La Tecnología como medio para innovar

Os dejo un ejemplo de aplicación de la apuesta de BMW como medio para la innovación. Y si me lo permitís, la innovación no está en el propio desarrollo de la solución técnica, sino en divisar el horizonte donde esta filosofía es posible. Sin miedo al cambio y con fe ciega en una visión que engloba un riesgo que otras empresas no se atreven a afrontar.
Cuánto nos queda por ver, y cuánto vamos a disfrutar (al menos yo!)

Este vídeo lo he encontrado en http://lonifasiko.blogspot.com/. Os recomiendo un vistazo a este blog.

saludos,
alberto conde mellado

Biggest dog on the road: Porsche Panamera or BMW 5-series GT

If you love cars then what should matter most to you is how a car drives, whether, faced with the prospect of a cross-continental trip, you’d want to grab its keys or not.

But, like it or not, how a car looks is integral to the whole experience as well. Sure, it shouldn’t matter, but it does, especially nowadays when so many cars are so accomplished. Engeneering in isolation is no longer enough.

Which is why we have to ask: what are the designers at Porsche and BMW smoking?

We pondered it long and hard and we can’t figure out which is the biggest dog on the road right now? The vulgar, out-of-proportion Porsche Panamera with its disconcerting bonnet, heavy flanks and huge, ungainly posterior? Or perhaps the BMW 5-series GT which simply defies description in its ugliness.

Renault = Clean cars ?

Apparently Renault is betting the company on electric cars. This could be the ballsiest and smartest strategic move I have heard of in a long time.

The auto industry is in a big crisis, these companies are huge, they employ a lot of people directly and much more indirectly… but they generate very small profits. Just consider that if somebody wanted to buy the Ford Motor Company (the 3rd largest in the world) they would need about 25 billion $. If someone wanted to buy Google they would need about 150 billion $.

The companies that are doing well are extremely well positionned, which means they stand for something very specific: Toyota means ‘affordable reliability’, BMW means ‘driving pleasure’, Mercedes means ‘prestige’, Porsche means ’sports car’.

This is the basics of marketing, that the brands stands for and owns something unique and relevant.

The problem is that there are not many meaningful and distinctive benefits left, and this is why Ford, Renault, Peugeot, Fiat and GM more than any others are all struggling to be relevant. But there’s a new word that is becoming increasingly important these days… and no one owns it yet…

Because of high oil prices and the fact that cars are highly highly polluting machines, most car manufacturers are investing a lot in alternative energy cars. The most successful by far are hybrid cars.

The problem is that ‘hybrid’ is not such a clean word to own, it’s not very choiceful, it’s a bit of oil and a bit of electric…

So if electric or clean is the word of the future, one has to make choices, no half-baked solutions. Renault is apparently taking this road. It is very risky because it depends on oil prices remaining high, on the continuity of Government subsidies and particularly on consumers changing the way they use their car… but if that happens Renault could become the new Toyota.

You have to be able to sum up your brand in one meaningful and relevant word to do good marketing.

Some jobs at Renault.

An article in the Economist about Renault’s big bet on electric cars.

More on the Kangoo ZE – zero emission and no noise – on sale in 2011.

A car which can't be described as beautiful..

..although, to be frank, few Bangle-era BMs can be described that way. But I will say this: 1) like the latest gen WRX STi, the body style has grown on me, and 2) like the GTI, the three-door looks better than the five-door (in my opinion). Obviously, neither version is available in the states, as it is believed that there is just no market here for this type of vehicle.

CD road test

- Gyro

Dirndls and Lederhosen

Last week was our first full week of travel- that means no classes, no homework, no seminars or workshops for 9 whole days!

Oktoberfest

On Friday afternoon Jess, Mike, and I took the bus at 4:00 pm to Bassano, where the closest train station is, to get our rail passes validated and catch the train to Padova, only to find that the next train to Padova was actually a 2 hour bus ride. Our reason for going to Padova was that the overnight train to Munich was leaving from that station at 11:28 pm, but we figured we would go early to look around a little bit. I had not considered that most things would be closed at 6pm and that it would be too dark to really do any sightseeing. Plus, the area around the train station was not the nicest part of town. Actually, it reminded me a lot of Chinatown in New York.

About an hour later the rest of the group taking the overnight train showed up and we walked around together, a group of about 15 American students each lugging a week’s worth of luggage ambling around the streets of Padova at night. We must have been a sight. We got some really good Chinese food for dinner (everyone was sick of pasta at this point, and like I said, it was like Chinatown), and stopped at a cafe to wait out the remaining two hours before we went up to the platform to wait for the train.

waiting for the train

Because I booked my reservation only a week before I left for Italy, the only cabins left were the six-person couchettes or the first class, single person sleepers. Well because I also did not know anyone at this point, rather than take my chances with 5 strangers I went for the single room (Thanks Dad ). It was custom. I had a whole cabin to myself, with a bathroom and a shower and there was a German lady who showed me to my cabin, and then woke me up in the morning (at 5:45!) and brought me one of those little airline breakfasts and a coffee. There was a couple in the cabin next door from New Hampshire who were very nice, they were also headed for Oktoberfest and they offered to share some of their wine with me.

We arrived in Munich bright and early at 6:30 in the morning, and after a quick shower and coffee i hopped off the train much more awake than my friends in the 6 person couchettes, who were still groggy. I shared some of my breakfast with them , to be nice

We checked into our hostel, then went back to the train station to meet up with the students that had taken a chartered bus all the way from Paderno to Munich overnight. I don’t think they got much sleep either.

The first thing we did was walk around the city a bit, and we found a beautiful church in the middle of one of the squares. Every other shop on the street was selling Lederhosen and Dirndls, which, to my surprise, ALL of the germans were wearing. Some even came in groups wearing matching costumes. Hordes and hordes of Germans in lederhosen.

That afternoon we took a tour of Dachau, a concentration camp on the outskirts of Munich. Apparently Dachau was the “model”concentration camp that they used as a guide for all of the other camps. It’s were they trained the officers, tried out different kinds of toxic gas, and they even had a “school of torture”. Our guide was really good, he was from Ireland and really gave us a good idea of how terrible things were there. On the ride back we asked him about good places to go in Munich, and he suggested Olympia park where they held the Olympics some time in the seventies, I believe.

Following his advice, that’s where we headed for the afternoon. The first place we stopped in the park (or it might have been right outside of the park) was the BMW Welt and BMW Museum. Oh Em Gee. I don’t even like cars, but I still thought this place was really cool. The Welt was like a showroom/interactive museum where you can look at the cars and sit in them, and it had kiosks and exhibits where you could drive a virtual car and see what innovations they were coming up with for the future. Cool stuff. We only went into the lobby of the actual museum (you had to pay to go in) but just in the lobby there were these really nice, antique looking cars, and then in the next room was a futuristic concept car. This thing was so cool.

After the BMW Welt/Museum we walked over to the park itself and went up into this big space needle looking thing in the middle of the park.The view from up there was incredible– you could see all of Munich and the surrounding countryside, all the way to the huge Alps way in the distance. We were there right at sunset as well, which made it that much more beautiful.

From the top of the space needle

The next day was the big day: Oktoberfest. We had a reservation from 12-5 in the Hofbrau-Festzelt tent, which is the biggest tent in the whole place. We’re talking massive. And this tent is mostly full of Americans and Italians, and some Germans too just because they’re everywhere.

The inside of the Hofbrau tent

Oktoberfest itself is like a gigantic carnival with rides and games, and with these huge beer tents all around. Our reservations came with vouchers for two liters of beer and half a chicken each, and we got to sit in the tent for five hours and listen to the band (all dressed in lederhosen as well) play the same three songs over and over again. Two of the songs were in German, during one of which you were supposed to raise your mug and toast. They played this one after almost every song. The third song that they played the whole time was the one that goes “Heeeee-eeeeey Baby! I wanna kno-oo-ow, if you’ll be my girl”. Of course, all of the Americans loved that one (and danced to it every time, too). My friend Jess actually bought a dirndl and wore it to the tent. She looked so cute in it!

The band in the Hofbrou tent

Next up, Prague!

And we thought we were cynics. Honestly, we're like babes in the wood compared to this lot.
At a round table on social media marketing in Paris today, Bundeep Rangar, chairman and CEO of IndusView, explained just how great it is to be able to ignore local laws.
“Social media allows you to circumvent grey areas of the law,” he explained. “Cutting edge in our industry is the vice industry. In a lot of countries, you can't advertise gambling sites, so what do you do? You create a social media site where you can click through to ads. It's not as advertising, it's as a link in the text, and that's perfectly legal.”
Michael Terpin, chairman and CEO of SocialRadius, cited viral ads such as the 'baby-father' one which turned out to have been created by the Danish Tourist Board, and the Lonely Girl blog.
“She was a paid actress, and when it came out – what a scandal! But they got so much advertising out of it,” he said. “Stunts work. You just have to be careful that any backlash you get supports your work.”
He's also a big fan of video bloggers. “If you can get them interested, they will get it into the search engines really quickly,” he said. “We did the 'I'm a Celebrity' campaign in the US. We got 20 bloggers with big followings to compete with each other to go to Costa Rica – and got two million visitors to the site.”
Less entertaining, but giving food for thought, were some of the figures. Apparently, social media marketing is already a $1 billion industry, and is growing at a massive 50 per cent per year – the only sector apart from search engine advertising that isn't either stagnant or in decline.

I've been hit!

Two hours, yes TWO, after picking up my car from the dealership’s service department, I was horribly hit by yet another careless LA driver.. sent me spinning into the intersection, the entire rear bumper tore off and scattered debris around the crossing, and my gas tank leaked last week’s refill all over the scene. Gower and Franklin, officially the most dangerous intersection in Hollywood in my book… to think I had debated NOT going to the gym that late at night but motivated last minute… I could have been lazily snacking in front of the TV in self-deprecation instead of tearing up over my once again defaced little car. Now I await the adjuster’s call: earlier, words like ‘potential total’ and ‘unsalvageable’ peppered the conversation.
The only positive from this whole experience is that I have now tested BMW’s emergency response squad and the roadside assistance they trigger, which appeared five minutes after the crash unsolicited.

I hate LA driving.