With so many people jumping on the “green technology” bandwagon these days, it can be extremely difficult to separate the snake oil salesmen from the people developing real technology. So when I first heard about Frank Pringle extracting fuel from old tires using microwaves, I was pretty sure he was just another huckster. Then I read the coverage; Popular Science Best of 2007 Innovators, Best Inventions of the Year , and I thought, “Maybe this guy is for real.” Of course there are a lot of technologies that are “real” that can never really be used commercially. This is where Frank and his company Global Resources Corporation go from being a cool idea to perhaps the most important company in the world. First, let me give you a little background.
In a nutshell, Frank Pringle has figured out a way to extract fuel from virtually any item made from hydrocarbons by using microwaves. Since almost everything we use is made of plastic and therefore hydrocarbon based, Frank can essentially turn garbage into gas. If you want to read the technical details you can check them out here, but let’s just say everything from shale and sludge to old tires can now be cost effectively converted into useable oil. Okay, sounds great but we’ve heard the pipe dreams before. When will we really see this happen?
Here’s where the Buzz comes in. Frank is close to signing a deal to deliver eight working units to a customer in Los Angeles who will use them to convert heavy sludge residue from oil tankers into useable fuel. Each unit can process up to 10 tons of sludge per hour, meaning the eight units can produce the equivalent of 272,000 barrels of oil per month from the residue stuck in super tanker hulls. Up until now, this sludge was processed as hazardous waste but GRC’s units will now be turning waste into fuel.
Even more potentially buzzworthy, Frank’s microwave technology can be used to extract oil stuck in dormant oil wells. Again, I realize this sounds too good to be true so let me explain how and why. It is widely known that, using current methods, less than 50% of the oil in a well can be cost effectively extracted. The average number is closer to 35%. This means that all of the “dry” oil wells really aren’t dry at all. We just haven’t had the right technology to lift the heavy oil to the surface. In simple terms, GRC can heat the oil using microwaves, which then makes it easier to extract from the ground. If Frank’s technology only succeeds in extracting half of the remaining oil stuck in the ground, it will have effectively doubled the amount of oil available for global consumption. Once again, this sounds great, but when will we actually see this? According to Frank, Ed Rendell, the governor of Pennsylvania, is looking to GRC to re-tap Pennsylvania’s hundreds of capped oil wells with a program expected to start this year. If this doesn’t qualify as a big deal, I’m not sure if anything does.
For the sake of our economy – and my gas bill – I sincerely hope Frank is legitimate and can deliver on the promises, because turning garbage into gas and doubling the world’s oil supply is definitely buzzworthy.
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For many people the term “New Media” is one of the most abused and over-hyped buzzwords around. So when I met the owner of the Roxy theatre in Los Angeles, and saw how he used new media techniques to turn around his 35-year old nightclub, I had to get the scoop. Here’s how he did it.
Barring an unprecedented swing in votes, on July 17th VH1 will give its Rock Honors award for best rock venue website to the old Roxy theatre on LA’s Sunset Strip. What makes this an interesting story is that a year ago the Roxy, which first opened its doors in 1973, had a website that looked like it came from the same era (of course I know there was no Internet in 1973). Nic Adler, the Roxy’s manager, whose family has owned the club since its inception, admits to both arrogance and ignorance. He admitted, “I didn’t even know what a blog was, and I didn’t really care. We were an L.A. landmark. I didn’t think I needed the Internet.” Meanwhile the Roxy was being eviscerated in reviews and blogs as being out of touch and unfriendly, and Nic was losing customers and bands to newer venues.
One day, new media consultant Kyra Reed asked Nic what the club was doing online. Considering they had an event calendar that was still showing 2004, it was quite obvious the answer was “absolutely nothing.” So began Nic’s education in social media. Without any fancy high dollar website investments (the Roxy uses a basic Wordpress template) Kyra showed Nic that tapping into the world of social media meant looking at the Internet as a community instead of as an advertising tool. Nic dove in headfirst, blogging daily, adding pictures, creating band pages, and putting his club on MySpace and Twitter. This also meant finding out what people were saying and taking the initiative to respond. Nic decided he needed to fight the bad buzz that had been brewing online for years.
For ten months, things moved slowly. Website traffic increased slightly, but Nic and his right hand assistant Annie didn’t give up. They set up different online alerts like Tweet Beeps so they would know when people talked about their club. One day, Nic saw someone blogging about visiting the Roxy and he left her two VIP tickets at the door. Coincidentally, and unknown to Nic at the time, this patron ran a popular music blog and wrote a rave review. The online community, which had been so hostile, began to turn. I asked Nic if there was a magic moment when things really came together and he said, “At ten months everything just hit. Before we did this we were averaging about 400 unique visitors a day, now we’re getting 3200 uniques a day and 500,000 page views a month.”
For the vast majority of people, “social media” means joining Facebook or LinkedIn and wondering why they joined. I asked Nic what he thought was the secret to his success. He said, “I got on board with this plan. Annie and I are each online 3-4 hours a day talking to customers and the community. This isn’t something we paid money for and farmed out.” He added, “We were really stuck in a rut for so long. Reaching out to our customers like this makes us more honest about who we are, where we stand, and what we need to do to change.”
A year ago, the Roxy had an increasingly bad reputation online and a website with a three year old calendar. On July 17th, VH1 fans will give them the vote for having the best rock venue website. By taking the time to learn and embrace the tools of social media and Web 2.0, Nic and his club went from zero to VH1 in 12 months flat.
Keep up on the latest tech industry buzz and get the Fast Company Buzz RSS feed.
The line between the real world and the online world got a little more fuzzy today. Vivaty (www.Vivaty.com) just announced the launch of their public beta. I normally wouldn’t write about a beta launch but I saw the screenshots and this just looked cool. If you’re wondering what Vivaty is, they’ve developed a new user interface that plugs into Facebook or AIM. Now here’s the kicker, their virtual UI looks like a 3-D movie. You actually “live” in it, as opposed to just having a home page or profile page. Check out the screenshots to see what I’m talking about. You can create your own virtual space that you inhabit like a real space. You can talk to friends, watch movies on a “TV” hanging on your virtual wall and do all the things that you would do in real life. They’ve got solid backing from Kleiner Perkins and Mohr Davidow so they’re launching with high expectations. I wonder how many users they’ll get just from guys creating worlds with virtual girlfriends.
Keep up on the latest tech industry buzz and get the Fast Company Buzz RSS feed.
Have you ever heard of Lil’ Wayne? Probably not. I listen to more hip-hop than the average 38 year-old and I’ve never even heard of Lil’ Wayne. But thanks in large part to a smart mobile marketing campaign, he just had the biggest record launch since 2005; selling over a million copies in the first week. To give you an idea of how big that is, Britney Spears’ last album only sold 290,000 copies in its first week.
One of the things I try to do in this column is demystify hype and buzzwords and show real examples of new technology in business. “Mobile marketing” is definitely one of those over-hyped buzzwords, but by using a company called Mozes.com, Lil’ Wayne seems to have found a really easy way to make this technology work. From what I can tell, Mozes is a lot like Twitter but intentionally built for marketing purposes and it also incorporates voice and web. People call in or text in to join a mobile list or “mob” that you can then text with offers and messages. In Lil’ Wayne’s case, his CD insert announced in bold print, “Call Lil’ Wayne Now from your Mobile Phone.” If you’re wondering how well this worked, Lil’ Wayne got 120,000 calls in the first week.
I’ve haven’t used Mozes so I’m not going to give it a personal endorsement, but it sounded like a quick and easy way to start a mobile campaign – and FC Buzz loves things that are quick and easy.
If anyone has tried it, I’d love to hear how it worked for you.
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From the day the first ad was placed, the Holy Grail has been to make advertising effective while remaining unobtrusive to the target customer. First came print ads that were easily ignored. Later, the remote control made it easy to click away from unwanted TV commercials. With the Internet came banner ads, and most of us quickly trained our eyes to practice “banner blindness” so advertisers continued their quest to blend the content with the commercial. Over the years, product placement proved to be the best solution but consumers still had to go somewhere else to buy the product. The Holy Grail was to integrate the ad, the store, and the entertainment all into one place and put it in front of the consumer in a way that they wouldn’t even realize they were being pitched.
If you walk by the old storefront office in Venice Beach California that houses Compulsion, you’d never expect to find a tech company that that has developed the Holy Grail of advertising. Founder Scott Mahoney and his tiny team of five engineers can turn any video into a fully interactive “clickable” ad for as little as $10. I can ramble on about the technical details of what they’ve built but before you read any further, play with the demo yourself and I think you’ll immediately understand why this company is buzzworthy.
If you tried it out and you’re anything like me, you’re probably thinking, “How’d they do that?” I was curious too so I talked to Scott and he explained that Compulsion is a video browser that allows you to assign “hyperspots” to anything in the video. You can assign links to everything on the screen, or just the product your selling. And unlike most of their interactive video competitors, converting your video only requires you to have a web browser and no technical expertise. The end result is invisible advertising since the content actually becomes the commercial. For the first time ever, you can sell people the shirt right off your back while they’re watching the show. No more interruptions. If you’re wondering, “If it’s invisible will it still be effective? Will people actually click on products in the video?” I wondered about that too so I asked Scott what kind of click through rates they were seeing and he said between 10%-30%. No wonder people have been trying to blend the ad with the entertainment, those kinds of click rates is unheard of.
People often ask me how I decide what’s buzzworthy enough for this column. 10%-30% CTR is definitely worth writing about but I may just have to tell them, “Buzzworthy is when you develop the Holy Grail of your industry.”
Fast Company Buzz is featured on the Fast Company home page every Wednesday.
Today I found out about a company called Houdini www.houdinisoft.com that apparently can legally “unlock” any CDMA phone for use on different CDMA networks. I know locked phones have been a big deal for a few years now, but I honestly never understood why. Most carriers give you some kind of a new phone every couple of years and technology changes so fast a new phone is probably a good idea. Are there really that many people who want to take their old phones to new carriers? The big fish in terms of locked phones is the Apple iPhone, but unlocking it still won’t allow you to use it on Verizon’s network (ATT and Verizon are the two biggest carriers in the US), so that kind of defeats the purpose.
Anyway, if you’re set on unlocking your phone try Houdini, and while you’re at it let me know why this is such a big deal.
Fast Company Buzz is featured on the Fast Company home page every Wednesday. If you have a buzzworthy scoop, I can be reached at www.TheKillerPitch.com
Most people think the Apple iPod was a groundbreaking product but the real innovation was iTunes. Without a legal and easy place to get all of your music – or nearly all of your music – the iPod would have just been a nice mp3 player.
This is the dilemma facing Sony’s plan to feed movies to its PS3 game console. Rumor has it no studios have come on board with Sony, so as of right now the only movies they’ll be able to offer are from Sony’s own studio. Obviously not the master plan Sony had in mind. Of course the other studios can always come on board later, but does it make sense for Sony to launch their movie feed service if they are the only content provider? Maybe Sony needs to call Steve Jobs and get him to negotiate some content deals for them.
Fast Company Buzz is featured on the Fast Company home page every Wednesday. If you have a buzzworthy scoop, I can be reached at www.TheKillerPitch.com
With so much attention on Web 2.0 and online social networking, some online communities are bringing back the old fashioned face-to-face mixer. Entrepreneur Andrew Warner has leveraged his Mixergy.com invitation site and built a huge following with the Southern California tech community by convincing companies like Shopzilla, Oversee.net and even Yahoo! to throw live “Lunch 2.0” networking events where everyone from unemployed tech geeks to big money VC’s mingle over pizza and submarine sandwiches. Are people just coming for the free lunch or is the next phase of online social networking to go back offline?
Fast Company Buzz is featured on the Fast Company home page every Wednesday. If you have a buzzworthy scoop, I can be reached at www.TheKillerPitch.com
According to popular lore, Joe Kennedy got out of the stock market just before the crash of 1929 when his shoeshine boy started giving him stock tips. Kennedy figured if shoeshine boys were in the game, then there must be a bubble. Today it seems like everybody including the proverbial shoeshine boy is jumping on the social networking bandwagon. Bebo, Classmates, MySpace, LifeKnot, Facebook, Twitter, Ecademy, Konnects, Friendster, Ning, the list goes on and on. Even FastCompany.com is a social network. But do people really know how to convert these companies into profitable business models, or is LinkedIn’s recent billion dollar valuation just more evidence that we are seeing Bubble 2.0 in the social networking game?
For all the talk about the power of social networking, how many “next big things” have crashed like the 2000 dot-com bubble? Today it’s Facebook that has the buzz, but I remember when Friendster was the next big thing and now I can’t even remember my Friendster username. LinkedIn claims 23 million users, but how many of those users are active? Better yet, how many people on all the various social networks just joined because somebody told them to and they really have no idea what they’re doing there? When people are lining up and joining just because everyone else is doing it, that’s a sure sign that mob mentality has taken over and a pretty good indicator that we may be in a bubble. Furthermore, many companies admit that they don’t know how to convert users into money. Twitter is getting more buzz these days than even Facebook but they still don’t seem to have a profitable business model. I’m sure somebody will step up and buy them, but even the deep pocketed buyers and investors of these companies admit that the social nature of the network makes effective advertising difficult. Even if the user numbers keep growing, will it matter if nobody can convert them into buyers and dollars?
For social networking to be a legitimate business model, somebody out there had to know the secrets of reaching these users and making money. And since Fast Company Buzz is all about finding out whose doing what and what’s working, I talked with the CEOs of two companies that are riding the bubble all the way to the bank. Michael Berkley CEO of SplashCast Media, a company that distributes branded content channels in social networks, explained how his company creates effective and profitable advertising on Web 2.0 platforms like Facebook. Mike said, “If you want to advertise to the social media crowd you need to make sure you do a couple of things:
1. Unobtrusively integrate brands into entertainment channels. For example, Red Bull sponsored a Ryan Sheckler skateboarding channel with a co-branded skin around the player and virtual product placement. They had clickable Red Bull cans in the video that brought up Red Bull product info
2. Give consumers a compelling reason to share the resulting branded content with all their friends. This typically means wrapping social games around the content, such as friend-vs-friend trivia contests about a particular actor or band, etc.
Tony Zito of MediaFORGE, a company that distributes widgets from traditional banner ads, added, “Advertisers need to make a true commitment to engaging the end user in a conversation. And once they learn what’s compelling to proponents within social networks, advertisers need to keep it simple and not try so hard.”
While SplashCast and MediaFORGE are making money from the social networking craze, it’s interesting to note that they aren’t technically in the social networking business. Instead, they’re building their companies by servicing the networks, much like Levi’s made a lot more money selling jeans to the gold miners than most of the miners ever did digging for gold.
So what’s the bottom line buzz? Is social networking bankable or just another bubble?
Fast Company Buzz is featured on the Fast Company home page every Wednesday. If you have a buzzworthy scoop, I can be reached at www.TheKillerPitch.com
I wanted to invite everyone to join in the discussion of the new Fast Company Buzz blog. FC Buzz will be a featured blog on the Fast Company home page every Wednesday and I hope you'll take part and contribute.
Best,
Francisco Dao
Welcome to the launch of Fast Company Buzz where you’ll find out what’s new, what’s hot, who’s doing what, and what’s working in the tech industry. Up until now, industry blogs have fallen into three categories: 1. Vanity blogs that were little more than desperate pleas for attention filled with mindless notes about the author’s life. 2. Geek blogs that focused on overly technical matters like the launch of somebody’s new network architecture, and 3. Mainstream news blogs that primarily repeated technology news from CNN.
Fast Company Buzz won’t do any of this. FC Buzz is about bringing you the latest ideas, rumors, and thought provoking buzzworthy discussions from the people and companies that are building the technology and tech/media industries. Instead of focusing on the intricacies of someone’s new SDK or reprinting mainstream Google vs. Microsoft news, I tap into VC’s, entrepreneurs, CEO’s, and even Wall Street fund managers to find out who’s doing what, what’s working, and which direction the business winds are blowing. Best of all, I hope you’ll be part of the buzz by sending in scoops from the real world where all of you work everyday.
In our Mashed up, Wiki, Web 2.0 blogosphere knowledge flows both up and down, so if you or your company are breaking new ground in the technology or tech/media industry, or you just have a scoop that people might want to know about. Send it to me at frandao@gmail.com. If it’s relevant and buzzworthy, I’ll put it out there for the world to read. Join the hive, be part of the buzz, and get the inside scoop on what other people won’t talk about.
