BMW will launch a new Genius Everywhere program, an Apple-like Genius Bar in time for the launch of their i3 electric vehicle which is expected in 2014. Clearly BMW sees Apple’s massive success in retail as a proven solution to support the launch of a new series of electric cars in North America. BMW will also rely upon Apple mobile technologies to arm their sales staff.
The Genius BMW Genius Everywhere program announced in AdvertisingAge will have pre-sale employees armed with iPads helping educate potential customs about this new electric line. The major difference as this point is Apple’s Genius Bar is for post sales while BMW will focus on education and pre sales. This is not the first time BMW has adopted Apple products, design and user experiences. BMW and Apple collaborated to bring iPod support to BMWs early in the car controls your digital device world and today they are also working to integrating Siri technology into more BMW models.
Tag: culture
Eisenhower and the French war in Vietnam outlined in the Pentagon Papers is proving to teach us some very interesting lessons. The Pentagon Papers now confirm actions under Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower that span 1945 – 1955. Even before the end of World War II France was demanding the Allied nations, namely the US and Britain to re-colonize Indo-China which they lost to the army of Japan.
The Pentagon Papers reaffirm the US under Eisenhower financed the French Indo-China war beginning in late 1946.
Truman and Eisenhower preferred to send tens of millions of dollars in military assistance to France. They both held a position that the US would not stand in the way of France’s re-colonization in South Vietnam, permitting the US to keep an arm’s length from a growing communist war supported by Soviet arms and Chinese military advisors. The cold war was indeed beginning to heat up Asia.
The surprise for me in reading the Eisenhower volumes is how a cold war against communism was shaping up in Thailand, rather than Vietnam. David Halberstam reminds us in his book “The Best and the Brightest” that it was Eisenhower’s advise to President-elect Kennedy that he would inherit a war requiring US troop involvement — in Laos, not in Vietnam. But well before Kennedy’s defeat of Nixon, back in 1954 the siege of Dien Bien Phu would change France and America for generations.
The Pentagon Papers Volume IV.c.9(b) is labeled “Direct Action: The Johnson Commitments, 1964-1968 and tells how difficult the relationship between Washington D.C. and Saigon was leading up to the Tet Offensive. After 40 years as a classified document, the only clarification in this volume was our investment in men and money didn’t mean a damn in the war against the north.
This volume was written right on the heels of Diem and Kennedy’s assassinations. It was a telling story: The war was not going to get any easier for either the US or the South Vietnamese against their determined enemy:
There seemed to be no compelling requirement to be tough with Saigon; it would only prematurely rock the boat. To press for efficiency would be likely, it was reasoned, to generate instability. Our objective became simple: if we could not expect more GVN efficiency, we could at least get a more stable and legitimate GVN. Nation-building was the key phrase. This required a constitution and free elections. Moreover, if we could not have the reality, we would start with appearances. U.S. influence was successfully directed at developing a democratic GVN in form. Beginning in September 1906, a series of free elections were held, first for a Constituent Assembly and later for village officials, the Presidency, House and Senate. U.S.-GVN relations from June of 1965 to 1968, then, have to be understood in terms of the new parameters of the liar. Before this date, our overriding objective had to be and was governmental stability, After the Diem coup, the GVN underwent six changes in leadership in the space of one and a half years. From June 1965 on, there was relative stability.
At the same time:
We never won in Vietnam. Over the weekend I found a November 2009 Newsweek issue about how the could have won in Vietnam. The headline addressed historical lessons regarding current US military goals in Afghanistan.
The lead was an attempt at revisionism regarding the war. It may be a trend to boast we could have won fighting the NVA and VietCong. To be honest the Pentagon Papers are now proving to be the ultimate trump card against revisionist history.
So far I have pushed through about half of the Pentagon Papers 7,300 pages. The early volumes alone provide clear evidence we NEVER could have won in Vietnam.
Arthron was concept for experiences in the domain of Art and Technology. Arthron facilities include its simple user interface and the manipulation of different media sources. Users can remotely add, remove and configure the presentation format as well as schedule the media streaming during an artistic performance.
Arthron is composed by six components described as follow. The Articulator is responsible for the remote management. This component concentrates a great part of the Arthron functionalities, such as stream scheduling (manual or automatic), network monitoring and measurement, remote configuration of other modules, access control, web page automatic generation for online publication, video effects, and communication tools. The Encoder is responsible for capturing and encoding (when necessary) of media source, which can be external (DV or HDV camera, DVD) or internal (a local file). The Decoder’s main functionality is to decode and display the media stream in a specific device (monitor, projector, etc). The Reflector is responsible for the replication and redistribution of media streaming over the network.
The VideoServer component is able to transcoding media streaming that will be published online. This component is also responsible for working with flv, ogg and h264 formats. The MapManager controls and displays the interactive map of Arthron components. MapManager offers to users an overview of the geographical distributed locations of Arthron components.