BP ruined the Ecosystem and their Reputation

I recently read an article discussing the effects of the BP oil spill. There have been detrimental side effects on the marine life because of the oil and other toxins.  Fish and shrimp have been mutated and it is likely that the gulf  ecosystem will not recover for quite some time. There were many pictures of fish and shrimp with mutations and open sores. Do you think that BP's reputation will ever recover from theses serious ecological problems? Do you think criminal penalties should be brought against BP's executives?

In Response to Aislynn's post about Apple

I completely agree with your post; I have a Mac, Iphone and Ipad and I love them all. I could never switch to anther phone or PC because all my devices work flawlessly together. They make it very easy for their products to work together and also make it very hard for you use other brands devices with them. This is the ultimate form of brand loyalty because I love the brand and they really don't leave me a choice to switch to another brand without spending a couple thousand dollars. Apples strategy is to come out with the best before all the others, so they really don't allow anyone to keep up with them.

How long do you think Apple will stay on top? Does anyone think any other companies stand a chance at this point?

Extreme Drink Branding

This is a stunt sponsored by Mountain Dew and it is very similar to what you would see companies like red bull do as a form of branding. They are branded as a "extreme" drink so they do extreme stunts to appeal to that particular demographic. They are normally young adults who do extreme sports like biking and skateboarding. This is a very similar target as Red Bulls target. Do you think that this type of ad is better than red bulls or do you think its an imitation? I think that they are kind of copying red bulls marketing strategy and doing it with much less success than red bull.

In response to Alex's Post abput Instagram

I think that it was 100% worth it and would have been a huge threat to Facebook if they did nothing about. Around April 4th, Instagram made its app available for Androids and proved that it was not just for one demographic, the richer Iphone user. After they made the app available their data usage doubled in one day.It went from a little over 750,000 users to almost 2 million and then reached over 2 million by April 6th. This is when Zuckerberg realized that if he didn't acquire Instagram someone else would. Twitter even made a bid one it and was unsuccessful. A while back Yahoo had the opportunity to buy Facebook for a billion dollars and turned it down. Look at them now, almost bankrupt while Facebook has a 100 billion dollar valuation.

Branding Yourself: Brought to a new level

In the beginning of the semester, we were asked to think of our selves as a product or a brand. well two recent grad students in the UK have done that and brought it to a whole new level. They have begun selling space on their face for ad's. They started the company BuyMyFace.com and are not selling spots on their face for up to $750 a day and have raised over $50,000 in the past 6 month. The spots were originally about $1.50 per ad per day but to to increased popularity they are selling 500 times more than there original price. They are allowing companies to physically brand them. I think this is such a simple idea and it is clearly working for these guys.  I cant think of anything legal that would draw more attention than a logo on someones face walking down the street. Would you sell a spot on your face for $750 a day? I think I would. Has anyone heard of anything else like this?
http://www.businessinsider.com/two-british-grads-sell-their-faces-to-raise-money-for-student-loans-2012-4

In response to alex's post about Google

These are called augmented reality glasses because they are able to add features like distance between too object or even facial recognition to things you actually see.I think it is a great idea and its very terminator like. Google comes up with all sorts of cool ideas like this because they give their employees time to work on things that interest them. This is why they came up with the self driving car. This is definitely a new market with very little direct competition or at least very little competition that could compete with a company like Google. I would wear these if they made them a little less geeky looking or created a lens that could fit into any glasses frame. Does anyone think that these are pointless? or do you think that Google could really be on to something with this ground breaking technology?

In response to Tyler’s post about Mobil Payment

This is an interesting post and almost reminds me of the movie Surrogate. In a world where humans do not interact they just use surrogate robots to do everything for them. But I don't think we are anywhere close to that state yet but we certainly have been on the decline with human interaction. The main reason, I believe, is that human-to-human contact from an economic sense is very inefficient. It take a lot longer to deal with a low skilled worker, who is most likely unhappy with their job, than to click a single button on your phone to order and pay for your food. Its brilliant from a business sense because you have increased efficiency at a much lower cost. Does anyone think we have crossed the line of relying too much on technology? It would be interesting to see how different our lives would be without our common pieces of technology, even for one day.