2011-10-17 08:29

Earlier in 2011 we repor­ted that TomTom users in the UK could pur­chase a spe­cial edi­tion devive fea­tur­ing Top Gear star Jeremy Clark­son as a sat­nav voice. Now the BBC has made a humi­li­at­ing U-turn after break­ing its own edit­or­ial guidelines by mar­ket­ing Clarkson’s voice.

Bosses at BBC World­wide, the BBC’s com­mer­cial arm, for­got to check their own rules. Accord­ing to the BBC’s con­flict of interest rules, presenters “must take par­tic­u­lar care not to endorse any product or ser­vice which could be covered in the pro­grammes on which they work”.

Halford’s (a cars parts fran­chise) had signed a deal with the BBC and sat­nav spe­cial­ist TomTom to stock the product, which costs £180 (about R2240). The BBC reports that 54 000 devices are already on the shelves.

BBC World­wide will now donate the pro­ceeds to Chil­dren In Need.

‘NOT A GENTLE VOICE’

Clark­son style told The Sunday Times: “It is mostly about the tone of voice I use. There’s a tone of voice I use when order­ing people to do things. It’s not a gentle sat­nav voice, put it like that.”

Clark­son will not receive any money from sales.

A Halford’s spokes­man said: “We are dis­ap­poin­ted by the BBC decision on behalf of our cus­tom­ers who told us they loved the product. It was prov­ing hugely pop­u­lar. While we have plenty of stock we will not be able to replace them when they are gone, so the strident tones of voice of Clark­son will be appear­ing in Halford’s for a lim­ited time and then be silenced. — at least on a satnav.”

The’ Go Live Top Gear’ edi­tion had a spe­cial Stig mode, which rendered the device instantly silent.

No mat­ter where in the world you are, the cor­por­ate BS is the same.

It’s true that any pub­li­city is good pub­li­city. If you’re in the lime­light, for any reason, people are talk­ing about which means your ‘product’, whether that’s you, a ser­vice or an item, is har­bour­ing the poten­tial of greater sales.

It is of course nat­ural that we err and over­look cer­tain things, but can it really be that all of the rel­ev­ant people at the BBC, TomTom and Clark­son him­self simply mis­judged the link between a vehicu­lar nav­ig­a­tion device and his primary role motor­ing journ­al­ist? Really? REALLY? Crikey!

OK, maybe it was an acci­dent. We, the con­sum­ing pop­u­lous, will for­give and no doubt for­get this faux pas.

After all, BBC has >now< been so kind as to donate all of the pro­ceeds from this rather luc­rat­ive deal to a children’s char­ity. Say what?

We don’t know how they con­flict of interests came to light, unfortunately.

If it hadn’t, the BBC (and Clark­son) would have made a small for­tune, the share­hold­ers would’ve been smil­ing and life would’ve gone on. Those poor little kid­dies sup­por­ted by the char­ity would’ve been left to their own devices.

How’s that for quick-thinking and excel­lent mar­ket­ing? Someone will get a pr0motion for it.

Halford’s also took the oppor­tun­ity to mar­ket when all they were asked to do was com­ment. Hav­ing launched the product early this year, it’s ques­tion­ably pro­voc­at­ive that their spokes­per­son men­tions they are pop­u­lar yet they have plenty of stock. Of course it’s per­sonal opin­ion, but that sounds to me like they’re not selling that well. Well done on the impromptu mar­ket­ing though. Well done.

…and in other news, RIM has fol­lowed the same dis­trac­tion policy this week by offer­ing free apps to Black­berry owners.

@$%^! Damn phone’s not worki— Oooh! FREE apps!

…and indeed the thiev­ing spy­ing (*allegedly)- rap­ing dis­tinctly third-world backwards-thinking tri­bal poly­gam­ist is also cur­rently using the dis­trac­tion policy, to entice voter sym­pathy with a spun tale of an *alleged assas­in­a­tion plot, but then apply­ing a thick coat of verbal feces in the form of fig­ur­at­ive comb-over by telling us it’s all over and should be forgotten.

* Where you see alleged, start laughing.

Source: www.wheels24.co.za

Yes­ter­day I came across an online ad’ list­ing a copy of Mein Kampf for sale.

The seller described the book as a gift given to his grand­par­ents, per­haps ques­tion­ingly, as a wed­ding gift.

This got me think­ing… We’ll use the ubi­quit­ous and pro­voca­tional Nazi regime as our primary example here…

Much of the pre­ju­dice exper­i­enced in our life­time, a lot of it has been bred into it over gen­er­a­tions. This is the reason young people nowadays will, without flinch­ing, without thought and without fore­thought yell and lobby against any semb­lance of ration declar­ing an oppos­ing, altern­at­ive or open-ended view upon the Nazi regime.

Any­one want­ing to exam­ine the regime and its pre and post his­tory, its tac­tics and strategies or its ide­lo­gies is doomed from the start due to the over­whelm­ing wave of ignor­ant naysayers.

“blah, blah, blah NAZI blah, blah, blah.” “ACK! NAZI! BAD, BAD, BAD!”

I’m fairly cer­tain most of you read­ing this (many less than than those who star­ted read­ing this; point in case) are already con­vinced I’m a Nazi and worthy of abol­ish­ment to some­where fiery.

So we’ve estab­lished that we’re deal­ing with a heated topic here, and that the gen­eral pop­u­lous is largely spew­ing place­boic vit­riol in response.

This begs the ques­tion: Can you eth­ic­ally make money out of some­thing you mor­ally oppose?

Nazi ‘col­lect­ibles’ (it’s not mem­or­ab­ilia!) are a huge global busi­ness with many thou­sands of col­lect­ors, all in vary­ing degrees.

Some, no doubt, are (per­son­ally and men­tally at least) fol­low­ers of the ori­ginal regime’s policies (Neo Nazis are some­thing else), some are gen­eral ‘war’ col­lect­ors, a por­tion are his­tory buffs and some are simply traders.

I would wager how­ever, that a size­able con­tin­gent of the above do not sup­port the Nazi regime. Whether that is as a res­ult of (hope­fully unbiased) edu­ca­tion lead­ing to that con­clu­sion or the gen­eral sub­ject­ive ignor­ance is another debate.

If you do not sup­port the Nazi regime, is it right­eous to trade and live off of the rem­nants of it?

If you need some other examples, think of Che Guevara’s image — prom­in­ently dis­played on everything from build­ings to T-shirts, from photo’ form to Andy War­hol–esque style.

Cam­ou­flage design cloth­ing when you are the first to protest against war?

Trad­ing in goods related to a film based on the his­tory of con­flict and human/human-inflicted animal suffering?

If you’re guilty of any of these, I’ve got news for you…

YOU’RE A HYPOCRITE.

If you’re an clued-up fin­an­cial news enthu­si­ast, you’re no doubt aware that the world is in some pretty deep doodie at the moment.

As per usual — for some inex­plic­able reason — the globe’s masses are still look­ing to the USA for guid­ance on how to run and price their little Monopolies…

The USA, though, is rap­idly approach­ing debt levels in excess of 100+ of GDP! That, is catacylsmic.

I’m not going to regur­git­ate what has already been spoken about in reams of detailed para­graphs else­where, but I will offer up two out­stand­ingly inform­at­ive links for you to under­stand the sever­ity of the odi­ous fin­an­cial spume we find ourselves in…

usdebt.kleptocracy.us

…and for the really scary numbers?

US Debt Clock

Before, you had to hunt and gather, guard­ing your brood and self against long-toothed pred­at­ors and club-wielding savages.

Then, you had to travel to a store, fend off attacks from other shop­pers for that last item on the shelf and pay, either with cash obtained in a pre-process or via a card, which far too often didn’t work due to ‘sys­tem errors’.

At some stage clever people ban­died about the idea of net­worked fridges that prom­ised to auto­mat­ic­ally shop for us when the sup­plies were detec­ted as being low. They said there’d be robots to fetch the shop­ping and a deluge of home-grown organic veget­ables to keep us green. They gave us web­sites, which were handy, but never took off because let’s fact it, a bottle of tomato paste rendered on your mon­itor just doesn’t war­rant the clicks needed to actu­ally pur­chase it when the thought of a com­pli­ment­ary herb is pages away.

Then the stag­nancy was stirred — by super­mar­ket giant Tesco.

They faced a dilemma in their South Korean mar­ket — how to move from second spot to first spot without the expense of match­ing the num­ber of stores of the pole contender.

South Korea has a fant­astic trans­port infra­struc­ture, and cur­rently hold the title of second most pro­duct­ive nation on the planet. It doesn’t help being able to move around effi­ciently if you don’t have the time to do it, so Tesco decided to bring the store to the people.

The rail net­work was flooded with high-quality light­boards run­ning the length of their plat­forms, turn­ing them into vir­tual Tescos.

Wait­ing pas­sen­gers could then per­use the goods on offer, scan­ning the smart phone-friendly QR codes of each item they desired. These scans are then auto­mat­ic­ally col­lec­ted in a bas­ket on the store’s shop­ping portal. A swipe to con­firm your pur­chase and it’s deb­ited to your phone’s bill.

By the time you arrive home later that day, your food’s await­ing unpacking.

Now that’s clever.

Source: insideretailing.com.au

(Not the salty beef noodles in ques­tion. )

A court in Taiwan this week ruled against a female food-blogger who said a local restaurant’s beef noodles “were too salty,” and that she’d seen cock­roaches scur­ry­ing around in the res­taur­ant. She gets 30 days in deten­tion, two years of pro­ba­tion, and must pay 200,000 Taiwanese dol­lars (about $7K US dol­lars) in com­pens­a­tion to the res­taur­ant. The court didn’t argue she was lying about the bugs, but ruled that “Ms. Liu should not have cri­ti­cized all the restaurant’s food as too salty because she only had one dish on her single visit.”

From the Taipei Times:

After vis­it­ing a Taichung beef noodle res­taur­ant in July 2008, where she had dried noodles and side dishes, Liu wrote that the res­taur­ant served food that was too salty, the place was unsan­it­ary because there were cock­roaches and that the owner was a “bully” because he let cus­tom­ers park their cars haphaz­ardly, lead­ing to traffic jams.

The res­taur­ant owner, who sounds like a total dick (I can say this because I’m not in Taiwan!), said “he hoped the case would teach her a lesson.”

Again, from the Taipei Times:

Huang Cheng-lee (黃呈利), a law­yer in Taichung, said that blog­gers who post food reviews should remem­ber to be truth­ful in their com­ment­ary and sup­ple­ment their com­ments with pho­to­graphs to pro­tect themselves.

We’re long past April 1st. This crazy story is true — as sad as that is.

Just think of the ludicrous pre­ced­ent this situ­ation sets…as an example:

“Sir, I find your body odour to be quite repug­nant.” “Be gone, foul fel­low. Your ill-deserved smat­ter­ings of repug­nancy dis­respect all that I stand for. I demand reper­a­tions equi­val­ent to one Guinea for your forked tongue.”

Mr. Stinky would be in line for a credit des­pite his odor­ous physicality.

China has long been infam­ous for its anti-free speech and Inter­net usage policies, but surely, crim­in­al­ising the over­use of salt on one’s noodle of choice is far too far.

China’s teeter-totter between Cap­it­al­ism, Social­ism and Com­mun­ism is per­haps lean­ing a little too far in the regressive?

Pass the salt, please.

Source: Boing Boing

…take the form of many offers. Some firms offer cars, some offer cash bonuses and oth­ers have hol­i­day programmes.

If you’re in sales, the pres­sure to pro­duce is intense. More so for those who work solely on commission.

To alle­vi­ate the stress — or is that pres­sure? — “one of the biggest insur­ance com­pan­ies in the world held an orgy to reward suc­cess­ful salesmen.”

Yes, you read that correctly.

Ergo, a part of Munich Re — the world’s biggest re-insurer, hired pros­ti­tutes for the 2007 party, reports the BBC.

The Roman-style orgy was held in the Hun­garian cap­ital Budapest’s his­toric Art Nou­veau thermal baths

A Ger­man busi­ness news­pa­per said the 20 pros­ti­tutes had worn colour-coded arm-bands des­ig­nat­ing their availability.

Accord­ing to Han­dels­blatt, quot­ing an unnamed par­ti­cipant, guests were able to take the women to four-poster beds at the spa “and do whatever they liked”.

“After each such encounter the women were stamped on the lower arm in order to keep track of how often each woman was fre­quen­ted,” the paper quoted the man as saying.

“The women wore red and yel­low wrist bands. One lot were host­esses, the oth­ers would ful­fil your every wish.

“There were also women with white wrist bands. They were reserved for board mem­bers and the very best sales reps.”

Ergo said it regret­ted what had happened and that the party was a “ser­i­ous viol­a­tion” of com­pany rules.

“The man­agers and board mem­bers respons­ible no longer work for us,” a spokes­man said.

Who­ever said large cor­por­ates were conservative?

The imme­di­ate list of ques­tions must surely include:

• Whose idea was it?
• What did it cost?
• Who rated the ‘escorts’?
• Where the ‘escorts’ tested for qual­ity beforehand?
• Were there ‘rules’ other than those relat­ing to the wristbands?
• Where there no female sales reps?
• How many people atten­ded the party?
• …who fired the man­agers and board mem­bers and where they fired out of rep­res­ent­at­ive duty or because they weren’t invited to the party?

Source: Orange.co.uk