The economy isn’t currently at its best which is certainly unfortunate. In some industries, it looks like sales can be up because of it.

Here’s a short blog post from Sentry Safe including a news video regarding Sentry Safes and how people are investing in their products for protection. It’s interesting to see that consumers are going one step further than storing assets at their own bank’s safety deposit boxes and purchasing safes on their own.

We do carry quite a selection of Sentry fire safes at BON included with all of the Sentry safes we sell. Some use them to store cash, some for collectables, and others even store gold in them.

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Some things just never stop being funny, and a scene from the 1999 cult hit “The Office” happens to be one of them when Bill Lumbergh asks Milton to move his desk to the back then steals his most prize possession.

You want a red stapler.
You need a red stapler.

You don’t want to be without one, do you?

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MarketWatch has an interesting article regarding HON, politics, and office chairs.

Mostly, this has to do with office chairs and “what is it about chairs?”. In one instance, they mention a message board thread regarding office politics and furniture that includes close to 200 replies. It’s an interesting article and worth the read.

For us at BuyOnlineNow, it’s nice to see that HON specifically mentions a line of chairs that we carry that they manufacture. It’s the F3(TM) chair that we carry in three colors:

Wine/Dark Red
Black
Mariner Blue

The chairs themselves offer some very cool features like one-time adjustments to seat heights, arm height, depth, and adapting to different ways users sit in their chairs.

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It looks like user-submissions are over for 3M’s One Million Uses and Counting promotion, starting tomorrow you can vote for your favorite video.

There are plenty of good ones to vote for. This one probably gets my vote:

We’re happy to stock plenty of their post-it notes, lots of good uses.

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We’re pretty big fans of social media around here. Big props and a lot of envy goes out to the Kodak team who’s capturing images at the Beijing Olympics.

According to this press release, they’re not in Beijing to count medal tallies, but to capture images showing national pride, fan support, and just overall great photography. They don’t disappoint. My favorite picture so far is this panoramic shot during a gymnastics event. I want that camera.

They also have a section on their kodak.com site dedicated to the Olympic games including, “pictures of the day”, a photo tour of Beijing, behind the scenes, and links to their different Kodak blogs. They even have a cool selection of Olympic party kit templates (PDF).

This may look like a plug for Kodak. We do sell a few Kodak products albeit mostly their photo paper. Well, when manufacturers of products that we sell do cool and innovative things, we like to let people know about it. Plus, it allows us to live the Olympics in a small way even though we’re not there.
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This came up in my Google Alerts. It’s kind of a silly quiz but enjoyable nonetheless. So, take the quiz and find out which Crayola Box of 8 color crayon you are.

Crayola 8-Box

According to the quiz, my favorite 8-Box color is green which apparently means newness, surprise, beginnings, and growth. Is that true? I couldn’t tell ya’.

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I was very happy to see this. Avery Dennison has announced that they are providing different templates for Google Docs.

You can view all of the current templates available and see the ones provided by Avery Dennison. They plan to provide more future templates as well.

Here are a few examples of these templates paired with Avery items that we sell at BuyOnlineNow:

Avery business card template, and
Avery business cards that we sell.

Avery shipping labels template, and
Avery shipping labels that we sell.

Avery address labels template, and
Avery address labels that we sell.

In addition to the Avery templates, there also also a ton of useful document, spreadsheet, and presentation templates available as well. I can see this being a very popular tool. Google also announces this on their official blog.

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Fellowes has something new and slick going on. They want to promote their antimicrobial products while teaching you how to reduce workplace bacteria, and they created an online campaign for it called The Office Coach.

They have some humorous Webisodes, fun “Coach Advice” you can forward to friends, a free seminar offer, sweepstakes contest to Hawaii in February 2009 (it looks like it’s during the Pro Bowl), and a free cleaning kit promotion for consumers who purchase $100.00 or more of Fellowes antimicrobial products (PDF file – might take a bit longer to load).

We carry plenty of these actually, and here are the items:

Keyboards
FEL9892901 – Basic Keyboard
FEL98915 – Split Design Ergonomic Keyboard
FEL98917 – Combo Cordless Keyboard & Mouse

Mice
FEL98912 – Cordless 5 Button Mouse
FEL98913 – 5 Button Optical Mouse

Mousepads and Wrist Support
FEL5933901 – Basic Mouse Pad (Black)
FEL5933801 – Basic Mouse Pad (Navy Blue)
FEL5934001 – Basic Mouse Pad (Silver)
FEL9175101 – Gel Wrist Supports w/ Mouse Pad (Graphite)
FEL9175401 – Gel Wrist Supports w/ Mouse Pad (Sapphire)
FEL9175301 – Gel Wrist Support (Graphite)
FEL9175601 – Gel Wrist Support (Sapphire)

Help inhibit growth of microbes and bacteria by purchasing these items.

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Last week we mentioned a very cool and fun contest that the Post-it Notes® team at 3M are promoting on YouTube. This isn’t the only way they’re going social on the Web. They also happen to have a Facebook page.

Having a Facebook page in itself isn’t always breaking news, but they are doing a great job utilizing it to promote their different contests and games while building their brand. As of this writing, they have close to 1,200 fans.

Their latest contest is the Post-it Memory game. The application uses your Facebook friends as characters to memorize along with a couple branded Post-it Notes logos. It’s pretty slick and fun.

Facebook Memory Game

I’m happy to say that my score is really low… which is good because if it was really high I’m probably spending too much time not working instead of marketing our products such as the Post-it Notes that we sell. Nonetheless, kudos to the Post-it Notes team!

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As noted on Kodak’s 1000 Words Blog, they brought in Brendan Fraser to a recent NASCAR Race at the Chicagoland Speedway. To help promote the new Mummy Series, he visited the garage area before the race, hung out on pit road, and was even Grand Marshal of the race.

He also got to say NASCAR’s four most famous words.

Since we sell a few of Kodak’s photo products at BuyOnlineNow, it’s always exciting to see manufacturers embrace the social media side of the web. In addition to Kodak having their own YouTube page, they also have their own Flickr photo page, a popular Facebook page, and yep, they’re even up on Twitter with Kodak’s Chief Blogger.

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