This Crazy Japanese Ad Featuring A Double-Barreled ‘Shrimp Cannon’ Is Predictably Addictive | ||
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Most cellphone carriers looking to advertise their data services usually follow a well-trodden marketing route, using words like “unlimited” and obvious metaphors to emphasize speed. Japan’s biggest carrier NTT Docomo Inc. has taken the metaphor idea to the extreme. Its latest commercial, dubbed “Three-Second Cooking: Explosively Fast Fried Shrimp” is a one-minute high octane romp. (See video below.) It sees two “TV chefs” load up a highly-pressurized double-barreled cannon with shrimp, to fire through bread crumbs, egg, oil and a flamethrower — with the action set to a suitable death metal soundtrack. Their meal cooks in seconds flat. And it also hasn't taken long for the ad to notch up an impressive 6 million views on YouTube. The Wall Street Journal’s CMO Today says the video, which sees the shrimp fired down two separate lanes is meant to be representative of the two bandwidths that its LTE mobile data uses. Whether Japanese viewers make that connection remains to be seen, but the company will be hoping its left-field advertising approach will endear some consumers to the brand, which could go some way to turning around its recent sharp earnings decline. SEE ALSO: Business Insider’s 10 Best Ads Of 2014 Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Zipcar Founder Wants To Turn Every Car In The World Into A WiFi Hotspot | ||
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Veniam’s technology can connect any vehicle, like a city bus or a garbage truck, to the internet, essentially building a massive “network of moving things.” For example, buses can provide free WiFi to its passengers, while garbage trucks can connect to waste containers and monitor which ones need to be cleaned first. “Our first value proposition is having a reliable, low cost connectivity to vehicles. The second one is we can also service transport for the Internet of Things, getting sensor data back to the internet at a very low cost,” Chase told Business Insider. Chase co-founded Veniam with Joao Barros and Susana Sargento, two engineering professors from Portugal, and Roy Russell, the founding CTO of Zipcar. Although free WiFi is offered at subway stops in some cities like New York City, it’s not really available in moving vehicles. In fact, Chase claims, it’s nearly impossible to make a smooth transition from a cellular network to free WiFi in a moving vehicle fast enough without Veniam’s technology. Veniam’s concept has already been proven in some areas. The City of Porto in Portugal has used Veniam’s technology to connect more than 600 vehicles recently, and now 73% of bus riders with mobile devices in Porto use Veniam’s free WiFi. That’s roughly 55,000 monthly users and 3 terabytes of data transmitted monthly, it says. “Six hundred connected vehicles might not sound like a lot, but it’s in fact the largest connected vehicle network in the world. I think that points to the fact that connected vehicles is a novel concept,” Chase said. Although it’s still in its early stage, Veniam’s idea to connect cars has drawn a lot of interest from investors. Barro, Veniam’s CEO, was able to get about $1 million in government grants in Portugal to set up the network in Porto. And on Tuesday, it announced that it has raised $4.9 million in Series A funding from True Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Cane Investments, and a number of private investors. With the new funding, Veniam is planning to boost its presence in the US market. Barro tells us it’s already talking to potential customers in several US cities, including San Francisco, New York, and Austin. It plans to announce its first US city deployment in the first quarter of 2015. “Eventually, we would like to have every vehicle in the world use our technology,” Barro said. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Robin Chase, the co-founder and former CEO of the car-sharing service Zipcar, is on to another car-related startup: Veniam, a company that turns moving vehicles into WiFi hotspots. This Crazy Japanese Ad Featuring A Double-Barreled ‘Shrimp Cannon’ Is Predictably Addictive | ||
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Most cellphone carriers looking to advertise their data services usually follow a well-trodden marketing route, using words like “unlimited” and obvious metaphors to emphasize speed. Japan’s biggest carrier NTT Docomo Inc. has taken the metaphor idea to the extreme. Its latest commercial, dubbed “Three-Second Cooking: Explosively Fast Fried Shrimp” is a one-minute high octane romp. (See video below.) It sees two “TV chefs” load up a highly-pressurized double-barreled cannon with shrimp, to fire through bread crumbs, egg, oil and a flamethrower — with the action set to a suitable death metal soundtrack. Their meal cooks in seconds flat. And it also hasn't taken long for the ad to notch up an impressive 6 million views on YouTube. The Wall Street Journal’s CMO Today says the video, which sees the shrimp fired down two separate lanes is meant to be representative of the two bandwidths that its LTE mobile data uses. Whether Japanese viewers make that connection remains to be seen, but the company will be hoping its left-field advertising approach will endear some consumers to the brand, which could go some way to turning around its recent sharp earnings decline. SEE ALSO: Business Insider’s 10 Best Ads Of 2014 Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Oil Tycoon Harold Hamm Has Lost More Than Half His Fortune In 3 Months (CLR) | ||
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A founding father of the US shale boom, Harold Hamm, has seen his net worth drop by more than half in the last three months due to falling oil prices, according to Bloomberg. Hamm is the CEO and founder of Continental Resources, an exploration company that owns 1 million acres in North Dakota's Bakken oil field. According to Bloomberg, Hamm has seen the value of his shares in the company fall by more than $12 billion since August. Hamm, who is largest shareholder of Continental, is hardly in poor house. The oil baron still has an estimated net worth of $11.1 billion, according to the latest figures from Bloomberg's Billionaires Index. As oil prices continue to slide, Hamm told Bloomberg that a slowdown in US shale production is unavoidable:
Meanwhile, November was the strongest month in nearly 30 years for US crude oil output. US oil fields produced 8,864 barrels per day last month, the highest average since May 1986. Hamm added that shale producers in Texas and North Dakota will not be as hard hit by falling prices as some oil-producing nations, like Venezuela and Iran. “We can adjust quickly,” he said. “It’s a lot easier to adjust companies than it is for countries to adjust. When you’ve got people starving or social policies within countries that people are used to, it’s hard to adjust those"... “This is a bump in the road, a correction, an adjustment that we’re going through right now,” Hamm said. People “need to calm down, take the long view and there’s certainly no need to panic at this point or any point.” This isn't the only blow to Hamm's personal fortune this year. In November, the oil tycoon was ordered to pay is ex-wife Sue Ann nearly $1 billion after ending a 26-year marriage. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Amazon Is Killing The Royal Mail — And The Government Is Doing Nothing About It | ||
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The Royal Mail is having a terrible day, after the UK regulatory office for communications, Ofcom, said that the company is not under threat from lower-cost competitors such as Amazon. Its stock lost more than 3% on Tuesday morning.
Ofcom released this note this morning (emphasis added): Having carefully assessed this evidence, including the confidential business plans of Royal Mail and its largest competitor Whistl, Ofcom does not believe the universal service is currently under threat from competition in the 'direct delivery' market, where operators collect and deliver letters themselves without using Royal Mail's network. Ofcom has therefore decided, in a separate statement on competition today, not to impose new regulatory conditions on Royal Mail's direct-delivery competitors. Royal Mail was hoping for measures to put a break on courier services like Amazon and UPS, who are slicing up the old monopoly's share of the market. The BBC wrote that the company has been complaining that competitors are being allowed to cherry-pick more lucrative delivery areas. This is a second recent blow for the newly privatised company. On November 19, the company's CEO Moya Green declared that: "the impact of Amazon delivering an increasing number of its own parcels using its own delivery network will reduce the annual rate of growth in our addressable market to 1-2 per cent." That admission had also caused a big fall in the company's stock:
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The company was the worst performer in the FTSE100 list, the 100 biggest listed companies in the London Stock Exchange:
Zipcar Founder Wants To Turn Every Car In The World Into A WiFi Hotspot | ||
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Veniam’s technology can connect any vehicle, like a city bus or a garbage truck, to the internet, essentially building a massive “network of moving things.” For example, buses can provide free WiFi to its passengers, while garbage trucks can connect to waste containers and monitor which ones need to be cleaned first. “Our first value proposition is having a reliable, low cost connectivity to vehicles. The second one is we can also service transport for the Internet of Things, getting sensor data back to the internet at a very low cost,” Chase told Business Insider. Chase co-founded Veniam with Joao Barros and Susana Sargento, two engineering professors from Portugal, and Roy Russell, the founding CTO of Zipcar. Although free WiFi is offered at subway stops in some cities like New York City, it’s not really available in moving vehicles. In fact, Chase claims, it’s nearly impossible to make a smooth transition from a cellular network to free WiFi in a moving vehicle fast enough without Veniam’s technology. Veniam’s concept has already been proven in some areas. The City of Porto in Portugal has used Veniam’s technology to connect more than 600 vehicles recently, and now 73% of bus riders with mobile devices in Porto use Veniam’s free WiFi. That’s roughly 55,000 monthly users and 3 terabytes of data transmitted monthly, it says. “Six hundred connected vehicles might not sound like a lot, but it’s in fact the largest connected vehicle network in the world. I think that points to the fact that connected vehicles is a novel concept,” Chase said. Although it’s still in its early stage, Veniam’s idea to connect cars has drawn a lot of interest from investors. Barro, Veniam’s CEO, was able to get about $1 million in government grants in Portugal to set up the network in Porto. And on Tuesday, it announced that it has raised $4.9 million in Series A funding from True Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Cane Investments, and a number of private investors. With the new funding, Veniam is planning to boost its presence in the US market. Barro tells us it’s already talking to potential customers in several US cities, including San Francisco, New York, and Austin. It plans to announce its first US city deployment in the first quarter of 2015. “Eventually, we would like to have every vehicle in the world use our technology,” Barro said. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Russia's Economy Has Shrunk So Much It's Now Almost The Same Size As Spain | ||
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The decline in the price of oil, Western economic sanctions against the nation following its invasion of Ukraine, and the collapse of the Russian rouble that resulted, has decimated Russia's economy. Now Russian GDP has shrunk so much it is no longer the world's eighth largest economic power, according to The Telegraph. Instead, Putin's Russia is now carries roughly the same economic weight as ... Spain: Russia has lost its ranking as the world’s eighth biggest economy, shrinking in just nine months from a $2.1 trillion petro-giant to a mid-size player comparable with Korea or Spain. For the past several years, Spain has been regarded as one of Europe's more feeble economies, with 1 in 4 Spaniards unemployed. Spain's GDP was about $1.4 trillion in 2013, according to the World Bank. Spain was the 13th biggest economy on the planet until Putin ordered tanks into the Crimea. Now it is likely that Italy, India, Canada, and Australia are all more economically significant than Russia. Here was the World Bank's GDP ranking for 2013, before Russia went into its current crisis. The numbers are in billions of US dollars: (European Union 17,350,853) It's not clear what Russia's GDP equivalent is right now because the decline of the rouble has been so swift and volatile that the calculation needs to be done anew every day. On Monday the rouble experienced its largest one-day flop since the 1998 Russian crisis. Of course, this may all be temporary. The price of oil has sunk to just above $68 a barrell (for WTI), dragging the oil-dependent Russian economy with it. If the price perks up, Russia can expect to make its way back up the GDP charts. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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10 Things You Need To Know In Markets Today (DIA, SPY, SPX, QQQ) | ||
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Russia Is Abandoning A Major Pipeline Project. President Vladimir Putin announced that a pipeline which would have exported gas into south-east Europe has been scrapped, according to the Financial Times. Asian Markets Bounced. Japan's Nikkei closed up 0.42%, and Hong Kong's Hang Seng is currently up 1.35%, making up a lot of the losses made on Monday. Hedge Funds Are Closing Like It's 2009. This year could be the worst for hedge fund closures since the financial crisis, Bloomberg reported. Hong Kong's Protest Leaders Are Telling Demonstrators To Give Up. The three original founders of Hong Kong's pro-democracy Occupy movement tearfully announced Tuesday they would "surrender" by turning themselves into police and urged protesters still on the streets to retreat. Global Banks Are Back In Profit, But Europe Is Lagging. The global banking industry has moved beyond recovery and regained overall profit for the first time since the financial crisis, although European lenders are still lagging far behind rivals, an industry study showed. More Federal US Authorities Want All Takata Airbags Recalled. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has now gotten into the act, demanding that Takata declare its airbags defective, which would facilitate a country-wide recall of the devices. S&P Joined Moody's In Criticism Of Japan's Public Finances. Standard & Poor's cast doubt on Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ability to repair the country's tattered finances, a day after Moody's tarnished the government's economic record less than two weeks away from a major election. And Japanese Workers' Wages Came In Below Inflation For The 16th Month. Wages rose by only 0.5% in the year to October, well below inflation, even after stripping out the effect of April's sales tax increase. Honda Sales In China Are Down By More Than A Tenth. Honda and its two Chinese joint ventures sold 72,973 vehicles in China in November, down 12.1 percent from a year earlier, the Japanese automaker said on Tuesday. European Producer Prices Are Coming. At 10 a.m. GMT, inflation seen by companies in October will be announced, with analysts expecting a 0.3% rise from September. The figure is an early indicator of how inflation might feed through to consumer prices. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Good morning! Here are 10 of the biggest stories you should hear about before markets open in London and Paris.