Very exciting. And up until that last lap, she was third, and at one point in the race led for a full lap and then some. That last lap just got ornery!
I think she earned the respect of the racing community, even though she admitted to some strategic errors in the last part of the race that may have prevented her from winning. I think she is on target to win in the future.
Good examples, Douglas. You and Todd have a vision of how it can connect to the interests of the NASCAR fans. I also think IBM's latest focus on mobile technology is another device with compatible markets.
I think the primary benefits businesses reap from a NASCAR sponsorship are brand recognition and product showcasing. As Todd referenced in the article, NASCAR has been aggressively penetrating into new markets and trying to shake their 'redneck' sitgma. Sprint's name is carried with each and every NASCAR Sprint Cup advertisement, News clip, and sports recap, reaching a growing viewing audience. NASCAR also provides a high profile way to showcase your products to consumers (and executives as Todd pointed out). The sport has highly complex data management requirements, spanning communications, data analysis, logistics, etc., all areas where a company like IBM would shine.
After reading your post on IBM's mobile portfolio, I envisioned IBM as the major sponsor for NASCAR. Sprint has reaped massive brand association benefits by branding NASCAR's communication network, showcasing in car communications during the race (listening in on spotters, providing in car chats at speed, etc.), providing realtime mobile race updates, and marquee branding of the "Sprint Cup." GoDaddy has leapt to the forefront repeatedly with Danica's marketability and recent Daytona pole position. I think NASCAR has been 'de-country-fied' enough to warrant another sponsorhip look from Big Blue.
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The US National Security Agency learned the hard way that it can be dangerous to give a contractor too much money and access, with too little scrutiny. The NSA and other government agencies hire tens of thousands of contractors
a year to analyze data. Edward Snowden -- who revealed himself as the NSA leaker after fleeing the country -- was one such contractor, reportedly holding a $122,000 salaried position at Booz Allen Hamilton at the time of his departure.
Midsize businesses rarely achieve the same standards of security in their own datacenters as professional providers that specialize in delivering these services to organizations.
It was about 10 years ago when a new generation of software-as-a-service (SaaS) alternatives started to gain acceptance and adoption among organizations of all sizes. And it has only been about five years since Amazon Web Services captured the marketplace's attention with Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, which opened the door to a vast array of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings. Now, the third piece of the cloud computing puzzle is beginning to win over organizations seeking to build their own apps: platform-as-a-service (PaaS).
Big-data and analytics tools enable marketers to understand customers as individuals, identifying unmet needs and addressing each customer as a "segment of one," says John Kennedy, VP corporate marketing, IBM.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Monaco kicked into high gear today, and we've already begun to see news emerging from that lovely city-state by the sea.
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