Page 46 - Business Facts

Worlds Largest Footed Pajama Party held at South by Southwest

On March 11, 2012 in Austin Texas during the South By Southwest Interactive Festival at the Austin Caravan compound, Steve Pandi the founder of Jumpin Jammerz hosted a party where 309 attendees dressed in adult footed pajamas and broke the Guinness World Record for the 'Largest Footed Pajama Party'. Attendees included founders of top technology startups and non-profits.

The party began with a private delicious dinner for friends from the startup community and then attendees danced the night away until the record was shattered.  Once the record was broken, school buses dropped the pajama people off to take over downtown Austin.   

The previous footed pajama party record was 250. Guinness World Records reviewed the notarized tally and the video proof below and presented the official record for the 'Largest Footed Pajama Party' to Jumpin Jammerz and the startup community.

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Want to know why the Bacardi logo is a bat? Read on!

Bacardi is the only rum that uses a free-tailed bat as its logo. There are two main reasons for this. The first is the bat's relation to sugar cane. Sugar cane is used in the production of Bacardi rum (as well as others) for sugar cane congeners. Mexican free-tailed bats are very great pollinators of the sugar cane plant and very efficient insect eaters. Like how the ladybug is valuable to the gardener, the Mexican free-tailed bat is valuable to the rum business because it eats the insects that destroy sugar cane. 

The second has to do with Bacardi's history. Bacardi was started by Facundo Bacardí Massó, a wine merchant from Catalonia, a region in northwestern Spain. He set out to try and "refine" the rum beverage to make it something valued at higher class taverns. When he began getting his formula off the ground, he and his brother Jose decided to move into a more commercial business. They set up shop in a Santiago de Cuba distillery that they purchased in 1862. In the rafters of the building lived fruit bats, which helped to inspire the Bacardi bat logo. 

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Some public toilets have blue lights to make it hard for heroin users to see their veins.


The use of blue lights in some public toilets is meant to make it more difficult to see the veins on the arm. The intention behind this is that by making it harder for junkies to see their veins, they won't be able to inject themselves, and therefore lowering the illegal drug problem. This can be counterproductive, though, because it results often in heroin users having worse results by missing their veins during injection. As it turns out, addicts who have a need to inject themselves will not let simple blue light stop them. The research paper at the source concludes that blue light doesn't really deter injection, but rather increases the use of riskier methods of injection.

Despite this, the method has been adopted by certain authorities, railway stations, hostels, and hotels. What's worse, blue lights introduce even more troubles than just for heroin addicts. They've reportedly made cleaning hazardous spills harder and increased the risk of trips and falls due to the lighting being poor. Essentially, all the blue lights end up doing is deterring heroin addicts from injecting in certain locations, or if they can't, they inject themselves in riskier ways. What defeats the whole idea, though, is that most new cell phones now have a flash light feature anyway. What do you think. Should public places use blue light to deter drug use?



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Sweden has tree hotels.



The idea of a hotel in a tree might strike you as either really cool or a little sketchy, but the Treehotel in Sweden has perfected it.
Hotels that have rooms in trees can be found in numerous places. One such hotel is located in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico. What makes Sweden's Treehotel so exemplary, though, is how much effort is put into it. Where other tree hotels often have smaller bungalow-type huts, the Treehotel has rooms with breakfast, lunch, dinner, spa, TV, and internet available.
One of the rooms at Sweden's Treehotel is covered on the outside with mirrors, making it nearly look like camouflage, and helping preserve the more natural look of the environment around. 

To spend a night there, it would run you up to $680. 
The website boasts the secluded mountain experience it offers, as well as its vast views of nature. You can read all about what the hotel has to offer at its website, found here

Canada's money is plastic and smells like Maple Syrup!

The new $100 and $50 bills that the Bank of Canada started circulating recently are made of more durable plastic, instead of those made of more traditional paper. They're a little bit more expense (they cost ¢19 instead of ¢10 per bill to make) but they have an expected life that is 2 and a half times longer than the traditional bills they replace.

The bills will also aid Canada battle counterfeiting. The polymer that they're made of is more difficult to fake. They have new holographic security measures, including one in the shape of a maple leaf. As an added bonus, they also smell like maple syrup and they're recyclable, meaning they will have a lower environmental impact than the prior bills.

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UPDATE: Based on some of your comments below, and some more digging, we've found this video of a newscast that talks about the Maple Syrup smell. Some people in it say they smell the Maple, others say it's just a rumor, and through the power of suggestion, people believe that the bill smells like something it doesn't. I've never seen that much Canadian money all at once in my life, so I'll let you guys watch and decide