Last week, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill that prohibits the sale of any baby bottles or cups that contain more than 0.1 parts per billion of bisphenol A (BPA). With the bill scheduled to take effect in July 2013, consumers will slowly start seeing more BPA-free bottles on the market – and not just in the state of California. Connecticut, Maine, Maryland and Minnesota have similar bans in effect.
Earlier this week, Disney announced plans to convert four classic films into 3D and release those editions to theaters across the country. The decision comes on the heels of the success of The Lion King in 3D, which has raked in over $80 million and is still playing in theaters, despite original intentions to screen it for only two weeks.
This week, Amazon released the Kindle Fire and the Kindle Touch as part of a new wave of toys for the tech-savvy. The Kindle Fire is Amazon’s first attempt to take on the tablet market, which has so far been dominated by Apple’s iPad. Amazon’s Fire is smaller and thinner than the iPad, making it great for staying entertained on the go but less practical for accomplishing work outside of the office. While it’s not quite as functional as the iPad, the Fire does have one main advantage: its price starts at $199, well below any other tablet currently on the market.
If you’re like me, you can’t wait for the email or phone call telling you that the package you ordered online has shipped. Whether you purchased a new apparel item for yourself, a gift for a friend, or even just your schoolbooks, it’s exciting to get home after a long day and find a package waiting on your doorstep.
On the flip side, there’s nothing worse than arriving home and – instead of seeing your goods – finding a note stuck to the door alerting you that no one was home to sign for the package and thus it could not be delivered. Well, not anymore!
photo credit: edenpictures
Although Hurricane Irene advanced at a mere 14 miles per hour over the weekend, a much slower pace than typical coastal hurricanes, it stretched over 260 miles from the center in some directions, affecting the populations of 12 states- possibly the greatest number of people ever threatened by a single storm in the United States. While it did not wreak as much havoc as originally anticipated, many states are continuing to battle raging floodwaters, far-reaching power outages, and immense structural damage to buildings and homes. The hurricane took at least 21 lives in nine states, but the full extent of devastation has yet to be determined. On behalf of Pinnacle, our thoughts and prayers are with the victims of the storm.
In Manhattan, authorities far overestimated the impact of Irene, which many New Yorkers affectionately refer to as, “Hurricane I-rain.” Citydwellers stocked up on food, water, batteries, and other survival tools at the end of last week when a state of emergency was declared. Fortunately for the city that never sleeps, a lost weekend of sales and the costs of repairing storm damage appear to be the only casualties.
And on a sunnier note, Manhattanites can put their promotional umbrellas back into their coat closets to save them for another rainy day!
If you’ve ever been to the emergency room with a less-than-life-threatening affliction, you know that there’s a good chance you might have to wait upwards of an hour before seeing a doctor. Well, not anymore, thanks to a new technology that allows hospitals to publicize emergency wait times via text message.
How does it work? Patients on the way to the hospital can text a designated number and, within seconds, receive a message that contains a list of local hospitals and their current emergency room wait times.
In recent years, some hospitals have used digital billboards or designated websites to publicize this pertinent information. Billboards are costly, however, and require that organizations have a large enough budget to spend on such technologies. While websites offer a cost-effective solution, they are not nearly as ubiquitous or practical as text messages. In order to find out the wait time from a website, patients must either waste precious time looking up the information before they leave the house – or have a smartphone and a driver so that they can access the site while en route.
The Georgia License Plate Design Contest reopened for voting on Monday, easing concerns that a misunderstanding about an optional “In God We Trust” sticker marred the outcome of the original results.
Of the eight semi-finalists, three designs featured the sticker on the bottom of the license plate while the other five displayed a county name, just like the current Georgia plates. According to officials, it was not clear to voters that the “In God We Trust” label would be an optional addition to the winning plate. Thus, to mitigate confusion, the Department of Revenue decided to showcase the eight individual designs with a blank placeholder to represent where individuals would display the sticker of their choosing.
A few weeks ago, the President & CEO of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) put out the following video blog about the association’s new initiative to develop and implement a system of generally accepted brand valuation standards – a system that, he says, our economy currently lacks.
In the video, Bob Liodice discusses the relationship between marketing and brand value. He is a firm believer that investing in the former is essential for the growth of the latter “If we don’t invest in marketing activities,” he says, “we could be damaging our brand value.”
The video comes in the midst of efforts from the Obama administration and the Interagency Working Group on Food Marketed to Children to cut back on the amount of junk food marketing and advertising initiatives specifically geared toward kids. Strict new guidelines have been proposed that could potentially cut current food & beverage advertising expenditures by 20%, reducing total sales by businesses in this industry by $30 billion in as little as a year. Of course, there would be job losses to go along with that dollar amount – 378,000 jobs over a four-year period, according to the ANA.
However, these brands won’t only be losing money and manpower. As Liodice notes in his video, marketing efforts directly relate to brand power, so if marketing initiatives are cut, brand value will also take a hit. He says that “we know empirically that strong brands means strong operating results, which means higher shareholder equity…organizations that have strong brands have a higher stock market value than those that do not.” Putting restrictions on how and to whom members of the food & beverage industry can advertise might not just affect these companies’ employees and profits, but our economy as a whole.
At an American Diabetes Association meeting this past Sunday, researchers announced that while diet sodas may be free of calories, they are not free of health risks.
In a study held by the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, researchers followed the health of 474 diet soda drinkers for 10 years. After the testing period came to an end, they found that the participants who drank diet soda increased their waist size by 70% more than those who completely avoided low-calorie and calorie-free soft drinks.
What concerned the authors even more were the health risks they found to be associated with drinking diet sodas. Previous studies have suggested that chronic conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and other health risks may be directly correlated to an individual’s waist size. In hopes of supporting this claim, the UT Health Science Center research team tested the correlation between diet soda consumption and diabetes in mice. They found that the mice that consumed food laced with aspartame (the sweetener in some diet sodas) had higher blood sugar levels than the mice that ate normal food, which means that the artificial sweetener aspartame could very well contribute to the development of diabetes in humans, too. Continue reading →
This week mathematical enthusiasts around the world recognized June 28th as National Tau day. While March 14th (3/14) has long been acknowledged as Pi Day due to its numerical resemblance to the first three numbers in the decimal expansion of pi, proponents of tau insist the holiday be more appropriately referred to as “Half Tau Day.”
Tau advocates, or Tauists, assert that tau equals approximately 6.28, which is twice as much as pi, and therefore believe that the number itself is more significant than pi alone. Efforts to replace pi with tau have been ongoing for about ten years but it was Michael Hartl who brought widespread attention to the movement in June 2010. In “The Tau Manifesto,” a dedication to one of the most notable numbers in math, Hartl explains that pi is not factually incorrect, however, it is a “confusing and unnatural choice for the circle constant.” Pi is the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle but tau is circumference divided by radius. Simple enough, right?