In a previous post, “Video Online is Picking Up Steam”, I discussed the growing success of Youtube in 2009 and how many experts believe that 2010 will be a great year for online video marketing. There are a few ways you can use online video to improve your business this year.

First, make your videos viewable on mobile devices. You should capitalize on the millions of smart phones users that have the ability to stream videos from the web.

Second, utilize online video on your web site to sell your product, brand, or business. Let’s say you have a business that sells state-of-the-art kitchen knives. You could add an embedded video on your website that describes your company, shows the knife in action, and features some top cooks that endorse the product. Another benefit of having embedded videos on your web site is that customers can share the videos via Facebook and Twitter. Here, the customers basically do the marketing for you.

Third, use video in your online advertisements. Every ad has pictures and text to present a product. By having a video ad, your brand will stand out and be more engaging for customers. Studies indicate that customers are more likely to visit your web site and make a purchase after watching an online video advertisement versus an online picture advertisement. This is a great way to boost sales and effectively direct traffic to your web site.

Fourth, use video to interact with existing customers. You could maintain customer engagement by having a video explaining how to sharpen or use the knives. I guarantee this will improve customer satisfaction and enhance brand loyalty.

In summary, taking advantage of online video marketing is a great way to stay ahead of the game. It is a hot trend that will give your business a boost.

Original Article: http://mashable.com/2009/12/09/business-video-tips/

The tech media seldom get more excited than when the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) comes to town, and that was certainly the case this year when Oh Gizmo helped lead the charge, no pun intended, with news of the RCA Airnergy WiFi Hotspot Power Harvester.

Simply put, it’s a free energy game changer. The battery, about the size of a shoe brush, harvests WiFi signals from the air and converts them to DC power. A USB cable attached to the top of the battery can them be plugged into your power-needy smart phone – BlackBerry users appear to be the target demo here.  According to the rep Oh Gizmo interviewed at CES, as your phone is charging, the tethered battery starts recharging itself with WiFi signals even as it’s draining. How well and how fast it works depends on how close you are to WiFi signals, says the rep.

While detractors including Slashdot are skeptical about the harvester’s effectiveness, gadget hounds may find one aspect of the product hard to resist: the projected price point. Oh Gizmo reports that “the USB charger will be available this summer for $40, and a [smaller, OEM-sized] battery with the WiFi harvesting technology will be available soon after.”

RCA isn’t the only manufacturer to attach itself to cool green products, of course. The iGo family of chargers is certainly worth a look, especially if you’d like the luxury of leaving some of your gadgets’ device chargers at home. And if you enjoy the news and buzz that comes from shows like CES, bear in mind that the Greener Gadgets Conference hits New York City’s McGraw-Hill Conference Center at the end of this month.

Image and video source: Oh Gizmo

Even if you’re not a fan of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (but if you’re not, ask yourself why) you may know of one of its characters, a highly-capable but emotionally-challenged android named Data.

Thinking about it, the name Data was quite appropriate. He was clinical about everything. And that’s precisely why we like data, lowercase “d,” in real life. Data doesn’t get rattled by office politics, the reason Google approves projects based on data and not the emotions and whims of coworkers. If you were unfamiliar with Google’s data-driven culture before, it probably makes more sense to you now why they’re pushing endless productivity apps to help us record, organize, and analyze our own data.

What’s the point of basing our lives on data? Well, the same as it always was: You either want to save time, money, and energy, or help someone else do the same. And the recording process has a name: lifelogging, and while Rubel didn’t coin the term he’s on to something when he says that “if you dedicate yourself to using data wisely to plan and measure you will succeed no matter what your goals are.” The most basic form of lifelogging is keeping a personal diary, perhaps the oldest and still the best way to keep track of your life, whether you plan to write your autobiography or one day subject the world to your grooming tips, ala Bob Packwood.

Rubel helps single out one of the more selfless lifeloggers – dad Allen Fawcett, who tracked his son’s sleep patterns for a year and recorded them in the graph shown in the time-lapse video embedded above. The blue shows when his boy was sleeping, the yellow when he was awake. Over time, the yellow awake blocks solidify into predictable blocks, as you’ll see. How did this graph help Fawcett? It didn’t, per se, but the data gives other new parents hope that sleep patterns can even out. And if data can give you hope, that’s a pretty good reason to record it.

This has to be one of the best jobs ever!  “What do you do for a living?” “Oh, I just crash helicopters!”  Unfortunately you are only privileged to this job if you work as a NASA engineer.  Considering the heat and infamy they received for the botched Mars Climate Orbiter mission in 1999 (the satellite crashed into Mars because one team of scientists used metric units while the other team used English units), it does seem a little odd that they still let NASA perform this type of work.  Fortunately for sake of NASA’s reputation, they are actually trying to crash the aircraft for this project.  The goal was to engineer a simulation to test a new crash countermeasure for helicopters.  The simulation required NASA to drop a donated Army MD-500 carrying four crash test dummies (one of which had simulated organs within its torso) from 35 feet in order to determine whether or not attaching a new Kevlar safety cushion to the bottom of the craft would effectively absorb the impact of the crash.  The cushion was originally designed and tested for space flight safety, yet NASA believed that it might have the added benefit of protecting helicopter travelers here on Earth.  To see the results, check out the video.

The helicopter remained relatively intact, including four relatively unharmed test dummies.  Because the cushion did such a great job absorbing the impact, engineers say that they will be able to reuse the helicopter for a crash simulation next year.

Original Article: http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2009-12/nasa-test-new-crash-tech-dropping-helicopter