Category: Technology

By Posted on Posted in Green Marketing, Innovation, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Technology Tagged with , , , , ,

Without starting with that intention, I’ve been immersing myself in “creativity juice” this morning. A whole bunch of the e-mails I’ve opened have, by random chance (if there is such a thing), forced me to think about how creativity happens,  what it means, and whether “if you build it, they will come”—a/k/a, in the pre-“Field of Dreams” world as the better mousetrap aphorism—has relevance in today’s world.

Today, I’ll share three of these inspirations with you: the raw material. And I’ll write down what I think about this confluence, but set it to post on Tuesday—because I want your reactions before you see mine. Please comment below.

1. This quote from @ChrisBrogan:

When I think about all that a business can do to succeed (or all that an individual can do, for that matter), I start from the mindset of forgetting about the path that someone else has forged. Why? Because innovation rarely (never?) comes from following an established path. If I were going to design a hotel, I wouldn’t try learning what worked and didn’t work for the Four Seasons, I’d think through (and then interview others about) all the details that matter to me as a traveler, and then consider what I could do better.

3. This 3-minute TED talk about creativity, green messaging, and climate change (suggested by TED after I followed an e-mail link and watched a different TED talk)

While I won’t give away my reactions yet, I will tell you that my response cites Steve Jobs, energy visionary Amory Lovins, and some game-changing, category-inventing products.

Meanwhile, you have the floor. I’m eagerly awaiting your response.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Customer Service as Marketing, Shel's Personal Life, Technology, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , ,

A complete customer service nightmare, not to mention I made the mistake of trusting my data to this bunch of losers.

Last April, I bought one year of the SafeSync data protection program, that supposedly backs up my files to a server on the cloud. About ten days ago, I accidentally deleted an important file. So I strolled over to the Trend Micro site, and attempted to retrieve the file.

After all, whenever I click on the software, it smiles at me and tells me that all my files are up to date.

Trend Micro's SafeSync lies to its custoemr
While not backing up my data, Trend Micro's SafeSync claims it is.

It wasn’t there.

Not only wasn’t it there, but the last time that folder was backed up was in July! I wish I’d taken a screen shot. I haven’t changed any of the settings since I set up the program.

So of course, I initiated a customer service request. And my request apparently led some employee at Trend to delete my entire backup, so I could not demonstrate that it stopped working.

Today I spent an hour on the phone with a tech, who was not able to locate any of my files. At this point, having utterly lost confidence in the product, I asked for a refund. I was told, first by Miss Clueless (who was, BTW, a very poor listener) and then later by Richard, her supervisor, that I would have needed to request that refund by 30 days after purchase. Then Richard tried to blame it on me, saying the empty data folder meant I had installed it improperly. I pointed out that I could see the first three months of files when I’d logged on earlier in the month. I pointed out that I had paid for a year of service, and that after 30 days, it was still working properly. No refund. I tried to escalate. He said “I’ll save you time. There will be no refund” and did not honor my request to talk to his supervisor.

Hello! I bought a year of backup data security; I received, apparently, three months

I am therefore adding to my list of missions to save you from buying anything from a company whose product lies to its customers, whose customer service staff is atrocious and which does not stand behind its product. All they had to do was give me back my $61. I would not have been happy about the lost data, but at least I would not have been charged for services not received. But they can’t be bothered, and I’m not going to get any work done until I vent. I’m pretty steamed at the moment.

In addition to safeSync (yeah, real safe!), they also make an antvirus product called Titanium and a cyberblocker called Online Guardian. And a suite called Internet Security Pro, and an eneterprise security program called Endpoint Security. Guess what I won’t be buying! A company this lacking in business ethics shoots itself in the foot. They clearly have no concept of customer service as either marketing or damage control.

My blog gets automatically posted to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, with over 10,000 total connections. I hope I can save a few of those people from wasting money with a company that doesn’t care.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Green Business, People Helping People, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Very interesting article on Sustainable Brands, “Climate Change – Good For Business” by John Friedman.

Friedman cites Richard Branson on the opportunties in the environmental field:

“I have described the increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as one of the greatest threats to the ongoing prosperity and sustainability of life on the planet,” he says. “The good news is that creating businesses that will power our growth, and reduce our carbon output while protecting resources is also the greatest wealth-generating opportunity of our generation.”

And I agree. I have profiled many entrepreneurs over the years who are succeeding with creative green businesses. In many cases, they are creating whole new market sectors—such as an entrepreneur who saves water by selling a spray fluid that largely neutralizes the odor and stain of urine, thus substantially reducing a family’s need to flush.

What is perhaps most interesting about the Friedman article is his historical perspective of energy and transportation not only as wealth-generators, but as environmental problem-solvers for their time:

A high percentage of the wealthiest people in history – excluding despots and conquerors – have made their fortunes in the areas of energy, transportation and construction. The Rockefeller fortune was based on oil (energy), Andrew Carnegie (steel), Cornelius Vanderbilt saw the revolution from wind to steam engines and built an empire in shipping and railroads. Henry Ford took the automobile from the purview of the wealthy to a staple of the average American household by increasing production efficiency, thereby reducing costs for consumers and creating an entire industry that was much of the basis for the American economy for decades…

Indeed many of these changes in industry and transportation have followed the evolution from individual power (feet or paddles), to animal power (horses and horses and buggies) to steam (initially powered in the U.S. by wood and then coal) and finally to internal combustion and electricity. It is important to note that in addition to increasing speed and efficiency, many of these changes were furthered by the desire for more environmentally friendly alternatives [emphasis added]; streetcars and buses in New York were seen as a solution to the manure that was lining the city streets.

Of course, there’s an obvious caution here. The message from the past, viewed through the lens of 2012 and catastrophic climate change, is that sometimes, solutions to old problems cause greater problems. This is a principle that must inform us as we go forward, to avoid blundering into even worse situations as we fix the urgent problems we face.

The good news: we know a lot more about what works and what doesn’t. For instance, we already know that nuclear power is not a solution to climate change and has enormous catastrophic potential. We know that fracking to drill for natural gas not only pollutes water but probably causes earthquakes.

And we also know that we have to be careful to develop solar, wind, hydro, tidal, magnetic, and other clean, renewable energy sources in ways that are both environmentally and economically sustainable.

This is our mission, our duty, our responsibility. Let’s get it done—the right way.

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By Posted on Posted in Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Green Business, Technology Tagged with , , ,

The technology to capture energy generated by people working out on exercise equipment has been around for years. I read about eco-pioneers who would bike in order to watch TV, probably at least 20 or 25 years ago.

Yet even in very green-conscious Massachusetts, it’s taken until now for a fitness center to use the power its members generate.

Congrats to Energia, of my own town of Hadley, MA, for being the first partially human-powered fitness center in the state (and one of only 70 in all of North America, to get with the program (pun intended).

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Politics, propaganda, Technology, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , ,

Jim Hightower, populist author and entertaining voice for common sense for decades (and a terrific speaker—if you ever get the chance, go hear him!) has a great article on the real agenda of those pushing the Keystone XL gas pipeline from Canada to Texas.

It’s to get that Canadian crude down to oil refineries in the free trade zone at Port Arthur, Texas—where it can be shipped overseas a lot more cheaply.

We Americans get the land takings, the toxic leakage, the interruption of wildlife habitat corridors and all the rest of the “good stuff”; foreign markets get the oil; prices in the US go up. Such a Deal!

Hightower is the former Texas Commissioner of Agriculture and a generally knowledgeable guy. I find him credible, and I trust his analysis.

Thanks but no thanks. Please spread this widely.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Demographics/Psychographics, Energy & Sustainability, Technology Tagged with , , , , ,

The new planned city of Masdar, just outside Abu Dhabi, only welcomed its first residents in 2009. Designed from the get-go to minimize the effect of desert heat, and keep motor vehicle traffic out of the city center (replacing them with a system of underground minicars), this green city is very much an experiment in progress, according to this article on Triple Pundit. Considering how many cities in the United Arab Emirates are showplaces of out-of-control energy consumption, Masdar is pretty exciting.

Already this experiment is bearing fruit. Hot desert cities have a lot to learn from this model—and so do the rest of us. Read the article.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Green Business, Technology Tagged with , , ,

And changing the face of our cities by thinking not only building by building, but even through a region that crosses an international border.

This TED talk on rethinking architecture is well worth watching (even if it’s a bit slow at first).

Besides, where else can you see a downhill ski resort in flat, urban Copenhagen—made out of…you’ll just have to watch the video to find out.
With thanks to @FabianPattberg

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Entrepreneurship, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Shel's Personal Life, Technology, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , ,

In Part 1, “Steve Jobs Introduces the first Macintosh, January 1984,” I discussed why “the computer for the rest of us” was such a big deal at the time. Now, I want to show you how the Mac allowed me to completely reinvent an old business model and dominate my local market for ten years. You might find some marketing lessons you can apply to your own business.

In 1984, when I bought my first (and one of the first) Mac, the bulk of my work was typing term papers and writing résumés. The difference for résumés, even with the dot-matrix printer that was all the Mac had back then, was amazing. Being able to bold or italicize, having the words appear on the screen exactly where they’d show up on paper, and most importantly, knowing exactly where the bottom of the page was and being able to adjust typographically to make things fit—W O W !

Up to that point, I would write a draft of the resume without worrying about formatting during the first interview, send the client away, type it up on an IBM Selectric typewriter (which sometimes took two or three tries, although it got better when I realized I could type on legal-size paper for photocopying onto letter-size and not worry so much about matching the top and bottom margins), and then bring the client back in to review the final product. Changes either required whiting out the error with a special paint, letting it dry thoroughly and very carefully inserting the correction, or retyping the whole bleeping page.

Now, here’s the lesson: Having access to this better technology meant I was not only able to change my business model, but create an unstoppable marketing advantage—and even back then, I was thinking like a marketer.

I went into the Yellow Pages with a little half-inch in-column listing that said “Affordable professional resumes while you wait.” (Couldn’t do accent marks in the Yellow Pages at that time.) Almost instantly, I had the busiest résumé shop in my whole three-county-area. And that slogan was my USP (Unique Selling Proposition) for the next decade. Résumés were not only more lucrative but a lot more fun than typing term papers, and within a few years, they (along with the growing percentage of students who had access to a computer) pretty much pushed out the term paper portion of my business. We rode the résumé train as the bread and butter of our business until Windows 95 started to catch on, with a résumé template that let people think (incorrectly, in most cases) that they could do their own résumés. And oddly enough, none of my local competitors offered the while-you-wait service that attracted so many people to us.

If you missed part 1 of this two-part series, https://greenandprofitable.com/steve-jobs-introduces-the-first-macintosh-january-1984

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By Posted on Posted in Entrepreneurship, Shel's Personal Life, Technology Tagged with ,

Part 1 of two related posts.

Here’s a video of Steve Jobs introducing the very first Mac, taken by Scott Knaster, who wrote software documentation for Apple.

If you’re under 35 or so, it may be hard to see what all the cheering was about—especially when you realize the audience was drawn from the smartest and most tech-savvy people in the country. After all, it’s a black-and-white computer with a terrible speech synthesizer and a 9-inch screen, running off a floppy disk, for goodness sake.

But compared to what else was out there, it was like going from a hand-crank-to-start Model T Ford to, let’s say, a Prius. There were no PCs in the under $8000 range that could do half of what the Mac did effortlessly, at a price under $3000. None that could:

  • Be controlled with a mouse instead of typing arcane instructions
  • Display type on the screen in multiple fonts, sizes, and styles, including handwriting-like script fonts
  • Create pictures using painting tools instead of massive amounts of computer code
  • Play chess on a realistic-looking 3D board, using the mouse to move pieces
  • Synthesize speech this clearly and easily
  • Have all the pieces in one relatively lightweight box, be carried around in a bag, and still have a screen big enough to work (there were portable computers back then, like the Kaypro and Osborne—but the Kaypro was big and awkward and had sharp metal edges, and the Osborne’s 5″ screen  was kind of like using something the size of an iPhone but weighed 24.5 pounds and had screen quality like an old non-cable black-and-white TV screen

Along with the “insanely great” slogan, Apple also called the Mac “the computer for the rest of us.” And it was! I had actually begun shopping for my first computer in late 1983. Frankly, although I recognized that I needed a computer and it would make writing my second book a lot easier, I was intimidated. I didn’t want to have to learn code, didn’t want to struggle with awkward and unintuitive commands. I had used computerized typesetting equipment on one of my newspaper jobs, and it wasn’t fun.

So I took my time researching. I looked at the Kaypro, Osborne, Morrow, Commodore 64 (which had the worst word processing software I’ve ever seen) and various others, and by March, 1984, I was pretty much set to buy an Apple II, but not excited about the learning curve, or about not knowing how the page would look until I hit print. But my dealer, who was a friend, told me, “wait a month, we’ve got something really cool coming.” When the Mac was released to the general public in my area in April 1984, I bought one of the very first ones.

In Part 2 of this series, “How the First Mac Gave Me a Monopoly Marketing Advantage for 10 Years,” I draw marketing lessons from what that first Mac allowed me to do that none of my competitors were doing.

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