Added to Christmas wish list
From the ‘I’d be really impressed if you found this department’: I’m looking for a red Kopp glass lens. 8 3/8. Marbelite #77.
Heineken’s new keg
I don’t know why I subscribe to Forbes, the articles generally aren’t that good, but I found this article about Heineken’s new keg interesting both from a business perspective and as a Heineken drinker, The Keg That Scored:
The retail kegs represent perhaps $300 million in revenue after the impact of lost sales from bottles and cans, but they offer more than that. They are still scarce enough that grocers can pocket 35% to 40% gross margins on them–17 to 20 percentage points better than what they typically get on a six-pack. That buys Heineken the bargaining power it needs in the U.S. to get coveted end-of-the-aisle floor space–and a novel means to promote its new beer, Premium Light, which boosted sales 12% last year but has recently missed growth targets.
Heineken spent an estimated $15 million on a keg production line at its giant brewery in Zoeterwoude, South Holland. At full speed the new line can churn out 120,000 kegs per day, holding 6% of Heineken’s 19-million-barrel annual production worldwide. The minikeg is something Heineken’s big American rivals cannot easily copy. Each drum holds 5 liters, or 14 bottles. Bottles of Budweiser or Miller retail for $5 a six-pack, too low a price to support the cost of a disposable keg.
Comments(1)Lunch 2.0 at Widemile and Portent
Today we went to Lunch 2.0 hosted by Widemile and Portent. Having already heard the founder of AdReady talk I didn’t get that much out of the talks since they discussed the same concepts (use testing, analytics and data to drive marketing and landing page content.) The talk would have been more relevant to me had they had tips on how what they’re talking about could be relevant to early stage startups. Sure, if I’ve raised a round I’ll likely engage any of those companies to optimize my Google Adsense spend but what if I’m on a show string budget?
Update: While walking back to the office we discussed what a self service version of AdReady or Widemile would look like, and lo and behold AdReady today launched just that, AdReady targets small advertisers:
AdReady, the Seattle online advertising startup backed by Madrona Venture Group, is rolling out a new service today called Performance Ad Library that allows advertisers of all sizes to choose prefabricated online ads and have them run on Google, Yahoo’s Right Media and AOL’s Advertising.com.
Bug bashes goodness from Archie McPhee
I was at Archie McPhee the other day picking up more prizes (I recommend the Parasite Pals) for Redfin bug bashes (a bug bash is when more than just the Redfin development team tries out a test version of the website in order to find problems with it) when I found this great bug bash trophy at their other store next door; Cynthia is our first winner:
Rogue work surveys
I love rogue work surveys.
My all time favorite was the survey that was sent out asking who was a vegetarian. See the problem we had was that at one time Redfin was about 50% vegetarian but as we grew the number of non-veggies grew much faster than the veggies. However, we continued to order a 50/50 split of food and the non-veggies started to get restless without their animals.
Though recently someone (though not the people who order lunch) send out a survey asking about pizza toppings. Turns out every pizza ordered had some sort of olives on it and I guess this spurred another survey titled ‘best and worst pizza toppings’. Here is the olive results from the Plants section:
Here are the results for the ‘Animals’ section:
(The whole survey is much longer!)
What do the lights mean?
I have a Logitech MX3000 wireless keyboard and mouse at work. Recently the mouse starting acting up so I tried to re-connect everything; big mistake.
While fiddling with this I tried to understand their user interface:
What the hell does ‘A’ ‘F’ and ‘1′ represent?
Why not have a K and M to indicate which of the two is connected?
Hiking and packing
After a great fish dinner and seeing the New Pornographers on Friday night with Glenn and friends (thanks Glenn!) (Seattlest has a review of the Saturday show. Bleeding Heart Show was great on Friday!) I woke up early for a 11 mile hike with Katrina to Myrtle lake. She had me nervous with strict instructions on how much water to bring (3 liters) and how much food (300 calories an hour) but the hike wasn’t so bad. Check out her blog for more details.
I’ve got a few pictures on my Zooomr page but this is my favorite:
It was good to get out of the city and get some fresh air because I spent a full day Sunday packing because today I took possession of my new loft.
For my birthday…
…I would like someone to buy my condo :).
Off tomorrow to the Columbia River for another J24 regatta with the Hair of the Dog team.
And I finally booked my tickets home for my high school reunion. I’ll be back in Winnipeg Friday the 31st at 11pm and leave Monday the 3rd at 5pm.