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 <[email protected]> > 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 > <[email protected]> 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. > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) > > [email protected] > > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep > > > _______________________________________________ > IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) > [email protected] > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep > -- 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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