Ancient and recent advertising using this approach. It may be effective “leverage” over consumers, but I don’t believe “does it work” should be only criterion. What do you think?
Using Patriotism and War to Sell Products – Sociological Images
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An Exciting New Brand
Last year I got a letter from Queensland Motorways, announcing their “Exciting New Brand” (I kid you not). They’d renamed “E-Toll” in to “GO Via”. So this “brand” is about toll roads/bridges. Not really a product/service that you or I are likely to get more excited about.
I actually found the term E-Toll fairly good and descriptive: people know what toll is, and the E indicates it going electronic (mail -> Email). It’s clear.
GO Via on the other hand is some marketing or brand expert trying to be too smart and funny. I do get the word pun: Via = Road in Latin. Haha? I do love word puns, but use when appropriate! This one makes the brand non-descriptive of what it does (for most people), ditches the recognition of the old brand, and probably cost quite a bit of money to develop. For what purpose, and has it reached that objective? Was it likely to? Seems like a complete fail to me.
Why technology start-ups won’t save us from recession – The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/11/john-naughton-corporate-responsibility-jobs
“Evangelists for the twin doctrines of globalisation and maximising shareholder value simply shrug their shoulders at this point. The fact that manufacturing jobs have moved to China, they say, is just a fact of life, an economic version of Newton’s first law.”
EU Officially Seizes The Public Domain, Retroactively Extends Copyright | Techdirt
“As was unfortunately expected, despite no evidence that this made any economic sense at all, the member states of the EU have agreed to retroactively extend copyright another 20 years, at which point you can expect it to be extended again […]”
This is such a bad idea…
Tipping Point of Open Source 3D Print Quality
RepRap has now surpassed the commercial Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) 3D printers in machine affordability, price for filament, speed, and print quality. See http://blog.reprap.org/2011/09/tipping-point-of-print-quality-open.html and the image below.
A EUR 400 piece of simple hardware+software (which you can build at home) beating EUR 12,000, through collective and fully open source innovation over a mere 6 1/2 years. This drastically lowers the cost of producing prototypes and custom (or just small run) plastic items. New design tools have also been developed, including the ability to describe an object using a language, which makes editing object designs much easier as well.
I’ve been following the RepRap’s progress for years, and co-funded the building of an earlier model in Brisbane. The disruptive potential of this technology is tremendous! Duplicating existing items is easy, but not very interesting – how about printing things that you would previously not consider. I’ve written about it before – we need to adjust our thinking to this new reality and make smart use of it.
It is, to quote Chris DiBona, like “China on your desktop”. But better and more flexible.
See also
- http://www.openscad.org/ (OpenSCAD parametric design language/tool with instant visualisation)
- http://www.thingiverse.com/ (freely available object designs)