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It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas - crowded malls, black Friday… With all the holiday shopping that everyone will be doing in the upcoming weeks, I want to share a great feature of Bing.com: the Cash Back program.
I think this feature is amazing, it literally provides you cash back on a majority of purchases you make online with little hassle to the consumer. Microsoft is basically subsidizing your purchases to encourage use of their search engine.
In short, all one needs to do is create a Bing.com Cash Back account here. Then when planning to make a purchase online, make sure you navigate to the store you want to purchase from through a Bing.com search first. You will receive a refund for the purchase (I’ve seen up to 25%) which can be seen in your account online. The money is deposited directly into your bank account after 60 days (to protect against consumers returning items). For a more detailed explanation of how this all works, go here.
The amount of stores where the cash back program is eligible is pretty extensive; a complete list can be found here. It even works on eBay.com if you purchase an item with the BuyItNow feature! While some might argue that the additional cost of shipping negates the savings, I strongly disagree. With a little effort in searching for deals, store coupon codes, or using site-to-store shipping options, shipping costs can almost always be avoided – especially during the holiday shopping season. So if you are planning on making the purchases anyways, get yourself an extra discount… you can earn up to $2,500 back a year and you might as well get it if you were already planning on spending the money.
Well it has been a little while but I’m back…
Today I want to share an idea that I cannot believe doesn’t exist through a practical application. “Green” has become big and I know it isn’t a trend. It’s simple, economics has brought awareness to a problem everyone knew existed but chose to deny. However, I don’t believe the critics who claim that once energy costs subside people will return to their previous behaviors of over consumption and wasteful habits. The issue is to mainstream now and is here to stay. Energy will only get more costly in the future as demand increases exponentially, making conservation and sustainability that much more important.
Now for the idea… The Magnet Car. In a former job I worked with the construction of generators. Specifically, the unit called an “exciter” which supplies electricity to a generator. Here is a simple physics lesson: If a magnetic field is in motion around a conductor, an electrical current is created. Here is an illustration and link:
An example of electromagnetic induction
This concept works in reverse as well: if you supply an electrical current through a conductor, a magnetic field can be created. This principal is a very, very rough explanation of how generators work. An electrical current is supplied making an enormous spinning electro-magnet (rotor) that is inside a huge conductor (stator) creating a very large amount of electricity. But how does the electricity get supplied to a rotor spinning at 3000 rpm or 3600 rpm in the first place? You can’t simply hook wires up to it, the answer is the exciter…
An exciter is basically a mini-generator. It creates electricity virtually out of thin air by use of permanent magnets. The permanent magnets are assembled on a diameter (PMG) that a stator (circular conductor) spins inside of, creating a small amount of electricity. This electricity is then delivered to the generator so a large amount of electricity can be created. This is a very crude and basic explanation of how the system works.
Now that you get the basics, the reality of a magnet powered vehicle comes from the PMG. The permanent magnets, whose charge can last for as much as 1,000 years, are stationary in the unit with a conductor spinning inside them.
Why not reverse this and have a PMG on a car with the drive shaft containing the magnets while the conductor (stator) is around it? A battery could maintain the electricity needed for low speed driving and turning on the car while the electricity created from the PMG could charge the battery. This is similar to current electric cars that need to be plugged in, except The Magnet Car wouldn’t require external charging… the magnets would provide the service. The current created would be AC, but this can easily be converted to the necessary DC current through diodes.
This is an idea that has been around for a while, specifically 1996 as this patent suggests. With the current mass attention to renewable energy, electric cars like the Chevy Volt, and an electric high performance car like the Tesla Roadster… why hasn’t the magnet powered car been given its fair shake? It is by far the most environmentally friendly option.
Today marks the launch of Microsoft’s latest attempt to compete with Google: www.bing.com. This new product from Microsoft is a search engine which has been heavily invested in and will be advertised in the same manner, boasting a marketing budget of $80M to $100M. Microsoft’s differentiation strategy for “bing” is that it is a smarter search engine or really what they have coined as a “decision engine” (meaning it makes actual decisions in the search process to provide better information for a better search experience). http://www.discoverbing.com/welcome/
I used the site this morning and I really think Microsoft has made a step in the right direction. They learned a valuable lesson from Google: with the information overload the internet offers, simplicity is key. I believe that by just providing the bare essentials on the “bing” homepage, Microsoft will find a much higher degree of success than their former search engine attempt – Microsoft Live. Additional features like an image based background may prove to be quite interesting given the fact that Microsoft has proposed user submittal contests to determine the background image for particular days.
Former MIT Media Lab graphic designer and current president of RISD John Maeda is someone I admire and have followed for about a year. He is a clear advocate for the advantages the simplicity school of thought has to offer in all facets of life. He has written books and spoken at symposiums about how to simply your life, work, and designs to enjoy a happier life. This is an idea Google prescribed to long ago and it is obvious where it has taken them: the top (having about 60% of all internet search traffic and establishing their brand as a verb in everyday life).
Check out Maeda’s blog on simplicity, he doesn’t maintain it as actively after joining RISD but it still has some very interesting information.
Microsoft may have risen to success by developing innovative software but they are clearly in a mature stage of their business cycle. While it’s inevitable that the name “Microsoft” will have a negative stigma no matter what (thanks to years of creative advertising by Apple), I think they have finally seen the light. Bing has not been an attempt to reinvent the search engine wheel but rather uses proven aesthetics in combination with an enhanced search algorithm to offer a competitive product.
Today I am writing about a pen I am completely blown away by. I have seen a couple of my teachers using it and I have had the opportunity to try it out. Now this isn’t any ordinary pen, it is capable of recording sound as you write (synced to each actual word – I’ll explain later) and capturing all pen strokes in a digital jpeg format which can be easily loaded to your personal computer, page by page as in the notebook. I have included a link to this pen, called Livescribe Pulse, which can be found at any Target.
The functionality and ease of use of this piece of technology is what shocked me the most. One simply writes down whatever they want and all sounds are recorded. The amazing part is, to replay the sounds you just touch the pen on any word and the sounds from that point in time are played. The supplied “dot” paper – paper with unique patterns of finely meshed (very unnoticeable) dots – serve as the digital timestamp for the pen to recognize when in play-back mode. This “dot” paper can be purchased in pad format for not much more than ordinary paper or printed out for free!
My immediate reaction to seeing this technology was regret; regret I did not possess something like this while in college! For a student taking notes for six years of college, it is very tough to organize all of your work for later reference amongst yearly moves and constant life changes. However, with this pen, a student can just dock it their computer after class and load all their notes in jpeg format onto their computer. Don’t forget that they can hear exactly what the teacher was saying when each word was written as well. Dismissing all catastrophic computer crashes, I can’t think of an easier way to archive all the expensive knowledge transmitted during class hours. I believe this the next best gift to a digital camera, if not better, for any new college student.
I am speaking from an engineering perspective where notes often include drawings and are not structured like other disciplines where typing notes is much simpler. However, disregarding the obvious health benefits to hand writing (http://drbenkim.com/nervous-system-healthy.html), I think there is a clear advantage to handwritten notes for the purpose of knowledge retention; which makes this pen a necessity for everyone. So regardless of who you are, check this amazing invention out. The applications for the Livescribe Pulse pen go far beyond college students (therapists also immediately come to mind).
It’s a shame the marketing efforts for this product have been non-existent. In an age when colleges are giving all incoming students iPhones to integrate with classes (http://www.acu.edu/news/2008/080225_iphone.html) the enormous academic market only serves as a small example for the immense potential of this invention.
