Filed under: Competitive strategy, General Motors (GM)

General Motors Corporation (NYSE: GM) will be building a new vehicle engine and parts plant in Brazil at a cost of $200 million, the automaker said this week. The new plant will bring about 500 new employees to the automaker at a time when it’s winding down the closure of quite a few vehicle assembly plants all over the U.S.

Six quarters from now, the new Brazilian plant shout be producing engines in the new facility, which is expected to make about 50,000 engines per year. In a unique twist, GM also indicated that engines from this new plant will be tested without using gasoline, eliminating contaminants inside the plant (as in emissions particulates).

Most likely, engines produced in this plant (which GM has been mum about) will be used in vehicles to feed the fast-growing Brazilian market and perhaps other South American markets as well. GM has seen a rapid increase in its Latin America sales as of late, with a 19.4% increase to 1,235,913 cars last year to countries in the region.

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Filed under: Good news, Products and services, Management, Consumer experience, Competitive strategy, Starbucks (SBUX), Marketing and advertising, Battle of the Brands

The idea of serving customer needs and desires is rooted in the age-old notion of listening to the customer. One company taking consumer input to a whole new level is our favorite specialty coffee vendor, Starbucks Corp. (NASDAQ: SBUX).

How about ice cubes made from Starbucks’ own coffee, so you can cool that java without diluting the savory stuff? That’s what one customer suggested. What do you think? Another thoughtful consumer thinks that Starbucks customers might like shelves in the restrooms to rest their coffee on while “taking care of business.” A nice idea perhaps, but I believe that the practice of taking consumables into restrooms is discouraged in most instances.

At least one Starbucks customer request has already had a major effect. Reusable “splash sticks” have been introduced by the company to reduce coffee splash through the sipping lid of its sturdy cups.

The entire focus of this new Starbucks business model is summed up by CEO Howard Schultz, who was quoted in BusinessWeek as saying that he wanted “to open up a dialogue with customers and build up this muscle inside our company.” Mr. Schultz would like to make response to the consumer a cornerstone of company tradition.

So, what do you think? Should Starbucks initiate valet parking? Should it have barristas on roller skates cruising its parking lots? Maybe it should offer complimentary mocha caramel biscuits for the dogs that accompany its customers? What about individual caffeine packets so coffee addicts could personally customize their morning buzz?

One thing’s for sure, Starbucks’ states it’s listening. Now is your chance to prove that you’re a marketing genius. Howard Schultz wants to return the company to its former glory. Give him a piece of your mind, would ya?

Gary Sattler is a freelance blogger. He does not knowingly hold interest in the companies mentioned in this blog post.

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Filed under: Business, Internet, Features, News, Podcasting, Web services, DLS Interviews

Thanks to the recent BitTorrent debacle, Comcast has been far from Comcastic for many of its customers. Throttling customers for using technologies they deem too data intensive is pretty nasty, and the company has had to acquiesce and change its practices, but what happens when they disconnect your service (and threaten to keep you shut-down for 12-months) for “excessive usage” — yet refuse to issue that threat in writing or tell you what “excessive usage” really means?

Well, that is exactly the situation Dave Winer, tech analyst, pioneer and RSS God, has found himself in. Comcast has restored his service, but still says they will shut him down for up to 12 months if he doesn’t alter his usage patterns. The kicker? They won’t tell him what level he needs to adjust his usage patterns to in order to stay compliant.

Can they do this? Especially without issuing the warning in writing? And what exactly defines, “excessive” in Comcast’s terms? Many of us here at Download Squad use Comcast and we DO love to download, so this issue bothers us both on principle and for practicality. Even though Comcast has been more receptive via their @Comcastcares Twitter account than they were via phone, this whole situation makes us very, very uncomfortable.

We spoke to Dave earlier this day (the podcast of our conversation is here) and this is what he’d to say:

“I thought it was an outage and they said I had to call a special number and that I had been disconnected as a matter of policy.”

Continue reading Comcast shuts down Winer

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Filed under: Internet, Web services, Microsoft, Search

Microsoft has rolled out a new improved news search engine under its Live Search banner. Overall Live Search News looks a lot like you’d anticipate a news search engine to look if you’ve used another one like state, Google News. But there are a few features that make Live Search News stand out:

• An orange banner will pop up and highlight breaking news at the top of the site, but only when there’s actual breaking news, which is kind of refreshing in today’s 24/7 news environment when many news agencies are pretending there’s always something breaking.
• See that blue sidebar on the right? Yeah, we thought it was for advertising at first too, but it’s actually local news selected for you based on your IP address. No need to sign up and change your settings to get local news tailored to you.
• Once you enter a search term, you can further refine your search from a list of categories, or choose from a list of related searches.
• Videos are featured right on the main page, and if you mouse over them you can preview the videos before deciding whether to click to watch the full video.

Overall, we’re pretty impressed with the new Live Search News. Our only real complaint is that there doesn’t appear to be a way to subscribe to RSS feeds for searches.

[via CNet]

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Filed under: Audio, Internet, Video, Web services, web 2.0

There are plenty of music videos on popular video sharing sites like YouTube. Some of them were even uploaded by content owners who had the rights to the videos. But many aren’t, and there’s always a chance that music video you bookmarked yesterday could be pulled down tomorrow.

PluggedIn is a new music video site that doesn’t have that problem because are all posted with the cooperation of 3 of the 4 major music studios: Universal, Sony BMG, and EMI. Warner hasn’t signed on yet, but it could in the future. The site has about 10,000 videos and they’re all high quality, with many available in HD video.

The biggest problem we have with the site is that like with most other 100% legal music sources, there’s a good chance you won’t be able to find what you’re looking for. If you’re looking for videos from Ashanti, Akon, or Nine Inch Nails, PluggedIn’s got you covered. Mike Doughty or Tori Amos, not so much (although there is a Tom Jones video featuring Tori Amos on backing vocals available).

The service does have profile page for a ton of musicians, including artists with no videos available on the site. Users can view pics, read information about the artist, or buy albums from Amazon. Users can also treat PluggedIn as a social networking site by creating profiles, marking favorite videos, and finding others with similar musical tastes.

[via VentureBeat]

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Filed under: World wide web, Web services, web 2.0

There are plenty of services out there that’ll take a long URL and make it shorter so that you can fit it in an email, IM or Twitter message. But sometimes you don’t want your URL to be shorter and easier to read or remember. Sometimes you want it to be as long as humanly possible. Don’t ask us when you would want that, just take our word for it. Fortunately, there’s a service that can help.

W-i-d-e-U-R-L will take your relatively short and easy to remember URL and lengthen it by essentially spelling it out. For example, www.downloadsquad.com becomes that behemoth you see above. But wait, there’s more! Is that super-long URL a bit too much to remember? No problem, W-i-d-e-U-R-L features TinyURL integration, which lets you swiftly condense any freshly created URL, thus closing an entirely pointless circle.

[via Robert Scoble]

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Filed under: World wide web, Blogging, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Six Apart has released a new Facebook Application called Blog It that lets users write blog posts directly from Facebook. That in and of itself wouldn’t be particularly exciting or useful. But here’s the cool part. You can also associate Blog It with your accounts on multiple blogging and micro-blogging platforms so that you can update a series of blogs from one location.

Blog It supports TypePad, Blogger, LiveJournal, Moveable Type, WordPress, Tumblr, Pownce, Vox, and Twitter. Users can choose to simply use the application to simultaneously (or individually) update their status messages on Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, or other micro-blogging services. Or you can write a full blog post, have it show up on your various blogs, and send out a quick note through Twitter, Pownce, and your Facebook news feed to let your friends know you’ve got a new post up.

You can check out a demo video after the jump.

[via Mashable]

Continue reading Blog It: Post to a dozen blogs and social networks at once

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Filed under: World wide web, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Facebook has rolled out two new features. The first is a Google Trends style tool called Lexicon that lets you graph popular keywords that have appeared on Facebook profiles, groups, and walls. The second is the addition of third celebration data to Facebook Mini-Feeds.

The graph feature is pretty much self explanatory. You enter a term, and Facebook will show you how frequently it pops up on the site. Enter two terms, separate by a comma, and you can compare their popularity. The Mini-Feed update is a tiny more interesting, but only a little. Users can now associate their Facebook accounts with Flickr, Picasa, Yelp, and del.icio.us so that pictures, reviews, and links they post to those sites will be added to their Facebook feeds.

The move seems designed to help Facebook compete with a number of new “lifestreaming” services like FriendFeed and Socialthing! which grant users to track updates from across a series of social networks. The difference between Facebook and those other sites is that FriendFeeed and Socialthing! let you track far more than 4 networks. Where’s Twitter, Pownce, Digg, Reddit, and YouTube?

It should be interesting to see if Facebook fleshes out its lifestreaming features in the future. It would seem to be in the company’s best interest to do so. Because if users decide that it’s easier to keep track of their social networking data while visiting a 3rd party site like FriendFeed, that means they’ll be spending less time at Facebook’s page, which means less advertising revenue.

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Filed under: Pic, Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Web services, Google, Freeware, web 2.0

Picasa Webalbums Assistant is a free Java tool that enables you to preview and download pics and entire albums from Picasa Web Albums.

The free program, written by personal studies student Bradley Beach, was designed for Mac and Linux users who don’t have the built-in convenience of one-click downloading from Picasa Web Albums.

Picasa Webalbums Assistant enables you to download from albums that are both public or private. If you need to download from a public album, enter in the username of the Google account, and Picasa Webalbums Assistant will find all public albums under that username. If you want to save pics from a private album, you’ll need the invite link sent by the user.

Once the album is located, the Assistant will automatically load preview thumbnails of all the pictures in the album. You can choose to download all of the pictures or a selection.

While Mac users patiently await the arrival of Picasa for the Mac (which one ambitious Google employee promised was coming this year), and its built-in communication with Picasa Web Albums, tools like Picasa Webalbums Assistant (and the free Picasa Web Albums Uploader) make the wait a tiny more bearable.

[via Lifehacker]

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I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property writes “It probably won’t surprise you, but in 2005, the FBI manufactured evidence to get the power to issue National Security Letters under the PATRIOT Act. Unlike normal subpoenas, NSLs do not require probable cause and you’re never granted to talk about having received one, leading to a lack of accountability that caused them to be widely abused. The EFF has discovered via FOIA requests that an FBI field agent was forced by superiors to return papers he got via a lawful subpoena, then demand them again via an NSL (which was rejected for being unlawful at the time), and re-file the original subpoena to get them back. This delay in a supposedly critical anti-terror investigation then became a talking point used by FBI Director Robert Mueller when the FBI wanted to justify their need for the power to issue National Security Letters.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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