For an advertisement by New York-based fashion brand Nooka, designer Mike Lubrano imagined converting a DeLorean into an iconic New York City yellow taxi cab. He says that the automobiles have ‘come to symbolize the future’ and communicate the brand’s ‘futuristic philosophy.’
When Diet Coke surpassed Pepsi to become the No.2 soda in America, it was as if the Cola Wars had finally declared a winner: Coca-Cola...
[Much of the blame] has to do with the astronomical number of gaffes Pepsi has made in the past few years, particularly in its brand management and the way it has branded its flagship product...Pepsi's 2009 logo redesign was dogged by political distractions
Pepsi paid Arnell Group an outrageous $1 million for this logo, which isn't drastically different from its predecessor.
The logo also made headlines for resembling that of newly elected President Obama...
...Coupled with Pepsi's new slogans -- "Yes You Can" and "Choose Change" -- the company was criticized for copying Obama's award-winning campaign and aligning itself with it at the same time.
...RIM said sales of BlackBerrys fell sharply in the latest quarter, leading to the company's first revenue decline in seven years. Its subscriber growth rate from the previous quarter also hit an all-time low of 3%. And two of RIM's top officers stepped down, leaving RIM's executive bench as shallow as it has ever been.
Meanwhile, morale has flagged amid the unrest, according to executives inside and outside the company.
At a dinner meeting in February between RIM's chief technology officer, David Yach, one of the executives who left Thursday, and chief information officers from companies and government agencies, including the Department of Defense, the mood from the RIM side was somber, according to a person who attended the dinner.
...The company's market capitalization hovers over $7 billion, a big bite for any buyer to swallow. Some bankers said there would be few buyers at that price tag for the whole company.
The exception would be giants like Microsoft Corp. andNokia Corp. The two explored a joint bid for RIM last year, according to people familiar with the situation, but those talks were preliminary and didn't lead to a bid.
Nokia has adopted Microsoft's operating system for its latest smart phones. Given that close partnership, the two could make a coordinated approach, if they decided to bid, according to people familiar with the situation.
If they jointly bid, the two companies would likely scrap RIM's mobile operating system and instead equip BlackBerrys with Microsoft's Windows software, with Microsoft taking over RIM's enterprise network, these people said.
But the funniest part of the ads is the fawning reassurance factor, apparently revealed by careful focus-group testing. That is, the secret fear of every Can-Am buyer is: "Will Real Bikers™ Laugh At Me"?
The first attempt to assuage these concerns in the ads is this drive-by acknowledgement by real bikers. Like, don't worry, dude -- you're still cool even though you're driving a trike.
Just to reinforce the notion that Can Am drivers aren't nerds is this scene, like something out of Roadhouse. This is where the hard-assed, grizzled biker inspects the Can Am and then nods approvingly. When, as we all know, he'd be laughing his ass off, pointing, and slapping his knee.
At the rate his support among the young is deteriorating, it won't be long before we see ads featuring bikini-clad Swedish girls beckoning young males to support President Subprime McTrainingwheels' campaign.We've gone far beyond that "check engine" light now: Toyota has created a social networking function for its cars so you can friend it on Facebook or have it Tweet you when the gas is low or just chitchat about shoes with it. Because you know, checking the gauge when you're actually in the car would just be too much work.Toyota will be launching its own private social network, Toyota Friend, CNNMoney reports. Beyond the private realm of Toyota Friend, users will be able to extend the communication to friends and family via Facebook/Twitter, receiving updates in your feed and such.
Tweet: My accelerator is stuck. Please drive with caution.
Driver: I KNOW! Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!
They wish.Trump's broken the perpetual gridlock we've found at the top of the Republican field, getting 26% to 17% for Mike Huckabee, 15% for Romney, 11% for Newt Gingrich, 8% for Sarah Palin, 5% for Ron Paul, and 4% for Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty.
"Bush has been so bad, maybe the worst president in the history of this country. He has been so incompetent, so bad, so evil that I don't think any Republican could have won," Trump told NY1.com in an exclusive Nov. 11, 2008, interview... "You know, you can be enemies with people, whether it's Iran, Iraq, or anyplace else and you can still have dialogue. These people wouldn't even talk with him. It's terrible," he said.
Regarding Obama, Trump said, "I think [he's] going to lead through consensus. It's not going to be just a bull run like Bush did. He just did whatever the hell he wanted.
While [working weekends as a programmer], he developed PolicyTree.org, a site that sought to simplify political debate about the Iraq war by presenting various policy perspectives in flow-chart form. This earned him a scholarship to the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy in 2006. A mere three months later, though, he dropped out when Mr. Lefkofsky offered him $1 million in angel capital to keep working on the site.
After struggling to cancel a cell phone contract later that year, Mr. Mason became interested in collective action. In an early interview with a tech blog, he attributes the basic Groupon concept to “an overactive sense of vengeance,” wondering, “What if we just got everyone on the web who had this problem to refuse to abide by (cell phone companies') terms and just basically stop paying their bill?”
Thus began ThePoint.com, a group-powered site whose goal was “solving all the world's unsolvable ideas.” In an oft-invoked story that demonstrates Mr. Mason's quirky personality, he initiated a campaign on the Point to raise $10 billion to enclose Chicago in a dome that would shield the city from cold weather. (The plan raised $250,000 in pledges, but because it fell short of it goal—or didn't “tip,” in Groupon parlance—no one actually ponied up.)
But Mr. Lefkofsky eventually began pressuring the Point to make money, and Mr. Mason noted that people were using the site to organize discounted group purchases. Groupon launched in November 2008...
Per capita, each media type has seen a rise and fall. Digital's rise was microscopic - it plateaued and began dropping in the blink of an eye. After all, music is just a series of bits -- and bits are extremely hard to protect. Next to impossible, in fact.
For years, albums were the way the record companies made money. Bundle a hit or two with a bunch of filler and force the consumer to buy the entire package, like it or not (Aside: Cable TV industry? You're next). But those days have long since passed - people buy only what they want and nothing more.
Singles are the only product type that's still working well for the industry, but let me be the first to predict that we will soon see it flatten and then plummet.Google has run a sting operation that it says proves Bing has been watching what people search for on Google, the sites they select from Google’s results, then uses that information to improve Bing’s own search listings. Bing doesn’t deny this.As a result of the apparent monitoring, Bing’s relevancy is potentially improving (or getting worse) on the back of Google’s own work. Google likens it to the digital equivalent of Bing leaning over during an exam and copying off of Google’s test...
...Around late May of last year, Google told me it began noticing that Bing seemed to be doing exceptionally well at returning the same sites that Google would list, when someone would enter unusual misspellings...
...Google began to strongly suspect that Bing might be somehow copying its results, in particular by watching what people were searching for at Google. There didn’t seem to be any other way it could be coming up with such similar matches to Google, especially in cases where spelling corrections were happening.
Google thought Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser was part of the equation. Somehow, IE users might have been sending back data of what they were doing on Google to Bing. In particular, Google told me it suspected either the Suggested Sites feature in IE or the Bing toolbar might be doing this...
...When the [sting] was ready, about 20 Google engineers were told to run the test queries from laptops at home, using Internet Explorer, with Suggested Sites and the Bing Toolbar both enabled. They were also told to click on the top results. They started on December 17. By December 31, some of the results started appearing on Bing......before the test began, the [test] queries found either nothing or a few poor quality results on Google or Bing. Then Google made a manual change, so that a specific page would appear at the top of these searches, even though the site had nothing to do with the search. Two weeks after that, some of these pages began to appear on Bing for these searches.
It strongly suggests that Bing was copying Google’s results, by watching what some people do at Google via Internet Explorer...
Marketing dudes: how about the "Fifth Third Bank Race to Defeat Hunger"? Or -- whatever?
We had booked our tickets through Orbitz, which has a handy notification service. What wasn’t so handy was that on Monday, we received a robo-call from Orbitz simply stating, "Delta has canceled your flight to Detroit." The massive blizzard had resulted in thousands of canceled flights, mostly in the East, but some in the upper Midwest as well. Unfortunately, Orbitz does not try to reschedule for you nor provide any easy options for doing so.
I was pretty shocked that a snowstorm, albeit a blizzard, had seemingly taken out Delta’s entire customer service operation.
I was able to message @Delta and @DeltaAir, who confirmed that our flight had been rescheduled through Atlanta and subsequently booked all of our seats together for both legs of the trip.
This may be a useful example for businesses of all kinds: whether you like it or not, customers use social media to talk about you — and many times it won’t be positive. Like my experience with Delta on Twitter, good customer service on active social networks can help take a negative customer experience and transform it into something far more positive. 
But things did not go quite as planned, however, as evidenced by the reaction on Twitter.
What a d-nozzle.
I know I'm not very popular, but that's just downright insulting.
It's an interesting development, to be sure, and that also highlights the importance of Twitter as a platform.How Can I Earn Much More Money Via Survey without any Investment?
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