred customers from coming downtown. I was worried that maybe Kleger and I had made a mistake in using such a term, so I went to Chief Inspector Albert Trimmer to get him to verify it.

So all the evidence points in one direction. The term originated in Philadelphia, probably sometime in the 50s, and wasn’t in common use in the rest of the country until decades later. And it did indeed refer to something unpleasant: the gigantic Army-Navy-post-Thanksgiving day crowds and traffic jams, which both retail workers and police officers dreaded. The retail industry originally loathed the term, and the whole “red to black” fairy tale was tacked on sometime in the 80s by an overcaffeinated flack trying to put lipstick on a pig that had gotten a little too embarrassing for America’s shopkeepers. The first reference that I’ve found to this usage was in 1982, and by the early 90s it had become the official story.

And today everyone believes it, which is a pretty good demonstration of the power of corporate PR. But now you know the real story behind Black Friday.

UPDATE: And what’s the future of Black Friday? Global domination! According to the redoubtable folks at eDigitalResearch, three-quarters of UK consumers have now heard of Black Friday. And they’re treating it with the same respect we do. From Marketing magazine today: “Black Friday is living up to its ominous name, with police being called to supermarkets across the UK, websites crashing and at least two arrests being made for violent behaviour, as bargain-hungry shoppers vie for the best deals.” Boo-yah!

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After a Year Off, the Triumphant Return of My Annual Black Friday Post

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Is the US Economy Becoming Dangerously Lethargic?

by Meridith7282 Posted on May 5, 2014

Mother Jones

Jim Pethokoukis highlights an interesting chart today from a Brookings report. The authors are concerned about a declining rate of entrepreneurship in the United States:

Business dynamism is inherently disruptive; but it is also critical to long-run economic growth. Research has established that this process of “creative destruction” is essential to productivity gains by which more productive firms drive out less productive ones, new entrants disrupt incumbents, and workers are better matched with firms. In other words, a dynamic economy constantly forces labor and capital to be put to better uses. But recent evidence points to a U.S. economy that has steadily become less dynamic over time. Two measures used to gauge business dynamism are firm entry and job reallocation. As Figure 1 shows, the firm entry rate—or firms less than one year old as a share of all firms—fell by nearly half in the thirty-plus years between 1978 and 2011.

So fewer people are starting up new businesses, and this trend has been evident for several decades. Pethokoukis speculates that the problem might be too little uncertainty in the economy: “Maybe the U.S. private sector has become too conservative and cautious….The U.S. still generates lots of innovation overall, but maybe too much is of the job-killing sort rather than job-creating kind that marks a dynamic economy.”

Maybe. But I’d really like to see a breakdown of what kinds of business creation have declined. My first guess here is that the decline hasn’t been among the sort of Silicon Valley firms that drive innovation, but among more prosaic small firms: restaurants, dry cleaners, hardware stores, and so forth. The last few decades have seen an explosion among national chains and big box retailers, and it only makes sense that this has driven down the number of new entrants in these sectors. When there’s a McDonald’s and a Burger King on every corner, there’s just less room for people to open up their own lunch spots. But if there’s been a decline in the number of new small retailers, that may or may not say anything about the dynamism of the American economy. It just tells us what we already know: national chains, with their marketing efficiencies and highly efficient logistics, have taken over the retail sector. Amazon and other internet retailers are only hastening this trend.

But is this what’s really driving the downward trend in new business creation? The Brookings report doesn’t give us any clues. But it sure seems like this is the absolute minimum we need to know in order to draw any serious conclusions about what’s really going on here.

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Is the US Economy Becoming Dangerously Lethargic?

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Recyclebank Rewards Schools for Innovative Green Initiatives

by AbdulEncarnacio Posted on April 10, 2014

Photo: Recyclebank

Recyclebank‘s eighth annual Green Schools Program is moving along at full force.

In case you aren’t familiar with the program, it awards grant money to schools for unique projects that will green their classroom and community.

Since 2007, the Green Schools program has granted close to $450,000 that helped more than 150 schools across the country bring their sustainable ideas to life.

From now until March 16, Recyclebank members are encouraged to donate points to schools of their choice participating in the program to help them reach their target funding goals.

Members can learn about the schools’ project ideas, donate their points and track each school’s progress online. For every 250 member points donated, Recyclebank awards schools $1 that can be used toward their green project.

Twenty-nine schools are participating in the program this year, with projects ranging from school gardens and recycling programs to upcycled art projects. Each school can request up to $2,500 in grant money for their project.

“The whole reason we feel so strongly about the Green Schools Program is that we want to empower youth to be thinking about the environment, thinking about what they can do–in their school, in their community, in their home–to make an impact,” Karen Bray, vice president of marketing at Recyclebank, told Earth911.

In addition to member donations, Domtar Corp. is supporting the Green Schools Program for the second year in a row and will contribute additional donation dollars as well as a year’s supply of its EarthChoice Office Paper to the school with the most innovative project.

So far, Burton Elementary School in Huntington Woods, Mich. has already achieved its $2,500 goal to fund a lunchroom waste reduction program. Keith Elementary in Cypress, Texas also met its $850 target to construct an on-site greenhouse for environmental education, while Central High School in Philadelphia crossed the finish line for its $2,000 goal to restore patio boxes for urban gardening.

Two other Philadelphia schools, Springside Chestnut Hill Academy and Philadelphia Performing Arts Charter School, are also tantalizingly close their funding goals to construct birdhouses and launch a recycling program. Other leading projects so far include a horticultural project and a school-wide art installation.

For Recyclebank, these projects represent small changes that carry potentially big impacts for the future of our planet.

“A lot of the conversations around being a little greener center around the next generation,” Bray noted “So what better way to start to build that awareness and that passion than going directly to the students and giving back a little bit?”

To view a full list of participating schools, donate to your favorite and track their progress, visit the Green Schools Program online.

earth911

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Recyclebank Rewards Schools for Innovative Green Initiatives

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Vermont Is Kicking Everyone’s Ass at Signing Up People for Obamacare

by QuinnHeavener Posted on December 12, 2013

Mother Jones

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Which states are doing the best at signing up people for Obamacare? Business Insider has a state-by-state chart here showing the number of people who have completed the process 100 percent: they’ve actually chosen a specific plan and officially enrolled their families. But I figure a better measure of activity is the number of people who have completed an application and been confirmed eligible to purchase private insurance via the exchange. They still have the final enrollment step left, but they’ve obviously navigated everything successfully, which is a good measure of how smoothly things are rolling out.

The chart below shows the results for 49 states (there’s no data for Massachusetts). States in red are running their own websites. States in blue are using the federal website. Vermont and Kentucky are way ahead of everyone else, and demonstrate how well the Obamacare rollout is doing in places where the website is working and the state government is doing a good job of marketing and operations. Raw data comes from today’s HHS report.

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Vermont Is Kicking Everyone’s Ass at Signing Up People for Obamacare

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Discover Ways To Select, Store And Prepare Coffee

by Jim Bow Posted on November 2, 2013

Did you click on this short article never having drank a cup of coffee prior to? Oh, you’re in for it. Perhaps you have actually attempted many different kinds of coffee, but you want to see exactly what else is out there. Keep reading to discover more details on the various ranges of coffee that you can attempt.

You will get a better coffee the more costly it is. Although this may not sound attractive, coffee really needs making some financial investments in outstanding beans and various other tools so that you can take pleasure in the very best coffee. If you attempt to be economical, you’ll never ever get the coffee you desire.

Coffee is respectable for you if you lay off the extras. The real coffee is not unhealthy; it; s the sugar and cream lots of people put in it. Make coffee healthy by including stevis or milk latte with honey instead.

Coffee should not be kept in the freezer for more than 3 months. Exceeding that time frame indicates the coffee will likely start to spoil.

If you liked your coffee on ice, attempt cold-brewing your very own coffee focused. There are numerous dishes offered online; Most involve mixing a few cups of water into several ounces of ground coffee, enabling the mixture to sit overnight. When the grounds are strained out, you are left with a smooth, rich concentrate that can be watered down with milk or water and ice.

If you wish to assist the Earth out a little in your coffee habit, then purchase filters that are reusable. These will spare you from losing a bunch of paper filters in the future. This is green for the earth, and saves the green in your wallet. Many recyclable filter lovers likewise think their coffee tastes much better this way.

If you grind your very own coffee, be sure to just grind the amount you will be using that day. If you grind too much and just leave your coffee around, the elements will take the freshness and taste of it. Contrary to exactly what lots of think, storing coffee in the fridge does not leave it fresh.

Use your utilized coffee grounds in your compost heap! Coffee grounds offer lots of advantageous components to a compost heap including pest control. Coffee grounds contain caffeine which assists restrict the development of fungus that can quickly destroy your veggie garden. The next time you brew a fresh pot of joe do not get rid of those grounds; include them to your compost pile! Make the most of any repeat customer program that your neighborhood coffee home runs. Even a single-unit independent location could have a punchcard system where you get a free cup of coffee for every five that you buy. Never ever throw these away, even for locations you do not frequent much. They can still amount to complimentary cups of joe in time.

Do not make use of hot water to make your coffee. Lots of people think this is the best way to make their coffee hot; the reality is that the only thing this does is decrease its flavor. You should be making use of water that is not only cold, however charcoal filtered if possible. Do you know more about coffee now than before you read this post. Ideally, you are now more prepared to go and purchase that next cup of joe. Whether you make it yourself or purchase that special cup from a business, you make sure to delight in that fresh tasting blend.

Some of the best organic coffee you can get is organo gold coffee . Visit my website for more information on how you can sell organic coffee to create financial freedom in your life.

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