Seed-embedded packaging

March 21st, 2007 • Culture Briefings

Last year, I featured an interview with Joshua Onysko of Pangea Organics. Pangea Organics is one of the fastest growing organic companies in North America. Since my interview, the company has released it’s latest innovation: seeds-embedded packaging.

Pangea’s seed-embedded packaging provides it’s customers with one more reason to use their products. Just soak the package and plant it in soil- – within days, lush herbs like sweet basil and amaranth will sprout out of the package. A brilliant idea to convert what would usually be a waste into a live experience.

I hope more companies follow suit.

Grocery chain goes high-tech

March 14th, 2007 • 1 comment Marketing/ Advertising

A friend passed me on a link to this — I suppose that would make Whole Foods the first grocery store to air it’s own podcast shows!
(PS- Whole Foods CEO John Mackey writes his own blog on the company site. Is that cool or what?!)

The monthly podcasts on WF site feature interviews with experts in diverse fields and share product information and recipies with the readers. I think it’s a fantastic way to get the word across about WF products. But surprisingly there was no information/ posters about the podcasts in the store – and I live right next to one.

Hot off the press!

March 8th, 2007 • 1 comment Culture Briefings

This just in!

Dreamworks will be making a film on the child-hood favorite journalist-cum-detective TinTin. The movie is expected to hit the theaters in 2 years with plans of making more movies, depending on how well the first movie does.

I briefly was enarmored by TinTin’s technicolor-adventure filled world, but soon moved on to Enid Blyton characters. Although now  some 18 odd years later, I can’t wait to see how TinTin unfolds on the silver screen.

Beauty & Monopoly

March 8th, 2007 • 3 comments Culture Briefings

  Last November,  household classic Monopoly partnered with Sephora to release a Monopoly-Sephora Edition. According to this news report, players can go to jain for a bad hair day, move forward to go for a manicure and pay fines for beauty faux-pas! Like the classic, this version allows you to claim territory over Sephora stores by placing Sephora bags on the property.

"Lending their names to the whimsical game are some of the industry’s top beauty brands. There’s Stila in Gloss Gardens, Make Up For Ever on Lipstick Lane, Nars on Cheek Street, Murad at Cleanser Crossing, and Bliss on Lotion Avenue."

Media Consumption Meme

March 5th, 2007 • 2 comments Culture Briefings

Anastasia of YPulse has a very interesting Meme on media consumption that was intiatiated by Marianne Richmond of Blogher. Here’s my input:

Web: I read news from WSJ, NYT and BBC. I rely on blogs like PSFK, Springwise and thecoolhunter for news that interest me the most. I also subscribe to fantastic newsletters like VSL, JCReport, TrendCentral, Marketing Daily, AdAge, and Iconowatch. Other favorites are Ypulse and WWD. I also like to stay updated about news in India and sadly, I only trust blogs like youthcurry.com and soniafalerio.blogspot.com with this information. I also maintain an active Del.icio.us feed. My favorite site on the web has to be amazon.com (for obvious reasons pertaining to spending one’s hard earned cash on items that may have no useful purpose except to make me happy for about 10 seconds)

Communication: I live on my Yahoo! mail. I know gmail offers free 2MB but I still pay the yearly $20 for more space on my Yahoo! mail. I am on Yahoo messenger, AOL (I don’t use it much) MSN and Skype. I actively communiate via facebook, orkut and sometimes linkedin. I’m on facebook because my college friends are on it, Orkut because my school and college friends from India are on it. I cannot possibly maintain any more. It’s tough as it is keeping up with two. It was a conscious decision to not buy a Blackberry or any phone that would allow me access to email. And I intend to prolong this situation until it absolutely demands for it.

Music: I’m afraid, it’s usually just what’s on my Ipod. I don’t seek out new music, but I rely on my friends to recommend new music. I’m a huge fan of soundtracks and am likely to dload music from TV shows and movies via itunes.com

TV: Does youtube count as TV or web? I actively watch LOST, Desperate Housewives, Ugly Betty and Grey’s Anatomy. I LOVE Apprentice but it clashes with DH so I had to make a choice! I’m addicted to Food Network.  Esp. Iron Chef. I also loved Top Chef on Bravo and intend to go back to the show once the new season begins. My guilty pleasure: watching Indian shows on musicnmovies.com

Movies: I watch a LOT of movies. Esp. independant cinema. The last movie I watched was Pan’s Labyrinth. I highly recommend it. My favorite theater are the Ritz in Philadelphia.

Magazines: I subscribe to Fast Company, Wired, Lucky, Zink (because I write for them) and most recent addition is the Economist. I read BusinessWeek, Entrepreneur and Inc online. But I buy one new magazine every month or so. I highly recommend Universal News and Magazines in NYC to check out hard-to-find magazines and foreign titles. When in Philly, I rely on used bookstores or Barnes and Noble.

Books: My attention span has decreased, I think because I’m so used to consuming media in short bytes. But I try to read one book a month. The last book I read was Everything is Illuminated- Jonathan Safran ( I recommend it but the epoynmous movie is very nice too)

Newspaper: WSJ. And yes, I still enjoy reading it on paper.

Ouch, now I feel silly. Feel free to join in and leave a link below if you do!

Indian Newspaper industry

March 4th, 2007 • 1 comment Culture Briefings

I recently subscribed to the Economist (I’m a fan of the magazine, but just never got around to subscribing) and an article titled "Let 1000 titles bloom" about the Indian newspaper industry caught my eyes. The paragraph below is an extract from the same article.

Competition is forcing once-staid publications to spice up their content. Mumbai’s Midday tabloid has introduced a bikini-clad version of Britain’s topless “page-three girls”, called the “Midday
mate”. Most broadsheets offer similar enticements in colourful
“entertainment” sections full of Bollywood stars. – The Economist, Feb
15, 2007

Mumbai’s Midday is a tabloid I grew up with. The bikini-clad version of Britain’s topless page-three girls called the Midday Mate is NOT a result of the competition nor is it a recent feature. The Midday Mate is a part of India’s pop. culture that kids in the 90’s grew up with and it continues (I think) to be a popular fixture of the tabloid.

The Economist wrongly points out that this feature was introduced to beat competition. When Midday introduced this feature, only a handful of newspapers existed in Mumbai/Bombay. It is only in the last 2-4 years has there been such an influx of new entrants in the field. When I was last in Bombay in 2005, the billboards and every available adv. space in the city was saturated with ads from DNA, The Hindustan Times and Mumbai Mirror– three newspapers that launched around the same time in 2005.
I agree with the article that competition is intense but I wish it had been more thorough in researching the article.

Also, I’m surprised that unlike Time and Business Week, The Economist does not allow for reader comments.

To read about the state of media (TV & newspapers) I strongly recommend Rashmi Bansal’s blog, Youth Curry.