I could not resist this one…  According to a story I found on Reghardware, a new battery has been created that can be recharged using a variety of liquids including water and URINE.  That’s right folks.  Now before you run to the toilet and waste all that valuable urine of yours, you can grab a couple of batteries and recharge them with your own pee.

“Dubbed NoPoPo, the battery has been developed by the Japanese company Aqua Power System and comes in standard AA and AAA formats. Although, larger capacities for use as auxiliary power supplies have been rumoured.”

So many jokes I can make with this…..  Brain overloading….  Having terrible pictures in my head of my friends peeing into a AA battery.  I think I need to quit on this post while I am clearly already behind.

One of the things that I always do both in my professional as well as my personal life is think about a conversation I had and wonder what I could of said differently. What I could of said that was better, smarter and sometimes funnier. I found this clip that has writer/director Kevin Smith addressing what looks to be a large crowd at the Comicon convention. During the Q&A, a guy fron the audience thought he would get cute and try to take on James. Big mistake. James came back on him with some absolutely classic and great retorts. I thought I would share.

WARNING: LANGUAGE USED IS NOT SAFE FOR WORK.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you are not familiar, there is a big conference every year called Defcon. This is a conference of hackers, security experts, etc. A NBC Dateline producer named Michelle Madigan tried to sneak into the conference as a programmer and had a hidden camera where she wanted to film hackers hacking I guess. Anyhow, Ms. Madigan was discovered and the conference organizers asked her if she would like a press pass which she declined. I don’t know what she was thinking, but she was outed in the middle of the conference and then literally chased out of the convention. You can see the whole video below. Wouldn’t you like to be a fly on the wall when Ms. Madigan meets with her boss on Monday?

Technorati Tags: Defcon, NBC, Dateline, Michelle Madigan

Now when you read this story, the first thing that is going to come to your mind is, “What does this have to do with marketing?” I promise I will tie it together.

Leigh sent me this story via Reuters:

BERLIN (Reuters) – A German bus driver threatened to throw a 20-year-old sales clerk off his bus in the southern town of Lindau because he said she was too sexy, a newspaper reported Monday.

“Suddenly he stopped the bus,” the woman named Debora C. told Bild newspaper. “He opened the door and shouted at me ‘Your cleavage is distracting me every time I look into my mirror and I can’t concentrate on the traffic. If you don’t sit somewhere else, I’m going to have to throw you off the bus.’”

The woman, pictured in Bild wearing her snug-fitting summer clothes with the plunging neckline, said she moved to another seat but was humiliated by the bus driver.

A spokesman for the bus company defended the driver.

“The bus driver is allowed to do that and he did the right thing,” the spokesman said. “A bus driver cannot be distracted because it’s a danger to the safety of all the passengers.”

And for everyone who is wondering about this “snug fitting” woman, here is a picture of her.

Now as I said, you are wondering what does this have to do with marketing? I guess this is just me and my suspicious mind, but what if this was all a setup? What if this was staged to get this woman great press? How much money is woman going to make now that this story is out? Wouldn’t such a wacky and simple story like this be an absolutely perfect marketing plan?

A guy could not drive his bus because of this woman’s “beauty”. This happened in Germany and I am writing about it here in North Carolina, all without spending one penny on advertising. I would say that would make this a pretty impressive marketing campaign.

I thought this was cute. Go iPhone.

Technorati Tags: iPhone

Special thanks to Jeremy for sharing with me.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We discuss a great deal here about the customer experience and how important it is in this day and age for companies to truly open up a dialog with their users. I found this absolutely amazing letter online that I had to share. Let me give you a short back story on this.

There is a real person named Scott Williams who lives in Newport, Vermont. What I guess Mr. Williams does as a hobby is he digs things up in his backyard and then sends them to the Smithsonian Institute. He names the random crap with scientific sounding names he finds in his backyard  and insists they are archaeological finds. Let me state upfront, I am not making this up.

So picture that you are the Chief Curator of the Smithsonian Institute and you have some crazy guy sending you trash from his backyard, what would you do? I know I most likely would throw his letters and crap into the garbage and not think of it for another second. Well, the Chief Curator of the Smithsonian is a much better man than I as he actually sent Mr. Williams a letter back regarding one of his “artifacts”. Below is the letter that Mr. Williams received. I know it is a bit long, but I promise you it is so well worth the read.

Smithsonian Institute

207 Pennsylvania Avenue

Washington, DC 20078

Dear Mr. Williams:

Thank you for your latest submission to the Institute, labeled “93211-D, layer seven, next to the clothesline post…Hominid skull.” We have given this specimen a careful and detailed examination, and regret to inform you that we disagree with your theory that it represents conclusive proof of the presence of Early Man in Charleston County two million years ago. Rather, it appears that what you have found is the head of a Barbie doll, of the variety that one of our staff, who has small children, believes to be “Malibu Barbie.”

It is evident that you have given a great deal of thought to the analysis of this specimen, and you may be quite certain that those of us who are familiar with your prior work in the field were loathe to come to contradiction with your findings. However, we do feel that there are a number of physical attributes of the specimen which might have tipped you off to its modern origin:

1. The material is molded plastic. Ancient hominid remains are typically fossilized bone.

2. The cranial capacity of the specimen is approximately 9 cubic centimeters, well below the threshold of even the earliest identified proto-homonids.

3. The dentition pattern evident on the skull is more consistent with the common domesticated dog than it is with the ravenous man-eating Pliocene clams you speculate roamed the wetlands during that time.

This latter finding is certainly one of the most intriguing hypotheses you have submitted in your history with this institution, but the evidence seems to weigh rather heavily against it. Without going into too much detail, let us say that:

A. The specimen looks like the head of a Barbie doll that a dog has chewed on.

B. Clams don’t have teeth.

It is with feelings tinged with melancholy that we must deny your request to have the specimen carbon-dated. This is partially due to the heavy load our lab must bear in its normal operation, and partly due to carbon dating’s notorious inaccuracy in fossils of recent geologic record. To the best of our knowledge, no Barbie dolls were produced prior to 1956 AD, and carbon dating is likely to produce wildly inaccurate results.

Sadly, we must also deny your request that we approach the National Science Foundation Phylogeny Department with the concept of assigning your specimen the scientific name Australopithecus spiff-arino.

Speaking personally, I, for one, fought tenaciously for the acceptance of your proposed taxonomy, but was ultimately voted down because the species name you selected was hyphenated, and didn’t really sound like it might be Latin. However, we gladly accept your generous donation of this fascinating specimen to the museum. While it is undoubtedly not a Hominid fossil, it is, nonetheless, yet another riveting example of the great body of work you seem to accumulate here so effortlessly.

You should know that our Director has reserved a special shelf in his own office for the display of the specimens you have previously submitted to the Institution, and the entire staff speculates daily on what you will happen upon next in your digs at the site you have discovered in your Newport back yard. We eagerly anticipate your trip to our nation’s capital that you proposed in your last letter, and several of us are pressing the Director to pay for it. We are particularly interested in hearing you expand on your theories surrounding the trans-positating fillifitation of ferrous ions in a structural matrix that makes the excellent juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex femur you recently discovered take on the deceptive appearance of a rusty 9-mm Sears Craftsman automotive crescent wrench.

Yours in Science,

Harvey Rowe
Chief Curator- Antiquities

Mr. Rowe, I salute you for taking the time to write this absolutely classic letter. I found via this web site.

Technorati Tags: customer experience, Smithsonian Institute

I found this story very funny and maybe the RIAA and the MPAA could learn a thing or two from a 29 year old Los Angeles developer.  Trey Harrison had been developing a PC application called Salvation for the last seven years.  He had just completed it and actually had just gotten his first couple of customers.  He then discovered his application that he had worked so hard on had been cracked and a pirated version was online available for download.

Instead of taking the RIAA or MPAA approach of hiring 400 lawyers and suing everyone that they can get a name and address on, Trey decided to just send the hackers an email.  That’s right, he found an email address in the NFO and sent them an email asking them nicely not to do this again.  And guess what?  The pirates responded by apologizing and promised him they would not pirate his application.

I think this story would serve everyone working at the RIAA and MPAA to remember that old saying, “You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar.”

Technorati Tags: RIAA, MPAA

This was sent to me by a couple of different people almost at the same time. Very funny.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I thought this would bring everyone a chuckle as it did for me. Thanks to Jeremy.