Qdoba Mexican Grill® Taps Muzak to Bring Brand Experience Online with New Interactive Music Player

Denver, CO (Vocus) March 1, 2010 -- Qdoba Mexican Grill®, a leader in the fast-casual industry known for its innovative and fresh Mexican cuisine options, announced today the company is taking its brand experience online with the addition of an interactive music player to its Web site through a

partnership with Muzak, a leading provider of music and sensory branding services for businesses.

The music player, available now on Qdoba’s Web site (http://www.qdoba.com/OurSound.aspx), offers a mix of the same fresh artists and songs that are played in many Qdoba restaurants across the country.

“We are always looking for innovative ways to extend our customers’ brand experience outside of the restaurants,” said Karen Guido, Qdoba’s VP of Marketing. “In the last year, we’ve focused on expanding our brand online through social media initiatives and now by integrating our sound on the Web site, and we will continue to look for ways to maximize our customer interaction, whether that be in our restaurants, on the Web, or a mix of both.”

Qdoba’s new web player, developed by Muzak, integrates social media aspects by allowing users to share their favorite songs/artists on Facebook and Twitter, read about monthly featured artists, purchase songs that they enjoy, and embed the player on their personal Web sites. In the coming weeks, Qdoba will also begin to offer free downloads to customers, as an additional way to integrate the brand experience at home.

The integrated web player is another step in brand evolution for Qdoba, closely following the recent redesign of the POP in the restaurants, as well as the company Web site last year, highlighting its roots as an artisanal Mexican kitchen.

Touch, the new division of Muzak responsible for the campaign, is a comprehensive sonic and sensory branding firm. Touch is focused on working with progressive brands like Qdoba, on strategic media and marketing efforts that connect customers in new and non-traditional ways.

New Exhibit to Feature Never-Before-Seen Images of the Beatles in Minnesota

St. Paul, Minn. (Vocus) April 19, 2010 -- It’s as if you were there: Aug. 21, 1965, and the only Minnesota appearance by the Beatles (www.mnhs.org/beatles), the biggest rock band of all time.

Seventeen-year-old Bill Carlson was there. Trying to hone his craft, Carlson was eager to grab an unclaimed press pass and shoot the Beatles’ arrival at the airport, the press conference and the concert that followed. Carlson took more than 140 photographs that day, capturing the personality of the Beatles and their fans in spontaneous, casual, black-and-white images. Now, 45 years later, history lovers, music lovers and everyday Minnesotans can relive the day for themselves in the new exhibit “The Beatles! A One-Night Stand in the Heartland,” at the Minnesota History Center, July 17 – Sept. 12, 2010.

The exhibit features 36 images, some of which are never-before-seen pictures of the Beatles in concert. Through the images, exhibit goers will be able to make intimate connections with the Beatles, a band that changed music and popular culture forever. The photographs also tell the story of Carlson, a young photographer just starting out in his career, who attended the press conference where he talked with George Harrison about his new Rickenbacker guitar. But Carlson wasn’t the only teenager following the Beatles. At the concert, there were more than 25,000 screaming, shouting, cheering and swooning fans. Carlson’s photographs capture close-up moments of fans touched by the Beatles and their music as well as mob scenes with girls waiting to greet the band as they got off the plane and during the press conference.

Academics Tout Social Networks, Micro-blogging As Superior Research Formats

London, UK March 25, 2010 -- A diverse worldwide group of university researchers and scholars are pioneering a new model for cutting edge research based on social networking and other Web 2.0 technologies rather than the traditional publish-or-perish model.

Led by theorists at Oxford, Princeton, the University of Witwatersrand, Osaka University and other institutions, the group is developing their ideas on a wiki sponsored by the World Mind Network called http://anewparadigmforresearch.wetpaint.com. The moderator is Irina Higgins of the Oxford Foundation for Theoretical Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence. The public is welcome to contribute.

They take inspiration from statements such as this, from MIT's Neil Gershenfeld: "Many of today's most compelling new questions are still tackled with old institutional models; it's ironic that religion has had its Reformation but that the role of a research university would be recognizable to a medieval monk"

Today, scholars all over the world can connect instantaneously. Theories can be developed, refined, and adjusted at the speed of light. Thousands can devote their unique niche talents to a problem that would take a small group of researchers at one institute years to solve. The species is approaching the kind of efficiency that previously was only seen in one integrated biological brain; as Alex Pentland has said, "The nervous system of the human race has come alive"

Says Larrry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia: "I believe that researchers are drawn to the wiki model because they naturally love several ideas suggested by the model; working closely with large numbers of their colleagues spread over the world; updating shared knowledge on the fly and avoiding costly duplication of labor; presenting knowledge systematically and in all its glorious complexity, and providing clear and compelling free access to important knowledge of their fields to a world that, in many cases, desperately needs such access"