1. Share Timely Information - Whether your company has a one-day sale or a special event, Instagram Stories are a great way to share timely content. Since Stories go away after 24 hours, it doesn’t clutter your gallery and gets the marketing message to consumers.
2. Behind-the-Scenes - The nature of stories creates a more natural, organic way to share content. Instead of delivering polished videos that usually appear in your gallery, your business can share fun videos that capture the spirit of your company and make your followers feel even more connected to your brand.
3. Promote Yourself - Through a combination of photos and video that are enhanced with the neon drawing tool, you can highlight features of your product or service in a fun manner.

Whether insightful or quirky, Instagram Stories gives business yet another tool to connect with consumers on a deeper level. How do you feel about the new feature?

Augmented reality - the use of technology to superimpose digital creations onto one’s physical world - used to be predominantly focused on industrial applications.

Many doubted whether this type of technology would get mainstream acceptance as many consumers showed resistance to wearing augmented reality headsets during the course of the day, as evidenced by the cold response received by Alphabet Inc.’s Google Glass.

Enter Pokémon. Back in the 90's, kids grew up playing Pokémon video games on their Game Boy and watching Pokémon cartoons and movies. You had to travel to fantasy lands, capture Pokémon and train them to indulge in a cartoon cock-fight. The fame of Pokémon led to spawning a successful empire of movies, toys, cards and more! 

The popularity of the Pokémon brand as well as the public’s growing awareness of augmented reality helped transform it from a technological curiosity to a widely accepted application. The success of Pokémon Go serves as an opening to what will be a much more interactive augmented reality experience in the next few years as developers create applications that will be seamlessly integrated into a user’s real world. 

We all know and love the viral ads that come around every year. They speak to us by highlighting an important issue, making us laugh, making us cry, or by warming our hearts with more often than not...puppies. What makes a campaign successful is not necessary the amount of money spent but the way it is experienced by your audience. Here are some fundamental points to keep in mind:

Decide who your demographic is and what your company stands for

Partnering with a cause or backing an idea can give your company a voice that might otherwise go unseen. Integrate this into your advertising and marketing campaigns. This will attract the type of consumer who wants to stick by you.

Make your brand relevant by connecting it to a current social, political or economical issue

If the consumer can connect with what you're saying, they'll listen. Case in point: Durex had a viral campaign aptly named "Turn off to turn on" that encouraged couples to put down their phones and reignite their love life. Technology addiction and the impact it has on relationships is a hot button issue that people are talking about. Give people interesting content, and they'll start the conversation for you. Make this connection for your brand.

Have your brand promoted by someone with authority or social status

You may not be able to get your hands on a celebrity ambassador but bloggers can make a huge impact. No matter what your product or service is, there is bound to be a specialist who takes to the internet to cover it. This can work as promotional material.

Engage with your consumers

Contests and give-aways, social media connections, events, incentives, games are only a few ways you can make your consumer identify with your brand and feel like part of team.

The convenience industry is a 700 billion dollar industry, leaving plenty of room for great new products on the shelf. As NACS put it, "Convenience stores have evolved from gas stations that happen to sell food to food retailers that happen to sell gas." The tradeshow is an exciting and fast paced event that connects store operators to businesses and products. With more than 24,000 attendees at the NACS show, it works as a great promotional tool to get your brand noticed. There was a lot of good energy buzzing around the convention with tons of excited entrepreneurs and established companies alike.

Conventions like these are great for your business as these face-to-face meetings with prospective buyers can be impressionable in ways that other outreach attempts cannot. Tradeshows make your brand seen and heard by the people that really matter. We would highly suggest adding tradeshow stops to any marketing plan to make a huge impact in your business.

For more information, visit http://www.nacsonline.com/nacsshow/Pages/default.aspx.]]> Tue, 13 Oct 2015 02:40:55 +0000 https://vcomedia.com/blog/polaroid-instagram-cam-review https://vcomedia.com/blog/polaroid-instagram-cam-review Well, the holiday season is upon us… Because apparently the holiday season is something that gets “upon” people. We don’t get that phrasing either. I mean, quite honestly, it sounds like the holiday season is a bit of a creeper in the Bill Cosby type of way.

Dang, that joke’s gonna get us in trouble.

But anyway, the holiday season has lurched upon our state of being, and thus, we must buy each other expensive presents for the sake of gratitude and good tidings and merriment.

Fortunately, Polaroid may have the answer to your gift-buying dilemma. If you’re pacing back and forth in the shopping mall right now, pulling out your hair and going, “Grrr, I can’t think of what to get so-and-so!” Then… three things:

Firstly, don’t pull out your hair; you’re suffering from trichotillomania and you need to get help. (Find out more over at Mayo Clinic)

Secondly, think long and hard and ask yourself why you have a friend named So-and-So. That’s a horrible name and that person probably isn’t worth your irrational mental exertion.

And thirdly, just buy the interesting product we’re about to tell you about and then go home and try to live your life like a normal human being and stop being such a freak.

So yeah, Polaroid has invented something called “the Polaroid Socialmatic.”

The very idea of an old-fashioned Polaroid gives us warm, fuzzy, nostalgia-type feelings over here at V+CO, so it makes perfect sense that Polaroid has made a camera configured to work with throwback-obsessed Instagram.

The Polaroid Socialmatic has a 14-megapixel camera in the front, and an additional cam lens on the back designed specifically for your obsessive, unremitting selfie-taking, you repugnant narcissist, you.

Using WiFi, you can upload your photos directly to the web via all of your favorite social media apps. But guess what else? This nifty invention still produces old school, physical photos as well, and the photos are engineered to be both water-resistant and smudge-proof.

We haven’t actually tried out this $299.99 little marvel yet, but it’s available for pre-order right now and it’s looking pretty promising. But wait, Amazon claims it isn’t available until January 1, 2015, post-Christmas? Okay, never mind, screw that.

Happy holidays or whatever,

The V+CO Team

We here at V+CO will reserve our judgment until we see how things play out. Look, our world is changing. Media companies of all sorts must go through a constant evolution in order to keep up, and stay relevant and profitable. Without inside information, it’s difficult to predict the precise outcome of Hughes’ modifications. But here’s the observed fallout, nonetheless…

On Thursday, it was announced that Gabriel Snyder would replace Franklin Foer as editor of The New Republic.

Franklin Foer, by the way, is the older brother of Jonathan Safran Foer, who wrote the novel “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” which was later adapted into a Tom Hanks-starring, family adventure film about 9/11. Yeah, so, um, no comment there. Incidentally, however, here’s an Urban Dictionary article on the concept of "tragicrafting."

But we digress.

Shortly after the magazine’s 100th anniversary, transformative plans were revealed, with a stated objective to turn The New Republic into a “vertically integrated digital media company,” whatever that is. But whatever it in fact is, the folks at The New Republic did not take kindly to the editor switcheroo.

Numerous contributing editors all chose to resign, simultaneously. And how did they express their disdain over the fact that the magazine was being turned into some newfangled digital thingy? Well, via Twitter, of course…

Here’s one sample outrage tweet: “Dear @TNR and @chrishughes, please immediately remove me from your masthead as a Contributing Editor. http://www.newrepublic.com/page/masthead”

There appears to be concern that under this new creative direction, The New Republic will become too page view hungry, too obsessed with empty metrics and excessive talk of branding.

Jonathan Chait, one of the resigning editors, explained his discontentment in “A Eulogy for the New Republic,” which was published in New York Magazine.

He writes: “Frank Foer isn’t leaving TNR because he wasn’t a good enough editor. He’s leaving because Chris Hughes is not a good enough owner.”

Ouch.

He further explained: “I expect the circumstances surrounding TNR’s transformation will be framed as a matter of modernity versus tradition. There is certainly an element of this. At the magazine’s 100th anniversary gala two weeks ago, where Hughes, Foer, Wieseltier, and Hughes’s new CEO, Guy Vidra, all spoke, the speeches took a sharply, awkwardly divergent tone. Foer and Weiseltier gave soaring paeans to the magazine’s immense role in shaping American liberal thought. Hughes and Vidra used words like brand and boasted about page views, giving no sense of appreciation at all for the magazine’s place in American life. In a comic moment, Vidra mispronounced Foer’s name.”

Chait insists that the owner and CEO are both “afflicted with the belief that they can copy the formula that transformed the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed into economic successes.”

Basically, there seems to be a fundamental disagreement over what the magazine represents. In Chait’s viewpoint, The New Republic “is and always has been a magazine of politics and culture pitched at a high intellectual level, which necessarily limits its appeal to a slice of the public too small to be financially viable.”

An article over on Slate claims that these staff changes “expose the fault lines of modern journalism,” because the new, Hughes-appointed editor “hails from the whiplash world of reactive Web journalism—not the staid, chin-stroky milieu of a century-old journal of opinion.”

We here at V+CO are not going to take any sides on this one, but we did vomit a little bit at the complete pretentiousness inherent in that “culture pitched at a high intellectual level” bit. It wasn’t a tremendous amount of vomit, but there was some legitimate expulsion of partially digested food, prompted entirely by the unapologetic elitism. That being said, apparently Hughes did hire Foer’s replacement before officially firing Foer, and Foer became aware of this through the rumor mill, which must have been quite embarrassing. So it sounds like this is just nasty all over.

Prepare to have your aforementioned dream shattered.

Or at least, prepare to have the aesthetic styling of your hopes profoundly altered. We here at V+CO believe in small businesses, in ambition, in the capacity of Americans to have a vision, to build, to strategize, to shamble forward starry-eyed towards a distant, beaming hope, to materialize an unlikely vision into reality.

We also know that this entrepreneurial process can be brutal: just completely and utterly and mercilessly brutal. Sometimes, little victories along the pathway to greatness are few and far between. It takes a tremendous amount of willpower and persistence to strive forward and elevate a venture out of the red and into profitability.

And so how do you believe in yourself when your circumstances are far from glamorous? When the bills are piling up, and your bank account is taking the hits, how do you stir up your rebel spirit and soldier on into the unknown?

Well, simple. You tell yourself stories…

Stories that are now so ingrained in popular culture we take them for granted; stories that are relatively contemporary and yet seemingly etched into the timeless fabric of myth.

One such story is that of Apple, and a sweaty little garage, somewhere in Los Altos, California. We all know the mythos here:

This multinational, widely admired megacorporation emerged from some rinky-dink garage, in which modestly dressed, quasi-hippie nerds liked to tinker around with circuitry for the sake of innovation. One of the nerds was Wozniak. The other was Ashton Kutcher. I mean, Steve Jobs. And they eventually turned their adorable little enterprise into a corporation with its own sense of culture, of ingenuity; and one with $182 billion annual revenue in 2014, no less.

If something that epic can emerge from a freakin’ GARAGE, well then, it doesn’t matter if you’re accruing credit card debt, working through endless nights and eating hot dogs, now does it? Because the story gives you hope.

Well, screw you and your hope.

In a recent interview, Steve Wozniak finally tells the people that the garage legend isn’t entirely accurate:

“The garage is a bit of a myth. It’s overblown. The garage represents us better than anything else, but we did no designs there. We would drive the finished products to the garage, make them work, and then we’d drive them down to the store that paid us cash.”

He continued: “There were hardly ever more than two people in the garage and mostly they were sitting around kind of doing nothing productive.”

Put simply, Wozniak is a genius, a pioneer, an educator, and an inspiration… But we want our garage story back.

Yes, technically speaking, we here at V+CO actually have some pretty nice, conventional offices in Hollywood, but… still. Just tell us the garage story, dude. Tell it to us again. Please? We like story-time so much! Tell us the garage story as we close our little entrepreneurial eyes and softly drift to sleep.

Check out Wozniak’s other insights over at Bloomberg.

At V+CO, we love the Steve Jobs/Apple cult of personality just as much as the next person. In fact, whenever someone says “next iPhone,” we instinctively just start shoving people down on the ground and running to the front of the nearest line, regardless of whether or not it’s actually a line to an Apple store. 

That being said, some of the most famous Steve Jobs quotes just don’t stand up to scrutiny, or even cursory analysis. Here are a few:

Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do.

Yahoo’s caption to this quote carefully notes that these words were actually drafted by Apple’s Think Different ad campaign, not by the Jobs-meister himself, but the sentiment still aligns with the overall Steve Jobs-cultivated lingo.

First of all, the round peg in a square hole part sounds euphemistic, and kind of hot, so we won’t even go near that one. As for the misfits, rebels, and troublemakers… no, all of them don’t actually push the human race forward. Some of them are just jerks who commit crimes. At V+CO, we’re in favor of a defiant, unconventional creative spirit, but why does that mean we should automatically extend leniency to escaped convicts?

Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

Are you kidding me? Your plan for society is to create a bunch of emaciated, ignorant people? No. Feed yourself. Please. Seriously, eat a sandwich if you’d like. Be reasonably ambitious, and don’t be afraid to try new things. Develop plans for your pursuits, whenever relevant, and explore existing knowledge so as to avoid wasting ten years of your life discovering something that has already been discovered. Use Wikipedia if necessary. The team at Apple did not randomly design and assemble their computers. They learned stuff first. Sometimes they ate food. At V+CO, we get the underlying spirit of this quote, but we’re concerned that literalists will be misguided into starvation.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

If you are seeing too many dots, you may also want to schedule an appointment with an optometrist.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.

We presented this quote to the manager of the nearest Arby’s, and asked him to reconcile this do-great-work mentality with the roast beef sandwiches we had been served. He was left speechless.

(Aw, that was too harsh. We actually love Arby’s. In fact, if you’re a higher-up at Arby’s and you’re reading this for some reason, consider hiring us to do an interactive marketing campaign for you. Just please don’t offer us comps on your food. Again, just kidding. We love your food. Lol jk lolz not jk)

If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.

By this, we think Jobs means that some type of “Adventures in Babysitting” scenario may have occurred, in which a series of protracted adventures occurred over the course of a zany and seemingly never-ending night. (Wikipedia link)

Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.

Now, are you… are you sure that wasn’t just someone from Xerox throwing the brick at you, Steve? It seems weird to blame the abstractness of “life” for something as tangible as a brick.

My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: Great things in business are never done by one person; they’re done by a team of people.

We also believe in teamwork, but we’re just wondering here: who was the Yoko Ono of Apple?

It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.

This quote we just simply can’t abide by. Here at V+CO, we have the highest respect for international maritime laws. Screw you, pirates.

In its attempt to thwart its rival Amazon.com, and engage in eBook price-fixing, Apple worked with multiple publishers: Hachette Book Group Inc, HarperCollins Publishers LLC, Penguin Group (USA) Inc, Simon & Schuster Inc, and Macmillan. Unhappy with the low retail pricing of eBooks on Amazon, these publishers hatched a price-fixing scheme with Apple. Think Ocean's Eleven, with the iPad folks as Clooney.

In her decision, Judge Cote concluded, "The plaintiffs have shown that the publisher defendants conspired with each other to eliminate retail price competition in order to raise e-book prices, and that Apple played a central role in facilitating and executing that conspiracy."

The V+CO news team hit the streets to find out what the public thinks of this ruling.

"I haven't read a book in years," says one random citizen. "My attention span dwindles with each passing month, and frankly, if there's a YouTube video that's more than 1 minute 5 seconds, I just don't click it. It's not worth the restlessness. But I think it's messed up that Apple and those publishers tried so hard to make money from books I would never buy." Another indignant citizen commented, "I personally think that 140 characters is just too wordy for a tweet, and Twitter needs to clamp down on its character limitations. By my standards, books are like an assault upon my comprehension. Still, I am so freaking mad that Apple wanted to charge me an amount of money for books that would ensure the steadily dying medium saw a decent bit of profit before its ugly demise!"

Citizens are now rallying together to ensure that the agricultural industry isn't conspiring to raise the prices of vegetables, because on some level they just want to know that they could hypothetically afford a carrot if they ever wanted one.

Senior Vice President Emil Michael allegedly suggested that Uber should dig up dirt on journalists who have been critical of the company, in order to discredit them. While in conversation at a dinner of elites in Manhattan’s Waverly Inn, the Senior Vice President insincerely proposed spending a million dollars to hire a team of opposition researchers that would look into the personal lives of outspoken Uber critics.

Through a company spokesperson, Emil Michael later apologized, saying, “The remarks attributed to me at a private dinner — borne out of frustration during an informal debate over what I feel is sensationalistic media coverage of the company I am proud to work for — do not reflect my actual views and have no relation to the company’s views or approach. They were wrong no matter the circumstance and I regret them.” 

Journalist Michael Wolff has written an article in which he asserts that the BuzzFeed piece exposing these comments should not be taken as an accurate representation of the dinner. He points out that the controversial remarks were said in a private conversation that Emil Michael mistakenly understood to be off-the-record. “While being off-the-record, or believing you are off-the-record, might mean you are more truthful, it can also mean you are, carelessly, full of gas. Was Michael stating Uber policy, or was this a half-bottle of wine rant? And do you want to acknowledge a difference?” writes Wolff in his clarification of the evening. He points out that the conversation was out of earshot of most attendees, and yet “the article implies that the Michael remarks were to the dinner itself.”

Now that Emil Michael has apologized for making jokes and allowing you to not have to own a car, we here at V+CO believe that everyone should just move on. After all, every company crosses the line at some point or another, whether conversationally or in practice. If an Uber executive must be made to apologize for insincerely conspiring against journalists, what’s next? Should V+CO apologize for launching a top secret weather balloon into the atmosphere that spies on other interactive marketing firms and shoots lasers at them? No, of course not; such conduct is perfectly within our rights, and we certainly don’t deserve any sensationalized media criticism from pesky journalists. Should we apologize for creating an Uber-style app in which anybody can be an assassin, and anyone can hire an assassin? No, of course no--. Sorry, our PR guy is now telling me to shut up and apologize.

Tech Crunch observes that it would take months just to comprehend all of the permutations of JavaScript frameworks that are out there. And it simply isn’t practical to properly analyze the wide array of options before selecting discerningly, because the marketplace is time sensitive and does not allow for such hesitation and delay. Yes, sadly, hesitation and delay in this instance are equated with the acquiring of knowledge, and the process formerly glamorized as “learning” is ergo penalized. Clearly, there has to be a careful balance between practicing a skill set finely honed, and expanding upon that skill set so as to avoid becoming obsolete. But it’s a tricky conundrum. Things are advancing swifter than Swift. And what’s more, Taylor Swift has turned down all of my advances. Ba-bum-bah-chhh.

You can read the full article over here: http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/18/you-too-may-be-a-victim-of-developaralysis/

This is the body politic… or rather, an individual purporting to represent the body politic. We just wanted to write you a letter in order to vent some repressed feelings. Open and honest communication is important in our relationship with you, because you know everything about us. 

Literally, everything… our communications, curiosities, hopes, fears, dreams, and other such concepts that are commonly clustered together. And I can’t speak for anyone else (even though that is precisely what I’m doing), but I think we need to have this talk.

We need to figure out our respective life directions, Google, and we just want to ensure that our directions are aligned. Because you’re a multinational corporation with a war chest of technology and resources, and you’ve publicly expressed a sense of uncertainty regarding your identity and purpose. In fact, Larry Page said that you’ve outgrown your 14-year old mission statement. And you could totally turn into a real life LexCorp like that.

It isn’t easy for me to express these concerns to you, Google. This is actually really hard for me to say, because you’ve been such a good friend. You’ve been really, really helpful…

I know that when I searched for advice on how to hold my tattered relationship together, you were there. When I searched for a little something-something on the side, you gave me helpful tips as we conspired to cover up my tracks. Tips such as: “Psst! Incognito mode may come in handy next time.”  You were even there when I Googled the various symptoms that resulted from that little tryst.

Now, it’s entirely possible that not all of us have Googled these things, but I think it’s safe to say we have some collective concerns. What if you, as our closest confidante, were to one day turn against us? Like when Pacino’s consigliere, Robert Duvall, finally betrayed him at the end of The Godfather Part III?

Actually, never mind, Duvall inexplicably wasn’t in Part III; but you can see where we’re going with this. You have too much power. And many of us have bought into the narrative that you are a potentially nefarious corporate entity.

Were you one of the companies that cooperated with the NSA so that government pervs could get all up in our business? I don’t know, but probably. I would check to find out, but then I’d have to Google it and that would just seem ironic and silly.

At the very least, you sold our data to companies that wanted to market their products to us with a creepy level of familiarity. Let me paint you a picture (yes, yes, I know there’s Google Images for that, but I’m being allegorical right now). Let’s suppose I went to a friend’s party, and while there I helped myself to some tortillas and dip… 

And let us suppose that while I was eating that crunchy snack, I felt a presence behind me, a sort of breathing upon the back of my neck, and I turned around to see an awkward individual eagerly informing me: “So you like salsa, huh? Buy discount airfares to Latin America or take local dance classes!” That would be a weird scenario, and in that scenario, Google, you know who you’d be.

I know you’re dealing with some stuff right now, some issues of your own and whatnot. The European court of justice just ruled against you on the “right to be forgotten” issue. The Euros think it’s creepy that you retain so much info on people. Now that issue is of course nuanced by all kinds of ambiguous complexities, but I see your position on that. You have been proud of indiscriminately indexing all types of information for so long. For you, this is like Alex Trebek becoming belligerent with a contestant for being too damn good at Jeopardy. And the contestant is like, “Alex! All I ever wanted to do was make you proud!” But Alex just shakes his head disapprovingly as he scrunches his Trebekian nose and shifts his little mustache from side to side, and says, “You’ve done me wrong, kid.”

Anyway, Google, when your chief executive Larry Page recently confessed that Google has outgrown its original mission statement, and elaborated that he doesn’t know how to alter it just yet, that scared us a little bit. These are Larry’s own words: “We’re in a bit of uncharted territory. We’re trying to figure it out.”

So I guess what we really want to say here, Google, is that we hope you don’t go all Skynet on us. I mean, that really is the collective fear here. We’re afraid of people-killing robots.   As you embark on the mysteriously challenging process of redefining your company mission statement, be sure to remember that “don’t be evil” thing you promised to us way back when.

Signed,the body politic/the hypervigilant techies at V+CO

It was recently announced that the monetary component of the award has gone up to an impressive $1 million, from the previous amount of $250,000. This fourfold increase was made possible by Google. The quarter of a million previously came from both Google and Intel.

The Turing Award is given by the Association for Computing Machinery, and ACM President Alexander Wolf notes that the million bucks will escalate the honor to “the monetary level of the world’s most prestigious cultural and scientific awards and prizes.”

Here at V+CO, we worry about what will happen now that Google has sweetened the pot. Will there be increased competition in the field of computing?

As we all know, the true masters of capitalism are reality TV stars. These parasites of society have learned how to deliberately cultivate their own dysfunctional behavioral patterns, uttering meme-worthy quotes and launching fragrance lines at every possible opportunity. Yes, many reality TV stars are merely forgettable people whose eyes blaze with the yearning for a two-minute pop cultural legacy, but the true masters of the form know how to monetize anything. So we ask you this: What’s going to happen once a voluntarily self-starved, otherwise privileged American leaves a reality show island, only to realize that he can make a cool million by contributing to computer science? What happens when a Kardashian tells her management team to start an artificially intelligent product extension of her personal brand?

It’s only a matter of time before Kimberly “Kim” Kardashian West reprograms a My Pal 2 from the early 90s and forces it to say things such as: “Love our Tan Extender with Bronzers…it helps keep my color on the days I don’t tan! #KardashianSunKissed”*

*Source: Kim Kardashian Twitter feed (https://twitter.com/KimKardashian/status/532587007763963904)

Google, we realize that your aim was to provide a greater incentive for unique achievements in the field of computing, to better the science, to inspire all talented minds to make that extra push towards genius; but what if, in the process, the integrity of computing is lost? There was a time when televisions were used to broadcast images of the first moon landing, disseminating a universal pride in the power of human accomplishment, and spawning a global sense of intellectual curiosity and wonder. Monetary incentives, however, caused TV to become an instrument of the following capitalists:  Damn it, Google. Computers, previously the pinnacle of intelligent human achievement, were on the verge of becoming artificially intelligent and contributive in their own right; but now… now computer science is just another prize to be won. The Turing Award monetary increase has corrupted our once pure state of nerdom.

You maniacs. You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!

The U.S. government agency is responsible for the National Weather Service. The agency spokesmen declined to specify which websites were compromised, and did not provide details on the nature of the attacks. Weather forecasts to the public have not been interrupted or adversely affected.

We here at V+CO firmly believe in the importance of internet security. We strive to establish websites and digital presences that are not only innovative and interactive, but also secure and dependable. In accordance with this mission, we instinctively condemn these cyber-attacks, not with any particular degree of passion, but rather, with an idle “yeah they probably shouldn’t have done that” type of tone.

We are, however, passionate about getting into the minds of these obviously confused hackers. What were they thinking? What passion was driving their efforts? The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration just doesn’t seem like a high profile, ideologically divisive target.

In order to ensure the longevity of the National Weather Service, we decided to put ourselves in the bad guys’ shoes…

We tried to empathize with the twisted minds of these cyber assailants. All four of us began pacing around the office, which is something that we’re ordinarily inclined to do anyways due to the fact that we’re all neurotic suffering from some form of psychomotor agitation. But this time, it was different. This time, we had purpose to our purposeless actions.

We had a case to solve.

Our programmer Mikki was particularly irked. “Dammit, there has to be a reason. Why the f*ck would they try to take down the weather service?!” he cried out. And then he began pounding his fists against the wall and smashing his face into coffee mugs.  “Dammit, Mikki! You have to stop this! We can’t let them win! We can’t let them win!” cried V+CO founder Vahag Dudukgian, as he pulled his programmer away from the now damaged wall. At that point, we all sat down, covered in chips of paint. For a few minutes, we discussed whether or not we would lose the security deposit on our office space, but this conversation amounted to pointless speculation.

The real revelation happened when we all finally went outside and decided to walk off the tension.

“My God, it’s the clouds! All this time the answer has been right above our heads!” declared Vahag, pointing wildly at the beautifully blue firmament.

That was when we all saw the truth. It really was the clouds. It was those strange nebulous formations, all fluffy and white, all full of themselves, just floating around. Doing nothing. Contributing nothing of significance to society. Just blocking our sunlight and pissing on the people below.

Frankly, we think these hackers may have some kind of problem with clouds.  Because if you really think about it, clouds are incredibly annoying. They literally draw pictures of rainbows while urinating on us. Who do they think they are, anyway?  It makes perfect sense that these hackers decided to give these clouds a taste of their own medicine by thwarting the excessive publicity that they receive.  So screw you, complex weather systems.

We will be filing a report of our findings with the U.S. government at our earliest convenience.

And here at V+CO, we’re contorting ourselves into torturous yogi positions while asking ourselves much bigger questions about the ever-evolving nature of this consumerist world.

Numerous merchants have vocalized their resistance to Apple’s new mobile payments system. In fact, retailers such as Walmart, Kmart, 7-Eleven, and Best Buy have formed a joint venture in order to develop their own mobile payment app. Pharmaceutical chains CVS and Rite Aid have both elected to shut out Apple Pay in their stores. News outlet The Verge characterizes their motivation for developing their own alternative as thus: “The notion of a widespread payment system controlled by retailers and free of credit card processing fees is very appealing to merchants.” 

In short, a new space has opened up, which may completely revolutionize the way that people pay for things. Retailers may finally be able to cut out the very credit card companies that for endless years annoyed them and adversely affected their bottom line. And what new system will be adopted? We don’t know yet. However, an opportunity has clearly arisen, and innovation is stepping up.

During one of our "there are no stupid questions so speak up" brainstorming sessions, we decided to take a step back and ask the question: Why pay for anything? Why acquire things?  I mean, really, isn’t money just an instrument of darkness that distracts us from what really matters? Shouldn’t we simply focus on love and light? Shouldn’t we opt to instead appreciate the mindfulness and presence of each moment, by doing yoga or some such thing? 

Granted, it can be difficult to strike that optimal balance between the contradictory psychological states of meditation and arousal, a yoga class does seem like a worthwhile pursuit, as far as trendy, psychobabble-burdened pursuits are concerned.

Or maybe the answer to our woes is something completely different. Maybe it doesn’t make sense for us to develop a modern, high tech method for obtaining the items we need. Maybe we just need to go really retro. Listen, this may seem a little random and old school, but I’m just going to put this idea on the table: Maybe we could implement some type of barter system involving chickens. 

The more pragmatic individuals among us may opt to give Apple Pay a chance. Although rife with controversy, the digital wallet service would allow consumers to make purchases using the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, Apple Watch-compatible devices (iPhone 5 and later models), iPad Air 2, and iPad Mini 3. And that could be extremely convenient.

Retailer resistance and consumer hesitance remains understandable. The Verge reports that past attempts at a phone-facilitated payment system have essentially all amounted to a confusing mess. Writer Dieter Bohn argues, “It has always been a financial cold war between credit card companies, banks, phone companies, and phone manufacturers fighting to divert a tiny rivulet of the humongous river of money that flows through credit cards every day.”

The Apple Pay controversy will be resolved in time; and while we wait, we’d be wise to spend more time thinking about the things that truly matter: yoga babes and traded chickens.

What is Thunderdome? We here at V+CO have no idea, but we’ve heard this quote before and so we’re repeating it in the kneejerk reaction, trying-to-be-cool-because-we’re-crying-inside pop cultural way.

Truth be told, we just wanted to let you know that V+CO is establishing its very own news division. We’re a digital agency on the verge of objective greatness. We provide strategic interactive marketing counsel to multinational brands, and our expertise encompasses social media marketing, digital PR, content management, online commerce, and groundbreaking technology. We want to give your brand a heightened presence in this crazy new world of overhyped binary and artificially constrained messaging. We intend to serve you in as many non-sexual ways as possible. And via this blog, we will be imparting to you the most salient information pertaining to tech trends and industry developments.

We also want to build a Thunderdome, even though we have no idea what a Thunderdome is. Because if we had a Thunderdome, we would be able to genuinely welcome you to our Thunderdome.

Wikipedia informs us that the concept has something to do with the Australian Mad Max movie franchise. But we’re very literal over here, so we’re just going to take over a black box theater in a hipster neighborhood, and we’ll be playing the thunder/lightning track from our white noise machine.

Why do we own a white noise machine?

Because it’s difficult for us to put our minds to sleep when we’re this good at what we do. We just have too many brilliant ideas. David Letterman once said, “There is no off position on the genius switch.”

And when we asked him if he thought that humility was a virtue, he replied, “Get out of my house.”

Sincerely,Your friends at V+CO