Successful Marketing

I like to consider myself a conscious consumer and pride myself on being able to see through most commercials. This one, however, had me running for the stores. It advertises small gummy bears with vitamins and fruity flavour. I have never been one for dietary supplements but now I take two of these every morning.

This is an earlier, less appealing one:

Sources: 1, 2

Things You don't Need

Here's a refreshing filmclip I found. I know a number of people in my circle of aquaintance who could benefit from watching this.



So I guess I will not be ordering this Sarah Palin action figurine after all.

Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

If I had any pluck, I would invest in apps. "What are apps?", you ask, silently. Apps, or applications, are special programs for your phone which give you maps for the strange city you are in, let you follow the temperature, the news, the stock market or the hit lists. The app is what makes your smart phone smart. There is an app for everything and everyone buys apps. The market is estimated to be worth around $ 6 million this year, which is a doubling of last year.

Just a few of the iPhone apps

At the moment Apple is hogging most of the shares through their iPhone app flora, but recently 24 operators and smart phone manufacturers have joined forces in the Wholesale Application Community (WHAC). They want to create an open platform to compete with Apple, a platform from which Apple is excluded. As it is, only iPhones take the Apple apps, but WHAC envisions a more adaptable set of apps which not only gives the customer more choice and vitalises smart phone development, but also diversifies the market and promotes competition.

For now, smart phones constitute only about 20% of the market, but as both the smart phone and the app market is expanding at an astonishing rate, it would probably be a good idea to invest in such stocks as early as possible.

Sources: CNN, http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/images/set3/apl10.jpg, last visited 15.2.2010

Mr Bob Carpenter

This afternoon I will have a visit from Mr Bob Carpenter. He is similar to his vocational brother the builder in every respect except for his slogan, which in Carpenter's case is: "can we fix it!? Yes, we can, although it will cost you". Never really went down particularly well with any children's hour audiences. But I digress.

He is to build a new ceiling in my living room. This is to cover the naste blue tubes his incompetent plumber chum hung from the bathroom to the kitchen beneath my present ceiling. I thought this would be covered by the cost of the bathroom (a whooping great pile of cash) but it seems it wasn't.

Following the bathroom affair, we spent almost half an hour with Mr Carpenter in awkward silence whereupon he guaranteed that "we would agree on a price" for the roof.

I only hope we won't have to do so before a district attorney.

We'll see this afternoon.