[IAEP] Sugar Cereal?

[Roland Gesthuizen]

Not such a silly idea .. if you put in place an informal feedback and
community mechanism that will not gum up your current operational mechanism.
Perhaps an informal group called "Polysaccharide: Linking the friends of
sugar"

I had some interest at the QSITE conference in Brisbane where I had the
opportunity to showcase some of the work by Sugar on a Stick. There was
considerable interest from one teacher who was demonstrating his experiments
with Linux on a stick. He was interested in the thought of engaging his
young students with a  wider development community that could better
understand roadmaps and software is developed and how he could use this to
introduce them to a wider world of testing and submitting feature requests.

regards Roland

2009/10/5 Sean DALY <sdaly.be at gmail.com>

> Cross-posting to Marketing, since this is a marketing idea :-)
>
> It's true that cereal-box promotion is the ideal platform for
> marketing to children, especially as prescriptors ("Papa, I want Sugar
> Coated Frosted Bombs instead of Extra Sugar Hyper Doobs because
> there's a scary tarantula hidden in the box.") For this reason,
> cereal-box placement usually involves a big fat payment. Of course,
> sometimes charitable messages are accepted for free. However,
> companies are very leery of any association which could impact their
> brand negatively... such as software which doesn't work.
>
> Until fairly recently, Windows XP executables were the usual choice of
> cereal-box promoters. Lately however, with the marketshare gains of
> Apple, Flash is preferred more and more. I have never seen any
> GNU/Linux software on a cereal box, not surprising due to the
> marketshare problem.
>
> What could work is finding a new bio or fairtrade retailer brand.
> Retailers are always trying to expand in the bottom of the market,
> taking share from major brands. To grow a new launch, a retailer might
> be willing to give the space away.
>
> However, there are problems with that too... distribution would be
> limited to a single retailer. And we are positioning Sugar as premium
> quality in K-6, even if not ready for widescale deployment yet;
> bottom-shelf placement might not be ideal. But I do think bio /
> fairtrade cereal would work... in particular because there won't be
> tons of added sugar, a downside to the perception of traditional
> cereals...
>
> Sean
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 5:55 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
> <bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> > Cereal companies routinely include CDs and DVDs in their cereal boxes if
> > they think it will help them to sell more cereal.  What greater way to
> > make your cereal more popular than to add Sugar?  The bootable DVD could
> > include many Activities, including a fast version of offline wikipedia.
> >
> > I'm not sure that our live CD/DVD stack is yet polished to the point that
> > it can reasonably be distributed to millions of people, but I think we
> are
> > not far, given the motivation.  The trickier thing is to convince a
> cereal
> > distributor of the idea.
> >
> > I leave that as an exercise to the reader.
> >
> > --Ben
> >
> > P.S.  We might have to employ a different branding if "Sugar" is a
> > problematic name in this context.
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> >
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>



-- 
Roland Gesthuizen - ICT Coordinator - Westall Secondary College
http://www.westallsc.vic.edu.au

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change
the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has." --Margaret Mead
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