[From Ricardo Hernández Canto] Hi Sammy,
Two weeks ago, Palm launched Palm Centro for Mexico and Latin America in Mexico City.
We had the honour to be present in such important launching party, were Palm is trying to replicate Treo success, now with a newer and much cheaper device that will try to reach a completely new market.
The party held the pressence of Ed Colligan (Palm CEO) which shows how hard is Palm making a bet for this particular new device, created to attract more and more users to its platform. The event also count with all the primary staff or Palm Mexico and Palm LatinAmerica:
Miguel Hernández (LatinAmerica Manager), Ingnacion Gallego (Mexico Country Manager), Zorena Albarrán, Erika Garcia, Humbero Valencia, Mario Villarino and more people from Palm Mexico.
If there´s something I´m glad from Palm is the planification that showed up during the entire event. For a start, the invitation I initially received was in Macromedia Flash and was a virtual Palm Centro showing the launching place with Google Maps. After that, we received some paper invitations with RFID technology within a “Centro” kinda-like paper.
The launch party was at Cuché Bar, a well known lounge bar in Mexico City located in Palmas Avenue no. 500 (Even the avenue had the right name..). The entrance had two nice big Palm Centro´s in both colors: Red and Blue.
When we enter, we were welcomed by some really pretty girls wearing black nice dresses with palm logo in their chests. The entrance tunnel had several big Palm Centros with RFID readers, whose function was to read the paper invitation with RFID Chips. We slide our invitations so the staff people let us enter the party. Those wireless rfid readers were made by the famous Mexican mobile hardware technology, ACCSYS 3000, from Ing. Jorge Cabrera.
Ricardo said that the event didn´t had anything special more as it was it on a similar launching party event from Treo 700p that took place in Chicago a some months ago.
Once inside the lounge bar, the lobby was carefully prepared with another four big Palm Centros, just resembling the same thing as the little Palm Centro devices. There were four models (two women and two men) that were dressed for different escenarios were you could use a Palm Centro device: A beach, a soccer game, a bar and and a friends party, they were demostrating the several functions of Palm Centro device.
If you visited each of the four escenarios, you could win the right to introduce your paper invitation inside a pot, were later the Palm Mexico Staff will choose ten winners of Palm Centro free devices.
The device capabilities that the stand models were demostrating were listening to music, taking pictures, makiNg a google maps search and several other software things.
The launching party was focused for Bussiness partners and Massive Press mainly.
For more enjoy, there was an extensive array of drinks as wine, licor and several kinds of drinks as tequila, ron, etc.. There were also lots of different kinds of snacks.
The party also had the pressence of Ximena Sariñana, a mexican younger singer whose music we enjoyed a lot. We also recorded her with Ricardo´s Treo 755p and we inmediately uploaded the video to our mobile video channel treocast.tv.
Ed Colligan was the big celebrity through the hole night beeing constantly chased for pictures and interviews. We think that, apart from the actual Palm hard situation in front of the new mobile hardware players, Ed is part of the little group that revolutionize mobile computing, with Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky as the other primary players of that time.
We couldn´t pass the oportunity to make a short Interview to Ed Colligan and get Ricardo´s Treo 755p being signed by him. My own 755p Iusacell Treo is black, so the signature was almost invisible. Within Ed Colligan pictures, we couldn´t capture Ingacio Gallego, Country Manager for Palm Mexico, because we was very busy during the party.
After Ximena Sariñana performance, Miguel Hernandez spoke some words and sort the 10 Palm Centro devices to the winners. Curiosly, most of the winners were women; then, Palm Marketing department give USB memories to all the people containing a lot of Palm Centro and Palm corporate information
It was a great party and make us see a little light at the end of the tunnel. During the many times we could spoke with palm directives, including Ed Colligan, they just keep telling us that Palm centro was only the tip of the iceberg, that we could stay calm because great things are just around the corner.
