However, yesterday, Pepsi announced what sounds like a pretty cool innovation – though it doesn’t have anything to do with the soda itself (link to press release & video). The innovation is what Pepsi is calling a Social Vending machine. It’s uncertain when and where the machines will start popping up near you, but from the looks of the photos – you’ll definitely notice them when they arrive.

The idea behind the social vending machine is to enable any user to give a gift to a friend by selecting a beverage and entering the recipient’s name, phone number and a custom text message. The gift is then delivered with a code and instructions for how to redeem the gift at a Social Vending machine.

The person receiving the soda then has the option of either sending a thank you soda right back or buying a soda for someone else. In fact, possibly the most interesting feature of the machine is what Pepsi is calling “Random Acts of Refreshment”, which is the ability to buy a drink for a complete stranger anywhere in the world. Meaning that it has taken Pepsi exactly 40 years to figure out how to buy the world a Pepsi, instead of a Coke.

Kevin Smith is an Account Supervisor at PJA Advertising & Marketing. Follow him on Twitter: @Mr_KevinSmith

Ms. Chen has managed to place a tissue-engineered human liver into a mouse. Into more than one mouse, in fact, and nearly 100% of the mice live. This is so innovative because drug companies the world over want to test how a drug candidate is absorbed, distributed, metabolized and excreted, and to date they’ve been hamstrung into using non-human models to do this before they get into clinical trials, which are toxically expensive and often dangerous. And though we’re genetically similar to mice, our livers work very differently.

So Ms. Chen had the idea, God bless her, to engineer a human liver in a lab mouse, since the liver is where so much of the body’s dealing with a drug works or doesn’t. I felt like Homer Simpson hearing about it. Doh! Why the heck didn’t I think of that? In retrospect it’s so stunningly obvious. And it’s going to be huge.

No big surprise that Alice is sinking her $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Collegiate Student Prize money into a start-up company she’s formed with some colleagues. It’s called Sienna Labs. Sounds to me like a decent investment.

Clearly, we need innovative thinking like this all over America, in technology, medical devices and life science.

Changing a username isn’t as tricky as you may think, but finding best practices and instructions for each individual social network can be time-consuming. We’ve curated all the information you need to change your usernames and minimize any confusion that your networks may face.

In this second installment of Social Media Points of Practice, we break it down into actions you can take before, during and after you change your username.