UVA+B SunFriend Encourages Healthy Exposure to the Sun

The UVA+B SunFriend device is wearable technology that monitors the sun exposure of the wearer, so that they know when it’s time to cover up or seek shelter. SunFriend, the startup company behind the product, launched it on the company’s website earlier this year and is bringing it to International CES for the first time.

Read about it here on Consumer Electronics Daily News.

Consumer Electronics Daily News is a publication of Oser Communications Group.

GoldKey Secure Communicator

This year during 2015 International CES, GoldKey is going to announce the Secure Communicator, a luxury smart watch that's also a stand-alone cell phone. The really exceptional part is that the watch includes dual-factor authentication with an encryption key that's managed in a USB key that's held by the watch's owner. What that means  is that if the feds want data communicated through the cell phone, they're going to have to come to the watch's owner instead of to the wireless provider. No more finding out later that the security of your communications may have been breached because your wireless provider has already handed over your data in response to a subpoena you knew nothing about. Don't imagine it's cheap, but real protection never is.

Read more about it here and see it at CES.

Mad Millie Cheesemaking Kits

Mad Millie is a New Zealand company that makes these wonderful cheesemaking kits that they're now selling in the U.S. They also make cider kits, but it's the cheese kits that really jingled my chimes.

The Kitchen Store: New England Cozy

Here's a profile of The Kitchen Store in Guilford, Connecticut, where Karen Schumann sells things that she uses in her own kitchen, including kitchenware, herbs and spice blends that she brings in from California and pizza dough.

How to Write Effective Trade Show Marketing Copy

Here's a link to a piece I wrote to help Oser Communications Group trade show publication clients put together their marketing copy for the publications.

Disposable Dishes with Ethical Elegance

This was a fun story that started with some thinking about the news that New York City is taking steps to divert more of the city's waste stream to composting facilities instead of into landfills. Around the same time, I was at a trade show where I saw vendors serving food samples on beautiful paper plates that were also compostable. I went online to see what compostable paper plates were on the market and found some great stuff. Then I went to another trade show, this time for the foodservice industry, and I happened to be discussing my work on the story with one of the vendors. And just at that time, a man came up behind me, overheard what I was saying, and told me that I really should stop by another booth at the show to talk to the man from Aspenware.
I knew I was onto a story that would be as interesting to readers as I had found it myself when I found myself discussing compostable dinnerware at a dinner party. Questions were asked, and the economics and ethics of compostable dinnertable became a topic for discussion for the entire table. It was fun to know that I'd given people that I respect something to think about.

Casual Dinnerware from Zak Designs

I talked with Zak Designs CEO Irv Zakheim for this story about his company and its design-driven products. In the wake of a horrible fire in Bangladesh that shined a light on the working conditions of garment workers in third-world nations, I found myself asking about how Zakheim ensures that the Zak Designs factories aren't going to be the next to be identified by the news media or political activists as unsafe or exploitative. I wasn't surprised to find that Zakheim had thought about this before I did, and I was glad to hear that he had a good answer for the question.