Lunch Talk: BBC - The History of Ready Meals. Part 2.

History of TV dinners (ctd).  link

Emergence of freezers; demographic changes - single working women, divorces; supermarkets; television advertisement; microwave.

The transition from frozen food to chilled food - innovation in retail distribution. Supermarket dominance of the food industry - Control.

Adaptable to social changes (lean cuisine) - Packaged Payload.

tags: packaging, payload, history, lunchtalk, distribution, control

Lunch Talk: BBC - The History of Ready Meals. Part 1.

Invention of the TV dinner.

link
tags: lunchtalk, health, packaging, payload

Invention of the Day: Facebook Social Networking Timeline.

On January 17, 2012, Aaron Sitting and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Inc. got another patent issued from the original provisional application filed on December 23, 2005. US Patent 8,099,433 is titled Managing Information About Relationships in a Social Network via a Social Timeline.

It's also interesting to see that Facebook learned from Apple's patent strategy and filed for a number of design patents covering its user interface features.

tags: patent, invention, problem, solution, packaging

Youtube is unstoppable.

Jan 23, 2012. VBeat -- The site has boosted its daily page views by 25 percent in the last eight months — and gathering over 4 billion page views per day, reports Reuters.

YouTube has made its video site accessible on more mobile devices, smart televisions, and streaming media set-top boxes (Roku, Apple TV, etc.).

Last week during its quarterly earnings report the company stated that its display ads sales are generating $5 billion in revenue due in large part to YouTube’s success.

Google has already started integrating Youtube with Blogger and Google+. The default video player on your mobile phone is most likely to by hooked to Youtube as well. In a few years, Microsoft's bundling of the Internet Explorer with its Windows OS will look like a child's play, compared to Google's mobile package of search, maps, videos, browser, social media, docs, apps, and much more.

Resistance is futile!

tags: internet, distribution, domination, packaging, business, model, mobile, advertisement

Invention of the day: bitter medicine no more.

To fight a nascent headache, I took two capsules of Acetominophen, commonly known by its brand name Tylenol. What a remarkable invention, I thought. Not the medicine itself, but the way it is packaged. The two-part capsule is ubiquitous. It easily defeats the old common wisdom about the necessity of swallowing a bitter pill to beat whatever ails you. I wish I could invent something like that.

To my utter astonishment, I learned that medicine capsules were invented more than 150 years ago. Since everybody on the web seems to quote Wikipedia on it (with a reference to volume 7 of Encyclopedia of Pharmaceutical Technology which few read), I'm doing it too:

James Murdock of London patented the two-piece telescoping gelatin capsule in 1847. The capsules are made in two parts by dipping metal rods in the gelling agent solution. The capsules are supplied as closed units to the pharmaceutical manufacturer. Before use, the two halves are separated, the capsule is filled with powder or more normally spheroids made by the process of spheronization (either by placing a compressed slug of powder into one half of the capsule, or by filling one half of the capsule with loose powder) and the other half of the capsule is pressed on.

Though new medicine capsule inventions, according to codingfutures.com, happen almost every day, the 150-year old idea is still alive and well.

tags: invention, problem, book, payload, packaging,  health, solution

e-mail should die

In the age of social networking, e-mail has become a giant security hole. PC World reports:

George Bronk, 23, was arrested in late October after police found evidence that he'd hacked into more than 3,200 e-mail accounts. He used the same technique that Sarah Palin hacker David Kernell used to break into the former U.S. vice presidential candidate's Yahoo account: He scoured his victims' Facebook accounts for answers to the security questions used by Web-based e-mail services such as Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

Forget about pranksters and perverts. Now, that banks, brokerages, and other financial institutions switch from paper to electronic statements, hacking somebody's e-mail account is going to become an even more profitable enterprise.

tags: privacy, security, information, finance, control, payload, packaging, 10x

Paper books will last another 39 years.

An unbiased opinion on the future of digital books from a 3-year old:

For Mr. de Halleux...and his wife both read to their 3-year-old son, Tristan. He reads Winnie the Pooh to the child on a screen. She reads it in old-fashioned paperback form.

Mr. de Halleux said he was confident the boy would eventually favor the digitized version. “He really likes it because you can zoom in on things,” he said.

Zooming in on things is a must have feature for an e-book. Children know it better than adults.

tags: content, information, payload, dilemma, problem, solution, packaging

Money as a mobile application.

Credit cards are becoming extinct:

just wave your iPhone at any Visa payWave terminal, which can already be found at some 32,000 retailers, and voila, you've made your transaction.

Visa has the market power to make interface devices ubiquitous, while the banks can be made responsible for distributing mobile applications. As the result, we've got the credit card business model, but without the credit card.

tags: money, ideality, distribution, packaging, tool, digital, information, commerce

No good deed goes unpunished. The URL shortening service pioneered by TinyURL is now being copied by Google and Facebook:

Google ventured into new territory on Monday with the launch of a new URL-shortening service it's calling Goo.gl.

Google's launch comes on the heels of Facebook having quietly launched its own URL-shortening service called FB.me.

Unless the inventors have patents for the idea, the big guys are going to walk over their business as soon as it proves to be popular.

tags: market, patent, control, competition, internet, information, packaging