Be QReative...

Quote from the movie Ocean's Eleven: "If that's not your brand of vodka..."

Creating brand awareness is one of the mayor goals for marketeers.
A couple of golden idea's to increase brand awareness have been made in the past.
Two of the best known examples:

Guinness, known as a beer brewery has their name linked to the Guinness World Records.

Michelin, known for car tires has their name linked to Michelin Guide containing ratings for restaurants.

The lesson I learn from these examples is that I always have to keep an open mind, opportunities might pop-up in unexpected places.

Be open minded and creative, and your idea's might turn into gold!

Even more new coins

Quote from the movie Jumper: "They couldn't make heads or tails of it."


A big difference between digital crypto currency and real coins is that real coins can be flipped.

Call it.. heads or tails. A method to make a choice.

The head side of the valid currency in the Netherlands is the reigning monarch.

Last year April, our queen was replaced by a king. This also called for a new version of the dutch Euro where the portrait of Willem-Alexander needed to be placed.

The displayed QR Code is based on the artwork that was used to make the new coinage.

Interested in the new set of euro coins? More information can be found here.
Interested in the QR Codes? Find more on my website, or order your own in my webshop.

Dangers of social media promotions.

Quote from the movie Lethal Weapon 2: "You haven't heard about me? l got a bad reputation."


The internet, and especially social media like Facebook, Twitter and blogging is a nice way to promote products like Custom QR Codes.
My QR Codes, like the one displayed on the left are graphically enhanced.
In order to promote these codes I occasionally make a code with a image that is related to current events, this one has an Olympic theme.

But there is a downside to promoting these QR Codes on social media. The link I place in these promotional codes uses the adf.ly shortening service, Using that service an advertisement will be shown before linking to the actual content i.e. a link to my site for promotional qr-codes.

I was unpleasantly surprised when after placing this code on Twitter the following happened.
I had to look-up what mobogenie actually means :-) It looks like the advertisement that the adf.ly service showed when the code was scanned was not appreciated. The "bad reputation" then automatically roll's back to the QR Code itself. The result is very unfortunate, someone who liked the graphical appeal of the image enough to re-tweet the original message deletes this tweet. An action that kind of kill's the promotional intent. My efforts to repair the damage resulted in no-replies.

Out with the new, in with the even newer...

Quote from the movie Spider-Man: "The end of one thing, the start of something new."

Last week a new product was available (at pre-order) for the Scrypt based crypto coin miners. An ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) based solution. This new mining hardware is specified at 5MH/s, requiring just 70 Watt's of power. This hashing to power ratio definitely outperforms the GPU based mining rigs.

It looks that the Scrypt based currencies like Litecoin will be probably be mined by the bigger players, just as happened before with BitCoin mining; totally locking out the normal guy.
This is not the type of decentralization that was intended when the currencies were made, but making an ASIC is a logical technological move whenever there is (easy?) money to be made.

It is no surprise that at this moment in time a new coin enters the market; a new coin with a small protocol adaptation to render the new ASIC's unusable for this currency.

This new coin is called VertCoin; it is based on the Scrypt protocol, but is made adaptive in the memory requirement. Currently the amount of memory needed for mining is double compared to standard Scrypt based coins, the adaptability of the protocol will make it easy to double this memory requirement again and again and again. This feature will making an ASIC for this coin a risk, now just waiting for this crypto-currency to gain some popularity and value.