Inside the world of Rob Mclean, Author

Last month Sony released the Playstation 4. As it stands today you cannot find a PS4 to buy anywhere in the world! They are all sold out. You can still buy them off ebay though... at TWICE the original cost. So I started thinking, what the heck was going on. Did Sony do this on purpose? The old 'generate brand value through scarcity' tactic? For those who don't know, scarcity is one way of generating value in a brand. For instance, perhaps you are offering a new email service. If you just fling the doors open for everyone to join, people get less excited about it. If you launch with only 500 accounts available, suddenly everyone wants an account. Is that what Sony did here? I did some super quick number checking and it seems obvious to me that they did. Here's the breakdown: So far Sony has sold 2.1 million PS4's . So we know that they made 2.1 million of them for the launch of the product.  We know t here are 70 million PS3s that have been sold sin...

Amazon announced that it plans, in the future, to use drones to deliver packages. Ok, let me first say, kudos Amazon! I love blue-sky marketing and PR. Ever since the dot-com crash over 10 years ago, blue-sky marketing seems to have disappeared. Personally I don't think there's anything wrong with showing people what your vision for the future is (even if it's unrealistic in the short term). What makes business fascinating is not so much what is available today, but what might be possible tomorrow. Part of what is contributing to this stagnation we see in society today is that no one seems to be dreaming big anymore. The first step to realizing a dream is to first dream in the first place. That's all blue-sky marketing ever was...sharing your dreams with others. Having said that, the notion of delivery drones is a bit ridiculous for obvious reasons: The shipping fees would be pretty high. There's a reason most goods are transported on the ground, it...

So I've now been using an e-cigarette (e-cig) for two months and thought I'd talk a bit about how I see the upcoming battle between Health Canada and e-cigs going. First though, let's do a quick overview of what exactly an e-cig is. Basically an e-cig vaporizes liquid that contains nicotine. The vapor is then inhaled. People who use e-cigs are called vapers (not smokers). Because the liquid is atomized (ie. vaporized), not burned the way tobacco is, vapers do not consider themselves 'smokers' in anyway. An e-cig is comprised of basically three components: The tank - this is the component that holds the juice (sometimes referred to as e-juice or e-liquid). The atomizer - this a coil and wick unit that atomizes the juice. When the coil is heated (from the battery) it atomizes the juice that has soaked into the wick. The battery - batteries for e-cigs come in various capacities (some last 8 hours, others 40+ hours, depending on their size).  The ba...