It’s often common to see new products emerge from the recovering economy as the recession begins to retreat and new avenues of financial growth are sought out. In the past, ideas such as the iPod and Excite.com have become big business right out of a recession. Many of these ideas have grown out of advances in technology, while others are often retreads of old ideas made new through the use of innovation and practices. In the case of Coke’s Freestyle machines, both cases are true.

The Freestyle machines themselves work essentially like an old soda jerk, where you can select your flavor, and the machine makes the drink for you on the spot. Technology common in measuring tiny doses of chemotherapy drugs is used to release digitally-controlled amounts of concentrate flavor from dozens of plastic cartridges.

My first thought was that mixing soda using the Freestyle machine seemed a lot like mixing Kamakazis at my local pizza hangout as a kid. Mix all the flavors together and see what happens. No two are the same. Watching the video, however, reveals that the product seems more along the lines of a Vanilla Coke machine…just a couple different options…I’m sure so people don’t accidentally mix something disgusting together that they don’t really want to pay for. That disappointed me a little, but still, the idea of a soda machine that can mix so many flavors together right in front of your eyes definitely has a wow factor inherent in it’s use. Just see below:

The machines themselves were created by the people who designed Ferrari racing cars and were made in a classic style reminisent of old 50′s diners and drive ins. The Freestyle fountains have proved so popular that they have had difficulty keeping up with demand due to slow software and problems with spill over. The machine also charges over 30% more for Freestyle Coke products than normal fountain drinks.

Beginning this month new fountain drinks are being released to a number of markets throughout the United States with Coke stating that it would prefer to release the product gradually across the United States.

All in all, it’s an interesting product from a company, Coke, who has a history of innovation in the soft drink business. It should be interesting to see how this product turns out for them.

I know this ad is from last year, but really liked how they used current events at the time to work into their ad campaign. It makes sense with so many things going on in the world these days, that companies would want to keep their brand fresh by incorporating current trends and ideas into their ad campaigns. It’s not that this type of commercial is new by any stretch, as companies such as Levis have been using this technique for decades, but it’s kind of fun to see a major brand such as Microsoft try it for once. Especially since they have historically been seen as more of a stuffed shirt crowd than buck the trend types.

I remember when I first started this site, the bottom had just dropped out of the economy, and economists everywhere had declared the United States had been in a recession for more than several months already but that most people hadn’t really realized it yet. The rest of the world announced their recession shortly thereafter, and we found ourselves in what has essentially become, our first global recession since World War II.

Today’s stock drop, I’ve read, is predominantly due to the failure of the Greek economy, and how it affect on the European nations around it has brought Europe to the verge of an economic meltdown. A failure in one euro zone country, Greece, has caused the other nations and the European Central Bank to consider extending aid to the country, or risk damaging the European economy as a whole. This in turn has affected the United States, casting doubt on how this turn of events could damage our economic continued recovery as well.

It’s interesting to see the impact of such events in modern times, as the world has changed a great deal since World War II. The economy is much more globally dependent, with the influence of corporations in Japan, the United States, France, and others maintaining a global sphere of influence. A major caveat of this state of affairs is that a failure by one link of the chain has the propensity to affect so many other links in a very short period of time, and it’s a sign of the times that we’re seeing a lot of these global communities and corporations maneuvering to find better ground as the world economy becomes larger and more complex.

Companies are spreading out, resources are being developed, and people are looking at a larger slice of the world pie than they were fifty plus years ago.

Two things happen when you move into a larger segment from a smaller one:

First, resources begin to devalue.

Take for instance cars, once made almost exclusively in America, automobiles were expensive, with high margins, and people bought them because that’s what was available. Now we have cars coming from everywhere, imports, domestic builds, even cars made in Americas, by Americans. As the world gets smaller and resources become more diverse, a failure by any one party generally becomes less obvious.

Still, in a lot of industries, this diversity just isn’t present in our current way of doing things. A failure by one country for instance doesn’t necessarily allow for a lot of redundancies of shared resources or economic interactions, and the larger economy stumbles because of this. I see this changing in the future. The European Central Banks refusal to maintain an economic bailout of Greece is one indicator that this is already happening, since all involved parties will be forced to find new and better ways of doing things for themselves.

Greece will, in fact, survive. But it won’t look the same when it’s done.

Second, failures in far off places have greater affect on our smaller economy.

For instance a war in the middle east could affect oil prices in America or Europe. An oversupply of glass for LCD screens could cause a price drop and a glut on product for the production of world wide televisions. Or a failure to find adequate supply of certain rare minerals found only in China could force corporations to look elsewhere for new methods of creating electronic devices, driving up production costs, and maybe even sales prices.

It’s an interesting conundrum to be sure and something to be aware of as countries such as China and Brazil become less focused on basic manufacturing and take a greater role in new product development and services.

The reality is that economies of scale is a big 800 pound gorilla that we don’t quite fully understand at this point, and it’s going to be a while before things get fully worked out to anybodies satisfaction. Not to say that this recession won’t end, but after this one there will be another, and another and another until most of this gets ironed out.

Hopefully we’ll learn something.

This a good video by an older gentleman from Canada who has a pretty interesting perspective on the definition of culture as well as how it has been adopted by our society. It’s a good watch, and serves to broaden ones perspective on the subject matter while bringing to light a few facts about the topic that I hadn’t really considered before. All and all, well worth the time spent.

I’ve been watching DIY network marathon all weekend and I’ve come up with a couple of new show ideas that I thought might be fun:

The first is a show where the host helps a small business such as a restaurant or bar use money saving tips to update or remodel their establishment. I’ve seen a similarly themed idea utilized on the Gordon Ramsey show Kitchen Nightmares on FOX, which takes a restaurant and attempts to turn the business around in hopes of making it profitable. Kitchen Nightmares, however, doesn’t delve into the nuts and bolts of the makeover like this show would though.

Kitchen Nightmares has featured a number of “dining room makeovers,” and the idea of taking an established business and remodeling it to bring in customers just sounds neat. I’ve also seen this concept done once on Renovation Realities, and it was a good episode to watch, so it seems like an idea that would work well in this recovering economy.

The second show is about renovating haunted houses, where the host gives the viewers a brief history of the house as well as the haunting as the owners talk about their remodeling project. Not sure if there are enough haunted houses to go around, but it sounds like a fun idea just the same.