Market Threat: Talking E-Labels Arrival

As if there werent enough ambient personalities floating around causing havoc, those pushers of progress… backroom marketing and demographic quants whose job is to convince captains of industry they can sell them the future… are in full effect, probably a side effect of all those out-of-work financial number crunchers who havent gone on to greener (cleaner?) pastures…

A new research brief called “Brand Enhancement by Electronics in Packaging 2010-2020” [ link to full press release… $3,494 deposit required ] shows us how Talking E-Labels in packaging can reduce costs by 99% (for what?):

Electronics is already used in packaging from winking rum bottles and talking pizza boxes to aerosols that emit electrically charged insecticide that chases the bug. We even have medication that records how much is taken and when and prompts the user. Reprogrammable phone decoration has arrived. But that is just a warm up. The key enabling technology – printed electronics – is about to reduce costs by 99%. Consequently, many leading brand owners have recently put multidisciplinary teams onto the adoption of the new paper thin electronics on their high volume packaging.

Lets hope these multidisciplinary teams have at least a few big-picture realists on board. Do we really need every disPepsi bottle to thank us for opening it, or dissing the coke bottle next door, or having the surgeon general promote the diet version?

To gain very high volume, and therefore lowest costs, by selling across all industries, basic hardware platforms such as the very low cost talking label must be developed. These are discussed. There are 250 pages and a large number of original figures and tables – over 150. These detail market forecasts, statistics for associated industries, pros and cons, technology choices and lessons of success and failure – a lucid, compact analysis for the busy executive. There is much for both non-technical and technical readers.

Perhaps a little Total Perspective Vortex is in order:

The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation invented a concept called Genuine People Personalities (“GPP”) which imbue their products with intelligence and emotion. Thus not only do doors open and close, but they thank their users for using them, or sigh with the satisfaction of a job well done. Other examples of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation’s record with sentient technology include an armada of neurotic elevators, hyperactive ships’ computers and perhaps most famously of all, Marvin the Paranoid Android. Marvin is a prototype for the GPP feature, and his depression and “terrible pain in all the diodes down his left side” are due to unresolved flaws in his programming. Ironically, the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as, “Your plastic pal who’s fun to be with!”

By-products of Designer People

During the backstory Young Zaphod Plays it Safe, the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation designed and produced synthetic personalities to order, but they turned out to be the “By-products of Designer People – amalgams of characteristics which simply could not co-exist in naturally occurring life forms”. Some of these were dangerous, as they did not alarm people to their dangerousness. [link]

As long as the Talking E-Label Genuine People Personalities dont start connecting up with their facespace and mybook and myspaceface or wars of worldcraft second life profiles, marketing things shouldnt get much worse than the early 1990’s…