Category Archives: Business

Top ten advantages of a Tesla Roadster vs conventional cars

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Update: see below the lovely black Tesla I captured just a few weeks ago on my visit to the offices of Expedia in Victoria, to talk about social media strategy and credit reports.

I had the great privilege of test driving a Tesla Roadster today with the help of Gian. Of course it does 60 mph in 3.7 seconds – check out the full official Tesla Roadster spec here. We chatted through some of the benefits, and afterwards I made a quick note of the top ten benefits from the test drive in typical ‘user-generated content’ fashion.

My quick and dirty top ten

1. The car is 88% efficient compared to 16% for a conventional petrol driven car. It charges itself as it drives when you take your foot off the accelerator.
2. The cell structured battery means you never have probs with recharging reducing the life of the battery.
3. You don’t have the problem with a conventional sports car of having to change gears to find the power torque – its a smooth flow of power to the driver.
4. There is no exhaust pipe to catch on speed bumps.
5. It’s made of highly resilient carbon fibre so it doesn’t dent or rust in the way a conventional car shell does.
6. The drive transmission, exhaust, etc does wear out like a conventional petrol engine motor can do.

7. It is expected that as the Tesla battery design is further improved, you will have the choice of 40% more power, or more boot space…
8. You can use the car for business. For promotion. For demonstrating corporate responsibility. For keeping a more charming profile on the street! And that means it’s tax deductible.
9. The success of Tesla is helping bring electric powered transport to the mass market by demonstrating its power and practicality. Electric motor powered fire engines came to mind for some strange reason?
10. It would take a heck of a long time (9 months) to run down the battery with no charge;-)

What I think I forgot to mention is that using the brakes actually charges the battery. Luckily Jeremy Clark didn’t forget, in this Top Gear test drive from a couple of years ago.

Cost/Benefits

So while a Roadster cost a little over £87K it’s good vfm when you calculate i all its benefits vs a conventional car’s. What’s more there is a corporate leasing option too – while Tesla don’t advertise this as available for the UK as yet I’m sure that’s worth discussing with Gian.

Tesla Roadster in Victoria

Bond, James Bond

While I am not a motor journalist (though there is a pic of me driving an ex-Russian tank from my pre-internet days as a newspaper reporter) I have written professional product reviews for eBay’s Shopping.com as their UK head of community; but this has got to be the product that tops them all. I hope the makers of the 23rd 007 movie ‘Skyfall’ agree, and seriously consider using the car in the next 007 film.

PS: I see my most famous college alumni Sam Mendes is directing, which is super neat. Maybe he would enjoy test driving a Tesla too?

Taking the Crimson marketing route at Bing

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Understand What consumers are saying and Why…
I heard an informative presentation from sentiment analytics platform Crimson Hexagon at Internet World 2013 yesterday, after sitting through the First Tuesday startup awards (event planner for the on-the-go crowd YPlan won) first. I asked at the end for an example of where the sentiment tool’s analysis of not just what but why customers expressed certain feelings about a product. And here is that example, of how Microsoft used it to guide the real-time Bing marketing strategy is embedded below (the Google Docs Viewer version is a tad truncated, so go here for the download link).

In light of that it will be interesting how a rival upstart, such as the new TheySay sentiment platform from the University of Oxford, which claims to have better language analysis functionality, actually does in terms of guiding marketeers:

“TheySay delivers a revolutionary approach to automated sentiment analysis based on advanced computational linguistics. Impartial benchmarking studies have been carried out by leading organisations that verify TheySay’s superior performance compared to other available sentiment analysis tools.” But for me, having studied sentiment analysis tools on behalf of Sony, the question is can it deliver improved business performance to compete with Crimson Hexagon? It’s great they give away the api to TheySay, check it out here, but I’m guessing the ‘chicken and egg’ of winning clients and creating compelling case studies to drive sales is the next significant step. Whoever gets that job I’m sure will need to know how to create social ROI from the inside out.

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