Happy Cheese Weasel Day!

I saw the story on Tech Crunch today and it gave me a chuckle.

Unknown to most, April 3rd is Cheese Weasel Day, the holiday where the Cheese Weasel brings dairy goodness to all the good boys and girls in the tech industry.

While the origins are murky, it seems to have started around 1992 when a weasel was spotted carrying a Kraft Single. This, they assumed, must be the Cheese Weasel, and therefore, that it must be Cheese Weasel Day. What was the weasel going to do with the cheese? He must be off to put it under the keyboards of good tech workers everywhere.

The practice of the holiday seems to spread through word of mouth. I first heard of it when I showed up to work on April 3rd many years ago and a fantastic spread of exotic cheeses was laid out in the middle of the office. It wasn’t until a few hours later, after the food coma had started to wear down, that I started to think about the legend, “The Cheese Weasel leaves cheese under the keyboards of good tech workers… cheese under the keyboards… keyboards.” I looked, and

Can you let someone die?

I live about 10 blocks away from a big city hospital, which is very close to the 101 South freeway.

There are a number of severe accidents that happen in a radius of several miles from that hospital, and, historically, an ambulance who gets to the scene typically doesn’t have enough time to get the victim to the hospital in time, thus the victim dies in transit.

Enter MEDEVAC, a helicopter outfit that wanted to build a helipad at the aforementioned hospital to transport those future 101 crash victims.

While the idea above may make logical sense, the community surrounding the hospital thought otherwise. They got together and started a petition to block the building of the landing field. Their reason?

The chopper is loud. And the hours when this chopper would be most in use would be between 10:00 p.m. and 3:00 a.m. (the time when most people are getting out of bars). If you already have a hard time getting to sleep, the last thing you want is a military-grade helicopter flying over your house at all hours of the morning.

And, if the chopper landing field does get approved, then people may fear for their property values… Who wants to buy a house that’s in the middle of a MEDEVAC landing strip.

Long story short, the community did successfully block the new heliport… I honestly didn’t vote for it, because the affected blocks weren’t in my direct neighborhood.

But, still, it had me thinking… The people who voted against the heliport are now going to make the chopper fly miles out of the way to a hospital that already has a helicoper landing strip in place.

This makes me think, “What is to become of the person who now dies in flight because they couldn’t get to the closer hospital?”

Does that make everyone in the community who voted against the above heliport responsible for that person’s death? And, if so, could the surviving vicims sue those who stopped the project?

Marketing 101

Hello class,

Today I thought we’d talk about a few of my favorite marketing ideas.

Car: Everyone loves the famous story about why Chevy had a hard time moving its Nova in Mexico… It’s because the company’s marketing department didn’t know that “no va” in Spanish means “doesn’t go.”

I just saw another auto marketing faux pas the other day that just about had me spitting coffee out of my nose. It was a huge sticker plastered on a Toyota truck’s wheel well. The sticker was attempting to help brand “Toyota’s Racing Development” division. Now those words alone wouldn’t typically cause one to do a double take, but where Toyota screwed up was in putting the acronym for the division in big bold letters under the division name.

Yes, TRD. Try sounding that one out and then wonder if the genius who came up with that was bitter because he didn’t get the raise he’d asked for. I think it would be even funnier if he was actually still with the company.

Hot Sauce: A few years ago, the president of a major hot sauce company went to his head of marketing and said, “We need to sell more hot sauce. I’m prepared to spend several million dollars on a comprehensive ad campaign to saturate our key markets. I don’t care what you need to do, just make it happen.”

Over the next few days, the head of marketing thought about what that campaign might look like and then came up with a brilliant idea. He told the head of manufacturing to make the little hole in the top of the bottle a little wider in diameter. Not a lot, just a millimeter or two.

Sure enough, over the next six months sales of hot sauce increased dramatically. Not because they had recruited any new users of the product, but because the users they did have were simply using more of the hot sauce than they were accustomed to. In the end the company ended up selling more product and they saved a few million dollars on an unnecessary ad campaign.

Paper Towels: You have to love the great mind who came up with the idea of changing the standard square perforated paper towel design to a longer rectangular shape. The message they used when they marketed the new towels was: “Bigger sheets for cleaning up those big spill!”

Of course what people at home don’t know is that most people aren’t regularly spilling tons of stuff to warrant the new, larger towel sheets. And because most normal people tend to tear paper products at the perforation, households around the world ended up now going through the roll twice as fast as they used to… And no one was the wiser.

Food products: When you’re eating a snack such as a candy bar or bag potato chips, do you ever look at the weight of the product you’re holding. Of course not! And marketers bank on that.

Recently there was a big increase in the cost of raw corn products around the world. This means it costs more for companies to make actual corn products, such as corn chips. But rather than raise the cost of a bag of corn chips to account for increased manufacturing costs, chip makers (depending on the size of the bag of chips) simply removed a certain percentage of chips from the bag. For a small bag, it might only be four or five chips.
They adjusted the weight on the outside of the bag to reflect the content change, but who’s really looking that closely at their bag of chips?

Where it gets nefarious is when the cost of corn drops again, more times than not, the company will put those missing chips back in the bag, adjust the weight again and then puts a big, fat label on the front of the bag that says, “Now 20% more!”

Food companies have been running this scheme for years. If every time Snickers really increased the size of their bar 20% over the size of the original and kept adding to that new size every time they advertised a 20% increase in size, Snicker bars would probably weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of ten to fifteen pounds.

Real World Teleportation

I’m normally an optimist. I can believe or imagine that anything in the world can be done given enough time and resources. But in the case of teleportation as we’ve come to know it through the Star Trek television series, it ain’t never gonna to happen. The idea of breaking a person down into individual molecules and then sending them to another location to be perfectly reassembled again presents too many risks to ever be feasible. The remake of “The Fly,” with Jeff Goldblum illustrates just one of the problems that could occur when playing with this level of technology.

That said, I believe there’s a strong business case for building the next best thing… Pseudo teleportation if you will. For the purpose of this blog, we’re going to call this concept a Teleporter. And what it is, is a real-time video travel agency. The idea is to tap into next-generation HD videoconferencing technology being used today by such companies as LifeSize, Cisco, Polycom and Tandberg to allow people to travel anywhere in the world without ever leaving home.

How it works: Human messengers are outfitted with special high definition video helmets (these could be built by innovative electronics companies such as Sony). Wiring from the helmet is attached to a battery-powered video codec box located in the messenger’s backpack. The codec box, which has a wireless Internet connection, takes the live high definition video stream and compresses it in real time to a manageable file size. The device’s wireless Internet connection transmits the compressed video to the Internet, where it is received directly in the viewer’s home. The home “traveler” sees the live video on their living room HDTV.

The great thing about Teleporter is that it’s fully interactive. The human messenger can take direction from the person on the other end. This could be done via a cellular line, or though the Internet using Skype. For example, a person at home can say, “Take a right at the next street… go into that store… pan left…. tilt down…. stop…purchase that… here’s my credit card information…”

Schools could use this for educational purposes (i.e., “Today kids we’re going to see some real Mayan ruins), shoppers could use it to buy gifts for themselves or friends (i.e., hire a Teleporter messenger to attend a big sale that’s happening in another country… buy unique gifts… rare spices from exotic lands) and, of course, virtual tourists could use it to see parts of the world they would never otherwise travel to because they don’t have the money or the time.

How it becomes profitable: The idea for profitability comes from selling franchises (a la McDonald’s model). For example, if I wanted to purchase a franchise in San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, I would receive the computer, the software to book trips, the hardware the messengers would wear, training materials and a three mile non-compete radius. In short, anyone in the world who wanted to visit Fisherman’s Wharf through this system would have to go through my shop. Other franchises may be available in other parts of the city, such as North Beach, Chinatown or Union Square.

The next question becomes, “How does the franchisee make money?” He/she will need to hire (or contract out) the messengers. From there, the owner will need to figure out how much to charge each incoming home “traveler” per hour for their trip. Depending on the economic climate in the area, it could range from, say, $20 an hour to more than $75. But that’s not the only way the franchisee can make money. If a traveler chooses to, they can open the call to anyone else who may wish to “tag along.”

The downside to being a “tag along” is that you don’t get any interactivity; you just get to see whatever the leader of the call wants to see. The upside is that it costs a lot less to be a “tag along.” For example it may only cost $5 an hour to tag along a Fisherman’s Wharf trip, whereas the leader is playing $75 an hour.

The money from the “tag alongs” go to the franchisee, and, depending on how many “tag alongs” are on a particular call, it could lower the call leader’s hourly rate. For example, If I am a call leader for Fisherman’s Wharf, I know going into the call it’s going to cost me $75 an hour. However, if I have 25 tagalongs from around the world, it could decrease my hourly rate to, say, $50 an hour (a major incentive for everyone to keep their calls open).

If everyone in the world started teleporting to other places in the world and buying stuff, it could transform our global economy. 3rd world countries that aren’t on most people’s “must visit” list, could gain by selling goods to a new breed of “virtual” tourist. Likewise, 3rd world citizens who would never be able to afford a trip anywhere outside of their country, could use a Teleporter to cheaply visit any other city in the world.

When explaining this idea to friends, I use the example of Bolivia. It’s a place I will probably never see before I die, but there’s still something there that intrigues me about it. I would pay $75 an hour to get a three-hour interactive tour of the country’s capital. And while I’m there, I’d probably buy something (a keepsake from my trip—maybe something weird for my brother… who know what you’ll find when you begin exploring with your messenger).

I don’t believe one company by itself could make Teleporter a reality. It will require teamwork from a number of industry technology leaders. For example, Sony could design the helmet camera, Intel or AMD processors could power the codec box, LynuxWorks could be the real time operating system, Cisco could develop and deploy the infrastructure that would need to be in place in all of the major cities in the world, Google could be the search engine that enables people to search for trips that are currently open to “tag alongs,” and Oracle could design the franchise/reservation booking infrastructure software. The great thing about this idea is that it’s totally doable using technology that’s currently available to us today.

Anyway, that’s pretty much the idea in a nutshell. Let me know what y’all think by posting a comment below and sharing the link to this blog posting with all of your friends. Would love to talk about it and share it with the world. If you are one of the companies, mentioned in this article and would like to learn more about this idea, feel free to contact me directly through this blog.

Do You IngBoo?

I’ve recently started using a new Internet retrieval utility that allows me to quickly access all of the information that’s important to me from one user-friendly Internet page. The utility is called IngBoo. It’s a major time saver, it’s SPAM free, clutter free, free to use and you can sign up for it at www.ingboo.com. (Disclaimer: IngBoo is also a new Weber Shandwick client of mine).

How it works
From the main IngBoo page, you can select from a number of predefined news/content providers, including CNN, CNBC, YouTube and Financial Times. In addition, IngBoo collects and reads RSS feeds, Twitter and Linked In updates. And the software includes a number of other handy features, such as the ability to track eBay auctions, monitor the weather and traffic in your area and stocks you’re keeping your eye on. Once a news source is selected, IngBoo creates a capsule reader for that source that is updated with the latest news and information. The point of the utility is to reduce the amount of time you spend daily tracking the information that’s important to you, while at the same time reducing overall email clutter.

I know what you’re thinking, is it really that hard to enter the URLs of all of the news sources you’re tracking? No, but it can be a major time suck. What happens when you hit a site that hasn’t been updated since the last time you visited? You’ve just wasted 20 or so seconds of your life that you’ll never get back. IngBoo, on the other hand, only updates your news capsule when information on that site has changed.

Think of IngBoo like a suburban mall. Malls are successful because they offer everything a person needs under one roof. You can get a haircut, buy a new pair of pants, buy dinner for the family… Before malls, people would spend half their day driving around town to get their errands done. With IngBoo, in a matter of minutes, you can find out what’s going on in the world, catch up on your friends’ blogs, read your Twitter updates and figure out whether or not you need to bring an umbrella to work tomorrow.

If there’s a news or content source you don’t see on the provided list, it’s not a problem. Click the “Search” link and enter the Website (or content) you’re looking for. If IngBoo can’t find the information on their site, you can enter the site’s URL and make it a new capsule. Anytime that Website is updated, IngBoo will let you know. IngBoo also prioritizes your news capsules, which helps if you have more than 20 or so capsules running at the same time. Capsules that have been recently updated are moved to the top of the stack, while older capsules are then pushed to the bottom.

I’m guessing your next question is, “Is this a portal?” No, IngBoo is not a portal. A portal essentially hosts other people’s content on their portal site. The problem with this approach is that portals tend to get cluttered fast, which makes finding the information you’re after difficult. Additionally, the information that resides on a portal, resides on the portal, NOT the website where the content originated. This is problematic for Website publishers who are trying to monitor how many people are reading their content every day. When you go to IngBoo and click on a news story, the hit actually gets tracked back to the original publisher.

Which brings us to the little IngBoo publisher’s button some of you may have noticed on my blog today. It’s the little green button, under “Followers” (towards the top right-hand side of the blog). The cool thing is that anyone can put one of these buttons on their site.There are several advantages for having an IngBoo button on your site:

• 
  It’s an easy way to get people to subscribe to your site. And more subscribers translate into higher traffic. Yes, there is RSS, but that technology is difficult for many people to set up and use. Only about 11% of Internet users are RSS literate.


• 
  IngBoo tracks the people who go from IngBoo to your site and will send you an analytics report that tells you where they went or what they bought when they went to your site. The report provides more granularity than you’d normally get with something such as WebTrends.


• 
  It will allow your content to be mobilized (i.e., sent to people’s mobile devices).
  

Bottom line: Give it a try. As I mentioned above, it’s free, it’s a time saver and a potential traffic driver to your site. What have you got to lose? Drop me a line if you’re interested in becoming a power user or if you simply have any comments/feedback you’d like me to relay to the developers of the utility.

The Six Million Dollar Man Reimagined

If you’re going to make it in Hollywood, you have to think like a Hollywoodian. If you want to make movies you need to think sequel, remake, comic book or television show. Period. Whatever you do, don’t waste your time coming up with anything original. Why? Because it’s just too risky to be original today.

Do you know how much the average movie costs to make today? Take a guess.

In 2006, the average Hollywood movie cost $65.8 million. With that kind of money at stake, wouldn’t you play it safe, too?

Putting my Hollywoodian thinking cap on, I think I’ve come up with the next foolproof Hollywood blockbuster. It’s a reimagining of The Six Million Dollar Man.

As part of the reimagining, the first thing I would do is change the title to something that’s a little more contemporary. When the Six Million Dollar Man was made back in 1973, six million dollars was a lot of money, but when you account for inflation and the year 2009, six million dollars just doesn’t have the same ring to it. That’s why I’d rename the movie simply “The Bionic Man.” It’s short, sweet and to the point.

Synopsis of “The Bionic Man”
The story begins as private sector research and development company, Propeldyne, is gearing up to demonstrate a new jet engine technology that would enable new commercial airlines to hit Mach 10 while at the same time consuming half the fuel that’s being used by today’s commercial airlines. At Mach 10, people could fly from SF to NY in under a half hour and from SF to London in just an hour. And where current jet technology uses about $1,500 in jet fuel to go from SF to NY. The new jet engine technology would reduce costs to around $750.

In short, it’s revolutionary technology... The interesting thing about Propeldyne is that it’s privately funded. This is not something the government has sponsored or another nationally-know jet company has designed. The new technology has been in development for the last five years in total secret.

After we give a background on Propeldyne and the secret jet engine technology they’ve created, we cut to the first public unveiling. The world’s major leaders and media are invited to witness the historic first flight. And the company has secure former NASA shuttle commander Steve Austin to the pilot the experimental new plane.

The plane takes off. On the ground scientists and researchers are monitoring the activity happening in the plane... Mach 7... Mach 8... Mach 9... Suddenly an emergency alarm sounds. Austin screams something inaudible into his headset... The plane explodes.

There’s chaos on the ground. Government leaders come in and immediately shuts down the private operation. Oscar Goldman, the Propeldyne executive in charge of the operation suspects that something more sinister happened in the cockpit before the plane exploded, but he has no proof, no leads and doesn’t even know where to start.

Two days later they recover Austin's body in on a remote mountain. He's a mess and just barely alive. He's still wearing his parachute that is in tatters from the plane's explosion. Goldman's people scrape him off the ground and bring him to another one of Goldman's research laboratories... One that's been experimenting with bionics. They set Austin up with the latest in bionic technology, train him and send him on a mission to find out what really happened in the cockpit that fateful day.

The mystery/investigation leads to a competing airline manufacturer and military executives in United States government. Using his new bionic super powers, Austin uncovers the national conspiracy to close down Propeldyne and brings the guilty parties to justice.

For this movie to work, it has to be made totally straight. Some would suggest taking the cheesy-kitch-tongue-in-cheek approach… because the show itself was so cheesy, but that’s just an excuse for a cheap joke. I think this reimagining, if done right, could be a pretty cool action picture. The Bionic Man would be a new superhero again. There to compete against the likes of Iron Man, Batman, Spiderman etc. etc.