On October 13, Park&Co hosted the Phoenix creative community for its latest “Creative Connect” gathering. At the event we wanted to see what would happen if you arm some of the Valley’s most creative people with a blank canvas and a few sharpies. The result was truly remarkable.

If you were at the event you likely participated in our “conversation board” experiment. If not, then watch the video below to see what happened when the people in attendance were asked to do what they do best - be creative.

Imagine a casual but elegant evening under the stars where you can mingle with the community as well as your friends and family. You’ll sample gourmet cuisine and watch a champion horseshow while supporting educational opportunities and scholarships for disadvantaged Arizonans!

This year’s Evening of Goodwill has been revamped into a casual night at a new location, Los Cedros. It is a world-class equestrian center and houses some of the most talented, beautiful horses in Arizona. Los Cedros is an actual citadel and its unique architecture lends itself to a casually elegant atmosphere.

The Evening of Goodwill is a wonderful and enjoyable way to help one of Arizona’s oldest and largest nonprofits build a foundation of self-sufficiency for those in need through the power of education. The proceeds are used for both post-secondary scholarships and education initiatives for at-risk youth attending their ecademie Charter High School. Casual wear, including denim, western wear and sundresses are all acceptable for guests. This year, ticket prices are $100 – with $40 of that being tax deductible. Park&Co is a proud sponsor of this event.

Please purchase your tickets today. Through your support, you help Goodwill of Central Arizona put people back to work. And at this time, this is a critical service to many.

Goodwill of Central Arizona’s 9th Annual Evening of Goodwill

• Saturday, October 3, 2009
• 5 PM - 10 PM
• Los Cedros, North Scottsdale.

For more information about sponsorship opportunities, silent auction donations, tickets and more, please visit eveningofgoodwillaz.org today.

If the down economy has canceled your trip to the Caribbean this year, and a “Staycation” sounds about as much fun as constipation, don’t give up on a summer sojourn just yet. You can still get away without breaking the bank, as long as you don’t mind pitching in to spruce up the planet.  It’s called an Eco-Friendly Volunteer Vacation. I stumbled across this article while on Shine.com.  Read the full article here.

If you’re not afraid  of a little dirt and humility, this is could be the perfect type of vacation for you.  However, they recommend that you realistically look at what you’re capable of handling and willing to do.  Check your city and state officials to see if there are any local volunteer programs you can become a part of, and use your vacation time to do something that revitalizes much more than just your sanity.

A couple of weeks ago, Google introduced its newest cool thing, Google Wave! At first, I was having a hard time understanding what this was and what I could do with it. Reading through the online documents did not help much, but what did help, was watching the hour plus video of the demo. If you have an hour to kill, watch the whole video.

Google Wave

For those of you who don’t have the hour to spare for the video, here’s a description from their website:

Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

The simple explanation is…it’s an online collaboration tool. The application or “Wave” is running in real-time and can support multiple media formats like, text, photos, etc. Multiple people can be invited to contribute content to the Wave, which is essentially just a conversation.

Wave example

The way I see it, this is a replacement for the email trails we send back and forth every workday on a particular subject. These emails get to be so long that after a few replies it’s hard to get a fix on the order of dialogue. Within the Wave, this “conversation” is happening in real-time and if you enter the conversation late, there is a “playback” button that allows you to replay the conversation by stepping back through it a response at a time. It’s kinda like Instant Messaging on steroids.

Here are some interesting links to learn more:

• Google Wave (main website)
• Google Wave Developer API (for the nerds)
• Signup for updates and information
• Video of live demo

Dane Platt and William Carey discuss their unique golf ball recycling program while offering you a FREE sleeve of Earth Golf Balls for a test drive. See below.

When I think of an “Eco-friendly” golf ball, I can’t help but picture those exploding joke golf balls made of chalk that you tee up for your unsuspecting buddy.

Then I met Dane Platt and William Carey of Dixon Golf.

And they introduced me to the Earth Golf Ball, the world’s first high-performance 100% eco-friendly golf ball.

These guys didn’t just stop at making a really green golf ball (more about the ball in a second), but they activated a recycling program that gets golfers involved beyond just playing a round.

“Golf, in its essence, should the greenest of all sports.  And yet our industry is still 10 years behind the times,” said William Carey.

Platt and Carey said that they want to incentivize golfers to recycle the standard golf balls that are made with heavy metals and do nothing for the environment. When you turn in any golf ball at a pro shop or store that carries the Earth golf ball, you receive a 50 cent discount on a new Earth ball. You get a $1 discount when you recycle a Dixon Earth ball. The program recycled more than 38,000 golf balls on Earth Day alone.

The Earth golf ball is organic to the core, and has replaced the heavy metals, like lead, tungsten and titanium, with a proprietary organic compound that is essentially like salt.

But is salt like chalk?

“The problem with completely biodegrable golf balls is that they do explode on the tee,” Dane pointed out. “So that doesn’t work so well for performance. What we have created is a high-performance ball that can be ground up and reused in all sorts of other new products, while we’re taking the heavy metals out of the environment.”

PGA Tour Partners sent a dozen balls to 125 golfers to test against the likes of Titleist, Nike and Callaway high-performance balls.  The Earth golf ball received a 92 percent approval rating. When asked what the Earth ball is like compared to the competition, Dane said the quality is between a Titleist Pro V1 and the NXT Tour. The company even has a long drive champ in it’s corner, with Sean “The Beast” Fister using their Eco-Distance ball in competition.

“You can’t make a crappy ball, call it eco-friendly and expect anyone to buy it if it’s not going to help their game” William said.

Do You Want To Take A FREE Test Drive?

I asked these green golf innovators if they wanted to put their Earth golf ball to another test: Having you, my readers, test drive and comment on their ball? They have so much confidence in the performance of their new green ball, that they were generous enough to give me four dozen to try. If you would like a FREE sleeve of Earth golf balls, please send me your name and address through my contact form, and I’ll send you a sleeve (while supplies last).  All I ask in return is that you give your honest review of the ball in the comment section on this post. And please play the ball and review it within one week of getting the FREE sleeve. I’ll be taking the new Earth ball for a spin this weekend.

A tip of the golf cap to Dane and William for not just making an eco-friendly golf ball, but for taking their drive farther by activating a terrific golf ball recycling program.

(This post appeared earlier today in Park’s, “A Brighter Shade of Green Marketing” blog at ParkHowell.com)

Since spending spring break at Telluride, I have a bit of a “Ski Green” theme going here. In doing my research for yesterday’s post about Telluride’s partnership with SkiGreen.org and how they can make it way more effective, I’ve found that CLIF Bar is one of the most environmentally-active consumer products companies out there. CLIF Bar is fighting global warming through their educational outreach efforts with skiers and ski resorts. This morning I found this cool new FREE iPhone app., and I just had to share it.

CLIF Bar is out to make the world, in their words, “Snowier.” The CLIF Bar Save Our Snow App is a smorgasbord of snow-inspired tools for the iPhone and the iTouch that let’s you make the right choice about where you spend your winter weekends.

It has weather and snow-condition reports for your favorite resorts as well as information on what resorts are doing to fight global warming.

One of the coolest features is the frost effect: blow into the microphone and the screen gets frosty. Drag your finger across the screen and voila, you’re drawing just like you do to your car window in the wee hours of the morning.

And even when winter has faded into those long hot summer months, you’ll still be able to freeze over your screen with a single breath of hot air. Look out Snow Miser.

To see what else CLIF Bar is doing in the environmental world, check out their excellent website.

Needless to say at Park&Co we are always looking at different ways to be sustainable both socially and environmentally. So of course, we recycle. Easy right ? You’d think, but it was brought to our attention that many of us were recycling things that we thought were recyclable but were not - it’s not like we were recycling styrofoam, I’m talking about the different papers and plastics that can be assumed to be recyclable, but aren’t. I’ll admit I was guilty of assuming that if it is paper, plastic or glass it is recyclable. Long story short, I learned Starbucks cups are NOT recyclable!

How could this be? A non recyclable paper cup. I couldn’t believe it so I did a little more digging. I visited Starbucks Shared Planet website and found out that they won’t have a recyclable cup until 2015.Peets Coffee implemented a recyclable cup in 2007. This is amazing to me that the r&d has already been done by other companies, and a giant like Starbucks can’t get this up and running for another 6 years.

Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy Starbucks and think highly of them as a company.  They pay their employees very well, are known for providing very good low cost health insurance, even for part time employees, and pledge to buy their coffee from Ethical Sources (i.e. not giant coffee farms that elbow out local farmers who grow the highest quality beans).

In the end I am disappointed that  Starbucks won’t take the extra steps to deliver us a recyclable cup, and annoyed that the only thing that I can put in the recycling bin is the cap to my coffee cup. The cardboard sleeve is not even recyclable.

So what can we do? We can join the campaign and request that Starbucks steps up their effort by clicking here. I did, it was simple and only took a minute. You can also post the widget below on your blog or website, I also did this for my personal blog.

Take a second and join the campaign.  After all, we aren’t asking for Starbucks to change the world, we just want to be able to toss the cup into the recycling bin and feel good about not trashing the environment.

Around this time every year, there’s always that one guy at your job that makes about 1,000 too many copies one Monday, and before you know it he’s in your office asking whether or not you want to partake in the NCAA basketball tournament office pool. I’m that guy. Hosting the office pool is about as easy as selling stock in GM right now, what with the “slumping economy” we all keep hearing about. People are keeping their dollars for essential items like “food” and “electricity”. Who needs all that when you can have fun trying to guess the winners of college basketball games that you most likely won’t even be able to watch?

It’s really all about incentive these days. You have to make it worth someone’s while to take part in this year’s office pool, because people want real bang for their buck. With that in mind, I’ve devised a few simple ways for you to spice up the office pool and hopefully up the fun with more participants. Keep in mind that office pools are illegal and we are in no way condoning them for anything more than bragging rights around the office because you’re a way better guesser than the rest of those chumps.

• Lower prices on brackets – Obviously the easiest way to get more participants is to charge them less to take part. Try a penny bracket, or even a free one where the winner gets to wear flip-flops around the office for a week or for the rest of the month the other participants have to refer to the winner as “Your Majesty”.
• Make winners out of losers – Turn the bad news into good news by rewarding the person who receives the worst score of the tourney. They probably won’t even want whatever it is you try to give them because they’ll feel guilty. You know what? Scratch giving them anything and just keep that special “loser prize” for yourself. That loser didn’t deserve it anyway.
• Halftime Capri Suns and orange wedges – Maybe it’ll look weird when you and the other pool participants are sitting around the lunch room table 6 times on Thursday and Friday eating these tasty halftime treats, but so what? Those other totally uncool coworkers are just jealous because they haven’t had such delicacies since their 2nd grade soccer matches.
• Liveblogging of the office pool – People want to stay informed about what’s going on in the tournament. Sure they’ve got that whole internet thing at their disposal for scores and such, but we all know that blogging is where it’s really at. Do a live blog for your pool participants, with updates on who’s leading the pool, which teams are looking good to move on, and where the celebration will be held after you’ve won the tourney by changing the rules halfway through to favor you (it’s not really “cheating” if you add a rule after the fact).
• Real-time reenactments of key moments – Who needs ESPN when you’ve got the wastebasket in your office and an endless supply of paper rocks (that’s basketball slang for ball) with which to replay the best moments of the day? Get together with the other members of the pool and find the most open space in the office where everyone can watch. Stage reenactments of the best buzzerbeaters and the wildest dunks of the day for the whole office to see. Run for cover when your boss walks by to see what the commotion is all about. He hates fun.

Now it’s time to take action. With just a few days left until selection Sunday, you’re gonna have to get to work on some of the particulars for making this year’s pool the true economic slumpbuster it deserves to be. Get to the grocery and store and round up those halftime treats; make sure you’ve got that liveblogging software hacked onto to your workstation, and order an extra ream of paper for all of the dunking and last-second heroics you’ll be performing for the masses. Oh, and don’t forget to hatch that plan to weasel everyone out of their money before the tourney is over so you can keep it all for yourself.

After all we are in a recession, and you need all the money you can get.

I know staying on top of the latest internet memes is very important, but when you have deadlines and absolutely need to be productive, browsing the web is the last thing you need to be doing.

I’m a regular reader of Merlin Mann’s 43folders, and like a lot of us, Merlin seems to suffer from compulsive web browsing. That’s why he created this page for you to set as the home page of your browser.

The idea is simple. If you find yourself drifting to procrastinate by browsing the web, you open a new window, see this visual trigger, refocus, and get back to work.

I find seeing what time it is particularly effective for me. I realize I only have so many hours left in the day to finish what I’m working on.

So if you find yourself compulsively browsing the web, try setting this page as your home page in your browser, and then get back to work!

• First and foremost come up with good ideas
• Make them look good
• Help our clients achieve their goals

I believe creative people are born creative, and inherently look at the world from a slightly different angle. Because of this, we tend to have progressive tastes which can be both a blessing and a curse. Don’t get me wrong, being creative is part of who I am and I wouldn’t give it up for the world, but it presents certain challenges that most people don’t see. One of the biggest is owning up to the realization that my taste isn’t what most people are used to and it can make them slightly uncomfortable. So how do I create something that I think looks great and communicates in a truly unique fashion without alienating the intended audience?

“Simplicity is not the goal.

It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations.”