Visa, Sponsor?
Project: The Voyager update project

I thought it would be interesting to choose a credit card company for the sponsor of our water products based on our idea that all of the content we sell will be the same, allowing the packaging to imbue personalized meaning. This is basically what most credit card companies are trying to do with personalized cards already. All a card company provides is a means to increase personal spending by delaying payments over time with interest. They all “sell” debt, so it is interesting how differently the various companies try to spin it. Naomi Klein refers to Internet brands in "No Logo" as a more pure form of branding as a lifestyle and/or narrative because on the web a company is free to showcase itself through the philosophy of the brand without getting bogged down in the physicality of production, location, or product. In a way, credit card companies are afforded the same privilege to allow the character of the brand to carry 100% of the product's weight - it becomes all about the story. I have chosen Visa as the company of choice because their narrative seems to be, at first glance, the most robust. American Express firmly bases their card stratification on the financial status of the borrower, providing a fairly narrow approach to what our water could be: water for people who make X amount of dollars, or X amount, etc. Between MasterCard and Visa the choice is simple, take their mantras, plug in water and see what happens. "For everything else there's water" versus "Life takes water" - I think we have a winner. When you first log on to the Visa website, you are faced with a dilemma: who am I? Am I Classic or Secured? I would like to think of myself as Gold but then why not Platinum? However, what I am most interested in are the Visa Signature and Rewards Cards because they provide the most effort on the part of Visa to slice and dice its audience. Visa Signature is divided up into Sports & Entertainment, Fine Wine & Food, Travel, Hotel & Spa, Shopping, and Concierge. Now if you are a Lakers fan, or are a country music fan, there’s a card just for you. The Rewards Cards partner up with different brands (BMW, Amazon, Borders, ESPN, Nordstrom, Starbucks, Trump, US Airways, Capitol One, etc) to provide a special second layer narrative that Visa can attach itself to – find what they already love and embrace it too, brilliant. Capitol One is an interesting offshoot because as an autonomous provider of cards with Visa logos, they have even more specialized promotions including a card-building program where you can upload a personal image, pick your rate and rewards schema. Possible trouble with choosing Visa is where and why they would sell water. Visa isn’t in the business of product exchange, which means they don’t have stores or a distribution infrastructure. Visa also has a desire to locate themselves within existing paradigms, which we might be what we are challenging. Visa is also in the business of branded transparency, i.e. if you like BMW or drive a BMW, use our BMW branded card. So that Visa is not represented as a special, unique entity in your wallet, but an obvious manifestation of things you already have an emotional/commercial connection to. However, it might not be a bad thing to propose Visa to do the opposite. If they made cards clever and obscure enough, people might carry them just for the style, not planning on ever using them of course.

Wed, Feb 20, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: water
Sent to project: The Voyager update project

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Water Research
Project: The Voyager update project

Chemical and Physical:

- Consists of two Hydrogen atoms polar-covalently bonded to an Oxygen atom at 104.45 degrees.
- Although Oxygen shares an electron with each Hydrogen atom, it shares unequally, hogging the electrons a higher percentage of the time. This gives the "top" Oxygen portion of the molecule a slightly negative charge, and the opposite "bottom" Hydrogen ends a slightly positive charge.
- Because of water's polar nature, it is a great solvent, commonly referred to as the "universal solvent".
- Things that dissolve well in water (salts, sugars, acids, etc...) are referred to as "hydrophilic". Conversely, fats and oils are "hydrophobic". Even the proteins and DNA inside of our bodies, are bathed in water.
- In moderate amounts, water is tasteless and colorless. However, in larger quantities is does have a slightly blue tint.
- Water has high adhesion and surface tension because it is polar, however, it also falls victim to capillary motion (when it is more attracted to another substance than itself). Capillary motion occurs when water moves from areas of wet soil to dry soil, creates a meniscus in a tube, or the dripping of tear fluid away from the tear duct.
- Water's high specific heat capacity is a large reason that the temperature on Earth remains fairly constant.
- Even given water's benign characteristics, some substances like lithium and potassium react violently with water.

Water in the Cosmos:

Here is a great breakdown from Wikipedia, "Water":

Water vapor is on:
• Mercury - 3.4% in the atmosphere
• Venus - 0.002% in the atmosphere
• Earth - trace in the atmosphere (varies with climate)
• Mars - 0.03% in the atmosphere
• Jupiter - 0.0004% in the atmosphere
• Saturn - in ices only
• Enceladus (moon of Saturn) - 91% in the atmosphere
• exoplanets known as HD 189733 b[5] and HD 209458 b.[6]

Liquid water is on:
• Earth - 71% of surface
Strong evidence suggests that liquid water is present just under the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus. Probably some liquid water is on Europa.

Water ice is on:
• Earth - mainly on ice sheets
• polar ice caps on Mars
• Titan
• Europa
• Enceladus

How does water make it around the cosmos?
- It is thought that when stars form they create a shock wave of gas and debris. This wave impacts the gases already present in the environment and the impact creates heat, under which water it produced.

How do we detect water outside of Earth?
- If you beam light at a far away planet's atmosphere, you can analyze the changes in the spectrum when it hits - different substances have different effects.

Water on Earth:
- 71% of Earth is water
- 97.2% of Earth's water is located in the oceans
- 90% of Earth's freshwater is locked in the Antarctic Ice Sheet
- How "big" is all the water on Earth? Answer = 326,000,000 cubic miles
- I'm pretty sure we all know about the water cycle, but here's a link just in casehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Water_cycle.png

Some Interesting Water Properties:
- Fog
- Rainbows (refraction)
- Tides
- Ice is less dense that liquid water, so it floats. I think this is a funny fact because I like to image what all the beverage commercials would look like without the ice bubbling and floating refreshingly at the surface.

Here's a pretty cool site with a survey of water in Space-Collective-Like terms.
 http://www.u24u.com/Intro/intro.html 

Sun, Feb 17, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: water
Sent to project: The Voyager update project

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