I found these two links which coincide together: 1, 2.

In summary, the first article details that the stock of Tesla, an automobile company that produces electric cars, dropped by 6.2%. While it is not entirely due to this, it is partially because of a car crash that resulted in a Tesla Model S catching on fire, which raised concerns about the safety of electric cars, as well as the lithium-ion battery inside them. It is important to note that this is the first fire to occur in a Tesla vehicle, after 83 million miles of Model S driving. As well, it was due to a collision. The vehicle also performed as designed as it protected the driver. The second article is from Tesla Motors’ own blog. It basically speaks about the incident and talks about what happened in great detail. Through full transparency and research, I believe that Tesla dealt excellently with what could have been a big blow to public relations. The blog post from Tesla Motors argues that electric vehicles are safer and that Tesla vehicles in particular have been designed to protect the driver in situations like these, and it is most definitely convincing.

We’ve discussed about this topic plenty of times in class. We’ve mentioned and discussed how Blackberry lost nearly $1 billion dollars in the last quarter with the Blackberry Z10. I cannot recall if we’ve talked about how Blackberry has announced that it will be cutting a third of its work force, about 4500 employees. However, this article puts a bit more of a positive light on this while showing how competition can take advantage of another company’s faults. Google’s Motorola will be looking to hire some of the employees that Blackberry will be cutting from its workforce. Google will be hiring “computer science and engineering talent”.  Couple with the communications patents that they received when they bought Motorola, this could possibly be the beginning to new innovations. As well, Google is taking advantage of RIM/Blackberry’s failure and capitalizing on the opportunity that its been given to get ahead through possible new innovations. Also, on the more “humanitarian” side of the issue, the people who lost their jobs due to Blackberry’s failed business ventures will be able to find new jobs at arguably a better company too.

I found this article to be quite interesting. I’m certain that we have all heard of, and probably used or consumed an Apple or Coca Cola product once in our lives, so it is fairly relevant to all of us. As of September 30, 2013 (which is coincidentally my birthday), Apple has dethroned Coca Cola as the No. 1 Global Brand, who has held the spot for 13 years until this year. While I am aware that Apple is an incredibly large brand and company, I did not expect it to overcome Coca Cola, which is known pretty much everywhere around the world. I personally thought the iPhone 5C would not have been as successful as it was, since it was marketed as a less expensive phone but still ended up costing $599 but I was surprised to find out that apple ended up selling 9 million iPhones in the first weekend of availability. However, this article takes a different approach to this, saying that Apple didn’t ‘technically’ sell 9 million phones. The article states that the iPhone 5C did not completely sell out, therefore Apple did not make 9 million actual sales to consumers, but rather to resellers.