Meganet

In a major upturn in the revitalization of Cadillac. Today General Motors announced that the iconic Cadillac brand which has stood for luxury for the better part of 112 years will be spun off from parent GM to be a stand alone business unit. With this new re-alignment will also come a move of Cadillac world headquarters from Detroit to New York City.

Johan de Nysschen, who became the new President of Cadillac in August, will be responsible for the brand’s overall operational performance. He is certainly up to the job. He was formerly North American CEO for Audi and CEO of Infiniti.

While Cadillac's current line up has a few flat spots in terms of sales, the all new Escalade, and a new flagship sedan that was teased to the world as the El Miraj concept give a clear view of where Cadillac plans to go to differentiate itself. The move to become a separate entity from parent GM rather than remaining a division as it has for the majority of its life at GM, will allow Cadillac more freedom to pursue growing areas of the luxury car market with more clarity and focus moving forward.

A move like this can only make one wonder what Ford's direction with Lincoln will be moving forward.


Source: General Motors

Press Release:

NEW YORK – As part of the continued expansion of Cadillac, General Motors today announced a strategic realignment that will establish the flagship brand as a separate business unit. In addition, the new Cadillac organization will expand to New York with a new global headquarters opening in 2015.
The realignment affirms Cadillac’s importance to GM’s strategy. Creating a new Cadillac business unit enables it to pursue growing opportunities in the luxury automotive market with more focus and clarity.

“With the relentless upward repositioning of successive new-generation Cadillac products, the next logical step is to provide Cadillac more freedom to cultivate the brand in pursuit of further global growth,” said GM President Dan Ammann.

“Cadillac’s mission is to reinstate the brand to a pre-eminent position among global luxury brands, a bold challenge requiring a distinct and focused new organization,” Ammann said. “More than a division or brand, Cadillac is becoming a center of excellence for our company.”
Johan de Nysschen, who joined Cadillac as its new president in August, will be responsible for the brand’s overall operational performance.

Cadillac’s leadership council is headed by de Nysschen, and consists of Jim Bunnell, vice president of sales and service; Uwe Ellinghaus, chief marketing officer; David Colasinski, chief financial officer; David Leone, executive chief engineer, and Andrew Smith, executive director of design. Further expansion of the Cadillac leadership team will be announced later.

Expansion Includes New York Headquarters
The plan includes expansion to New York City in the form of a multipurpose brand and event space in conjunction with modern loft offices located in the heart of a city renowned for establishing trends and setting standards for the global luxury market.

While the majority of functions with oversight and responsibility for both global and U.S. operations will be located at the new global headquarters, there will be no change to technical product development teams located in Michigan, nor does the plan impact manufacturing or assembly operations. Cadillac management is reviewing options for which specific staffs will be based in New York and which will remain in current locations in the Detroit-area or elsewhere.

Cadillac has operations in more than 40 countries. The brand’s ongoing growth has been driven by an expanded product portfolio, leading to 28 percent global growth in 2013 and an increase of about 10 percent so far this year. Cadillac sales in China have grown 75 percent year to date.

“We are very proud of our Detroit roots and heritage, and the majority of the Cadillac workforce will remain in Michigan," de Nysschen said. "But there is no city in the world where the inhabitants are more immersed in a premium lifestyle than in New York. Establishing our new global headquarters in Soho places Cadillac at the epicenter of sophisticated living. It allows our team to share experiences with premium-brand consumers and develop attitudes in common with our audience."
Company officials thanked New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for his active support of and involvement in establishing the creation of Cadillac NYC.

"As the media and advertising capital of the world, New York is the ideal location for Cadillac to move its marketing operations to enhance their brand and spur future growth," Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said.

"From Day One, our administration has been creating a more business-friendly environment that encourages new investments and job creation, and today is another example of how that approach is delivering results for New Yorkers. I welcome Cadillac's marketing team to New York and commend them on their decision to invest personnel and resources alongside our world-class workforce."
Said U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer:  “To have an iconic American brand like Cadillac choose Manhattan for its global headquarters is another example that this city is a growing hub of innovation. New York continues to be a magnet for the best and the brightest companies and workers alike, and as Cadillac continues on its impressive growth trajectory as a global brand, I’m thrilled it will do so based in New York City."

Last week Apple announced the new iPhone 6 and 6 plus (the 6 being the updated version of the iPhone 5s with slightly larger dimensions and the 6 plus being a phablet with a true 1080 display). These will both be available on September the 19th, through carriers or an Apple Store.

Of course, the Apple Watch was also announced which caused swoons from legions of fanboys worldwide (not available until 2015 though). It's pretty, but no beauty, but does it really mater? Apple will still sell lots of them.

Let's start with the new iPhones, they have a new Apple A8 ARM CPU which can be twice as fast as the old A7X in the iPhone 5s and a new graphics chip (also faster). They also come with an updated M8 co-processor which as well as looking after things like the compass, gyroscope and accelerometer, now handles pressure as well. The older M7 off-loaded these functions, the M8 does the same. Allegedly it's a chip manufactured by NXP so probably a very low power 32bit ARM MCU which off-loads all the data collection from the actual sensor chips and then triggers the main (A8) CPU when it's got some usable data for it - it probably does a bit of data pre-processing too.

The M8 allows the phone to diligently collect movement data using very little power and applications can access the data as they need, the barometer adds the ability to track the height of the device (altitude), so can now measure the user's climbing stairs etc activity - Apple are doing their best to own the health market and it will make a big dent into applications when HealthKit hits iOS 8 allowing multiple health apps to aggregate their data into a central application. Why wear a Nike Fuelband, when your iPhone collects the same data, might as well take the data from the iPhone and send it back to Nike's Plus service (and Nike has recently got out of the tracker market, at least for separate wearables - maybe Tim Cooke [CEO of Apple] who sits on Nike's board gave them a heads-up).

Then there's the NFC stuff that's now in the iPhone, that will be used for Apple Pay. Apple has previously publicly rejected NFC completely saying the market wasn't ready and the NFC market was too fragmented, that's all about to change.

Then there's the Apple Watch, it's square, but Apple have done a fantastic job on the UI, it's nice now and can only improve. It too has a new chip (the S1), but there's not much detail on that yet.. It also has 'health' features and can track movement (independently from the phone), it's got LEDs and sensors on the base which can measure your pulse-rate (many read that to be heart rate, but it's not quite the same, pulse rate is just measuring the blood squirting through the veins - heart-rate generally means taking an ECG reading and measuring the number of beats per minute - that gets tricky and can mean FDA approval, which is a pain that Apple just may not want to go through YET). It has health apps built-in, though it will use the iPhone GPS to measure real distances moves etc.

Currently the LED/sensors just measure pulse-rate, but (probably very much like Withings did with the Pulse) they can also measure O2 concentration in the blood (pO2), then glucose/sugar levels and who knows what else, the technologies there, it just requires enabling bits of software.

The Apple Watch also has that nice little NFC subsystem in it, which will allow older iPhones (and iPads) to utilise Apple Pay (see what they did there!).

However, it's Apple Pay which is the real game changer. NFC on Android phones is fragmented, everyone has their own way of doing things. All the mobile carriers are trying to do mobile wallets, banks are trying to do mobile wallets, Apple is now doing a mobile payment system with agreement from the major card issuers (MasterCard, Visa, AMEX). Admittedly is US only at launch, but it will surely roll out to at least European countries reasonably rapidly. The US hasn't adopted Chip and Pin (C&P) yet, however stores are accepting NFC cards for small payments (NFC cards have a symbol on them, like a wireless signal radiating out). Apple now allows a user to store the card details (in a secure area) on the iPhone and uses that info to make an NFC transaction. It doesn't need all the card info, just enough to tell the merchant who the user is and that gets passed back to the card issuer, the transaction is done (all using secure tokes and secured on the phone using Touch-ID). Presumably Apple takes a small cut of the transaction from the card companies, but they get reduced fraud (mag stripes are easy to clone and until C&P is rolled out in the US, this is a MUCH more secure method). There's also only a single payment system that merchants have to worry about that uses their existing merchant accounts and systems. This will be HUGE for Apple.

That's just the beginning - take TfL's Oyster system in the UK, they're trying to get rid of dedicated Oyster cards and allowing users to use their normal (NFC) bank cards for pay-as-you-go journeys, this will eventually extend to all types of journeys (season tickets etc). Apple can now step in and support Oyster on the phone (and Apple Watch), no more searching for the right card that's registered for Oyster, dangle your watch near the reader.

Moving forwards, as the technology is adopted, Apple can start removing the need for the card companies themselves, it becomes the card issuer, it becomes the bank. The card companies are needed now, but for how long? The technology is there built into the iPhone and Watch. It links into your iTunes account and you have central control.

In the future, Apple produce an NFC reader in their desktop offerings (MacBooks, Airs, iMacs, Mac Pros) and e-commerce sites can access this, go to a site which is Apple Pay enabled, pay through your phone, the possibilities are endless - and the revenue streams to Apple with them.

The big losers? Well Pebble has just been blown out of the water, ok it's cheaper, but it's dumb compared to Apple's Watch. A lot of Android Wear watches are also likely to be hit hard, though some of them are prettier - at least now. Apple have built a watch eco-system - they currently support 3 watch designs and lots of different bracelets, they are all designed and made beautifully (even if the watch itself isn't the prettiest out there, it's a version 1). Now Apple work with the high-end watch designers - Apple Watch inside, designer watch outside. If Apple do this properly, they've corned the smart-watch market for a long time.

The BIGGEST losers though - eventually the card companies, Apple is disrupting them from the inside, much like it did with the music industry and is slowly doing to the film/video industry. The other major loser is COIN, such a good idea (though only for the US's antiquated mag stripe card system, it has a long way to go to support multiple C&P cards, if they ever get the technology and agreements to do so), it's business now looks very shaky indeed, killed by Apple before they've even got beta units out to people. Another loser is potentially POWA, they've got a great system for e-commerce sites so people can pay with their mobiles (and have just raised $200m), Apple Pay potentially kills their services too.

Pascal Lamy has presented his report to the European Commission on the future of the UKF (700MHz spectrum).

In summary the report proposes: -

The 700 MHz band (694-790 MHz) is currently used for Digital Terrestrial Television broadcasts and Wireless microphones, this spectrum to be re-alloacted to wireless broadband by 2020 (with a +/- 2 year variance).

The spectrum below 700MHz (470-694 MHz) should be maintained for DTT broadcasts and should be given regulatory stability.

The Program Making and Special Events (PMSE) spectrum should be moved to the 800MHz band (823-832 MHz) and 1.8 GHz (1785-1805 MHz).

This will mean TV sets/etc will need a major retune in around 2018 to ensure reception and also new broadcast technologies (MPEG-4 and DVB-T2 - which is used by Freeview HD, but not all current sets/etc will support it).

It's likely PMSE will require new equipment (especially for radio microphones), but at least manufacturers have about 6 years to do this.