3 posts tagged “innovation”

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer had a simple explanation Thursday for why the country is so reliant on foreign oil: Congress is nuts.

Other comments by Gov. Charlie Crist called for more domestic oil production and disputed critics who say it would take 10 years to actually get oil if a moratorium on offshore drilling were lifted.

"I've talked to people in the industry and they say that if we let them start to drill, they can have it coming out in a year and a half. So I don't know where this 10-year myth came from, but it's something that's just not accurate," Crist said. "We're Americans. We have the ability to go to the moon, you don't think we can get a little juice out of the ground?"

While serving as North Dakota governor, Schafer chaired the Interstate Oil & Gas Compact Commission, which issued a report in 1996 that warned officials about reliance on foreign oil and recommended conservation, alternative fuels and increased domestic oil production.

"I've been sitting there since 1996 saying we need to do something about this and nothing's happening. This is a tragedy to this country," Schafer said.
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This is what I've been coldly saying in the posts here on MarketEDU. That this country is sitting idly by, stagnating our technological capabilities all because of Big Oil Companies and those few in the government that have big oil interests ($$$$).

We need to get on with it already and move beyond oil and coal. Move beyond immediate profits in order to have a future economy and an actual future! Period!

Ever since WWII this country has sat back and just concentrated on the almighty dollar. Technological advances have slowed considerably. Also witness corporations who when in trouble, immediately lay off knowledgeable employees rather than innovate their products/services. Its all just short-sightedness which is a big problem for us here.

We need to R&D for the near and far future or we'll have no future. Act now and hope to prevent the horrors we are facing on this current road to ruin, or continue and create a dismal future for our children's children, and their children.
 
We need to act swiftly on alternatives and then improve those in order  to get on the right path to a viable future.
 
Otherwise those Sci-Fi movies we all love to watch will turn out to be the horrible future we may face. Notice how many of them show civilizations in ruins and a few bands of people scattered throughout the universe looking for a new home or waiting for someone else to clean up the mess we left behind on earth?

Hopefully, the only hope we have won't be for a Wall-E world, the story of a robot named WALL-E who is designed to clean up a polluted Earth.

-Future1investor

Much of our every day lives has to do with the failures and successes of the little person. People like you and I who make our opinions known, others who see a business opportunity and are willing to stick out their neck and give it a go. Tonight I was watching The BIG IDEA and was reminded we desperately need to promote and encourage peoples ideas and business attempts so that we as a nation can get back to what made our country a power house.
 
So much of our former glory has been lost and I feel it is because many have lost the vision, the drive, and desire to create, innovate, improve, and celebrate the uniqueness of our minds. This is what we once called the American Dream.
 

It can be as little as a bit of underwear err excuse me, lingerie' . Take for instance the story of a girl who shared a living space with Christina Applegate (Kelly Bundy). The girl Robin Antin was a choreography of music videos, who wanted to do something different. She invited over some friends (music video dancers) to play around with various types of music and choreography. Applegate suggested they do their thing in public at the Viper Room on the Sunset Strip. That was the birth of the Pussycat Dolls.

Then over the years they had celebrities guest sing/dance in the group and it became ever more famous. Now on the CW network we see Antin riding the coat tails of Coyote Ugly with her own version called Girlicious.

It seems like now there is no end in sight to the increasing success that Antin could achieve.

She recently came out with her own line of lingerie' to play up the strength of women, the girl next door, and sexual attractiveness
 that almost any woman can have if they don't already have it in their lives.

Almost every person has the potential to create and those who don't can give their opinion to help shape an idea or existing product. Some people create by experiencing failure and discovering a side benefit. Others create through food and offering comfort. More others bring excitement to our lives with a huge variety of products and services.

Whatever the case, these people take an interest, a passion, a need and make it happen by giving it a go despite the high risk of failure.  

Whatever your passion, please let it be known to others or step out of your comfort zone and try to make it a business. You never know what you could have done unless you try!  Above all, learn from your experiences and accept critique of your work to learn from others then continually improve! Even if you aren't the creative or business type, you can still do this in your job and make that job better, easier on you, and more productive.

My membership with a social web site was rejected late last week because they felt that my content was not wholly original or that some of my content was pulled from other sources. I wonder when the last time they checked that their other members were truly wholly original? Perhaps they should send themselves a rejection notice as well! It can be easily said that there is nothing now that is wholly original. Nothing that has not already been thought of before. The closest to original you can get seems to be a variation of an idea.

All businesses are copy-cats. Look at Microsoft for instance. Look at business in general. They buy their expertise through acquisition, repackage an idea, mass market, etc.. Once an idea that hasn't been done before is successful or even a failure, you almost immediately see businesses spring to life that in some way imitate or merely swing a slight variation of the same.

It is not a matter of originality but rather perhaps uniqueness of the same, quality, and marketability. We are all pirates of the earlier innovations and ideas. No one on this earth today has an original. If so, there would be far less businesses, far less wealth. There would be less competition of similar products. Consumer choices would be more definitive. Companies with bad products would not survive to try again as consumers would move onto the better idea rather than be confused over the choices and have to go through the experience of crap vs. genius.

We would not have to wait to speak to customer support or be given the run-a-round when a company like Dell sought to use it's customer service reps as a wall to prevent customers from returning bad product, getting refunds, and or new parts. Google "Dell Nightmare" to see any one of over a thousand posts. (There used to be over 480,000 posts with the content of Dell nightmare. Or see my experience here. My post is the last one near or on the bottom. Dell's stock price has been in an overall downward trend since March 2005.

In fact while the site rejected my membership it is not original either. While its monetizing idea holds some merit, it is not original. The site I won't mention here trys to bring bloggers and businesses together. It seeks to allow businesses to reap the benefits of a blogger's positive comments as a way of gently promoting a product or service on their blog. Businesses give bloggers an opportunity. The opportunity offers to pay bloggers for their words expressing the product/service. The idea is that this gives businesses more exposure for their product/service. What I haven't found out is; does the blogger still get paid if his/her comments on a product are negative?

This is nothing more than an offer to cheaply pay someone to sell their product for them. It is cheap exploitation of blogger's time for little compensation. This is not a new idea. Nor are most of the products/services touted. The site takes the idea from FaceBook or MySpace to exploit networking for dollars. This is no new idea either. Its all a matter of perspective. But we are all pirates. Better perhaps to be a pirate who trys to do something better by providing something more through: education, entertainment, better ROI for the user's time, charity, or something else perhaps.

Anyway it is no different than how companies like Nike exploit the poor and disadvantaged in Vietnam. They might retort otherwise but they are no different in how they use bloggers as cheap labor. Read this article written just this month. Click on the Asia Times pic.

Nike has been a buy since March gaining nearly $10 to a closing price Friday of $67.89

Do I have wholly original content? No
Do I glean supportive content from the internet? Yes
Do I blog to promote thought? My perspective? To ask questions? Yes

I may be rejected by a site that thinks they are original but then I just smile brightly and giggle at the thought.