Starbucks is set for further expansion in Europe - and Arla is a key partner. The Esbjerg-based company will manufacture, market and distribute Starbucks’ ready-to-drink coffee beverages for the European market. Arla subsidiary Cocio Chokolademælk has already increased plant capacity and is ready to begin production. I know quite a few Americans who will be happy to have their Starbucks back.

In just two years, Lego will open another Legoland theme park in the United States. The company’s second park in the States will be in central Florida - not far from the Orlando area, which is already home to Walt Disney World, Universal Studios and other top entertainment destinations. On the grounds of Florida’s oldest amusement park, Cypress Gardens (now defunct), this fifth Legoland park will be the largest yet. And it should give the brand a big boost within the US.

New York has long been a popular destination for Danes. And now, it looks like the New York Times is trying to return the favor. A few weeks ago, on the heels of the COP15 climate summit, the Op-Ed columnist Thomas Friedman posted a story about Denmark’s many green initiatives and how the country is working hard to become a low-carbon economy. It positioned Denmark well - despite the summit’s inadequate results.

And that’s not all. Just last week, the same paper published a feature on “The 31 Places to Go in 2010″. And guess who came in at number five? Yep, Copenhagen. That’s right, Copenhagen is described as “one of the world’s greenest — and maybe coolest — cities”. Maybe it was all that Oprah-gushing?

The New Oxford American Dictionary recently chose its word of the year. And what new word summed up the final year of this nameless decade? Unfriend. Fitting, no? The competition was stiff as the short list included a number of beloved words from technology and economics, such as ‘hashtag’, ‘intexticated’, ‘freemium’, and (a personal favorite) ‘zombie bank’.

So what about the word of the decade? Well, the Global Language Monitor (which, incidentally, now has the number of English words past the 1,000,000 mark) says the term ‘global warming’ was the most popular word of the decade. Apparently, ‘climate change’ was the ‘Top Phrase of the Decade’, which strikes me as odd since ‘global warming’ is also a phrase. But whatever. It’s all about the truthiness.

Do you send a million text messages a day? Or do find yourself spending all your free time in the Twitterverse? If so, you might be putting your ability to spell in serious danger – at least according to some critics. OMG, you say!

Short Message Service Language, aka textese or chatspeak, might actually be the fastest growing dialect in the world, but is it leading us to pathological sloppiness? Some are even calling it the death of the English language. Really? 

Well, turns out shortening English into cryptic phonetic bits doesn’t impact our ability to spell ‘real’ English. Recent research shows that if you’re a good speller of the Queen’s English, you’re also a good textese speller. In fact, those who used more elaborate codes while texting where actually better spellers of normal English. Srsly. And, as good logic would have it, if you are a poor speller in ‘real’ English, you’re more likely to make errors in textese. So bware!

Companies in the United States and Canada are increasingly including Twitter and Facebook experience in their job posting requirements. Advertising, marketing and communications agencies are looking for people with a flair for social networking. And some business that are looking to gain instant, cost-effective exposure are hiring bloggers and project managers to build their brand image through Wikis and social media.

Of course, it’s ironic that many companies on the hunt for Facebook skills are still worrying about poor employee productivity levels due to the site…

After surviving the inevitable phone and internet issues during the move, everything is now up and running and it’s business as usual for the Eye for Image team. Our new office is on Pistolstræde - just a stone’s throw from Strøget and Kongens Nytorv. A few of us are having some trouble staying away from the shops, but the office is great and, since we’re all scattered around Copenhagen, the central location is a big plus. 

We’re all really looking forward to summer in the heart of Copenhagen - stop by for a visit sometime!

Everywhere you turn these days there’s a story about Twitter coming to the rescue of a fire or police department. In less than 140 characters on Twitter, agencies - including the FBI - can post crime and suspect details. So far it’s a huge success, but there are plenty of skeptics. For one, social networking sites such as Twitter aren’t secure and many feel that Twitter can’t be a source of trusted information (there have been incidences of phony police accounts). But the FBI, for example, is using it for updates on missing children, fugitives, job fairs and computer viruses - and won’t accept tips over Twitter. 

With a fast growing number of users and the ability to efficiently get quick messages out to computer and mobile users everywhere, questions over Twitter users’ authenticity won’t be the straw that broke this camel’s back.

Governments have been trying to craft unique, visible and successful brands for ages. But the current Obama administration has been especially creative lately. They recently unleashed a huge rebranding strategy to cover military activities and even the current financial crisis. Here are a few highlights:

- George Bush’s War on Terror, or The Long War, is now Overseas Contingency Operation

- Terrorism is now called ‘man-caused disaster’

- Toxic Assets are now referred to as Legacy Assets

- And the US government will no longer refer to people being indefinitely held in places like Guantánamo Bay as ‘enemy combatants’. I guess they’ll just be called detainees now.

I wonder what their new name for the financial crisis itself will be?

JetBlue has just launched what has got to be one of the cleverest ad campaigns of the recession. Its “Welcome Bigwigs” campaign targets all those former c-level execs that are no longer enjoying fancy hotels and private jets. The low cost airline has cheekily found a way to poke fun at the people whose lavish lifestyles were financed by the very recklessness that brought them down.   

Few companies have been able to humorously address the current economic situation. There’s of course a good reason for that – it’s not funny. But we can all get a laugh out of the super rich needing to downscale and “jetpool” with the rest of us.

JetBlue’s emphasis on frugality is directed to all “Hedge Fund Managers, Big Investment Bankers, Moguls, Tycoons” and others who “might be rethinking that next trip on a private jet … ” and the in-flight entertainment includes only a few of the “business news channels that can be complete bummers.”

Oh, and their free “potato chips are not a government bailout and there are no strings attached.”

The print ad is below, but click here for the website.