Thursday, November 20, 2008

Vote Vetrazzo II

In September I wrote about my Jen's work for Vetrazzo and asked for votes to help them win a Forbes competition for a big cool grant. If you missed that or need a refresher, please hop back and take a look at why I think it's worth your time to do this (Vote Vetrazzo). They have an awesome recycled product, and an even more awesome management philosophy and work environment. They definitely deserve a leg up. They made it through the semi-finals voting round and now there are just five companies competing for the grant. In part thanks to all of you, Vetrazzo is one of them. Now they need your vote one last time. The deadline for voting is November 30.

If you go to the Forbes.com
Vetrazzo page, after a short ad (just wait it through) you'll end up on a page with lots of details about Vetrazzo and what they'll do with the grant and why they deserve it (jazzed up since last time I think), while a video plays of the company president (James Sheppard) making a long but very interesting pitch for Vetrazzo to the Forbes team. At the bottom of that page is the online ballot to vote for Vetrazzo, just like last time (if you want to skip everything and go straight to that spot on the page click here). This will generate a verification email that will be sent to you, and all you have to do is click the verification link in that email (or copy and paste it into a browser and hit go) and your vote will be counted.

James won the privilege to go to New York and do this new video because Vetrazzo made that top five, and those five companies got to make their pitch to a panel of experts in New York. Your votes this time count for 50% of the final score, while the panel's own votes count for the other 50%. In the new video James is speaking before that panel, with a slide show, and goes into a lot of detail, but I actually found the whole thing very engaging, and ended up watching it all despite its length (which is saying something, busy as I am). I recommend it if you have the time. Lots of info there about world and national economics, the surfaces industry, technology, how to run a green factory (using solar power, natural lighting, recycling their own water), and of course all things Vetrazzo. The second half of the video is a very on-point Q&A session. The panel knows their stuff, they ask some good, probing questions, and James totally nails it. It's almost like watching an athlete perform a perfect round of mind-Judo.

Whether you want to stay and watch or read all that, or just go right to the task, please vote Vetrazzo one more time!

7 comments:

AIGBusted said...

Hi Richard,

I think you should add a "feedburner" to your blog so that we can recieve emails when you update the blog. It would be more convenient as this blog is only updated periodically. It would also be useful so that folks who read this blog will be alerted when you release "On the Historicity of Jesus Christ".

Richard Carrier said...

I have long had a manual notification list (just email me and ask to be on it). I don't understand how to add "feedburners." The tech baffles me. Is there an easy way to tool this in with Blogger? What are the steps required?

AIGBusted said...

Hi Richard,

I don't remember specifically how you do it, but basically once you register, they give you an HTML code and you take that, Go to "Edit Layout", click on "add a gadget" and from there you paste the HTML code into the gadget.

Richard Carrier said...

Register with who?

AIGBusted said...

Register with Feedburner.com

Richard Carrier said...

Thanks. I just registered there. I'll blog about subscribing soon. I've added the link for subscribing to the top of the right menu above. Does it work?

Richard Carrier said...

Actually, I now see that Feedburner just emails the whole blog to people (in HTML and everything), which is annoying, and not what most people want. Most want a bare notification, with URL, in plain text. I do that manually now. So if you want to be notified by email of when I've added an entry, just email me at rcarrier@infidels.org and I'll put you on my list.

But if you (or anyone) actually wants Feedburner to email the whole blog to them every time, then click here (but unless I hear from a lot of people telling me they like this feature, I'm not going to promote it). Otherwise, if you want to add my blog to a web feed service you already have (or want to join), I have installed the widget for that in the right margin (under "Followers" and above "Atheist Blogroll").