1/12/11 "Car-Plane vs. Jumbo XL Jet"

Today we had a study of international marketing by Marsel Gifico. He is an absolute genius and oa true entrepreneur in every sense of the word. He made his first fortune created the Spanish version of Yahoo, known as Ole. Ole was very popular throughout Spain and Central/South America because of its name which evokes the very spanish tradition of bull fighting. After it was bought by a larger internet company, he did not like being stifled by the bureaucracy and left.

His next project was to use SMS to relay information, in 2000. Waaayyy before texting was even a thing. He said that when he came up with the idea only .01% of people who had cell phones used SMS texting. Using the technology he relayed information like jokes, stock quotes, and even toyed with a twitter like application. You send your text message to the company with numbers and then depending on the numbers it would be sent to your friends.

He spoke often about finding trends in markets. That it is a marketer's job understand where technology is going and how to best get people excited about it. He argued it is marketers, not consumers, which create trends. He had us do a small project in which we tried to predict which market would be most accepting of a Spanish red wine. Mexico, Australia, and China look to be the best markets.

After school we walked to the Science Center of Barcelona. It took way too long and the tourism maps are just not precise enough. But we found it and it was pretty cool. That's about it for today. And for some reason I didn't take any pictures so...

Here's a church.

And a bird.