BlackBerry's new Creative Director is...

I do, too, Mugatu. I do, too.

Samsung should hire her to promote the Note7 phone ā€¦ this girl is on fire!

Is Will.I.Am design kryptonite? He ruined so many cars too

The Brief, Bumbling Tech Careers of Alicia Keys, Lady Gaga, and Gwen Stefani

For a minute in history, it was oh-so-cool for legacy tech companies to hire pop stars. It didnā€™t work.

https://backchannel.com/the-brief-bumbling-tech-careers-of-alicia-keys-lady-gaga-and-will-i-am-f64f8770ed88#.jvqbtfo9p

Maybe they should have hired an army on barbarians on horseback. It would have been just as effective :laughing:

I found that whole trend really odd. I worked with a few of star athletes while at Nike. Michael Jordan, Derek Jeter, Carmelo Anthony, Dwayne Wade. All of them had great input on what their performance expectations were and feedback on what fir their personal style. The tone Nike spent was when we work together on show we collaborate as peers. I always felt a lot of respect and appreciation for what we did on the product side and an excitement to be involved, and we echoed that back as it was pretty exciting to be working with them. Even though they were spokespeople in some regard, they also had to work in the product. The product had to perform and a bad product could lead to a career limiting injury. In fact, they would be putting the product through some of the most extreme performance conditionsā€¦ even with all of that none of them seemed to feel the need to be called creative director.

So the whole celebrity creative director thing just baffled me. It feels so ā€¦ tawdry. Now if any of them stopped performing, recording, or acting and sat with the team every day and actually designed phones, that would awesome, but a title does not make a person, a person makes a title.

At least at Nike the athletes/celebrities providing input had a huge amount of experience in that field to know what the performance issues were, what they wanted improved and that in turn would influence their play, making it extremely valuable advice to apply to the design process.

Even if they had stopped performing to help full-time to work on product design, do they use technology so differently that their input is more valuable than what regular consumers provides? Basketball shoes I understand absolutely how pro input influences shoe usability and the brand itself. A phoneā€¦not so much.

Would I buy some basketball shoes because Michael Jordan helped design them? Sure, he backs up his input with experience.
Would I buy a phone because Alicia Keys had some kind of input? Nope.

I donā€™t know how it is at Nike, but at CCM (albeit 12 odd years ago), all the product managers were ex-hockey players. I think it does help to bring the VOC into the development process.

On the other hand, my impression was that they were more skeptical of new technology than the average consumer.

Would I buy an Aston Martin RB 001 because Daniel Ricciardo applied the final brand placard? Yeah, well, I guess. :laughing: :laughing: :laughing:

I hope nobody ever cleans that placard! His fingerprint residue makes the car twice as fast as a regular one :smiley:

Have to resurrect this one with some shocking news:

Will.i.amā€™s technology company i.am+ is running out of money, according to current employees, company emails, and documents obtained by The Verge. As a result, two current employees of smart home platform Wink ā€” which i.am+ acquired in 2017 ā€” tell The Verge that workers havenā€™t been paid in seven weeks, and that their office in Schenectady, New York has been temporarily closed.

Letā€™s get Will.i.am that much deserved Core77 design award before itā€™s too late!

Man. I was hopping there would be a new CD for blackberry. Whatā€™s Vanilla Ice doing? Does blackberry even still exist?

R

:smiley:

Blackberry still exists! You are closer to Waterloo than I am, you should know!

Current market cap: $3.4B Canadian. Down from a peak of $83B. Iā€™m actually kinda shocked itā€™s still in the billionsā€¦

Likely they have tech patents that others are licensing.

I just saw this, didnā€™t even know you could still buy one.

Yo: I would have assumed they sold a lot of the patents to cover down-sizing costs, but I guess they managed to hang onto enough to keep the revenue flowing.

They still own QNX which from what I understand is a pretty big player in the embedded computing space. Basically they make an operating system for use on devices that arenā€™t PCs like cars, planes, medical devices, etc.

Iā€™ve seen quite a few job openings with them over the years in Kanata (Ottawa suburb). Especially relating to autonomous vehicles in recent years, Apple also opened an office literally next door which is also reportedly working on autonomous vehicles.

Research in Motion would be a great name for a company working on autonomous vehicles. Just sayinā€™.

100%

Vancouver company Damon Motorcycles is using QNX/Blackberry for its motorcycle safety system. They killed it at CES this year, so if youā€™re looking for a direct exampleā€¦ there you go.