I first became familiar with Dan Pink while watching one of his TED presentations online. He writes a great blog post about the difference between failure and mediocrity.  Here it is: Most people are more frightened of failure than of mediocrity. It should be the reverse. Failure is a broken leg — painful, but easily fixed. Mediocrity is a creeping disease — invisible and insidious — that disables so completely that there’s often no recovery.

When you're drinking coffee in a restaurant and order decaf, it's likely the coffee will be delivered in a glass pot with an orange band at the top. Ever wonder where that came from? The orange label came about in 1923 when Sanka, the first commercial decaf coffee, appeared on grocery store shelves.  When General Foods bought Sanka in 1932, they looked for a way to promote the coffee to restaurants.  Since the Sanka can was orange at the time, General Foods put an orange band at the top of the pots and gave them away free to restaurants.  Customers came to associate the orange-banded pots with Sanka, and eventually it became the generic color for all decaf coffee brands.

Stephen von Worley on Weather Sealed posted this chronological growth of Crayola colors from the line-up of original eight introduced in 1903 by Binney & Smith to the 133 colors available today. By von Worley’s calculations, Crayola colors double every 28 years.  Click the image to enlarge. Read the full article.

Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) is introducing a new sandwich next week.  Well, I think it's a sandwich.  According to most conventional definitions, a sandwich is something stuck between two slices of bread.  This "sandwich" from KFC has no bun -- unless you consider two large chicken strips to be "buns."

Consider these numbers ... Years it took to reach a market audience of 50 million: Radio - 38 years TV - 13 years Internet - 4 years iPod - 3 years Facebook - 2 years Source: The Science and Art of Selling