A new two seater, hydrogen fuel cell powered city car was launched in central London today.

riversimple is the brain child -and love child too perhaps - of Hugo Spowers, who has spent 10 years pursuing his inspiringly holistic vision for the future of personal transport.  The riversimple team, whose first prototype we saw at the launch, has been supported for the past 3 years with funding and in other ways by the Piech family - the ‘other half’ of the Porche family dynasty.  Sebastian Piech spoke at the launch, as did Hugo Spowers. 

As Hugo says in the video I posted earlier today, “riversimple isn’t just about the technology”.  Another ‘pillar’ of the company (and there are several) is non-Ownership - the cars will only ever be leased, not sold; “this is a business model that reward longevity and low running costs, rather than obsolescence and high running costs”.

The riversimple website tells us that their purpose is nothing less than to ‘work systematically towards the elimination of the environmental impact of personal mobility’. 

Such a lofty aim might seem quixotic, and riversimple themselves ask the question ‘Are we doing too much?’ in their launch materials.  Indeed it could seem impractically radical to launch a car company that aspires to have others build its product using designs published online under open source licences.  On the other hand, who would try to launch a conventional car company now, or for that matter at any point in the last 10 or 20 years?

Surely now, as the motor industry crumbles under the combined pressure of oversupply and what seems like a systemic failure to provide any genuine innovation (I don’t count ‘dual engine’ hybrids!) is the right time for fresh thinking and new ways of doing things. riversimple can provide both of these in abundance.  What they are trying to do is profoundly disruptive: it is nothing less than a comprehensive reinvention of the existing structures of the motor industry - technical, financial and cultural.

What about the car itself?  Is it a hairy-shirt, brown bread eco-warrior’s public statement? 

Definitely not.  In fact, there are details everywhere you look that will appeal to enthusiasts as well as the current Prius demographic.  And not just the details; the stance is sporty - the wheels (each with its own motor) are placed right out in the corners of the car; the exposed carbon-fibre monocoque will draw in motor-racing fans (though they are there for reasons of lightness and strength, not aesthetics).

In the West such considerations will play a part in purchase decisions, but riversimple’s car is conceived as a true world car - a competitor to the Tata Nano that has sustainability built into it’s DNA…

From my point of view, the riversimple car, and everything that it manifests (the radical thinking, idealism, creativity, technology) is exciting and desirable in a way that the supposed ‘halo’ cars of the existing manufacturers completely fail to be.  The Aston Martin One-77 for example; £1m worth of old ideas, in a packaging concept that was relevant in 1960…

riversimple is looking for funding to take it to the next stage of its development.  Surely the UK government should be putting money towards this kind of venture, rather than propping up existing manufacturers and dealers with £2,000 subsidies granted on the condition you scrap a perfectly usable 10 year-old car! 

riversimple launch, London 16th March 2009.  Hugo Spowers speaks, and drives the car.

riversimple launch, London 16th March 2009.  Hugo Spowers speaks, and drives the car.

A new two seater, hydrogen fuel cell powered city car was launched in central London today.

riversimple is the brain child -and love child too perhaps - of Hugo Spowers, who has spent 10 years pursuing his inspiringly holistic vision for the future of personal transport.  The riversimple team, whose first prototype we saw at the launch, has been supported for the past 3 years with funding and in other ways by the Piech family - the ‘other half’ of the Porche family dynasty.  Sebastian Piech spoke at the launch, as did Hugo Spowers. 

As Hugo says in the video I posted earlier today, “riversimple isn’t just about the technology”.  Another ‘pillar’ of the company (and there are several) is non-Ownership - the cars will only ever be leased, not sold; “this is a business model that rewards longevity and low running costs, rather than obsolescence and high running costs”.

The riversimple website tells us that their purpose is nothing less than to ‘work systematically towards the elimination of the environmental impact of personal mobility’. 

Such a lofty aim might seem quixotic, and riversimple themselves ask the question ‘Are we doing too much?’ in their launch materials.  Indeed it could seem impractically radical to launch a car company that aspires to have others build its product using designs published online under open source licences.  On the other hand, who would try to launch a conventional car company now, or for that matter at any point in the last 10 or 20 years?

Surely now, as the motor industry crumbles under the combined pressure of oversupply and what seems like a systemic failure to provide any genuine innovation (I don’t count ‘dual engine’ hybrids!) is the right time for fresh thinking and new ways of doing things. riversimple can provide both of these in abundance.  What they are trying to do is profoundly disruptive: it is nothing less than a comprehensive reinvention of the existing structures of the motor industry - technical, financial and cultural.

What about the car itself?  Is it a hairy-shirt, brown bread eco-warrior’s public statement? 

Definitely not.  In fact, there are details everywhere you look that will appeal to enthusiasts as well as the current Prius demographic.  And not just the details; the stance is sporty - the wheels (each with its own motor) are placed right out in the corners of the car; the exposed carbon-fibre monocoque will draw in motor-racing fans (though it is there for reasons of lightness and strength, not aesthetics), and especially the doors, which open like a beetle’s wing cases.

In the West such considerations will play a part in purchase decisions, but riversimple’s car is conceived as a true world car - a competitor to the Tata Nano that has sustainability built into its DNA…

From my point of view, the riversimple car, and everything that it manifests (the radical thinking, idealism, creativity, technology) is exciting and desirable in a way that the supposed ‘halo’ cars of the existing manufacturers completely fail to be.  The Aston Martin One-77 for example; £1m worth of old ideas, in a packaging concept that was relevant(ish) in 1960…

riversimple is looking for funding to take it to the next stage of its development.  Surely the UK government should be putting money towards this kind of venture (and retraining auto industry workers), rather than propping up existing manufacturers and dealers with £2,000 subsidies granted on the condition you scrap a perfectly usable 10 year-old car! 

LINKS:
 - Good article on Wired
 - ‘Talking ‘bout my hydrogeneration’ - AndyH of greenthing analyses why riversimple is a BHAG
 - My photos of the launch on flickr

riversimple launch, London 16th March 2009.  Hugo Spowers speaks, and drives the car.

I’ve had an entertaining half-hour this morning playing around with the Augmented Reality (awful term, but it kind of does what the tin says) experience offered by GE of all people, marketing their Ecological credentials.

Here I am moving my sheet of paper around while GE’s windmills turn, and the sun shines on the screen and also seems (worryingly, given that it’s a hologram) to be reflecting off my head;

There’s no doubt that as a toy, there’s a good deal of ‘wow-factor’ around this technology - which as far as I can see consists of overlaying some flash animation onto a webcam stream, and ‘keying’ the animation to a visual reference which can be moved around by the user (in this case the key is a pdf downloadable from the GE site).

It’s interesting to see that the GE webpage for this project has a link to the open source code that’s been used to build the AR experience.  Not what I would have expected from GE, but definitely a positive in my eyes, so their marketing programme is working to that extent.

Wikipedia’s entry on AR (I guess if it really takes off we’ll all move to the acronym) has a long list of applications, but only one under the heading ‘Advertising’ : “promoting a new product by providing impressive and interactive AR application on Internet”.

Hmm, very enlightening that.  But seriously, there must be a huge number of potential applications for AR in creating engaging experiences in many different ways.

Will AR in some form become an everyday part of people’s online usage?  In various forms it’s been around for a long time, but wider ownership of webcams and mobile phones with camera and video capability will allow much greater reach than previously.  So perhaps 2010 will be the year of AR.  Gaming and Porn seem the industries most likely to be able to monetise the business potential (am I allowed to say that?).

I’ve had an entertaining half-hour this morning playing around with the Augmented Reality (awful term, but it kind of does what the tin says) experience offered by GE of all people, marketing their Ecological credentials.

Here I am moving my sheet of paper around while GE’s windmills turn, and the sun shines on the screen and also seems (worryingly, given that it’s a hologram) to be reflecting off my head;

There’s no doubt that as a toy, there’s a good deal of ‘wow-factor’ around this technology - which as far as I can see consists of overlaying some flash animation onto a webcam stream, and ‘keying’ the animation to a visual reference which can be moved around by the user (in this case the key is a pdf downloadable from the GE site).

It’s interesting to see that the GE webpage for this project has a link to the open source code that’s been used to build the AR experience.  Not what I would have expected from GE, but definitely a positive in my eyes, so their marketing programme is working to that extent.

Wikipedia’s entry on AR (I guess if it really takes off we’ll all move to the acronym) has a long list of applications, but only one under the heading ‘Advertising’ : “promoting a new product by providing impressive and interactive AR application on Internet”.

Hmm, very enlightening that.  But seriously, there must be a huge number of potential applications for AR in creating engaging experiences in many different ways.

Will AR in some form become an everyday part of people’s online usage?  In various forms it’s been around for a long time, but wider ownership of webcams and mobile phones with camera and video capability will allow much greater reach than previously.  So perhaps 2010 will be the year of AR.  Gaming and Porn seem the industries most likely to be able to monetise the business potential (am I allowed to say that?).

Update 11th June:

News on Brand Republic today of an AR campaign from Glasses Direct; nice idea, and appropriate to the product.  Clearly I was wrong in my prediction for which business sectors would be next to market with AR apps…

Here’s a link to the Glasses Direct AR page.  I tried downloading the app, but sadly could get no further than the error message below, so I can’t report on how well it works.  A shame to launch the PR coverage in the circumstances; frankly, FAIL.

There’s an article in the Times today, reporting on Santander’s plans to ‘scrap’ some of its sub-brands in the UK - Abbey, Alliance & Leicester and Bradford & Bingley are all going, and their branches will be rebranded Santander.

The overall tone of the article strikes me as both a bit jingoistic - Spanish banking group scraps historic British banks - and also essentially conservative; it’s change, it must be bad.

The most interesting section of page for those who read the piece online is, to my way of thinking, the comments.  So the readers of the Times’ print edition will miss out on the additional balance these bring to the story.  A cross-section of these shows the range and tone;

…stop getting so hung up on all this “british”…what difference does it make? nationalism is horrible

…they should change their customer service not the name !!!

That’s another bit of national history that crumbles away

No problems. Vodafone has done the same with numerous phone companies all around the world, including Spain’s Airtel, and the world hasn’t stopped.

Doesn’t matter how old a name is it’s still got to mean something good or of value to a consumer. Abbey like County and Midland doesn’t have a value proposition for consumers and consumers will not miss the name/brand.

That will mean four branches of Santander in my local town centre. Guess what will happen next.

And so on…  A few hours after the article was published online, there were nearly 30 comments, representing a broad spectrum of common sense views as well as a couple of shouty monomaniacs.

I don’t see social media commentators going on about the vibrant communities that have formed around the traditional newspapers’ online content, and a quick search of Twitter for the Santander / Bradford & Bingley story shows that there was little or no ‘trending’ other than media owners (Telegraph / Guardian etc.) distributing their articles, and a few retweets of these links.

For all the noise around Twitter, it’s still a minority game in the UK compared to online newspaper readership (leading newspapers - Guardian, Telegraph etc. have c. 25m unique visitors a month; Twitter has c. 1m UK users), and that’s something that those who are trying to integrate traditional PR and the emerging discipline of social media marketing need to take account of.

There’s an article in the Times today, reporting on Santander’s plans to ‘scrap’ some of its sub-brands in the UK - Abbey, Alliance & Leicester and Bradford & Bingley are all going, and their branches will be rebranded Santander.

The overall tone of the article strikes me as both a bit jingoistic - Spanish banking group scraps historic British banks - and also essentially conservative; it’s change, it must be bad.

The most interesting section of page for those who read the piece online is, to my way of thinking, the comments.  So the readers of the Times’ print edition will miss out on the additional balance these bring to the story.  A cross-section of these shows the range and tone;

…stop getting so hung up on all this “british”…what difference does it make? nationalism is horrible

…they should change their customer service not the name !!!

That’s another bit of national history that crumbles away

No problems. Vodafone has done the same with numerous phone companies all around the world, including Spain’s Airtel, and the world hasn’t stopped.

Doesn’t matter how old a name is it’s still got to mean something good or of value to a consumer. Abbey like County and Midland doesn’t have a value proposition for consumers and consumers will not miss the name/brand.

That will mean four branches of Santander in my local town centre. Guess what will happen next.

And so on…  A few hours after the article was published online, there were nearly 30 comments, representing a broad spectrum of common sense views as well as a couple of shouty monomaniacs.

I don’t see social media commentators going on about the vibrant communities that have formed around the traditional newspapers’ online content, and a quick search of Twitter for the Santander / Bradford & Bingley story shows that there was little or no ‘trending’ other than media owners (Telegraph / Guardian etc.) distributing their articles, and a few retweets of these links.

For all the noise around Twitter, it’s still a minority game in the UK compared to online newspaper readership (leading newspapers - Guardian, Telegraph etc. have c. 25m unique visitors a month; Twitter has c. 1m UK users), and that’s something that those who are trying to integrate traditional PR and the emerging discipline of social media marketing need to take account of.

There’s lots of noise around Twitter today about Tweetdeck’s latest development in its functionality - an integration with Facebook’s status updates.

@Mashable has published good article, Facebook Integration Arrives on TweetDeck, which highlights some interesting aspects of this development; Tweetdeck is effectively becoming an IM client, for example.

I have had a quick play with TweetDeck v0.24b, and I think I like having the FB status updates alongside my various Twitter groups.  My time on FB (already much reduced by the rise of Twitter) will probably take another downward step…

People who are displaying their Twitter stream directly into Facebook (like Roberto Hortal (@rhortal) from MORE TH>N, whom I’m connected to on both Twitter and Facebook, might well reconsider how their updates are displayed to avoid duplication as below (the subject of Robert’s tweet/status update is quite appropriate).