Watch Out, Best Buy, Ikea Will Soon Sell Their Own HDTV System And It’s Awesome - Matt Burns via TechCrunch
Game changer? maybe.
IKEA has announced launching the Uppleva line of integrated HDTV and furniture: it’s genius, and completely supports my contention from yesterday that only two kinds of retailers are growing. One, like IKEA and Apple, are selling their own designs, more or less exclusively. The second are specialty purveyors of carefully curated goods, like Trader Joe’s.
The Uppleva line is going to be very successful, I predict, and opens the TV market to IKEA, and will hasten the demise of chains like Best Buy:
Matt Burns via TechCrunch
The new UPPLEVA line completely disrupts the big box store’s HDTV buying process with a high-dose injection of Ikea genius.
Ikea has yet to announce the nitty-gritty details around the UPPLEVA line including the price. The line will apparently hit key stores in Stockholm, Milan, Paris, Gdansk, and Berlin in June 2012. Come autumn it will arrive at additional stores in Sweden, Italy, France, Poland, Denmark, Spain, Norway, and Portugal with a more broad launch following in 2013.
The YouTube teaser lays out some basic spec concerning the HDTV. It seems up to the task with a 1080p LED LCD screen, 400Hz response time, and some sort of smart TV functionality — all good stuff. But the HDTV really doesn’t matter. Even though it has the specs of a high-end screen, Ikea could have employed a mid-range model and still made the same magic.
Ikea understands that everything needs to work together. This new product line from the Swedish retailer exemplifies the notion of an all-in-one system. Sure, this probably doesn’t appeal to audio heads or A/V geeks, but it brings a beautiful system that works to the masses. Like with everything else Ikea sells, the UPPLEVA system is completely customizable with a range of TV sizes and cabinet designs. Buyers probably still have to piece them together using those dumb keys, though.
IKEA is one of the few companies that can really battle Apple for the living room.
(via emergentfutures)
Source: stoweboyd
Railroad Sensors Predict Derailments Wirelessly « Wireless Sensor Networks Blog
Union Pacific, the nation’s largest railroad company, says a new software program deployed throughout its network can now predict certain kinds of derailments days or weeks before they are likely to occur, improving safety and potentially avoiding millions of dollars in damages. The company moves some 900 trains per day, including 175 per day in its central north-south corridor.
Union Pacific first started using acoustic sensors 10 years ago to transmit noises from vibrations of ball bearings in train wheels back to a control center that can communicate directly with engineers on board the trains. This allows the company to get trains off the track at the earliest convenient opportunity (for example after a load is delivered and the car returns to a terminal), but before a faulty bearing causes a derailment. More recently, the company started using visual sensors that can detect when wheels begin to flatten–another factor that can cause an problem on the rails.
@gotransit good idea!
(via emergentfutures)
Source: wsnblog.com
Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch | Fast Company
Culture, like brand, is misunderstood and often discounted as a touchy-feely component of business that belongs to HR. It’s not intangible or fluffy, it’s not a vibe or the office décor. It’s one of the most important drivers that has to be set or adjusted to push long-term, sustainable success. It’s not good enough just to have an amazing product and a healthy bank balance. Long-term success is dependent on a culture that is nurtured and alive. Culture is the environment in which your strategy and your brand thrives or dies a slow death.
I would say this even stronger: culture is what is implemented in the organization and in the head of the employees while strategies, plans and organization charts are incomplete and one dimensional sketches of what we want the organization to be. The problem is that we think that we can bypass the concept of culture to get directly from these sketchy plans to changed organizational behavior, when in fact the changed culture is what we really want to achieve.
Powerful
(via emergentfutures)
Source: futuramb
Source: Flickr / dancphotography
Hmmm… wondering if this is a wake up call to companies that refuse to consider how Skype can be USED within their network instead of just banning it out of fear…
Skype is killing long distance, one minute at a time
The Internet is a great deflator, squeezing out the middlemen and lowering prices. The shifting fortunes of Wall Street brokers and travel agents are good examples. However, the Internet’s deflationary impact is on full display in the international long-distance market, where Skype has started to take away any and all growth from the phone companies.
Skype (now a division of Microsoft), which at its very basic level is a people-to-people connectivity service, has become everything the phone companies feared it for. The latest data from research
» via GigaOM
(via emergentfutures)
Source: gigaom.com
BPS Research Digest: Why we're better at predicting other people's behaviour than our own
Psychologists have identified an important reason why our insight into our own psyches is so poor. Emily Balcetis and David Dunning found that when predicting our own behaviour, we fail to take the influence of the situation into account. By contrast, when predicting the behaviour of others, we correctly factor in the influence of the circumstances. This means that we’re instinctually good social psychologists but at the same time we’re poor self-psychologists.
Very interesting!
(via emergentfutures)
Source: futuramb
Happy New Year
The O.R.B: A mobile headset doubles as a ring, it vibrates, you can read SMS, has voice-to-text function, Caller ID and Remainders.
So COOL!!!
(via emergentfutures)
Source: kevinklvuniverse
