Snake Coffee

I’m not a CTO or any other kind of xTO, nor am I even an IT professional. But Sun Microsystem’s new Project Blackbox got my attention. An extraordinarily simple idea, as Sun puts it, it’s a mobile data centre. The brilliant part of the concept is that it’s packed inside a shipping container.

Who cares about this sort of thing? Internet.com reports that:

Sun is attracting interest from prospective customers of various sizes in financial services, telecommunications and government and military markets — the kind of verticals where rapid expansion can provide a competitive advantage.

“YouTube went from zero to $1.8 billion or whatever it was sold for in 18 months,” Douglas said. “You couldn’t build a datacenter in that time, so for things that get explosive growth, this is a great fit.”

The Blackbox could also be an effective computing tool in areas racked by natural disasters, where earthquakes, floods or tornadoes trash datacenter gear in buildings. In the event of another Hurricane Katrina incident, the Blackbox could be quickly deployed to help a company get IT operations up and running.

At first glance, this seems like an extraordinary technology innovation. But actually, there isn’t any new tech innovation here. Even the concept of a mobile data centre isn’t all that new. The real innovation is to put it into a shipping container - a stroke of marketing genius.

Are there other ‘concepts’ like this out there? Write a comment and tell me all about it.

Buddha Jumps Over the Wall.

Another one for the collection of great product names.

Cool News writes about this awe-inspiring Chinese soup made from quail eggs, bamboo shoots, scallop, abalone, shark fin, chicken, Jinhua ham, pork tendon, ginseng, mushrooms, and taro.

The name reflects the appeal of the soup: it is said to be so enticing that even a vegetarian monk could not restrain himself and would sneak out of the monastery (literally “jump over the wall”) to steal a taste.

Previous posts on the subject of interesting brand / product names:
Patagonian Toothfish for Lunch?
Change your Name for Success
Non-Descriptive but Effective Product Names

In Viral Marketing for the Real World (HBR, May 2007), Duncan Watts and Jonah Peretti describe a simple way to make viral campaigns successful, even when they don’t go past the ‘tipping point’.

Malcolm Gladwell first described the ‘Tipping Point’ concept in his book of the same name. It describes how ideas spread, in a fashion similar to epidemics, with each person exposed to the idea sharing it with others, in an ever-expanding circle of ‘infected’ people who become aware of the idea. The ‘Tipping Point’ concept has itself ‘tipped’ among marketeers worldwide, albeit with the help of some good old-fashioned marketing techniques.

Watts and Peretti describe the mathematics of the Tipping Point concept. Chart 1 below shows how ideas ‘tip’ when the number of people exposed to an idea, known as ’seeds’, go on to share it with more than one other person.

However, when each seed shares it with less than one person on the average, then the idea is doomed to never tip (see chart 2) making it a failure, especially if it happens to be a costly marketing campaign attempting to make use of Gladwell’s concept.

However, marketeers can get around this problem by maximizing the number of ’seeds’ whom they reach at the initial stage of their campaigns.

Chart 3 illustrates the value of a high-seed campaign with rate of reproduction below the Tipping Point - start with a lot of seeds and the total number of people reached is still pretty high.

Alternative Marketing reports that banks in China are offering free rides in a Ferrari to customers who open new accounts with them.

Since foreign banks were permitted to start services in April this year, they have had to go all out to woo the Chinese customer. Persuading wealthier customers to walk in is proving to be tougher than they thought. So in come the freebies. Citibank has given out free Ferrari and Land Rover rides. Standard Chartered has offered wine tastings and luxury-goods promotions. HSBC has held seminars with economists flown up from Hong Kong.

I wonder if HSBC is on to something here…

Does it cost more to give a free ride in a Ferrari or to organize a seminar with an economist? Which kind of customer does each one appeal to? Which kind is more valuable?