Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Air Canada Saving Fuel

I was recently flying with Air Canada in the West and since a lot of the flights were short, I often ended up in a Dash-8. The Dash-8 has two turboprop engines and as soon as we landed and had slowed down to taxi to the gate, the left turboprop was turned of immediately. I met a pilot on one of the Dash-8 and he actually said that it was to conserve fuel.

I'm not sure if Air Canada is simply trying to save on fuel for money reasons, or to save the environment, but I really love to hope that it is for environmental purposes as well.

Thursday, November 22, 2007

Give your old iPod a break


Have you ever thought what is going to happen to all those millions of iPods that have been sold so far that are apparently "outdated"? They still play music perfectly fine, which is what most people use them for. I thought I would quickly mention a really cool way to give your old iPod a boost, or even revive it.

The biggest problem is the battery. The batteries in the iPod die after about 1.5 years (mine has been fine for almost 3 years now), but lets say your battery dies, then you can simply replace it yourself. Many entertainment electronics stores like futureshop, will sell kits of replacement batteries with tools and instructions on how to open your ipod.

While you have the iPod open, you might wanna do another mod. Replace the harddrive with Flash memory. This will eliminate moving parts and therefor eliminate many possible errors in the future. If your iPod HD is broken, this is the perfect replacement. This mod will also prolong the battery life of the iPod, because by eliminating the moving parts, the storage needs less power to operate. ALSO, it makes the iPod faster in accessing the data. It's an allround boost to the iPod.

So lets all rethink our iPod use. Do we really need the latest technology? We might actually be happy with our old iPods.

For the mean time, if you do have any old 3rd, 2nd or even 1st generation iPods that might still work, but you are simply not using anymore, just send them to me, I'll mod them either for you, or for anyone else, so they don't have to end up in the landfill.

Cheers, Hans

Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Edutainment


This guy has some rethinking to do :-)

Friday, November 2, 2007

My thoughts on new marketing

It's so interesting to watch how marketing is changing. We are heading towards conversational marketing, where a company and the client are completely on the same level of conversation and communication goes in both directions (the company listens to the client and the client listens to the company).

One of biggest differences I think though was just mentioned in one of the podcasts that I listen to regularly.

Marketing has become a commitment!

That to me is key. A company has to be aware that they can't just simply "preach" to their customers through ad campaigns.

If you are interested in marketing, check out the following podcasts:

Jaffe Juice
Six Pixels of Separation
Managing the Gray