Under Indra Nooyi’s leadership, Pepsi keeps showing a commitment to move towards social responsibility.
They just recently launched this campaign to reward new ideas and charities.
And they now unveiled a 100% compostable packaging for SunChips.
It is interesting that what we are witnessing right now is just simply the digitization of books formerly printed in paper. For over 500 years, books have been written and conceived with Gutenberg’s guidelines in mind (Gutenberg is the inventor of the mechanical printing press).
But since the advent of computers and now of the Internet, so many new possibilities have emerged – and yet the printed world has barely changed. The advent of the Kindle, the iPad and other portable reading devices has so far simply resulted in turning analog print into digital print, while keeping the same linear prose format.
If you stop to think about it, we are stuck in one model that, while beautiful and applicable for much good, is certainly not the only model to serve all potential needs that books can serve.
Over the coming years, the whole way we think of e-books and just "books" will probably change. One day it will not be "surprising" to read, within a book, interactive pictures and images akin to the ones you see in Harry Potter movies – those quirky 3D moving photos within the wizards’ magical newspapers.
And it is also quite conceivable, indeed likely, that multimedia forms will reinvent how we do storytelling and how we provide information. Why stick to just prose, or just music, or just newspaper, or just video? Why not create new models for information that combine elements of them all?
Why assume that a linear story is best? Why think that a book is necessarily different from a video-game? Someone will come up with a book that merges some elements of a game with different endings. Analog examples already exist. And digital multiple-choice endings already exist. But we have not even begun exploring all the new possibilities presented by electronic "readers."
And why assume that a book needs to first be written and published, then read, then auctioned off to a Hollywood producer who then helps create a movie version of the movie? Someone will surely create a way to inform or entertain that combines elements of both – and more.
The potential for reinvention of the "book" is so far totally untapped.
I have received about twenty forwards from proud Jewish friends about Israel’s humanitarian contributions to Haiti – most frequently this CNN video. It is sad how this humanitarian mission gets twisted by opponents (or extreme supporters) of Israel into a political issue. Disregarding that noise and not connecting it to Mideast policies, a picture is clearly emerging that Israeli technology and services have been at the cutting edge in Haiti, as reported by TIME:
Eight hours later, they were still there waiting for treatment, but Loremas knew that his 18-year-old niece Richline was one of the lucky ones. Like his little sister, whom he had deposited at the same field hospital the day before, she would be getting the best care possible in earthquake-ravaged Haiti. The Israeli hospital can treat only about 100 people a day, but it is the paramount medical center operating in Haiti in the aftermath of the Jan. 12 earthquake. It receives the cases that other hospitals find difficult and cannot manage. Upon entry, patients are photographed, and then they and their electronic records are digitally tracked around the tent complex with bar-coded bracelets. Ninety percent of those in Israeli hands have complex crushed limbs and bones — crush syndrome. But given the severity of the injuries and the conditions in apocalyptic Port-au-Prince, the hospital has had an amazing success rate: of the more than 400 people treated by Jan. 19, only eight had died.
If you can imagine it, you can create it.
If you can dream it, you can become it.
–William Arthur Ward
Michael Malone from ABC News wrote an interesting article on Apple’s iPhone and its overall new product development strategy, with interesting strategic lessons for new product development and business in general.
This is another in a series (see prior examples here and here) of magical uses of art in real life situations – which accentuates all that is good about art and about life – and can be a phenomenal marketing tool:
really nice stuff…
Further to my earlier post about Apple’s cool ads, I got hooked on the songs in there and tried to find the original videos. For Chairlift-Bruises I came across the video immediately below and was struck by it. It seemed so cutting edge and professional, yet so casual and young (uncomfortably so for my wife – and I can understand why as a parent I’d also be concerned). Was it possible that kids did this on their own? Or was the video director so sophisticated as to make it look so down-to-earth? It turns out it was all done by an 8th grader who is quickly building a following. And it’s actually far better than the official video! You factor in these considerations and you understand why we are just in the beginning of what will be a revolution in content generation, with repercussions for business, culture and society that we cannot begin to comprehend.
Check out this new ad from Apple for their new iPod nano with video. How is it that the Apple team ALWAYS gets ahead of all trends and pop culture and sets the tone for advertising coolness and standards? Everything in this ad is so perfect – colors, steps, shots, all.
The song on the ad is Bourgeois Shangri-La from Miss Li.
This earlier ad from Apple – with the song Bruises by Chairlift – is also awesome.
Harvard has a pretty neat site – www.implicit.Harvard.edu – that offers people the opportunity to take tests that may surprise us with insights into subconscious biases we all have…