Applecore Cable Manager

I have really been enjoying these simple rubber cores that cheaply and effectively organize cords of all sorts. They make it easy to wrap a cord around due to the shape (like an apple core...duh) with slits on both ends to thread cord through. I find the hardness of the rubber just right; firm enough to hold the cord, but soft enough to be easy to bend open to insert cords. There are three sizes: small for something like earbud cords, medium for a phone/ipod etc. charger-size cord, and large for computer charges or appliances. I haven't tried the largest size yet, but love the ones I have. They come in a variety of bright colors which helps when it comes to finding and organizing cords. -- David Rosenfeld Applecore Cable Manager Small, Medium, Large $2, $3, $5 Available from and manufactured by Applecore

Amnesty International!

Review of another successful event for CDI College...

Fund-raising through an exciting dinner event!

Calgarians helping Albertans...

Let's see more Generosity of Spirit, eh? :)

Review more about CDI College...

Leaked video of how the Blackberry Storm 3 (code named Monaco) may function...

Click image for video.

By the way, Dale Bennett got me interested in these, originally.

This sexy device has yet to be officially announced.

(Sad sauce.)

The book is dead — long live the ebook

Source: Calgary Herald

Google launches eBooks in direct challenge to Amazon

Source: Herald, eh?

Marketing Presentations

Brilliant Marketing Mix (PPPP) and SWOT Analyses!

Our teams analyzed the marketing efforts of the following businesses:

• Guess Clothing,


• Home Depot retail stores,


• Westside Leisure Centre,


• and Calgary Transit.

Business partners!

Moments during the Graduation Ceremony for 2010

Roombots: autonomous, mobile, evolutionary self-assembling furniture

Roombots are autonomous, roving furniture segments that cruise around your house, looking for each other and spontaneously organizing themselves into furnishings that evolve based on how you use them. It's a project from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. This project intends to design and control modular robots, called Roombots, to be used as building blocks for furniture that moves, self-assembles, self-reconfigures, and self-repairs. Modular robots are robots made of multiple simple robotic modules that can attach and detach (Wikipedia: Self-Reconfiguring Modular Robotics).

Connectors between units allow the creation of arbitrary and changing structures depending on the task to be solved. Compared to "monolithic" robots, modular robots offer higher versatility and robustness against failure, as well as the possibility of self-reconfiguration. The type of scenario that we envision for the Rolex Learning Center is a group of Roombots that autonomously connect to each other to form different types of furniture, e.g. stools, chairs, sofas and tables, depending on user requirements. This furniture will change shape over time (e.g. a stool becoming a chair, a set of chairs becoming a sofa) as well as move using actuated joints to different locations depending on the users needs. When not needed, the group of modules can create a static structure such as a wall or a box.

Roombots: Modular robotics for adaptive and self-organizing furniture (via Beyond the Beyond)

Long-exposure photo of Roomba coverage
Concept for swarming "display blocks"
What happens to junk left behind in foreclosed homes?

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/8bYK2xityP4/roombots-autonomous.html

TWORK...TWITTER TWEETS AT WORK

HOW I TWEET:

1. Answer the question "What is INTERESTING?" rather than "What are you doing?"
2. Use your Follow Friends to filter the most relevant Tweets for your interests.
3. Retweet so that anyone Following me can use me as a filter for interesting news.

Once your Twitter account has "hundreds" of Followers, it's interesting that more and more Followers start Following you non-stop after a certain point, eh?

HOW I FIND NEWS:

My Friends' Tweets have acted like a springboard to a wealth of informative sites.
Hashtags can be used like bookmarks when I Retweet these informative sites, and I can go back through and connect these to my own work;
if I'm lucky, by the time I go back to the hashtag, others have added similar Tweets under the same hashtag.

HOW TO GET RELEVANT FOLLOWERS

If you are promoting your business, you don't really want "anyone" to Follow your business' Twitter activity. You want relevant Followers that are actually interested in becoming a customer someday, right?

For marketing purposes, Tweets need to be sent in volleys of three to eight at a time, as close to each other as possible (you might consider using 3-8 multiple Tabs in your browser to achieve this).
One pattern that still seems to attract new Followers to you:

Tweet 1: interesting business news
Tweet 2: relevant information that is Trending at the moment
Tweet 3: your advertisement, promotion, or marketing
Tweet 4: interesting news
Tweet 5: relevant information that is Trending with a Hashtag at the moment
Tweet 6: your coupon (ala Dell)
Tweet 7: personal insight
Tweet 8: interesting business news

RESULTS: This model is used by people that perform SEO and SEM, and using it will give you at least the same number of interested Followers as the number of your Tweets...

IMPORTANT: Most of your Tweets ought to include links for full articles or for marketing links.
Marketing links need to go to "painless" actions...
think email subscriptions, automatic enrollments, satisfaction guarantees, and discounted payment pages with items already "in the cart."

LIVE AND SHARE IDEAS THAT WORK

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

Okay, this is one of my new heroes because he authored a brilliant book...


...more ideas at Buzzmachine.com

Teach, market, and work the "Google" way for the next several years with some contemporary concepts!
Warning: some of the innovative and down-to-earth ideas might make some people cringe, perhaps because they are such a true depiction of how people learn nowadays.

This book is an "easy read," and the first half contains very keen insights about how to improve profits (across industries) today through Google.

After reading about the future of sales, I considered how experiential marketing, brand awareness, and advertising is becoming a more essential part of the Google world. I mean, how would anyone know what to type in the search box without marketing?

Oh, while you're at it, have a look at the Popular Search terms box on the top left of my blog. Pretty nifty, eh?

The latter chapters have some proposed models for the way the world might work in the future, and I noted how formal training, education, and continuing education is already changing into a more self-taught "Google" paradigm. Today, education is still a hot commodity - I think it can be kept "hot" with some of the following ideas, for starters:

• integrating WWGD? advice for both learners and instructors
  (like requiring less rote memorization per se)
• motivating institutions to establish creative marketing partnerships,
  especially with respect to helping companies to develop their staff effectively;
  Continuing Education, anyone?
• flexing the requirements for instructors when it comes to
  tenure, research, and field experience
  

Go ahead! Type some brilliant words into the Google box, and you get millions of results for products to buy, topics to learn, and incredible new experiences.



Oh boy, I wonder if the library needs my copy back yet?