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Lenzr is packed full of photo contests for March and April 2010. They came out of the woodwork to be part of this series, and there’s more queuing for May.  It seems local businesses like the buzz that a properly promoted photo contest can deliver, and the price is right. If you’re interested in promoting your business on Lenzr email rob at smojoe dot com, or you could message Lenzr admin but it all goes to the same place. The buckstop is here.

Toronto Party Rentals Company seeks Backyard Party Events photos on Lenzr

Backyard Party Events is a photo contest for the DIY party people who would rather host friends than be guests.  The sponsor is a Toronto party rentals company that wants to see pictures of people who stay home and do it themselves, renting tables, chairs, tents, wet bars, stages and fences for their own world class bash. I’ve been to few benders like that. We all have. But do you have any pictures? The photo contest is designed to immortalize the people that have rented the big stuff and made a big splash, a memory that will stand the test of time.

The sponsor is a Toronto tent rentals company that’s absolutely stuffed to the rafters with everything required to make a massive bash. This place is a party bomb waiting to explode on somebody’s backyard. Here’s a link to Laura on the Absolute Blog.  She’s standing by to write about the best photographs in the contest that includes tents, staging, folding chairs, tables, event lighting and much much more.  All of this is detailed in the Toronto party rentals sponsor profile on the Lenzr blog.

The prize for the Lenzr member that uploads the highest ranked picture is a spiffy new 10×10 Popup Tent, and $500 Gift Certificate * for anything in Absolute Tent and Event Services catalog.

Geothermal Installation Company Sponsors Fire and Ice photo contest on Lenzr

The Fire and Ice photo contest on Lenzr is probably the coolest theme, and will be no doubt be the hottest competition on the index as photographers show off their skills.

The back story here begins on Saturday Feb 27th 2010 when I journeyed down to the National Home Show and met Steve Hamoen of ZoneLife.ca in the Better Living Centre in Toronto.

I spent two hours talking to Steve and hangingout with him at the show. I enjoyed watching him answer questions and set minds ablaze with every explanation of exactly what’s possible these days with geothermal heating and cooling systems.

Steve Hamoen is a geothermal installer who stamps out common misconceptions about this new energy source.  Firstly, the heat doesn’t just come up out of the ground in easy to use levels, but rather in units that are commonly referred to as low grade energy - the source needs to be ramped up into more viable residential or industrial heating (or cooling) strengths using boilers or coolers as the case may be. This usable low grade energy also needs to be distributed from the source to the areas that require heat or cooling, and all of that sort of thing also requires electricity. Overall the system is part of a bigger, better planet saving solution.

Geothermal power is cost effective, reliable, sustainable, and environmentally friendly, but has historically been limited to only a very few areas of the globe, like Iceland. Recent technological advances have dramatically expanded the range and size of viable resources, especially for applications such as home heating, and in particular floor heating.

The Prize is GeoAir PCO air purifier

Photo Catalytic Oxidation (PCO) is perhaps the most advanced air purifying technology available today.  And unlike existing air cleaning systems that rely solely on ultraviolet light, the GeoAir PCO device integrates a titanium dioxide semiconductor to leverage photocatalytic oxidation allowing it to vaporize indoor air pollutants, including those that cause odors, and break them down into non-toxic products like C02 and H20.

Bacteria, viruses, mold spores don’t stand a chance and are destroyed when they come into contact with the system’s 187 square-inch Ti02 grid.  All volatile organic compounds (VOC’s) are destroyed. The system is cost-effective, maintenance-free and provides maximum energy efficiency with negligible resistance to airflow.

Toronto Grass Cutting Company asks How Green Are You? in Lenzr Photo Contest

The How Green Are You? photo challenge hopes to collect one sentence stories and snapshots of eco friendly notions submitted by Lenzr users that could be readily adopted by society in general.  The photo contest should become a repository of green ideas and inspirations. Already we have men making ‘half fuel’, clotheslines, compost piles and gardens, and we’re certain that even more sophisticated images will be uploaded before the contest ends, May 1st 2010.

Photographers are asked to be generous and share wisdom inside environmental theme images and art.

The How Green Are You? photo contest is sponsored by a solar powered grass cutting business in Toronto Ontario that has trucks and trailers festooned with adjustable solar panels.  They offer a sustainable, organic service that is also a relatively silent; their Neuton battery powered lawnmowers are very quiet.  This service is just finding its legs in the GTA and needs public support to achieve its true potential.

This sponsor is competing in the 2010 Green Innovation Awards.  Every year the Toronto Community Foundation donates up to $50,000 to help green businesses get established in the competitive Toronto marketplace. Green ideas may include any new technology, product and/or service that helps make Toronto a greener and more liveable city. Successful applicants are invited to present green ideas and funding requests to a panel of experts sometime after the submission deadline of March 12, 2010. The good news is that the Award recipients will be announced at the Green Toronto Awards Ceremony in April. 

How Green Are You? photo contest prize is Neuton CE6 battery powered lawn mower.

On May 1st the highest ranked image as decided by the members wins Neuton CE 6 Battery-Powered Mower with DURACELL® battery technology. There is no gas or oil to spill and no engine emissions to pollute the air. The 360 watt-hours of battery provide plenty of power. The Neuton CE 6 mower can cut about 1/3 acre (approx 15,000 sq. ft.) on a single charge. If you need more time, just swap in another battery and keep on mowing! Approx retail value $489.00 + shipping.

Toronto business phones installation company issues a challenge for Obsolete Office Equipment

Obsolete Office Equipment is another dynamic challenge centered on the workplace. The contest hopes to uncover the antiques that are still being used in today’s offices. Show us the obsolete objects that are still relied upon by frontline staff and backroom employees and the people who manage them.  Show us that much hated office things that slows everyone down.

This photo contest is a vision quest, a nostalgic look back at how business used to be conducted. Show us rotary dial telephones, punch clocks, obsolete measuring devices and things we used in the 1970s. Submit shots of call center switchboards and data centers.  Can you believe how far we’ve come in just ten years?

What will offices be like ten years in the future?

The contest sponsor is a business telephones system design and installation company that believes understanding your business needs is the most important part of choosing the right telephone system, as the closer your chosen telephone system comes to meeting your specific requirements, the greater the value it will add to your business.

The Prize is a 4 Line office telephone AT&T Model 1070. This state-of-the-art communication device has 4 line speakerphone & answering system capability. With Caller ID / Page / Intercom / Call transfer / Expandable to 16 stations / 32 # speed dial / 3 party conference / 6 number redial,  it has so many wonderful functions!

It has been a long time coming, and it’s still not done yet, but Deborah Lewis of Toronto City Events has a handsome new Wordpress blog at DebLewis.ca

It’s pink of course, and has some bells and whistles. Darryl Cheung of Deezilla.com skinned the Brian Gardiner Revolution Lifestyle template that was downloaded by Smojoe over a year ago.  I paid sixty bucks for the files, and made QueenWestGirl.com (which I sold earlier this spring), but those same files are free now, open source available here.

Anyone visiting DebLewis.ca will see Smojoe’s fingerprints in the content and fossilized in the sidebar.  The Lenzr blog widget runs in the bottom corner, three links in the Blogroll, and my own pretty face graces two Featured Content windows.

The layout and design of DebLewis.ca was selected because of those dynamic featured content windows, those big sliding pictures on the homepage are very compelling. But learning how to make them display properly was the principle cause of our delay.  Anyone struggling with these issues should look for conflicts between other third party widgets and applications. Darryl Cheung revealed that Deb’s own upload custom calendar was somehow affecting the featured content display; developers should look for those kinds of problems.

Deb Lewis is the owner, founder of and principle planner at Toronto City Events. This new blog was a lot of work to build, (not much money but a lot of time) and it will no doubt be a lot of work to maintain.

However her blog debut shows how she has embraced web share and is now keen to post her info and grow seven different communities at once, each filled with the people of Toronto, her target market.

This is probably a good time to reflect on my own belief that even now in the age of Twitter and Facebook status updates, blogs have never been more necessary.  That’s because the blog is the perfect place to showcase the other more spontaneous media.  Like myself, Deb runs the MyBlogLog ‘what’s new with me?’ widget in the 300x sidebar as this displays her Flickr images, tweets and social bookmarks. This makes her blog destination the perfect place to get up to the minute insights on the woman that is Deb Lewis, and witness in real time her expertise in action planning and promoting concerts and live events in the City of Toronto.

More Smojoe / City Events Seminars on Horizon

Look for another co-presentation in September 09 called How To Market an Event in Toronto using the Internet for Free. This is something I’ve been kind of obsessed with after pioneering procedures and gaining new insight into the Canadian teenscape in regards to the Miss Teen Canada World pageant. During the July campaign I was real proud of the widgets I’d made on Eventful.com (which many of the 54 contestants in the 2009 MTC-W Blog Army speedily added to their OnSugar blogs), and the hooks I’d sharpened to leave as bait on other local TO events indexes; in the next presentation I’ll spend time showing folks just exactly how I concoct more compelling Craigslist advertisements.

Bret Patriquin went to High School with Deb Lewis

Smojoe lunched with Bret Patriquin at Amsterdams (King St at Portand) in downtown Toronto sometime on Aug 20th 2009. We shared our brains on the state of search marketing in Canada and profited from each others’ perspective.

Bret Patriquin is perhaps ‘the most well known unknown’ internet marketing consultant in the city of Toronto. I’m keen to solicit his advice and help spreading the word about my photo contest that helps business sponsors target keyword driven organic search results. At lunch I ate a chicken Gouda sandwich with red melon balls; this picture I offer in homage to the local bloggers I emulate.

Just last week I had a beer with native actress and model Rachelle Whitewind at a curious cafe on Queen St East just past the bridge and before Broadview Ave. Didn’t get the name of the place but it was super cute and the beer was cheap. Rachelle is fresh back from Los Angeles where she experienced first hand the American film and television industry. For two years. She told me now she really appreciates all that Canada has to offer artists and performers. Rachelle is friends with Urban Native Girl and we talked about Lisa Charleyboy’s success helping showcase the lives and achievements of Canada’s aboriginal people online.  Rachelle is inspired again.

Also in the month of August and also totally unrelated to Deb Lewis, or her blog or Bret or Rachelle, is a young woman named Brandy. She is the blogger behind Artistic Tendency. Last week she came to listen and learn from Smojoe. This very talented artist and designer, blogger and business woman is centered in Barrie Ontario where she works to promote an artists cooperative that will soon be a major tourist attraction for the area.

Local photo contest website Lenzr.com launched on July 1st 2009.

Happy Canada Day! The fireworks all over Toronto are bursting to celebrate the birth of this nation, but to me, the pyrotechnics are popping for Lenzr.

After a two months gestation period which began when the notion was first conceived on my chalk board, and then transcribed into a seven page IA document (drawn on the fabric of experience learned from Dumpdiggers.com), William Webb of Innate Media Group delivered a demo on June 15th and now finally the beta site at Lenzr.com/toronto is presently running the first photo challenge.

At the core of this photo contest website you can hear the echoes of the photo battles for old coins and marbles that occurred last fall in the Dumpdiggers Arena. As a website designer, I gained a lot of wisdom making the antiques social networking site at Dumpdiggers.com. Lenzr was built on the knowledge that photo contests can make boring businesses socially relevant, and that’s the key to findability in this age of earned media. Using the photo contest mechanism to dispense coupons doubles the effectiveness of the innovation as it collects and confirms email addresses.

Lenzr Photo Contest Evolved From Dumpdiggers Arena Photo Battles

In Dumpdiggers.com, the photo battles in the Arena were just too darn short; they would only last a week. The contests were over and done with before anyone knew about them and respected collectors would show up in the forum and ask about photo battles in their niches long after they’d expired. The optimum length of a photo contest is three months, and if you maintain that tempo you can structure four contests a year and make them seasonal. Here’s the chronology of photo battles on Dumpdiggers.com

Lenzr.com photo challenges last for two months, and so there are six contest periods every year. But please understand that Lenzr.com is not a typical contest website that exists only to market one company. Rather, this destination was built to showcase very specific user submitted photos in an internet love affair with Toronto; it really is all about the art and the glory of winning the game is probably more important than the prize to most of the participants.

As you can see above, the model is similar to other ‘hot or not’ type of websites where you don’t have to be a member to vote. So casual passers-by can pass judgment on images and their votes are counted, and so are their IP addresses.  So voting becomes the best way to screen the images, one by one, in an interactive digestion of the material.

The first ever Lenzr photo contest is sponsored by Lenzr itself. The challenge will end August 31st and will award a shiny new digital camera to the lucky winner as it chronicles the story of their picture on the Lenzr blog and in other partner sites. The 12-megapixel Pentax Optio P70 is a super compact camera with a wide-angle 4x optical zoom lens (27.5-110mm equiv.). It has a 2.7-inch LCD display, Advanced Face Detection, Smile Capture, Blink Detection, and Pixel Track Shake Reduction “to assure sharp images with low noise even in poor lighting.” The camera can also capture 720p HD video at 15 frame-per-second.

Lenzr’s partners include many local Toronto bloggers.

Lenzr also has an alliance with All Canada Contests.

Lenzr is already an individual category on Toronto-Forums, a popular discussion forum website anchored in the GTA. Its hoped this forum will become the best place to discuss contests and sponsors and even individual pictures. This is where winners will be announced and winning pictures profiled. New ideas for contests and sponsors and photographers and friends can hook up in here to discuss Lenzr.

The very best facet of Lenzr is the library and the legacy of winning photos it shares with the people of Toronto. The archives at the rear end of the website will someday become a treasure trove of free images for anyone to use in blogs and forums, and also as postcards and calendars and rotating headers; the content will spawn photo widgets with free pictures of Toronto for the rest of time.

WordCamp is an information buffet.

There are times when you can learn as much as you can handle as fast as you can handle it. At WordCamp, everywhere you look there is someone very interesting and very knowledgeable waiting to talk, and their name and business is printed right on their badge. For someone like me, a hermit who stays home and surfs for one gem a week, this is information overload, and that’s probably what this post will look like…
This blog post will celebrate the gems of knowledge that I learned at WordCamp Toronto 2009.

Friday morning I arrived at 8:30am and recruited help getting my laptop setup. When I asked eight strangers which of them was the smartest, one tall man stood up and introduced himself. John Leschinski of Leschinski Design fixed my new PC’s networking issues at WordCamp 2009 in a Toronto second. Now I follow John on Twitter and hope he’ll continue to school me. That’s Lorelle on Wordpress hanging off him.

Twenty minutes later I watched Terry Smith of B5 Media digest Splendicity.com which is unique because it’s built using Wordpress MU (Multi User) with elements from Buddypress and bbpress.

Then I had lunch with Dan Zen who treated the occasion much like a round table discussion and asked everyone to introduce themselves and then explain what they did for a living.

Friday Afternoon at 2pm Smojoe social media anchored a round table discussion in Track3 wherein I outlined some of the basic constructs of my own social media marketing tactics.

Friday at 3pm in Track1, Erin Blaskie

Erin Blaskie and her sister, Trina traveled from Ottawa

At 3pm Erin outlined how she’s using social media tools to make her alter ego Erin Games famous on the internet. I had to smile when I saw that she’s using the Brian Gardiner Lifestyle ‘Revolution’ template (the exact same one that I have asked Darryl at Deezilla to customize for Queen West Girl.)

Erin has mass knowledge about how to make YouTube videos go viral and seems to have her finger on the pulse of the videogame community - she showed off some other powerful media tools that let people watch her gaming. They are hungry for tips and tricks that will give them an edge over their friends. Erin has had a lot of success as a guest blogger on some big video game websites, the names of which didn’t catch…

After her presentation there was some discussion in the audience about the mental shift that’s required to stop being just a documentarian and start becoming the star of your own blog. Its all about finding the confidence to hand your camera to your friend and ask them to photograph you at the event, because you are the focus, and the event is just the backdrop

The next day, Saturday I attempted to learn something about PostRank.com

I’ll admit some of this stuff just goes right over my head

Joey deVilla is a Microsoft evangalist

Joey was one of the superstars at WordCamp. He is very approachable and immensely entertaining. His website Global Nerdy is excellent, and his personal blog, Joey deVilla.com is definitely worth a gander.

Here are some pictures of Joey playing his accordion to much applause at The Drake Hotel. While outside sunning our bodies he related more wisdom from the empire. Joey mentioned a book by Maggie Mason, “Nobody Cares What You Had For Lunch” and he believes every blogger read it… ok well that’s not exactly what he said, but that’s what I took away…

WordCamp Toronto 2009 Opening Night Party at Lou Dawgs

The basement restaurant that hosted the opening night party was fashioned from concrete and decorated with a thin veneer of paint and wood. I thought it was odd that they only served Sleemans brand beer, but that wasn’t the only negative about Lou Dawgs - worst was the acoustics. In this environment there was no place for the sound to go… Any band would have been too loud.  The blues band, Spy vs Spy was over 30 decibels too loud, and consequently most of the attendees left the bar to continue their conversations out on the sidewalk.

Many thanks to David Peralty the writer and thinker and photographer behind Branding David. What a great beer shot! This is Paul Perrier and Andrew Ainsworth and me.

On Thursday April 30th, Smojoe had lunch on the patio of Jack Astors at Yonge and Bloor with Julian Brass of Notable.TV, and together we enjoyed a terrific social media marketing brain share over fajitas and fresh tomato juice.

Short story, today’s lunch occurred rather spontaneously because I happened across Julian’s ad while trolling Toronto craigslist marketing and PR boards on the weekend; he was on there Friday looking for an intern to help out a busy social media start-up. No I didn’t apply for the job, I wanted to know more about the start-up.

What does he do exactly? Notable.TV is a streaming video site that targets 25 - 39 year old people and shares exclusive ‘insider moments’ from some the most noteworthy and inspirational happenings all over the country. The Features section showcases Notable Happenings that must be seen, while other sections cover Fashion, Music, Events, People, and All Access.

So who is Julian Brass? A sharp dressed twenty five year old guy with a BComm from the University of Guelph, Julian Brass has a background in business, events management, and online audience building. Right after finishing school, he managed consumer acquisition strategies which included online and offline marketing, PR, advertising, affiliate management as well as planning his own events and partnerships for a silicon valley firm called Engage.com That’s where he worked with hip California ad agencies and PR firms to develop affiliate networks, event strategies and membership initiatives. Last fall he escaped back to Toronto with all their secrets.

The performer meets the producer meets the programmer, Julian Brass knows he can actualize his own destiny by building himself a role as host in a web video profiling business.  The bold endeavour combines his web skills with his show business savvy and lots of diverse marketing experience. He;’s a good actor, and over the last five years he’s built an impressive resume of TV host credits, fashion show MC appearances, and some film and tv work. He’s been honing his skills in front of the camera.

Smojoe can help Julian build Notable.TV’s audience and daily traffic with some basic link building packages. Fifty keyword focused incoming links will secure some popular search clauses and raise his website’s overall page rank. I showed Julian how to amplify his own social relevance by bookmarking his video content on StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious and Reddit. Putting the names of the artists and events he profiles in the titles and tags of his video media should bring a steady flow of search traffic in direct proportion to the star power of the celebrity subject.

Julian and Notable.TV can help Smojoe by showcasing some upcoming client events on his streaming video site.  Julian Brass just became another piece of Smojoe’s VIP social media package, and I gave him a fair price to resell my link packages. It was a good lunch.

I’m not usually this far behind… Yesterday I did a search for more information on a new free blog site called On Sugar and that’s when I found an article about On Sugar on TechCrunch where I learned that it launched last November.

Six months later this enterprise is still growing.  Now people are asking if perhaps one day it might challenge WordPress dominance. Okay I’ll admit that isn’t likely, but I am surprised this handy new parking lot isn’t already more popular… at the risk of sounding cliché, On Sugar really is blog candy.

Petite Fashionista mentioned On Sugar in her how-to-blog seminar last month. I’d never heard of it before and wrote it down. And I was impressed with the look and smell of it immediately…

Sugar Inc must be more popular in the United States than it is in Canada because honestly I’d never seen one before and I look at a lot of Canadian blogs. This company launched the site or around September 2008. The Drupal-powered OnSugar platform is designed to be simple but also versatile. It has a proven track record as the Sugar blog network is written using the same technology and this has been around since 2006. Navigation is a breeze because the program is very intuitive – it’s the kind of code you write after years of empiric testing. This easy-to-use program gives registered members the necessary tools to create unique looking blogs with lots of cool features like photo galleries and polls. The above mentioned TechCrunch article said something about access to a large repository of free images from Getty which I couldn’t find at first, but later spotted in the image upload area of the website. The preview displays white text in the bottom corner of each pictures that says ‘Getty Images’ because nothing is ever 100% free in this life.

Bloggers working On Sugar are still able to monetize their sites through standard ad networks like AdSense or Glam which can be inserted easily into the sidebar using the blank text / html widget. But On Sugar has added something new, a ShopStyle widget option.

ShopStyle was acquired by Sugar last fall. The software lets bloggers create visual spreads of real-world products and then collect a piece of the action - they get a cut of any sales that result from the widgets. This is just the beginning of an entirely new ad network - more on that later.

On Sugar employs the following state-of-the-art internet technologies:

* Drupal - open source content management system
* Akamai - Entire platform uses the Akamai content delivery network

* memcached - Extensive use of memcached

* Smarty - Template engine
* sIFR - (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) is a technology that allows you to replace text elements on screen with Flash equivalents.
* TinyMCE - Rich Text Editor
* LLMP - Linux, lighttpd, MySQL, PHP
* Fully documented API

Key Platform Features:

* 10 different post types: (text, gallery, spread, poll, quiz, quote, link, chat, video, & audio)
* Free access to a hundreds of thousands of Getty Images®
* Fun drag and drop “spread maker”.  Create your look with thousands of fashion images from hundreds of online retailers through ShopStyle, e.g. ShopBop, J. Crew, Net-a-Porter, and others.
* ShopSense: Make money by linking to products and retailers NEW
* Build your audience of followers with automatic notifcation of new posts
* Follow your favorite sites and view an aggregated feed of your followed sites
* Post by email NEW
* Automatic update of your Facebook and Twitter status NEW
* Multiple sites per account
* Multiple authors per site
* Easy import from Blogger, Wordpress, & Typepad
* Full domain support
* Free

Key Site Features:

* Drafts/Timed Publishing
* Search
* Archives
* Pages (e.g. About Me, Galleries, Videos, etc)
* Widgets for highlighting content from your site or around the web ( Flickr, Twitter, etc)
* Related posts from your site or, if you choose, from sites you follow
* Completely customizable themes

Have a look at my Dad’s beekeeping blog: CampbellsHoney.onsugar.com is a terrific example of what’s possible and just how it easy it is to use 0 even a 78 yr old beekeeper from Canada can make a fine and useful information portal.

There are nine other properties in the Sugar network:

FabSugar.com - fashion and trends focus.

BellaSugar.com - beauty and skincare.

BuzzSugar.com - entertainment news and reviews, for must-see movies, albums, MP3s and TV.

YumSugar.com - cooking and entertaining with style and ease.

FitSugar.com - healthy, balanced lifestyle focus.

GeekSugar.com - readers’ guide to great gadgets.

GiggleSugar.com - good laughs and humor.

DearSugar.com - An advice web site.

CitizenSugar.com - Politics and News

TeamSugar.com - user-enabled hub of the network where all members go to discuss the content on the other Sugar sites and maintain their own profile pages.

Nestle Pure Life TV commercials and web initiatives are greenwashing Canadians into believing that bottled water is a healthy choice, and a manageable environmental solution. They make me sick, and very angry. Have you seen this? The thirty second spot shows kids playing outside in a sprinkler system and then drinking bottled water. The marketing advocates making a healthy choice, and implies through suggestive narration and on screen text that human bodies need large amounts of bottled water, daily.

Their website contains a challenge wherein the fourth component is to ‘Go Green’ and that’s like a cigarette company advocating users ‘Stay Healthy’. Readers please note: there is no green bottled water solution. Eco-costs include manufacturing, trucking, shelving, and marketing. At this point in history, the annual U.S. demand for plastic bottles requires enough oil to keep 100,000 cars on the road for a year, says Janet Larsen of the Earth Policy Institute. The War Against Water Bottles reports that only 35% of Toronto’s water bottles are actually recycled, and that 650 million empty vessels are still being thrown into Ontario landfills every year despite most municipalities having the ability to recycle the bottles. A significant amount end up in nature, where they’ll take over a thousand years to break down.

The irony is that the City of Toronto just spent your tax dollars last summer doing experiential marketing in places like Dundas Square conducting blind taste tests in a widespread effort to prove the quality of our drinking water and the infrastructure behind its distribution. All over Canada our municipal governments are trying to educate city dwellers that tap water is actually the healthiest choice, but their marketing budget is small… Nestle Pure Life has a huge advertising budget; they can well afford to make suggestive tv commercials and reverse all our hard work…  But I wonder if they can sleep at night?

Bottled water is big business
Estimates variously place worldwide bottled water sales at between $50 and $100 billion each year, and the market is expanding at the startling annual rate of 7 percent.

Bottle water is almost pure profit; the biggest expense is marketing
Pepsi’s Aquafina or Coca-Cola’s Dasani bottled water are both sold in twenty ounce sizes and can be purchased from vending machines alongside soft drinks, and at the same price. Assuming you can find a $1 machine, that works out to five cents an ounce! Gasoline is cheaper. And both of these two brands are essentially filtered tap water, bottled close to their distribution point. Most municipal water costs less than one cent per gallon, and over 40% of all bottled water comes from tap water.

Nestle Pure Life is particularly evil. They’re actively greenwashing Canadians into believing bottled water is manageable. I found this image on their website in the Go Green category - look how many water bottles are in that blue box! Nestle wants you to think that’s acceptable. They deliberately show a mother and daughter together in this image, and the choice to use Asian actors is also part of a larger strategy. Studies show that second and even third generation Canadians are more likely to distrust public water delivery systems, and are therefore more likely to purchase bottled water. Nestle’s marketing focused on Latinos in the southern United States last summer for exactly the same reasons.

Stop the Corporatization of Water
Due to increasing urbanization, population, shifting climates, and industrial pollution, fresh water will soon become humanity’s most precious resource. In the documentary film Thirst, authors Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman demonstrated the rapid worldwide privatization of municipal water supplies, and the effect these purchases are having on local economies. Water is being called the “Blue Gold” of the 21st century and corporations are in a race to purchase groundwater and distribution rights.

It’s time to recognize the bottled water industry as a big component in the sinister drive to commodify a basic human right: access to safe and affordable water. Just say no to bottled water; just say no to Nestle.

At the start of this month, Microsoft Corporation posted a five minute video that visualizes the year 2019.  Because it’s Microsoft, it shows a lot of gadgets. The irony of the situation for me is that I’m trying to use my Smojoe blog software to embed the video right here in this post, and I have… succeeded! Now I have to erase and rewrite everything I wrote about how technology fails people that are too cheap, dumb and lazy to utilize the software’s most basic functionality. But the lesson remains - don’t give up. Just keep trying and you will eventually succeed, and perhaps you will get to live the dream presented here:

The video was debuted at Wharton Business Technology Conference on Feb 27th, 2009. The media is titled 2019, and now I shouldn’t have to remind you that’s only ten years away.

Arthur C. Clarke once said, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and that’s what Microsoft has imagined. But of course it’s all possible. In this carefully prepared video it looks like Microsoft architects and visionaries are interpolating various research technologies like Surface and other technologies to show surfaces that can be manipulated, electronic paper, crazy video cellphones, touchscreen/remote-control walls and amazing hand held wands. They have not focused on automobiles or health science or architecture, which are the most obvious things people dream of when asked to consider the future. But rather this video shows a catalog of gadgets, and yes these objects really do look like magic.