Ray Wang gave me a demo in Orlando last week of the Tesla mobile app which allows you to "interact with your Model S to monitor charging, pre-condition your car on very hot or cold days, and even honk the horn to find your Model S in a crowded parking lot."
I think he honked his Model S in California because he said his wife texted him "cut it out".
Demos always cause trouble :)
Photo Credit - Ray Wang
Tiny Uruguay has such a small local market, companies there must think globally. Luckily, they're prepared to do so: Local education rates are rising, and expats such as Wi-Fi pioneer Pablo Brenner are returning. (He founded the country's first VC firm, Prosperitas Capital Partners.) These are some of the winners in this emerging tech hub.
Inetsat: A full-service TV content distributor, providing a platform, low-cost servers, and cloud-based monitoring to local TV networks at reduced cost.
Cubox: A software development studio founded by Evan Henshaw-Plath, who was also the first employee at Odeo, the company that would become Twitter.
Clinixon: A low-cost, cloud-based system for small health clinics to monitor their patients' progress.
Fascinating interview with Ari Emanuel and Patrick Whitesell, co-CEOs of the talent agency, William Morris Endeavor which shows the continuing power of creative talent and content even as digital media takes many twists and turns.
"All this disruption to distribution is good for us, because content matters more, and therefore as agents we have more power.
We define content very broadly. Representing chefs, designers, makeup artists--it's all important. How do you think about their business in multiple distribution platforms? Do you need Vogue? Could you have a makeup artist and a fashion person and a thing that's taking care of the technology to create opportunity for clients in a different way? That's the kind of thing we think about all day.
You're defining Hollywood as the movie business! We sit in the entertainment business, and that goes from Chill and Uber all the way up to the movies.
When everyone has Internet-connected televisions, it's gonna be the Wild, Wild West. Is there going to be a Coke app then? Is Coke gonna then have some of its own original stuff? Will they buy that stuff? Music? Will Coke come to us? Will they do it themselves? Will there be a Rihanna channel, like there is right now? That's why we've created the Audience [a social media management firm]. How is all of this going to be discovered? Platforms like Path, which we're an investor in, and Facebook, Google+, and Tumblr enable discovery through social. But we are not going to pick a horse right now. We want to see how it evolves. The great thing is that the "dying" business, this traditional business that we're all in? It's pretty fxxxin' good"
But producing in vitro meat — muscle tissue that’s cultured from animal cells and grown in a laboratory — has none of those hang-ups. In fact, it’s mouthwateringly efficient compared with existing methods of meat production, using 45% less energy and 99% less land, according to some estimates. It’s even endorsed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. In 2008 the advocacy group promised a $1 million prize to the first producer that could mass-market lab-grown meat — proof that vegetarians who currently shun pork might be open to, say, lab-grown bacon.
Nobody has claimed that prize yet. But physiologist Mark Post and his team at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, who have already grown small amounts of meat tissue, say they’re months away from producing the first in vitro burger. Their challenge — aside from convincing consumers that lab meat isn’t as gross as it sounds — will be cost. Proper cell cultivation is pricey (development expenses for the burger are estimated at north of $100,000), so it’ll be tough to scale with conventional farming, which produces 50 billion hamburgers each year in the U.S
I was pleasantly surprised to see a 8 page insert in USA Today on the Samsung Galaxy S4. There’s 4 of the pages on my hotel room floor in the photo - each page highlights new features in the S4. Ed Baig, in his review in a separate section of the paper highlights a few of the features
"Want to answer a call or skip a song with the wave of your hand? Go right ahead. Want to pause a video by looking away from the screen? You can do that, too. Did someone walk in front of your family just as you were capturing the perfect pose? Poof — the interloper can be made to disappear from the picture. You can also use your phone as a remote control for your television — whether the TV is from Samsung or not — and receive recommendations of what to watch."
While we all get excited about social and mobile – digital - marketing, it is a useful reminder that traditional print, radio, billboard and other media are not exactly dead
Of course, the S4 is getting plenty of TV, web, infographic and other contemporary exposure – will probably become a case study for the ultimate in multi-channel advertising
The first part of the system is a hub that forms the bridge between the Internet and home devices supporting low-power, wireless protocols like Zigbee and Z-wave. SmartThings adds a set of reference devices to that: a motion sensor, a contact sensor that can be attached to doors and windows, and a low-resolution cloud-controlled camera. You can also use standards-based devices from other manufacturers. Finally, there’s the SmartTag, a keyfob that indicates your presence and also acts as an environment sensor. All kinds of apps will run on top of the basic platform.
I recently posted What your hotel knows about you
At Inforum yesterday, I heard Bob Dunfee of Infor present a hotel use case (“Happy Hotels”) and the data they can pretty easily (and without violating too many privacy rules) gather for one of their patrons (“Lindsay Smith”). His slide below shows existing data most CRM and internal systems have collected over time from traditional channels and then the new customer data especially from Lindsay’s Facebook social graph. Infor's own CRM assets leverage Radian6 from salesforce.com for broader social listening.
Bob also described a bit of Infor’s relationship with 8thBridge (which is especially successful in retail circles) and the addition of actual commerce and product data makes the customer profile grow even thicker.
When you step back and add geospatial and other data from mobile channels, you see the amazing amount of customer data that is becoming available to most industries.
Bob said it well when he summarized we are moving into a world of “Actionable Social CRM”
In a world where the perception of clean technology is that it
largely “failed” — witness the bankrupt startups and lost investments
and (in the U.S., at least) the toxic political conversation that
emerged about clean tech during 2012 — apps may be its saving grace.
Many of the most promising startups in clean tech focus on devices and
apps that enable individuals, households, businesses and cities to use
data to improve their energy and environmental footprint.
Sustainability-related apps cover the gamut of topics and audiences — and professionalism. A random sampling: greenMeter (pictured above; computes your vehicle's power and fuel use, and evaluates your driving to increase efficiency), JouleBug (a social, mobile game that rewards players for reducing energy waste), AirStat.us (a free, daily air quality alert for your city), iRecycle (access to more than 1.5 million ways to dispose of stuff), iGo Vampire Power Calculator (shows how much energy the electronics in your home use and cost), PEV4me (calculates the financial and environmental impacts of driving plug-in electric vehicles), Light Bulb Finder (shows how to switch from conventional light bulbs to energy-saving equivalents with the same fit, style and light quality), and GoodGuide (provides health, environmental and social performance ratings for consumer products).
Infor-Art
Every visit I make to an Infor faciility - as in the NY HQ earlier this year - or event - as in Inforum this week, I am blown away by the aesthetics in every aspect of its operations. The excellent taste of CEO Charles Phillips and creativity of executives like Chip Coyle and Marc Scibelli and the imprint of the captive agency, Hook and Loop is pervasive:
The NY HQ - the stunning lobby
The Innovation Hub at Inforum - the white couches spread around the event provided a nice contrast to the Infor logo reds
The growing ads at major airports
The User Experience of the software
The broader role of Hook and Loop, the captive agency
Photo Credits: Infor
April 27, 2013 in Creativity in Product Design, Industry Commentary | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)