B3TA

Neuromarketing as the potential to be an interesting tool for understanding human brain activity and behavior. There’s a significant bottleneck in application, however: performing brain scans (fMRI) is incredibly expensive. As an example, Omnicom, a global marketing coms network, bases its global neuro-based media planning on a sample of 16 people. So, for neuromarketing to grow as a concept, research needs to be cheaper, and more convenient.

Neuroscientist Christopher deCharms shows how fMRI can be conducted in real time. Maybe this will lead the way to the next gen neuromarketing research.

1. Freedom of speech is absolute (not relative) in a free democracy.

2. In order to work, freedom of speech should be followed by tolerance.

3. Citizens should not be deterred from criticising media.

4. Media must not attack citizens that are not public figures.

5. Media should be aware of the consequences of their doings.

6. Media does not have the right to prosecute individuals, this is the role of the legal system.

7. Individual humans stand above corporations.

8. Corporate censorship is unacceptable.

9. All blogs are potentially public, but cannot always be considered as public media, and can thus not be publically scrutinized.

10. Irony and provocation is necessarily subject to context and must therefore not be taken out of context.

11. The stronger party always has a responsibility towards the weaker party.

This is my position, of course.

Some restaurant guests in Staffordshire, England, got a chock when receiving this bill after their meal. Good one.

BBC News

For those who aren’t up-to-date with what Fake Steve Jobs, Googleverse, Web 3.0 and Mashups really mean, the last issue of Wired magazine comes with a fantastic blue booklet called Geekipedia.

http://theplanninglab.com/?p=427

Inside Facebook, a blog, points out that the two most active apps (defined by highest percentage of total users that are active) on Facebook are games.

So, we can conclude that people are using Facebook at work, and they are playing computer games! it seems not much has happened since the days of Solitaire…

Fast Company, a business magazine, writes about the economics and psychology of the bottled water industry in this article. Some interesting facts about bottled water:

* Americans spent $15 billion on bottled water last year.

* 24% of the bottled water American consumers buy is tap water repackaged by Coke and Pepsi.

* Americans produce waste from plastic bottles worth $1 billion.

* For the price of one Evian bottle, you can fill the same bottle every day for 10 years, 5 months and 21 days with tap water.

* Half of the price of a typical bottle goes to the retailer, a third goes to distributor and transportation, a tenth is the cost of the water, another tenth is the profit.

* Water-drinker segments include: the “water pure-fectionist”, the “water explorer”, the “image seeker” and the “struggler”.

* The CO2 bubbles in SanPellegrino water are extracted from vulcanic springwaters in Tuscany and trucked the Pellegrino plant in northern Italy.

* Worldwide, 1 billion people have no reliable source of drinking water. 3 000 children die every day from diseases caught from tainted water.