UK Journey

Voy a utilizar mi blog para actualizar periodicamente sobre mi estancia en el Reino Unido. Lo hare del mismo modo que cuando estuve en Boston, es decir, proporcionando una contrasena con el fin de no hacer publico el contenido de los posts, no viendome obligado a adecuar el contenido y registro (pudiendo asi explicar todo de una forma natural).

Bailout

A video dedicated to the daring attitude of South Park creators and how US treasury system appears to work :)

Una buena forma de celebrar un aniversario

...está tan presente en tu vida, que hasta hay un color que se llama así.

Otra escena ambientada por la misma canción...



Una canción sobre esperanza, desesperanza, amor y desamor que tanto en Shrek como en el anuncio de Repsol, resume una historia. En este caso, resume los 50 años de un producto y servicio que ha permitido y está permitiendo (en menor medida desde la llegada del gas natural) la provisión de un bien de primera necesidad a toda la población. La cercanía que este producto evoca en la población se fundamenta, en gran medida, en la forma en que éste llega a los hogares mediante su entrega a domicilio. Por ello, el "aleluia" de la canción recuerda al sentimiento que provoca a la gente escuchar ese "canto" tan particular que anuncia la llegada del preciado bien.

Blogs as corporate tools

The first time people get in touch with Blogs, may think that they are just another entertainment tool created to show our friends funny stuff as some platforms we already have as Fotolog, Facebook, Clickr...Although we can also use blogs to that purpose, the global trend is not that one. Blogs are being a successful way to connect profesional people all over the world to talk about serious and relevant topics. We can see this now in milliards of blogs over the Web; however, in today's post I want to talk about a blog created by the vice chairman of General Motors as a new way to communicate with the customers.

Two years ago, Bob Lutz, vice chairman of General Motors, when trying to find a way to have closer communication with customers, decided to rely on a new blog as an effective corporate tool. The corporate blog, called Fastlane (http://fastlane.gmblogs.com) enables Bob to start conversations with prospect customers about products, services or even the future of the company. Nowadays, this blog is not only one of Bob's passion, but also a trusted site in the Net. So, why did Bob Lutz decided to start this new adventure alone, without delegating the work to the communication department or any other worker? Some years ago, as we discused in class, corporate webpages were an effective and comonly used method to transmit the customer all the demanded information about the company. However, nowadays they are no more an appreciated communication channel by customers. While some companies trust in keeping track of the purchase data of their customers, others as Starbucks or Disney have realised that this may not be a definitive factor. The agility and precision that a Blog has to transmit the real needs of the customers made it one of the definitive channels for some multinationals to complement the other existing e-tools. In addition, it's necessary to point out that this is a powerful weapon to build product loyalty and generate product advocates, people who really feel the brand and have the willingness to spread a positive word-of-mouth.

The challenge of chosing your www.NAME.xxx

In one of our e-Marketing classes, some one month ago, we faced the challenge of chosing a new web adress for a ficticious product called Gogiberries. When trying to find an adequate name, every team thought in diverse variables and came with an original (and available in the Net) name. Some of the teams found appealing the idea of a name easy to recall as gogo.com; some others tried to link the name with the product itself with a name as gojiberries.com; and some other just try to find some original names Gojizilla.

We don't know what would be the most successful name if launching the product to the market. However, we are aware of the possibilities Internet allow us. For example, we can buy more than one domain and re-direct all them to the same Webpage. In this case, we could build only a webpage but try to attract young segment with Gojizilla.com and more care-about-benefits people through gojiberries.com. Some years ago, in the end of my high-school, I did a research about brands and I found that a lot of experts stated that most successfull brands must have between 4 and 6 letters (with as much vowels as possible); that's mainly because is easier for people both to say the name of the brand and also to recall it and store it into the brain. The most common example given by researchers is Adidas.

However, I ask a question to everybody: Do we have to care nowadays about how easy to write and to say is our Web Adress? With search engines and linked pages, is it still necessary to have short and easy-to-recall names?

Internet Generation

With the explosion of Internet around 1994, each day there are more people living together with Internet. A coming generation is growing up with a new technology and, as we have seen in class, new habits and behavior patterns are being created. This allows companies to change the strategy of approaching the audience. Now, they react easily and quickly to Web-oriented advertisement and to those commercials with a high level of technologic information. The selected audience realize that the company is talking to them, and the response to the ad is positive. As an example, above there's a commercial made to force people stop smoking; as said before, the advertiser knows who is the part of the audience they want to target: young people that have just started smoking or that want to try it. Because they know these people have grown up with Internet, they have chosen this kind of artistic approach to reach them..Well done!

Internet 2.0

I'll start my post with a vision of Internet 2.0 from an humanities (not engineering) perspective that comes from the Digital Ethnography department of Kansas State University. This video points out in less than five minutes a lot of furure implications of a new technology; I will try to focus my lines in the last seconds of the video, when the authors mention this key issues:


Teaching to the machine: we, the users, are supposed to be the new creators of Internet 2.0. A new technology that is also a new business model, that allows us to create and to have the opportunity put a price to our ideas. Is going to be a sustainable or a disruptive technology? At the moment, companies and individuals seem to absorb the incremental improvements of this technology in a good way. However, we must be aware and don't put off the scent selling cheap our valuable ideas. Companies not only keep track of our good ideas and contributions, but also re-adapt theirselves automatically and learn about us, the users and creators. An example is A.L.I.C.E. (http://www.alicebot.org), a virtual robot that learns while people chat with him; this is called artificial intelligence.

Copyright, Autorship and Identity: These are three integrated issues that may have an answer in the next years. Nowadays, the Web offers a lot of spaces where people can hide themselves offering corrupt information without being punished. In addition, there are also a lot of companies and individuals who take profit of other people's work because of the weak regulation over copyright. Internet 2.0 may face to these challenges and try to find a definitive solution.

Ethics: is linked with other issues such as copyright, autorship or identity. All technologies are controversial, since the individual can act through them to reach objectives that would be impossible to reach without technologies. What ethics do is to explain the correct behavior of the individual. With Internet 2.0, individuals are able to act with an incorrect behavior without having regard to some rules (because there's a lack of rules and law at the moment). This can happen of various ways, from acting with a false identity to writing false things about other companies. Also, aesthetics is not controled in Internet 2.0 and may be controlled in some way for the global good. Some harmful and painful images can be in the Web in seconds if there's no law or regulatory system that controls it.

Love and Family: with Internet 2.0 we are now linked to much more people that we actually think. The network involving ourselves can be enormous, but however, our daily live can be harmed. Our family, our values...spending time with people who we like or love may go to less, and the sense of love can change with virtual contact. Examples as Facebook show how is more important to have more people as "friends" in your network, that really knowing some closed friends in deepth.

New Business: Platforms to create e-Business

Nowadays, in the globalization era, we can easily transfer data, products and services anywhere in the world. The information economy gives people the opportunity to be important figures in the global panorama. And, how they can be important? On the one hand, there are a lot of ways people have to become important opinion formers: blogs, youtube, facebook, etc., all of them give people the chance of showing to billions of Internet users all what they create. This is called Internet 2.0, the interactive and user-centric net. On the other hand, Internet development in the past few years has been focused directly on Business. Start-up costs have considerably decreased with e-business, and thereby, a lot of daring and risky initiatives have been launched through Internet, taking into consideration that sunk costs were now smaller.

However, there were still a lot of legal and economic barriers to entry and only some few entrepreneurs with funds were able to start new businesses based on Internet. The net has been being a good platform to express and exchange ideas, but doubtfully a good "test bench" for new kinds of business since "dot com boom and bust". But fortunately, time has passed, and some new ideas are growing up. An example is a new platform recently created to launch business on the net. Similarly as some other Internet 2.0 platforms, this new web allows not-specialized users to easily start an e-business.All you have to do is creating a free account (signing-up is relatively easy); afterwards, you just have to customize your e-shop with your personal design and configuration...then, with some easy-to-get extra information, you'll be able to sell an unlimited number of products and start making money from your house. In addition, the web offers you a lot of features to enhance your business, as: search engines, ship orders, credit cards allowance, return policy pages, marketing tools, product exposure through automatic Froogle submission...

As you can see, with Internet 2.0 now everything is easier...not only communicating, but also making money.