Here at Sunrise we love progress. Especially when it involves the environment, so a recent blog post at Ecogeek sparked our interest.  The post brought a cool invention to our attention.  The design of the recycing robot by Osaka University and Mitsubishi Electric Engineering Co.  They  have created a robot with laser-sensing technology that can differentiate six different types of plastic from all other garbage.  The 5-foot 6-inch by 6-foot 9-inch machine identifies the plastic materials by analyzing the reflectivity of five different wavelengths of lasers on the materials. 

The purpose of the robot is to streamline the recycling process and increase the amount of plastic that gets recycled.  With this robot taking care of that sorting, people can recycle with the assurance that the robot will take care of the details.

Although at 55,000 dollars this isn’t exactly being marketed as a home sorting device it certainly has a lot of potential for industrial sites.

For more information please visit

EcoGeek

Telegraph

Botropolis

 ”Because the Earth likes to eat healthier too.”  That’s the tag line across Frito Lay’s SunChip website advertising their new compostable bag.  In a world where it’s all about having one up on the competition this new bag is giving an already strong product an additional edge. This plant based bag is designed to break down in a quick 14 weeks.  The only draw back is that this bag is noisier than standard chip bags. There will be no “sneaking the SunChips” because the bag will be a dead giveaway.  To view how the bag decomposes over the 14 weeks please visit the SunChip Clip below.

Sunchip Clip

It will be interesting to see how the competition follows.  They may look to mimic the compostable bag or for a quick fix try to simply advertise a more eco-friendly bag that is made out of recycled material, etc.

For more information please visit:

SunChips

Jazzing up your company catalog isn’t a quick process.  It takes a lot of thought, opinion polling, and research to try and get it right.    Here are a few tips in creating an effective catalog.

1.The first tip is to not try and jam everything into a few pages to be cost effective.  This will overwhelm your customer and will likely leave the pictures too small.  Instead try weaving white space effectively into your design.  This is  especially true for photos that you want to draw the customer’s attention.

2. Another way to create an effective catalog is to create consistency from page to page.  A layout that your customer finds easy to navigate will certainly help this process.

3.  Finally, ensure that the color scheme is in sync with the color scheme of the company. This means company cards, website, etc.  This should be a continued branding effort.  Therefore it should be a continuation of what the company looks like not a deviance from it.

For more information please visit:

Print Runner

A newsletter is an opportunity that companies both large and small capitalize on to inform their customers about the current events of the company.  It often works as both an informative piece as well as a promotional one.  But how exactly do you create an effective newsletter. There isn’t an exact formula- if there was we would all be using it.  However, here are a few helpful tips.

The first piece of advice is to keep the information relevant.  It may seem obvious but too often newsletters are an overwhelming amount of irrelavent information.  Align what you’re writing about with what your customers will take the time to read.  If your customers are environmentally consciousness you might want to spotlight your new green product line, or ways that your company has started recycling.

Another helpful hint is to send your newsletter out on a set schedule.  Don’t send it out whenever you find it convenient.  It isn’t a press release. It’s a newsletter. You also don’t want to overwhelm customers.   Monthly is usually a good time frame to send it out.

One of the best ways to improve your own newsletter is to look at newsletters you find interesting and mimic what they do. Do they have a lot of links?  Are they concise?  Is it an easy layout?  What type of colors and fonts are they using?  If it worked once it’ll likely work again.

For more information please visit:

Promarketer

Top Story

New research may now back what many of us already believed, the idea that a person’s stage in life  is more important in determining their behavior than demographics.  At least this is what a recent study by Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California (ETC), the Hallmark Channel and E-Poll Market Research has determined.

These life stages are broken into eight major categories.  The categories consist of teens, college students, recent graduates, single no kids, new nesters, established families, married couples with no children and empty nesters.

The study looked specifically at media habits. While looking at people that fell into the same stage in their life they tended to possess similar attitudes and behaviors but those attitudes and behaviors varied from other stages.  For example, here are a few of the study findings. 

And new nesters value television more than other groups, and have a lot of TV content coming into the home, per the study. As a group they are most likely to have digital/satellite channels, and they place the highest value on devices that filter video content such as DVRs, video-on-demand services and DVD players. They use those devices to locate and display family-appropriate entertainment and screen out unwanted content, the study found.

In contrast, the study notes that childless couples are more engaged with friends and activities outside the home, ranking higher than new nesters in such activities as travel, exercise and spending time with friends. When they do watch TV, dramas, not family fare, tend to be a higher priority, per the study.

Continued research on these stages could provide greater insight for marketers, positively influencing their ability to reach consumers.

For more information please visit:

Adweek

epoll research

SDXC from the SD Card Association offers a whole new world of flash drive capabilities.  This memory card’s capabilities are nothing short off amazing.  It’s rumored to be able to store 100 HD movies, 60 hours of HD recording or 17,000 fine-grade photos.  These types of capabilities will no doubt come with a price tag.  To become an early adapter of this technology you can expect to pay upwards of $450.

These memory cards are commonly used in cameras, smartphones, camcorders, navigation systems, gaming consoles and laptops.  However, the view for the future is more expansive as mentioned in an excerpt from this article.

 Last year Toshiba talked about putting SDXC slots in TVs, which would allow users to play movies directly from SD media. The company envisioned users going to movie-vending machines from where they can buy movies on SD cards.

Oh the future, where everything is just a flashdrive away.

For more information please visit:

Tech World

Lets Go Digital

CES Show

What is being hailed as the world’s smallest library is somewhere between quaint and genius.  This “library” is none other than a salvaged phone box.  Stocking around 100 books it works as a book exchange.  Users simply bring books they have read and then take books that they haven’t.  This little libarary also hosts DVD’s and CD’s and appeals to all ages with a variety of childrens books as well.

In addition to the creativity and sense of community that this library offers there is a eco-friendly factor.  The salvaging of the phone box itself along with the book exchange it facilitates is a great way to be green. It is the epitome of reuse.

For more information please visit:

Baltimore Sun

Blogspot

The ketchup packet, stuck so long in it’s inconvenient form that it seemed destined to remain that way.  You know the issues, hard to open, hard to dunk, certainly not kid friendly.  To top it off there’s never enough ketchup in one packet so you have to repeat the process.  This causes a repeat of the prior issues.  Well after all this Heinz, the company that literally turned our ketchup bottle upside down, has now reinvented the packet.  For this we are forever grateful.  The new and improved ketchup packet seems to cover it all.  It offers more ketchup, more kid-friendly, a dunk side, and a squeeze side. Heinz even made it more closely match their grocery store product line in terms of shape and color.  It’s clearly labeled making it easy to open and understand. The product is currently being tried in test markets.  I’m excited for it to take it’s rightful place in the fast food industry.

For more information visit:

WCBS News Radio

Daily Mail

Do you have a nickname?

No

Last book you read?

1984,  George Orwell

If you could meet anyone dead or alive, who would it be?

Leanoardo Da Vinci

Favorite Hobby?

Music and painting

If you could have a superpower, what would it be? Why?

Not needing sleep- I’m not sure if that can be claimed as a superpower but I would be able to get everything I wanted to done!

What attracted you most to working at Sunrise?

The opportunity and the work experience.

You may not feel familiar with thermoforming, however, it is surprising to find just how often it works its way into daily life.  The plastic plates you picked up for this week’s party are thermoformed.  Those large plastic parts in cars and planes are thermoformed.  The majority of  food, medical, and retail plastic packaging is also thermoformed.

The difference between large thermoformed plastic parts for an airplane and the thin material of dinnerware is referred to as thin gauge verse thick gauge.  Thin gauge means that the plastic is thin enough that it is actually fed through the machine on a roll.  Thick gauge means that the plastic has to be fed through on flat sheets.  Thin gauge is used for items like plastic cups, lids, trays, etc.  It is usually disposable or recyclable.  On the flip side thick gauge is tends to be used for more permanent items.

Now when you go to the store you can feel a little  more informed about your plastic purchases.