The irrelevant, irreverent and irrational ramblings of a self-exiled Canadian yuppie peon trading his time for money in the heart of Corporate America. Stranger in a somewhat strange, though vaguely familar land trying to grok all the absurdities of modern (American Corporate) life while trying to tell an entertaining story.
I missed the original airing of this commerical during the Turin 2006 Winter Olympics in back Feb as, understandably, Timmys elected not to buy airtime on US channels.
This spot shows why Tim Horton’s is #1 in Canada.
It works on some many different levels that it literally covers the entire gamut of ways of ways to connect with the audience. It’s the quintessential hockey story (doesn’t get more Canadian then that). It’s an immigrant story about different generations coming to terms with the country they live in called Canada. It’s a story of fathers and sons and for all the CBC’s out there (to which there are many) it’s about connecting with our parents. “Give me my picture back!” I can so imagine my dad saying that.
…and fade to the product shot at the end of the spot.
Kudos to the Timmys marketing team for putting all that together. I have a hard time figuring out if the tearing up every time I watch it is from the emotional heart of the story or my appreciating of the marketing genius of the spot.
As long as they can keep that Timmy’s brand marketing team together, I’m gonna have no problem owning NYSE:THI, it’s practically like owning a piece of Canada. Props to those guys from transforming Timmys from obscure regional donut chain to national institution on par with Hockey, the Mounties and our national healthcare system.
BTW, you can find the extended version of the spot here but to my mind, the shorter version is so much better.
So I’m researching some good Chinese Proverbs for some essays I am writing.
Yeah it’s tacky but being Chinese I can get away with it. I didn’t find the one that I was looking for but thought I would share some of the gems that I came across. Enjoy. PS. You can find the rest here.
A wise man makes his own decisions, an ignorant man follows the public opinion. (Contrarian investors take heart.)
An inch of time cannot be bought with an inch of gold.
Be not afraid of going slowly, be afraid only of standing still.
Better do a good deed near at home than go far away to burn incense.
Clear conscience never fears midnight knocking.
Biggest profits mean gravest risks. (Yes, the Chinese very clearly understood the concept of Beta.)
Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time.
Do not employ handsome servants. (Luckily I don’t think I’ll ever make enough to afford servants.)
Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend’s forehead. (An real proverb that works just as well as a SNL joke)
Experience is a comb which nature gives to men when they are bald.
Great souls have wills; feeble ones have only wishes.
He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.
If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.
If you are poor, though you dwell in the busy marketplace, no one will inquire about you; if you are rich, though you dwell in the heart of the mountains, you will have distant relatives.
If you suspect a man, don’t employ him, and if you employ him, don’t suspect him. (So the ancient Chinese also had well developed HR best practices)
If you want 1 year of prosperity, grow grain. If you want 10 years of prosperity, grow trees. If you want 100 years of prosperity, grow people. (Ditto)
If your strength is small, don’t carry heavy burdens. If your words are worthless, don’t give advice. (Maybe I should stop blogging)
Insanity is doing the same thing in the same way and expecting a different outcome.
It is later than you think. (So Saruman the Wise was Chinese!)
Man is the head of the family, woman the neck that turns the head. (I’m sure Katy agrees with that one.)
Man who waits for roast duck to fly into mouth must wait very, very long time. (It has better be some pretty damn good roast duck)
Of all the thirty-six alternatives, running away is best.
Talk doesn’t cook rice. (I have to remember to use in my negotiations sometimes)
The great question is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with failure.
The greatest conqueror is he who overcomes the enemy without a blow.
There are two perfectly good men, one dead, and the other unborn.
To understand your parents’ love you must raise children yourself.
When you cease to strive to understand, then you will know without understanding.
With true friends… even water drunk together is sweet enough.
With virtue you can’t be entirely poor; without virtue you can’t really be rich.
To all the robotics nerds, engineers and other geeks already bored with their sets of Mindstorm NXT out there, check out www.GumStix.com.
They are this crazy company based out of Portola Valley off the 101 that sells – get this – pocket sized Linux computers about the size of pack of chewing gum. The idea is that these ultra mobile computers can be used as the hardware platform for a new generation of mobile devices be it robots, pocket size computing appliances, do-it-yourself cell phones or even GPS devices.
Wow. To quote Syndrome, “I’m geeking out.”
Because the underlying system is Linux, developers are able leverage existing Linux expertise and technologies already available in the marketplace. They sell a variety of add-ons extend the capabilities of the GumStix for a variety of uses including WiFi and Bluetooth modules for connectivity, audio add-on to build the next ipod, flash card slots for additional storage, robotics microcontrollers for integration to drive mechanical devices. In effect, Gumstix is Lego for grownups with engineering degrees.
Besides appealing to the hobbist segment, GumStix has also targeted a variety of relevant segments including military, education and OEMs. Talk about crossing the chasm.
Future Prospects
Playing the role of technology marketer, Gumstix has a potentially bright future as the platform of choice for the emerging market of ubiquitious computing devices. By going after education segment it is essentially training up a whole generation of hardware engineers to build products on its generic mobile device platform.
Because it is based on open source Linux software and off the shelf hardware components, it current lacks barriers to imitation that would prevent a third party from easily coming in and stealing market share with copy cat offerings.
One way it can create a degree of lock-in and thus some measure of protection from imitators is to develop a GumStix specific integrated development environment (IDE). Currently customers develop on GumStix using a variety of off the shelf tools and technologies that are not integrated together not optimized for GumStix.
I think an additional barrier to imitation can be created if it can somehow develop a proprietary HW spec that governs how the computer core and add-ons interface with each other. It can then license the spec to 3rd party add-on manufacturers (Actually, I don’t know the first thing about hardware so I’m actually taking a wild guess with one here.)
Of course, the whole point of open source is to drop technical barriers to imitation. And this has not stopped some valuable companies to be created based on open source products such as RedHat (though less valuable as of late).
It can dominate this market simply by leveraging the heck out of its first mover advantage; innovate to take advantage in hardware to continually develop new smaller, lower power, yet power devices; be top of mind in current and future generation of hardware engineers and simply grow with the market being the largest supplier of reliable and easy to integrate mobile computing components in the marketplace.
It’s still early days in the mobile computing components market. However you subscribe to the fact that computing will become ubiquitous that more and more everyday objects will have some computing component built into it, it’s a good bet GumStix is going to around to cash in when that happens.
In the early days, the Internet was hailed a vehicle that promoted free speech to all citizens of the world, free from censorship of authorities.
Today we know that it is possible to censor the Internet by specifically regulatng where the Internet traffic can enter a country thus creating a natural chokepoint that authorities can filtered. As an example Wikipedia is heavily censored in China with many pages on censorship and June 4,1989 limited from the eyes of its citizens.
In response the Canadians at the University of Toronto have created a distributed utility, Psiphon.ca, that allows people in the ‘free Internet’ to act as mini routers/proxy servers to routing restricted traffic to folks in the ‘censored Internet’ such as Iran and China.
Though the technology has been available for a while, what makes this initiative work is that is distributes the actualy deliver of the information to all the citizens of the internet making it difficult for censorship authorities to identify specific IP addresses to ban. Think of it as P2P technology applied to the problem of censorship.
Combined with a boost of marketing to generate awareness (media converage in New York Times, Wired, Slashdot, etc.) to get folks to actually use the application and create a critical mass of proxy servers and you get a potent weapon against Internet censorship.
This is initiative gets my vote as savvy use of Internet technology and marketing smarts to forward a socially-conscious objective. Let’s hope there are more initiatives like this in the future. Go Canada!
Confessions of An Economic Refugee 