All posts by Arjen Lentz

Dad, parallel entrepreneur, cook, gardener, explorer, philosopher, tinkerer....
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Del Monte packaging: Bananas get second skin

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1361666/Del-Monte-packaging-Bananas-second-skin.html

The company has taken the view the yellow skin is not quite enough, and will sell individually-wrapped bananas at convenience stores, leisure centres and gyms.

The Germans have a word for this “umverpackung” (“package wrapping”).

Del Monte of course has even more wrapping on this, from the marketing department: the packaging increases the shelf life (they put the banana in when it’s green and it ripens more slowly) and my goodness, it’s recyclable!

That’s of course total greenwash marketing blah. Splitting up a bunch changes the pricing model from weight based to item based, and the price of the individual item is in fact qaudruple in the US where this product has already been available – yes, 4 times the price.

So it makes $ business sense for them, but it’s really, well, bananas. Do you buy it?

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Another new Toplevel Domain coming soon (.eco)

http://www.care2.com/causes/the-environmental-community-finds-a-home-online-with-a-new-eco-domain.html

In January 2012, thousands of new domains will become available to Internet users, including .ECO, the environmental community’s new home online.

I think .eco might be nice, but the notion that adding a new toplevel domain would increase the available name space is simply nonsense.

If you have a business or organisation, what you in fact do is capture as many as possible of the relevant (and even some irrelevant) versions of your chosen domain names
And if blah.com already exists, are you likely to want blah.org or blah.eco? Not likely – it causes confusion so you want to avoid that.

Essentially for xxxx.yyy it’s largely a single name space xxxx, and yyy is the arbitrary extension. The yyy is inconsequential to the fact that you want the xxxx to be unique – the yyy is just an optional extra identifier between commercial, organisation, educational, etc.

Domain registrars have been loving the introduction of new toplevel domains (.biz, .mobi, etc) as each domain registration makes them money! Then of course there’s the domain name trolls that register names and sit on them, offering to sell them to you. If you were to suggest that having extra TLDs is really a giant money making scam, you wouldn’t be far off. I’m sure that coca cola can afford .coke, but that’s not really the point.

So back to practicality, an ecological group might want to get .eco as its primary domain, but would also *need* to get .org so noone else does (and when picking their name ensure noone else already has it), and in addition they may *want* to get .com – so they need to get domain registrations in 3 TLDs rather than 1 and that costs. Being in the domain registrar business is obviously very profitable…

For .eco I see an additional problem: green-washing. Who decides who can have a .eco name? http://doteco.org/ is and they’re making notable effort to have a good policy in place.
But I’m sure many corporations will jump at the opportunity – you know how many corporations have “think tanks” and “research groups” that essentially plug and lobby their wares? It’s already a quagmire.

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Lytro Light Field Camera – actually designed from scratch

http://www.dpreview.com/articles/7237351494/lytro-light-field-camera-first-look-with-ren-ng

Just four months after announcing its intention to transform photography, camera startup Lytro has announced its first product. The company’s ‘light field camera’ may not look or work like anything currently on the market but, with an asking price starting at $399, it’s clear that the company can conform to conventional expectations.

This is really interesting, they’ve specifically gone back to scratch to design something functional for the purpose, this camera design is no longer based on the traditional film-based shape. Note that this rarely happens, cars for instance could look quite different but manufacturers appear to baulk a the risk of introducing something too different…

And the way the camera works is quite revolutionary as well. It has no moving parts, but a set of lenses that work together with the CCD to also capture information about where light came from. This allows it to “focus after the fact”, on pretty much any object in the picture. So, you can take photos more quickly as the system doesn’t need to focus, and you can re-focus on something else later. Quite brilliant!

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Upstarta Brisbane Wed 19 Oct 2011: CVSdude success story by founder Mark Bathie

The Upstarta group in Brisbane has a special speaker for its October 2011 meeting, Mark Bathie who founded the CVSDude company right in South-East Queensland, which evolved to Codesion then was acquired by CollabNet in the US. Mark is now back in Australia and will tell his Upstarta-style history.

If you’d like to attend this free event, join the group – but be sure to RSVP, as the group needs to know the numbers and either cap or possibly shift venues. The meeting will be at 6:30pm, further details can be found on the meetup page.