Monthly Archives: May 2016

Marketing Lessons from the Political arena… what went wrong and right

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One of the rules that we always talk at Board meetings, closed doors, is how do we get our team NOT to look into the competition as the beacon to look at what to do, how to react, how to gain market share.  Always trying to convey the message that you should be aware of them, but you should go after your clients, customers, stakeholders, and make what is best for them and the company, disregard what your competition does or not.

I learn this when I was a kid and my father used to wake us up at 4:30 am, jump into the club swimming pool, and be very competitive.   I really never made it more than what expected, because – my father dixit – I was too focused on the other lanes, on what the there people were doing instead of trying to beat myself every day, every new stroke by stroke….

If you look at why the candidates that are gone, are gone, is mostly because they stop worrying about their constituents, the voters, their public; and they focus on what was the competition doing.

Listen to them all :

Ted Cruz  and Marco Rubio even teamed to “bring down Donal Trump and make sure he never gets elected …” annd now even the Democrats are doing it; Bernie Sanders just made this his central speech .

Will Hillary Clinton be the last one to say it ?   So far she has been the smarter of all, dismissing her “competition” and stating that she focus on the people that follow her and that wants to listen to her.  But her campaign managers are not  : “We can’t have Donald Trump in the White House “ Hillary Stop Trump

My advice to whoever ends up been the candidate : WORK for YOUR votes, talk to your constituents, be strong in your points, this is NOT about not letting Donal Trump become President, it is about WHAT the voters want.

 

VR , Project Tango and what does it really mean …

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Google just announce that Project Tango, their vision of how we bring to real live, the depiction of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash vision of how we will combine what we do, how we do it, between the real world, the Universe, and the virtual world, the METAVERSE

In his world, Stephenson people will be going from one to the other, using something very similar to the Oculus, where people could even work, managing automated devices, from a distance, from home or some other place, but also they will have at some point to interact in person.  Countries become server farms and URL’s

Looking at how investment in this area is accelerating, we can understand why Project Tango is so important.

Media-In-ARVR-2-Header

Investment is accelerating in this area, mostly forced by Media companies, that can feel this is a great opportunity to level the competition ( CB Insights )

But while Google plays with all these concepts, and spend their stockholders money in all this research, the rest of the world has to deal with what is the definitions of VR = Virtual Reality.

Let’s see what FB thinks about VR : During FB8 Mark Zuckerberg was clear about VR , but no so much : “We had 360-degree open-source cameras. We had the bot revolution.We had antennas connecting the unconnected. It’s all sort of smoke and mirrors right now, but Facebook at least seems to be making this real much faster than anyone would have ever thought.”

Talking to some friends in the space, here is where i am today.  So far all the the different explanations lead me to one of these 3 :

Virtual Reality Definitions:

  • The most common these days is 360 video ( most of the pieces of the NYTimes )  Don’t know if I would call this Virtual Reality.  Eveything is REAL… nothing is added.  You can just play with what was taken… Is like having the best seat at the Opera house.  perfect for creating Travel guides, Museums Virtual visits, etc.. but all you need is a camera that is taking in 360 degrees so you can show that and let the technology control what you see or not.  This could (is ) typically added with 3D and there are way too many applications as well as specialized hardware doing this ( Oculus being the most important).

YouTube’s head of product Neal Mohan put it recently, when talking about the experience of 360 video, all you need for VR with Google is a smartphone and cheap Cardboard viewer. “Those are the kinds of magical experiences this technology is going to be able to create, without having to spend money on some fancy headset.” Tango is likely going to take that strategy, and push it one step further.

  • Augmented Reality.  I called this the Hybrid solution, You have a REAL image, video, Text and they by using technology you can over impose virtual things. Over impose video, images, where real takes get mixed with  images stored.  The best example I was able to imagine ( there are others but for now this is very good explaining what I mean)  think of a room, or house, where you can see the room through the lens of you camera, cellphone, etc. What you see are walls, empty room.  Then you use one of those hardware ( like Oculus or the cardboard or plastic where you just place your cel phone) and through and app you are suddenly immerse in that empty room.  Now with your hands and using your head as movement, you can start adding “furniture” that you have in a file or maybe even from Furniture Stores that you access online. The furniture takes the exact size to fit or not inside the room.   What it means is that based on a REAL physical experience ( the Room, the House, etc) you start adding images, video or text that is NOT real.

IKEA tried this in 2014 Catalog , that is 2 years ago… it had too many glitches, bu they were in the right direction.  Ikea just announce a new version developed at the French company Allegorithmic, using Unreal Engine 4 from Epic Games, specific for Kitchen design

  • VIRTUAL REALITY.  Now, think of yourself sitting or laying at home.  Your device operating in front of your eyes in a closed vision path. ( hardware like Oculus or cardboard or plastic with a cel phone that has an app that controls the 3D sensation and that control with movement).     You are suddenly ANY place in the world, you can access ANY posible video experience that has been prepared ( or in the near future, these “experiences” could be totally unprepared) you are suddenly talking to people (the redefinition of Instant Messenger) , presenting yourself with a specific image ( an avatar? ), buying , selling, interacting with other people or situations. … nothing is real world, but everything seems to exist.   You just place yourself in a another dimension.

For now we have to focus on the first one.. Content companies need to prepare for all this, let their content free so it can be accesses by any other program/person in a virtual fashion.  Today is still a dream.