Kinect em ação

Fri, 2 Jul 2010 15:17:30 -0300

Durante a demonstração da Microsoft em Cannes, foi apresentado os seus dois projetos: Windows Phone 7 e o Acessório Kinect.

O primeiro tem uma interface bem integrada com as Redes Sociais e uma preocupação maior em ter uma plataforma focada em aplicativos.

Nada de novo... claro, já havíamos visto o filme da demonstração no site da Microsoft, o que com certeza tirou o brilho da novidade.

Mas já o segundo, realmente é surpreendente!
Durante a demonstração, usaram dois jogos, o primeiro é esse da foto acima.

O ponto que mais me chamou a atenção no Kinect é a precisão. Realmente o que vimos na demonstração da E3 é fato.

O Segundo jogo foi mais simples. O usuário tinha um bichinho de pelucia e o jogo reconhecia que bicho estava nas mãos da apresentadora e no momento que ela simulava o arremeço, tinha um filhote de leão interagindo e correndo atrás do brinquedo.

Que venham mais novidades como essa da MS!

Uma Apple Diferente

Fri, 2 Jul 2010 11:41:51 -0300

Por trabalhar no Mercado Publicitário, sempre convivi de perto com os Fan Boys da marca e logo me tornei um Apple User.

Recordo como se fosse hoje, quando comprei o meu primeiro iBook e a sensação ao abrir a caixa (unboxing). Era nítido que a empresa se preocupava com todos os pequenos detalhes que iam da qualidade da embalagem, acessórios que acompanhavam até ligar o produto (Wellcome).

Sim, valia a pena pagar bem mais caro por um Apple.

Dali em diante, essa sensação era a mesma ao comprar o meu primeiro iPod, Macbook Pro, Apple TV, iPhone 1G, iPhone 3G, 3GS .... mesmo diante deste vasto histórico de produtos Apple, não me considero um Fan Boy, mas sim um amante da boa tecnologia.

Por que digo isso?

Porque nunca me fechei em conhecer o que as marcas concorrentes estavam fazendo, inclusive fui um dos primeiros e até mesmo um dos poucos a arriscar em um Zune, Xbox 1, HTC (Windows Mobile) e acompanhar de perto a reestruturação da marca HP e o quanto ela investiu na reformulação dos seus produtos.

O que mudou?

De uns 3 anos para cá, sinto que algo está diferente com a entrega da Apple. Não estou mais sentindo aquela preocupação que a empresa teve em vender o melhor em todos os aspectos para o seu consumidor.

Onde consigo provar isso?

1-) Mais por menos

A linha de notebook deixaram de vir acompanhada do adaptador para ligar em monitores, o controle remoto começou a ser um produto a parte, os cabos de iPod, iPhone & iPad não têm a mesma qualidade que tinham nas primeiras versões, o cabo de energia do meu Macbook já teve que ser trocado 2 vezes.

2-) A ganância

Quando vi que a Apple iria lançar o iPad e quais seriam os modelos, pensei: por que eu preciso de um 3G, se eu poderei fazer o Tethering com o meu iPhone?

Tamanha foi a minha frustração quando percebi que este recurso poderia ter vindo, mas a Apple não liberou por pura ganância.

3-) iPhone 4 e seus bugs

Ainda não comprei o iPhone 4, mas o pouco que estou vendo, me confirma a sensação de que ele não ficaria de fora desta nova fase da Apple.

Os Bugs que estão rodando pela internet como: o sinal que some quando o usuário coloca a mão em um determinado ponto do aparelho, o Facetime que é bloqueado para usuários de outras TELECOMS...

Se vocês não notaram isso, façam uma breve reflexão.
A Apple vive uma nova fase.

Cannes Lions - 2010

Fri, 2 Jul 2010 11:26:30 -0300

Estamos organizando todos os cases, em breve disponibilizaremos para consulta.

Uma lição ficou de tudo que eu vi por lá.

Se quisermos fazer uma Copa 2014 inesquecível, tanto no aspecto publicitário, quanto em infra-estrutura, temos que começar já!

Nizan Guanaes

Fri, 2 Jul 2010 10:38:15 -0300

Saiu uma matéria muito interessante no NY Times que reconhece o trabalho que o Nizan Guanaes tem feito pelo mundo, representando o Brasil.

The power set: five influential Brazilians
By Jonathan Wheatley and Vincent Bevins
Published: June 28 2010 15:51 | Last updated: June 28 2010 15:51
The FT profiles five men who can each claim his part in Brazil’s rise – from running its capital markets to Rio’s Olympic selection.
Carlos Nuzman
Few men can claim to have bested Barack Obama. But despite a last-minute intervention from the US president, it was Carlos Arthur Nuzman who was victorious in the Olympic bidding sweepstakes last October. Crowds on the streets and beaches of his native Rio de Janeiro burst into celebration at the news their city would be hosting the Summer Olympics in 2016.
It was a long time coming, some said: no South American country had ever hosted the games. But as president of the Brazilian Olympic committee (COB), Nuzman made the case that Brazil could rise to the challenge. And now, as chairman of the organising committee, he must prove it.
Olympic firsts are familiar to him: in the 1964 Tokyo games he competed for Brazil in his own sport, volleyball. Later, having launched a career as a lawyer and businessman, Nuzman took over as head of the Brazilian volleyball confederation, and the international success of Brazilian volleyball teams is often attributed to his leadership between 1975 and 1996.
As COB president, Nuzman’s bid to stage the Olympics in Rio in 2004 was thwarted, but he brought the Pan American Games there in 2007, showcasing the city’s talents in preparation for the 2016 bid. He also launched a training programme for athletes and coaches, and was able to get the full backing of the government for his Olympic bid.
Nuzman will have few worries about sportsmanship or enthusiasm at the Rio Olympics. Far more challenging are the twin obstacles of inadequate infrastructure and the threat of violence. The often shocking levels of lawlessness in the favelas that surround Rio can be addressed, he said during the bid process, through a special security project for the Olympic village, relying on the armed forces if need be.
The infrastructure challenge may prove to be more difficult to overcome. Brazil has longer to prepare for the Olympics than for the World Cup in 2014, but rumours are already swirling that the Brazilian football confederation, under the leadership of the controversial Ricardo Teixeira, is behind on many of its construction timetables. The country is woefully behind in infrastructure building generally.
It will fall on Nuzman to show that Brazil can handle the responsibility that he, and many others, have long argued it deserves. – VB
Eike Batista
Eike Batista is Brazil’s richest man, with a fortune estimated at $27bn, and the eighth richest in the world, according to Forbes magazine. He has been used to media attention from an early age; his father, Eliezer, helped turn state-owned miner Companhia Vale do Rio Doce – later privatised and renamed Vale – into the world’s biggest producer of iron ore and the second-largest mining company in the world.
Raised as a polyglot in Europe, Batista sought financial independence while studying engineering at the University of Aachen by selling insurance door to door. Back in Brazil, he hit the headlines in 1991 by dropping his society bride-to-be for model and carnival queen Luma de Oliveira, with whom he went on to have two children. His enthusiasm for extreme speedboats earned him Brazilian, American and world championships.
But Batista is not the playboy his early fame suggests. He no longer races speedboats but recently secured a 10-year contract to host the sport’s world championships, held for the first time this year off Rio de Janeiro.
Brought up with mining and logistics, Batista has made these his own business since the early 1980s, first as an intermediary for diamond and gold miners in the Amazon, and later by developing his own mines in Brazil and overseas. From 2000, he concentrated his attention on Brazil and created EBX (his initials, plus X for multiplier of value) and its subsidiaries MMX (mining), MPX (energy), OGX (oil and gas), LLX (logistics) and OSX (shipbuilding and other supplies for the oil and gas industry).
He achieved something close to notoriety among Brazil’s often-sceptical media when he raised roughly $10bn from the initial public offerings of all five companies between 2004 and 2008, with little more to offer investors than ambitious plans. But his companies’ investments are on schedule and beginning to live up to their promises. MMX – which sold some of its mines to Anglo American for $5.5bn in 2008 – is already producing iron ore. MPX and OGX will be delivering energy and oil by mid-2011. LLX’s first port, Sudeste, will be operational by the end of 2011 and Açu Superport by the following year. OSX’s first shipyard is also due to commence operations by 2012.
Batista jokes that he is delivering his own private PAC to Brazil – a reference to the government’s flagship accelerated growth programme, designed to deliver the infrastructure Brazil so badly needs. It is not a bad assessment. – JW
André Esteves
The youthful face of André Esteves has been spotted at some of the main events within Brazil’s fast-growing capital markets recently.
He was there when Cosan, Brazil’s biggest sugar and alcohol group, announced its $4.9bn merger with Royal Dutch Shell – one of 13 mergers and acquisitions worth roughly $12.5bn that Esteves’ investment bank, BTG Pactual, has been involved in over the past nine months. During the same period it has also taken part in initial public offerings that raised a total of $24.5bn for 11 clients, including Spain’s Santander, whose IPO of its Brazilian subsidiary was the world’s biggest last year.
Formerly as media shy as most Brazilian investment bankers, Esteves has emerged as the public face of the country’s meritocratic investment banking culture, and he is expected by many to challenge billionaire entrepreneur Eike Batista (left) for the position of Brazil’s wealthiest individual.
But although Esteves admits to having more money than he can spend, he says getting rich was never his main motivation. “I never worked hard so that I could sell up and go to the beach,” he told the FT shortly before the Santander IPO. “I have always worked to be part of something bigger, to be a driver of change.”
His pace of activity suggests he is already there. Esteves first joined BTG Pactual as a 21-year-old systems analyst in 1989. He rose quickly and, in 1999, he and younger partners wrested control from its founders, leading Pactual through one of the fastest periods of expansion in Brazil’s capital markets.
What happened to Pactual between 2006 and 2009, when it was owned by Swiss bank UBS, is the stuff of modern legend. UBS claims it bought it for $2.6bn in 2006 and sold it back to Esteves and partners in a fire sale forced on it by the global crisis for $2.5bn. People in Brazil give different figures: they say Pactual was sold for $2.9bn with equity of $300m (after capital had been shared out to partners) and bought back for $2.2bn with equity of $2.1bn. As one person put it: “Sometimes you can have your cake and eat it.”
Either way, it left Esteves in charge of one of Brazil’s most powerful investment banks. A force for change indeed. – JW
Nizan Guanaes
Nizan Guanaes views himself as an ambassador for his country. The chairman of Grupo ABC, Brazil’s largest advertising and marketing services group, believes the expansion of ABC abroad is helping to promote Brazil and, as such, to transform the country’s economic role.
“Brazil is an emerging market,” Guanaes says. “We need to be seen as an emerging culture. We have to move from being a commodity country to building world brands from Brazil.”
Born and raised in the city of Salvador, the young Guanaes also spent some of his formative years in the UK. After returning to Brazil, he built a reputation as a skilled advertising copywriter. In one memorable television advertisement he worked on, entitled “Hitler”, for newspaper Folha de São Paulo, a camera pans out from an extreme close-up of the German dictator while a voice recounts his achievements. When the infamous face becomes clear, another voice says: “It is possible to tell a heap of lies while only speaking the truth.”
In 1989, Guanaes took over the DM9 agency with business partner João Augusto “Guga” Valente. In 2000, DM9 was acquired by DDB Worldwide for $111m, and Guanaes left advertising as part of a non-competition agreement to launch internet portal iG. Two years later, he returned to take over DM9DDB with Valente, and founded the advertising agency Africa.
These companies were the first in what later became Grupo ABC, a holding company that comprised 18 companies with operations ranging from ads and branding to promoting Brazil’s beach fashion events and putting on musicals.
Now the world’s 20th-largest communications group, with annual revenues of $277m, Grupo ABC’s international clients include Peugeot, Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble.
Dividing his time between New York and São Paulo, Guanaes remains committed to expanding operations further, particularly into businesses with a digital focus. In the past two years, Grupo ABC has acquired two Californian agencies, Dojo and Pereira & O’Dell (the latter voted California’s best digital agency), while another of his companies (he declines to say which) has signed a contract with LucasArts.
An eager participant in the Clinton Global Initiative who boosts his own image by attending events such as Davos, Guanaes argues that Brazil should seize the opportunity and do the same. “Brazil wants to know, and be known,” he says. – VB
Edemir Pinto
Edemir Pinto has seen remarkable changes since he took over as head of BM&FBovespa, Brazil’s multi-asset exchange. He became chief executive in 2008, shortly after BM&FBovespa was created by the merger of the country’s futures exchange and the São Paulo stock exchange.
In two years, Pinto has overseen rapid growth in Brazil’s exchange trading, and the emergence of the country as an increasingly sought-after investment destination – so much so that Brazil’s combined securities, futures and commodities exchange has become the world’s third-largest exchange by market value.
An economist by training, Pinto joined the BM&F futures exchange in 1986, becoming responsible for risk management and settlement the following year. By 1999, he was chief executive. When BM&F merged with Bovespa, he initially served as co-chief executive and chief financial officer of the new company.
As Brazil shrugged off the effects of the global financial crisis and interest rates plummeted in developed countries, capital poured into Brazil – to the point where the government imposed a 2 per cent tax on foreign portfolio investments to slow appreciation of the real.
Pinto worried that Brazilian equities were under “friendly fire” – that investors might simply prefer to buy shares of Brazilian companies listed abroad rather than at home. In the end, the tax proved largely symbolic and did not roll back BM&FBovespa’s growth. In spite of a drop-off at the beginning of this year, the Ibovespa, Brazil’s main equity index, has almost tripled in dollar value since March 2009.
Pinto says Brazil’s experience with crises has left the country with sound financial regulation, which provides stability for investors. “We did a review of the regulation of our exchange, and don’t think we have anything to improve,” he says. “We’ve done that.”
Under Pinto, BM&FBovespa has reached several growth milestones recently. In March, the number of options traded exceeded those traded on any US exchange. In May, the exchange received an investment-grade rating from Moody’s, the rating agency.
Pinto says capital markets in Brazil could stand to be less dependent on foreign money, and there is room for internal demand to grow. But he recently claimed: “By the end of next year we will be the second-biggest exchange group in the world.” – VB

PipoLand

Kinect em ação

Uma Apple Diferente

Cannes Lions - 2010

Nizan Guanaes