Choosing the most appropriate laptop bag is a matter of personal choice, dictated by your own personal circumstances. Are you always on the go? You will need something strong and reliable. What type of transportation do you use? If you have to walk or bike to school or work, you will need something strong, reliable and light-weight. Will you be carrying around plenty of other stuff in your laptop bag? You will need something strong, reliable, light-weight and with plenty of compartments.

Style

Do you prefer something classy and stylish? If you prefer carrying it around by hand there are many designs based on the classic case without the leather-heavy look, just like sleeve-shaped handbags with some thicker cushioning. Backpack laptop bag is a good option if you need more compartments for documents and other stuff . If however you like carrying your bag with the strap on one shoulder running across your body on to the other side, the messenger bag or satchel should do it.

Weight

Your laptop might be heavy enough that your bag should not add too much to the weight that you will carry around. Always check how much the bag weighs empty. There are plenty of laptop bags that are made from light-weight material. Try to choose simple designs, without too many pockets and metal trimmings that you won’t need.

Material

Consider exposure to the elements. Find something that’s made of water-resistant material if you work around water a lot. Stay away from leather, they are too heavy and they get moldy. Make sure all zippers and other metal fasteners are non-corrosive. Other materials to consider are cotton canvas, nylon, polyester, Cordura etc.

Features 

Look for (enough) separate compartments (inside and outside pockets) for all the electronic accessories that come with your laptop, plus some for your documents. All should be accessible to you without having to turn the bag inside out. Check out the manufacturer’s warranty. Good quality laptop bags can be pricey and if any of the parts break or tear within the warranty period, you would at least know what services you’re entitled to.

 

What is a lanyard?

A lanyard is a length of cord or rope worn around neck or wrist typically used to carry things around that would otherwise be easy to lose or misplace. Lanyards can be traced to as far back as 15th century France when they were originally used to lash and tighten ship riggings. Sailors would wear lanyards around their necks to carry their tools around while on board.

Types

Modern lanyards are of 4 basic types - tube, cord, beaded and flat. They range in material from cotton to polyester, satin, nylon, silk, braided leather or polyethylene terephthalate (PET). The choice of material depends largely upon the lanyard’s intended use.

Styles

When worn, lanyards typically go around the neck like in ID holders or worn around the wrist whilst attached to a small digital camera or mobile phone so that it isn’t accidentally dropped. Others are used much like key chains and tied around the belt or a purse.

Attachments

There are a large number of attachments that can go with custom made lanyards, one for every possible function most users can think of.

A few examples:

• J-swivel / alligator clip / executive swivel – the most common attachments for a variety of ID accessories like badge holders/pouches
• Safety breakaway – a simple mechanism that allows the release of the clip as a safety precaution against accidental strangulation. It is ideal for machine operators, security staff and most sporting activities involving ropes. It is designed with a pre-determined breakaway weight or equivalent tug-force.
• Mobile phone buckle (detachable) – allows the convenient removal of the mobile phone whilst keeping the lanyard on.
• Split ring – preferred attachment for connecting keys
• Bottle holder – frees up the wearer’s hands especially during outdoor events where bottled water are distributed. Contemporary Uses Lanyards are cheap and functional. They are popular marketing and fundraising tools.

Businesses use lanyards as promotional giveaways during corporate events to create brand recall. Many designs are available to cater to specific needs. Some double as pen or bottle holders. Still others come with steel and aluminum carabiners for activities that involve climbing, rope rescue, construction etc.

The three candidate cities that are selected to host Summer Olympic 2020; Istanbul, Madrid, and Tokyo are proposing their logos. Even though all seem flowery the are absolutely stunning, what do you think?

Here are the looks at each logo:

Madrid

Original design

Final design

This is their third consecutive attempt to be summer Olympic host. Bright colour petals remind me of a crown. Although it looks beautiful the legibility of “M20” has been mocked on Twitter big time.

Instanbul

Being their fifth attempt to bring Olympic to Turkey since 2000, Turkish international Olympic Committee asked for public opinion to vote the five Tulip logos

Most voted:

Upper orange part is a symbol of sunset over the city and European side of Istanbul. Lower turquoise part represents Asian side of the city.

Tokyo

Having hosted one of the greatest game events in 1964, Tokyo easily beat Hiroshima as the candidate city for Japan this time. The cherry blossoms circular wreath that incorporates Olympic colours and purple colour as symbol of Japanese heritage In my opinion this looks spectacular!

What do you think of the logos? Who do you think will be the host? I guess we have to find out when Olympic committee will elect host city in early September 2013.

Business Tips: 10 Networking Facts

What is networking? Why is it so important? We know that it helps make the business successful. It is as if you are looking for a job.

The more people that you know, the easier it will be for you to land that dream job. The most important networking facts include:

1. Networking works for everyone Networking is great. To start, always give a sensitive and warm welcome to guests in every meeting. The aim for networking is ensuring that all feel comfortable and relaxed enough to connect you and other people. 
2. Enduring relationships are set up Networking works best when enduring relationships are built. It is not wise to network to promote the services and product or just searching for sales opportunities. The main aim should be establishing enduring connections and profitable relationships. Networking helps you build long term relationships that generate huge benefits in the long run
3. Enhances effectiveness Networking is very effective. It has proved one of the best ways to expand and increase advertisement through word of mouth. Much of the sale, about 80%-90% sales of their business are achieved through networking organizations.
4. Networking builds on quality A crucial fact about networking is that focus more on quality than quantity. It helps business professionals grasp the importance of understanding the basic needs of people and work on improving them rather than giving away or collecting hundreds of business card that will do your business no good. Being able to understand the business or a person generates better insight in identifying the possibility of an arising opportunity. An opportunity can be of useful information.
5. Identifying opportunities The present networking organizations will help you in accessing opportunities all over the world. Being a part of an online networking group will help your business expand greatly.
6. Gives important information Networking is not just about selling a service or a product or just getting a job. It goes beyond that. Its main reason is providing important and useful information. Its purpose is to provide the best research tools that will help a business succeed.
7. 3rd party synergistic opportunities facts Networking is responsible for the creation of these opportunities. These opportunities provide your business with a number of professional contacts. These contacts introduce you to other new customers, relatives, clients, associates among others thus expanding your business.
8. Sharing techniques and protocols Another fact is that, networking works due to other networks availability and ability to share. This is possible because they are able to share unique protocols, techniques and tips used in their successful organizations and you and learn from them and expand your business.
9. The networking purpose facts Another fact is that networking happen all the time. It happens even when someone thinks that it does not. It is always active to help you achieve your goals even during the times that you have no idea of the way to turn. All that a person needs to do is initiate a thing and networking will keep it alive. Making the first impression is what really matters most.
10. Networking takes the pressure off you The last but not least of the networking facts is that it strives to help you understand the importance of taking off the pressure of everyone networking with you. This is easily done through asking general questions. Direct questions are discouraged.

 

As you have seen, networking will do your business a lot of good. Remember, the person who has the most contacts will make the most sales at the end of the day. He will also have more suppliers.

With the year halfway over, you can choose to reward your most hardworking employees with incentives in the form of promotional merchandise. Promo items are always a huge hit in the workplace especially if you put some thought into the selection of products.

Make your employees feel even more special by choosing functional and unique items. Not only will these customised corporate gifts become a prize for their dedication, they can also work in further motivating and inspiring everyone to work even harder.

It cannot be denied that the market is overflowing with promotional products and making a choice can be challenging. To help you get started, consider these suggestions:

• Branded Mugs – add a twist to this all-time favourite corporate gift by including a bag of excellent coffee beans or tea bags.
• Printed Wine – make it an even more special day by gifting your productive employees with something they can relax with once they get home after a long day at work
• Personalised Candy – show your sweet and fun side with this business gift.
• Custom Smart Phone cases – these days, it is all about mobility and anyone simply does not leave home without their smart phones.
• Personalised Travel Bags and Accessories– if travel is part of your company incentive, you can complement it with travel bags or other accessories.

Do you know that Australians love to recycle and use recycled products?

In fact, 2.5 million tonnes of the 5.5 million tonnes of paper and cardboard used by both businesses and households in 2006 to 2007 was recycled. Of course, such figure is still relatively low as the Australian government would like to increase awareness about recycling by implementing the laws and regulations listed on its National Waste Policy. The government actually hopes to attain its waste management and resource recovery goals by 2020.

You can do your share by promoting your brand using recycled promo merchandise. A lot of consumers will appreciate your effort and such strategy will impact your brand in a positive way. Plus, you are also helping in the conservation of our natural resources by choosing recycled products. Reducing our waste products also help in fighting global warming. Landfills, which are where our garbage is deposited, are known to produce methane, a greenhouse gas.

At Promo Planet, we offer a bevy of personalised recycled items including pens, note sets and notebooks. They are fully customisable and brandable, allowing you to boost brand visibility effectively and efficiently. Our Bamboo Ballpens are among our best sellers as they are unique and certainly useful. You can hand them out during conferences and tradeshows and see your brand’s popularity soar.

For more details, call our sales team and enquire about our eco-friendly promotional items.

Today, we are looking at a really great idea for a promotional item, mugs! Mugs and cups are used by pretty much everyone, whether it’s drinking their daily tea or coffee or just used for drinking water. The use of mugs as a promotional item can be a sure way to be sure your company logo is always in sight. The great thing about Mugs is that they are durable and last for a really long time, unless they are dropped or damaged. Another great feature of promotional mugs is the sheer amount of space you have for your company logo, slogan, website and all other varieties of information.

The mugs we have come in 2 varieties: First, you have kitchen mugs for use indoors or at the office, then you have travel mugs; which can be used on the road, in the office or basically anywhere you want.

Kitchen Mugs

Let’s look at kitchen mugs first. They come in a wide variety of materials, shapes and sizes. Some of my favourites are:

Curved Engravable Mugs

These mugs simply give a classy and smooth look; they are really durable and will last the client a lifetime! The engraved logo looks really great and will be sure to promote the image of professionalism and good quality.

Ottawa Flared Mug

This classic and simple mug is a great way to get your image out there, with your logo sitting on the front; you can imagine your potential customers and clients using this mug on a daily basis. Also available in a variety of colours

 

Colourful Steel Double Wall Mugs

 

These are great mugs available in all kinds of colours, you’ll be sure to find one that matches your company logo. The sturdy steel construction and great looks will make sure that these mugs are used single every day.

If any of these designs aren’t what you are looking for, take a look at the mugs page and you’ll see a much greater selection.

Travel Mugs

Bohemium Custom Branded Travel Mug

 

What a great travel mug/flask this is, with your company logo displayed prominently on the front with a great silver looking finish; this is a great promotional item. What client wouldn’t love to use this on a camping trip or even out on the road when they simply don’t have time to stop for hot coffee?

Arabian Bottle Mugs

 

These are great giveaways for those clients and potential customers who love exercising or just a way to drink water conveniently. The high quality translucent plastic finish really stands out, and with your logo, you’ll have a great eye catching and useful product.

There are a number of different mugs available both for travel and kitchen/office use, with each of these different designs and colours, there’s no excuse not to order a few today. Your clients and customers will love you for it!

USB sticks are the modern equivalent of floppy disks or perhaps a small hard drive, used to store data files, they range in capacity (generally ranging from 1Gb up to 32Gb). The beauty of USB sticks is that they are so portable and can be used for a wide variety of purposes. In any situation where you need to give data to clients or staff, USB sticks are a great choice. Not only that they fit the purpose but they can then be reused over and over, this is a gift people will use for years.

USB Designs:

USB sticks come in all shapes and sizes, from the basic model to a number of novelty and brand image ideas. For example if you’re a company concentrating on green resources, then why not give your customers a wooden or bamboo USB stick? The idea is novel; mixing modern technology with wood or bamboo. What’s great about this is that your clients will associate this with being both green and high tech, a great combination.

If your company happens to have a square logo, why shrink it down to fit on a small rectangular USB stick, when you can get a much better square shaped or even simply a bigger stick. This will allow your logo to fit perfectly and give a very unique looking USB which customers can use for storage again and again

What about a company specializing in dealing in gold or precious metals? Well, you can even give out USB sticks shaped like a gold bar.

 

Other items that would combination for a business selling beverages, a book shaped USB for a company dealing with books or large amounts of data. How about a key shaped USB for a security company? There are a large number of choices suitable for different corporate events and company images.

How to use the USB sticks effectively:

There are promotional ways that you can use USB sticks. A good example could be a corporate event, such as a presentation to clients or a tradeshow. You can give away these USB sticks with a selection of images and information about the products and services or perhaps a video presentation. These can be powerful tools, as not only will the client be informed, but (on branded models) they will now have your company logo in their pocket. This could be used for any kind of company really, providing that the USB design matches the corporate branding that you are trying to convey.

Let’s now look at something more specific, such as a software company. It would be simple enough to provide demos or trials of the software on USB stick. By delivering the software demo in this way instead of a download link or a CD, you are making the experience memorable, and the client is more likely to test the software as all modern computers have USB ports, whereas some do not have CD drives.

USB drives are great in the way that the can be used promotionally for both passing information and as a highly reusable item that will remind the client of your company every time they need it. Even going for a more traditional USB drive simply putting the company name and logo on it can make a big difference, novelty designs even more so.

 

Office clutter is a common enough sight in many work places. It certainly is in mine…. on my desk especially. It cannot be helped sometimes. No matter how often I try to organise my desk, there simply are days when no amount of organisation seems to work! My desk drawers are filled to overflowing with many training materials, books, brochures, user manuals, product guides, price lists etc. that everything else has to go on top of my desk.

I have two business card holders. One seems to belong to everybody else because they gravitate to it whenever they need to find somebody’s contact information. The other one contains paper clips, key chains from several business trips, fridge magnets, some colorful marbles and a few months’ worth of change.  Both card holders are precariously perched on top of a stack of old ring binders.

I also have 3 coffee mugs from different corporate events that are too tall to fit inside my desk drawers.  They sit against the cubicle divider. I filled them with novelty pens, letter openers and my chopstick collection. It was (in my humble opinion) a cool way to “dress-up” my work area. As my clutter grew however, all attempts at personalising my desk were rendered useless amidst all the chaos.  

 

Everything changed when I won a charming little fishbowl in an office raffle. My workmates were sure the fish would die from stress if I put it in my cubicle. They gave me a week! I didn’t care what they said. I have been visiting the raffle display corner and have been staring at that fish for a few minutes every day since they announced the raffle. I didn’t even know at the time what kind of fish it was.  It wasn’t particularly pretty, kind of yellowish blue (hard to imagine yes, but that’s how it looked to me). The round tank itself was incredibly clear and very easy to look into, unlike others that looked as if they were made from thick and ugly prescription glasses.

The very next day after I won I cleaned out my desk of all the dust traps that I have been keeping. I put all my books into four storage boxes and had them moved to the stockroom. When all that’s left on my desk were my laptop and my 3 decorative coffee mugs, it was finally ready to welcome my new-found motivation for a clutter-free desk, my new fishbowl! I certainly didn’t want my fish to think it fell into a sewage tank! I wanted to give it a nice, fresh-looking environment!

Over the next few weeks, I covered my old cubicle walls (boring grey upholstery) with beautiful underwater-motif fabric, added miniature plant jars in the corner and had some lighting fixtures custom-made for my tiny aquarium. I also bought two smaller replicas of my fishbowl, filled them with lollypops and toffees and placed them on the other end of my desk between the coffee mugs.

    

Oh, and the not so pretty fish was a blue tang (remember Dory from Finding Nemo?)…. It gradually turned the rich blue that Dory was in the movie.

I have since installed a bigger fish tank in my apartment, with a variety of fish in it. Watching the fishes flash in and out of the rocks and the water plants gives me a peculiar sense of peace and contentment. It sort of refreshes my tired brain. Nothing however compares to the feeling that I get each morning when I greet Darius (Yes he’s a hunk so I can’t have named him Dory) as I begin my day at work and each night as I leave for home.

You might be wondering about the clutter.... Well I have managed to keep them to the barest minimum. My priority now is to keep Darius’ environment as pleasant as possible. He’s in a much bigger fishbowl now. The little guy turned me from a slip-shod to a fairly neat and mindful person, it’s the least I could do, really.

Does anyone know how many coffee mugs they’ve received as gifts over the years? We have them in all shapes, sizes and colors…. We’ve lost some (probably without even noticing it)…. We’ve also kept some, especially those with the most unique designs or those from extra special events.

Coffee mugs are amongst the most common freebies or giveaways during corporate events because they’re readily available, easy to customise and very affordable. For these same reasons the coffee mug is under-appreciated by most of us. We’d much rather receive something else at the next office party, right?

At Work

The lowly coffee mug is actually multi-functional and versatile. Use it to hold all your pens and pencils and it becomes a pen holder. Use another one as a paper clip holder, a coin bank, a candy jar, a flower vase if you have one deep enough or you can even park your mobile phone in it! A few coffee mugs set side by side can become your very own unique and decorative desk organiser.

For the Family

Take a few of your mugs home and assign one to each member of the family. You don’t have to buy and settle for a set of identical (boring) coffee mugs when everybody can have their own; distinct from everybody else. Personalised mugs don’t necessarily have to bear somebody’s name. Give the strawberry-shaped mug to your carefree and fun-loving daughter; the lemon-colored one that looks more like a bowl to your spouse; the plastic Spongebob cutie to your little one whilst you keep the classic black for yourself.

Around the Home

• Coffee mugs that you’ve been keeping for a few years and are now cracked and discolored with age can be turned into charming seedling planters or mini herb pots to line your kitchen windows.

• There are mugs that would make really nice candle holders to safely catch all the wax drippings.

• Fill a few old mugs with aromatic oils and turn them into improvised oil lamps at strategic spots inside your home.

• Every time a button comes loose, drop them into a designated button mug. Control the clutter by using your old coffee mugs as receptacles for various knick-knacks that would otherwise be left lying around.

• You don’t need a fancy toothbrush holder when an ordinary coffee mug will do the trick just as well. Whilst toothbrush holders don’t actually cost too much, your coffee mug came absolutely free, courtesy of your last corporate party!

For Friends

Need a new way of packaging your gifts? Presents these days do not always come in a box. All you need is a little imagination and some creativity. An old coffee mug can be stuffed with some gourmet chocolate, dressed-up with oversized ribbons and voila! You have a cute and innovative treat for your friends!

Try to find fun and inventive uses for all those souvenir mugs you’ve collected over the years. Instead of letting them gather dust on your desk or around your home, why not transform your coffee mug collection into whatever suits your fancy? A coffee mug by any other name…. is entirely up to you!