These are the most expensive brands of the year for 2009. No big surprises.. I guess that companies from internet and technology industry will climb up on the ranking and get better and better positions. The first five companies are at the top of the list for many years! Who doesn’t drink Coca-Cola? McDonald’s and Google go higher and higher every year while Toyota and Intel become less popular with a weaker brand name. United States is the leading country in the entire list. What a surprise!

These are the first 10 best brands of 2009:

2009 Rank	2008 Rank	Brand	Country of Origin	Sector	2009 Brand Value ($m)	Change in Brand Value
1	1		United States	Beverages	68,734	3%
2	2		United States	Computer Services	60,211	2%
3	3		United States	Computer Software	56,647	-4%
4	4		United States	Diversified	47,777	-10%
5	5		Finland	Consumer Electronics	34,864	-3%
6	8		United States	Restaurants	32,275	4%
7	10		United States	Internet Services	31,980	25%
8	6		Japan	Automotive	31,330	-8%
9	7		United States	Computer Hardware	30,636	-2%
10	9		United States	Media	28,447	-3%

Click here to view the entire list.

(via InterBrand)

This is a cool idea. It’s a brand new website that was launched 10 days ago. In Rentalic.com you can share your guitar, camping tent and iPod dock with others and get some money. Do you need some speakers for your party this weekend? Don’t buy them.. Just rent them for just few dollars.

About Rentalic.com:

Rentalic Inc. is a privately held company based in San Mateo, California. We provide an innovative web platform that enables person-to-person renting between friends, family, and communities. It is an online marketplace where owners can post items or services to rent out and borrowers can rent items or services they need. By offering a wide assortment of products and services that are conveniently located and cost effective, Rentalic.com provides a high value service to everyone!.

It’s very new and has few staff there but get there and support it! It;s a great idea that let you rent, share and be green!

Follow them on Twitter and Become a Fan on Facebook!

It was about time to see a Social Media campaign coming from the number one refreshment drink in the world. Coca-Cola Company, one of the top global advertisers (mostly in Print and Broadcast media), is going to use Social Media to promote the happiness message around the world. Three guys from Germany, Belgium and Mexico are going to travel around the world visiting 206 countries, where Coca-Cola is sold. They will have cameras, laptops and other gadgets in order to post in Social Media websites the happiness of people around the world. Expedition 206 will last one year and the team will start on January from Madrid, Spain.

Coca-Cola will track the campaign through Facebook fans and friends, Twitter followers and website pageviews. Clyde Tuggle, senior VP-global public affairs and communications says: “The challenge that we put to the communications team was to think about the social and digital media space as a new venue for driving good public relations for the company. The team, which has typically worked in the space of print media and broadcast media was suddenly challenged to go into this new media space and come up with an idea to expand our brand.” (AdAge)

Follow @x206 on twitter and become a fan of their Facebook page.

The idea of traveling around the world is not unique. Let’s see how this campaign will go..

Sustainable Brands Boot Camp –13 week online sustainability training program intended to get business professionals up to speed on what they’ll need to be competitive and sustainable. Brought to you by the producers of the Sustainable Brands Conference.

Participants will learn from some of the world’s top sustainable business practitioners. Each of our faculty members is a leading sustainable business expert in his/her specialty, counseling many of the world’s top global brands about how to step up to today’s market demands and successfully build business value and brand equity by innovating for sustainability.

The course follows Sustainable Life Media’s 4-step prescription for building the better brands of the future: “Observe, Re-Design, Measure and Communicate.” In just an hour-and-a-half a week, over one business quarter, you and your teams can gain a solid grounding in the core disciplines needed to move successfully in to the new age of sustainable business. Topics include market drivers, business model and product innovation, supply chain partnerships, brand strategy and marketing, metrics, and more.

If you haven’t yet taken the time to give yourself a full orientation to the basics of building a sustainable brand, now’s the time. Sessions are available live and on-demand.

This is a great idea. The BC Dairy Foundation (British Columbia, Canada) created a new campaign to promote the power of milk. They created ‘The Week Shop‘, an online (and offline) store that sells products for people that are ‘weak’ due to lack of milk consumption. There is a YouTube Channel, a Flickr account and a very good website that supports this campaign.

This is a funny commercial of Chair Pants.

So, drink milk if you don’t want to be the future customers of “The Weak Shop”

If you look at the header you will see a new logo for ImNikos.com. Bold letters, white, gray and blue colors and three symbols.

This blog is about Online Marketing, Social Media, Internet and many more that happen in the web. In the web, users communicate and exchange ideas. (symbols)

I’m in Marketing and I know that Branding is very important.. For me ‘ImNikos.com’ is considered as a brand and needs to have a uniformity across the web.

Thanks for visiting my blog and stay tuned for many more interesting posts!

First of all, our planet is not in danger. Our planet is not threatened by climate change. Our planet has survived ice age, meteor attacks and a lot higher temperatures than what we are faced with now. It is we – the people ON this planet – who are threatened by climate change. It is we who are in danger, it is we who will not survive the consequences of our own actions and it is we who will die out. Our planet will adjust, and survive, like it has done many times before. We, on the other hand, will not.

So, assuming we want to save ourselves, how do we do that? I say it is simple; we don’t. Because isn’t that really the root of the problem; that there are too many of us on this planet? Today, there are 6,790,734,196 people on this earth. That number is expected to reach 9,000,000,000 by 2040 and continue to grow until 2050. Now, with almost every one of these people constantly working to increase their standard of living in some way, it just won’t work. With that many people on this planet we can drive Priuses, eat organic, fill up our water bottles, bike to work, reduce-reuse-recycle all we want, and we’ll still all be screwed. There’s no way our planet can sustain us in the long run. We are literally shitting where we eat and I think we all agree that has never been a good idea.

So in all their tragedy, maybe wars, natural disasters, epidemics and diseases are doing us a favor? Maybe, ironically enough, we need them to save us…

Guest post by Marianne Condrup – #BAD09

(Pictures via and via)

With Square Up application you can have paperless iphone-based transactions. An iPhone user can easily receive a credit/debit card payment in 5 seconds. The system involves a small plastic card reader which plugs into the headphone jack of an iPhone (or iPod Touch) and transfers the credit card’s swipe data to the app. The user has already synchronized his Square Up application with his bank account that automatically receives the payment. It looks like PayPal but it is simpler and mobile!

So, you go out with your friends and you pay all the drinks. Your friends don’t have cash to give you and of course you don’t want a check. They just give you their cards, you swipe them and you get the money you want in 5 seconds! Isn’t it cool? You have a garage sale or you sell something through Craigslist. You meet with the buyer and you get the money instantly through your iPhone! No cash, no checks!

It is safe and easy! According to Paul, “Today there many ways to pay with a credit card but very few to receive money with a card.” Square Up solves this problem and makes the money transactions iPhone-based and paperless.

The plastic ’square’ will cost $1 or so and the application will be free. Square Up keeps a small percentage of the transaction every time you use the app.

(Picture via)

I guess that most of you have noticed or read about the change in Flickr’s logo.. Yahoo recently added “from Yahoo!” next to Flickr logo in order to enhance its brand through this very successful image and video hosting service. What yahoo did is very reasonable and it might help the company’s brand. Apparently this action is a part of its new campaign. Why Yahoo chose only Flickr and some others and not all of its websites? For example Zimbra and Delicious, two very successful websites, don’t have a yahoo logo in the header or the footer. I can understand that the audience of Zimbra is much different than the one of Flickr but Delicious focuses on the similar target market that Flickr does. Interesting..

Yahoo has several websites, services and divisions. It is quite difficult to have a uniformity across its websites but it is important. I navigated through several Yahoo websites and I noticed that there are some differences in the logos (old red and new purple) and in favicons (the small icon next to the web address). Yahoo has several logos: ‘a Yahoo division’, ‘a Yahoo service’, ‘this is Yahoo’ and ‘from Yahoo’. Why all these different? Some of them in the old red and some others in new purple.

With favicons, Yahoo has not a uniformity across its websites. In most of them we see the new purple Y! and in some others the old red one.

I like that Yahoo has a very modern logo. I also like that on the web purple means Yahoo! and they chose a unique and rare color instead of using blue that most companies do! But.. They need to pay more attention in uniformity across its websites..

Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day on their own blogs with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. Blog Action Day 2009 will be the largest-ever social change event on the web. One day. One issue. Thousands of voices. October 15, 2009

The theme of this year is “Climate Change”. I think that it is overused but still important.

We encourage you to write about climate change in the context of how it relates to the topic of your blog. To help you start thinking, here are a few ideas about how you might connect climate change to things that you might already write about:

• A Technology or Business blog might write about emerging clean tech and how innovative companies might be able to help address the problem of climate change.
• A Health or Lifestyle blog might write about how climate change will affect our children’s health and daily living.
• A Nonprofit or Political blog might write about how climate change is deeply connected to many other issues – such as poverty and conflict.
• A Design blog might write about new trends in eco-friendly or sustainable design.
• A Travel blog might write about the places you want to see now before climate change makes them difficult to access or, well, under the sea.

This is also a great opportunity for companies in Sustainable Business industry to participate, promote and support this ‘online event’. ImNikos.com will participate in Blog Action Day! These are some very well-known blogs that will participate too.