ARCHIVED FORUM -- March 2012 to February 2022READ ONLY FORUM
This is the second Archived Forum which was active between 1st March 2012 and 23rd February 2022
Hej guys!
I work with Create heading design and development. Me and my partner in crime (Anders) are stoked that we get this somewhat closed off playground to test out some ideas with you guys before releasing/sharing with the rest of the world.
To start things off we think it'd be cool to introduce ourselves and hopefully you guys will follow suit so we get an idea of who we are playing with and what different kind of skills/passion you guys have.
My name is Christian, I'm originally from Stockholm Sweden, I have an industrial design background and of course I'm a Bang & Olufsen fan. Ever since I was a child I loved my family's TV and sound system (ah the memories of playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time on that thing...), which of course was a Bang & Olufsen system and to this day I still have my family's old BeoSystem 5000 (BM5000, BG5500CD, BG5005) which at the moment is on display at our Lyngby office while I'm renovating my flat.
I began working at Bang & Olufsen after I was done with my master thesis that I developed in Struer with B&O, which was a dream come true for me. After which, Create was formed from a proposal I created and since then I've been developing and exploring the future of concept exploration at Bang & Olufsen. In this journey we have developed a prototyping platform, a couple student collaborations (Aalto ARTS, DTU, Thesis Projects etc.) and facilitating The Innovation Camp at B&O where we teach multi disciplinary product development to a multi disciplinary group of students. You can get a sneak peak at https://www.instagram.com/beocreate/ or even http://www.beocreate.com/ (launching soon, we'll let you know when ;) )
My core competencies lay in; design thinking, concept development, 3D modelling, model making, sketching and basic knowledge in electronics/Linux development (well, by smashing buttons and yelling "WORK!" to a RPi or Arduino).
We hope in the beginning of next week we can bounce some ideas off of you and show the latest development of something we have nicknamed 'FX2000 Thunderstrike' and Re-Create.
Again, thank you for having us and we're looking forward to some interesting conversations and cool collaborations! And remember just send me a msg if you have any thoughts ideas or just want to bounce something!
All the best,
Christian Thams
Hej Christian (and Anders!)
Thanks for getting in touch. That is very helpful to see your background and your passion for B&O. Here is a quick introduction from me:-
I also became a B&O fan at a young age (my mother had a vintage Beogram 1000 when I was about 4 years old and I can still remember carefully raising and lowering the tonearm lever and enjoying the way the arm gently glided up and down ;) I bought my first B&O system (a used Beocenter 3300) from a junk sale when I was about 13 and I spent months carefully restoring it back to life.
I'm from Leicestershire, England and I studied for an Electrical and Electronic Engineering degree back in the 1990s, before working for a national telecomms company specialising in cabling and telephone systems. About 10 years ago, I started making music and audio cables for friends and then selling the spare cables on eBay. This hobby soon took up all of my spare time and in 2008 I quit my day job to build B&O cables full time.
I now lead a team of three engineers in a small workshop where we design and test cabling and circuits to interface between B&O products and many other devices (the workshop also doubles as a home cinema and recording studio after the work is finished!) Our cables are used by over 90% of the UK B&O stores, as well as by many others across Europe.
The key skills I can offer will be in getting different products to function well together, via electronics hardware and wired/wireless connections. I have facilities to test audio products in the workshop, as well as plenty of enthusiasm!
If it is of interest, I will be visiting the ISE trade show next week in Netherlands, where B&O are exhibiting. If you are planning to be there, it would be good to meet up.
You can reach me via email at steve@soundsheavenly.com and you can see more about what I do at www.soundsheavenly.com
Kind regards, Steve Marriott.
Steve.
www.soundsheavenly.com
Founder of Sounds Heavenly Cables and Brand Ambassador for Bang & Olufsen
Sounds Heavenly are proud to sponsor BeoWorld!
Please check out my YouTube channel at https://youtube.com/soundsheavenlycables
Looking forward to seeing what you come up with. I am simply a B&O lover - we had a Beovision 3400SJ when I was young and it was so much better than any TV I had seen before. I bought my first system when I was a medical student , worked my way up to about 100 systems before giving it all up and only have about 5 these days. I love B&O for the magic and I think this is what is needed today. Very difficult to achieve though as one big TV looks much like another. Technology is also very expensive to develop and the time scale to get back the R&D so short. Very into voice control at present.
Have a long history with Beoworld as was the first forum moderator and helped take it from one post a day to what it became in at least a small way. The secret then was responsiveness, and I think instant response is the key - B&O always worked with minimal input - the single key stroke - complex function made simple so it can be enjoyed by all but with no loss of control.
Peter
I deal in pre-owned Bang & Olufsen, and have done for the last 12 years professionally. Before that, I've been a B&O fan all my life (well, from the age of around 12, so that's 34 years of being a fan).
My knowledge of B&O is, errr, pretty good. There's not a great deal I don't know about products from the mid 1980's onwards. Before that period I have a good working knowledge and I've either owned or handled most products from the late 1960's onwards. Anything before that, I just ask Martin (Dillen) who knows pretty much every vintage product ever made (and beyond), right down to component level!
I'm a huge fan of 'keeping it simple' - and I think many companies are totally and utterly missing the point when it comes to user interfaces. I'd guess around 0.0001% of buyers get excited about sitting down in earnest to have a damned good read of the instruction manual. A User Manual should be there as a last resort. Any piece of AV should either have the simplest on-screen / on-display controls - or be so simple to use you can just plug and play. The set-up of the the Play products is a good step towards this - I've been impressed on a few occasions actually.
As mentioned in my previous thread, I'll be the miserable one who says "what's the point?" more often than not. I think it's as good to have negative views as well as positive, if there are any, in order to stop an idea spinning off track. When any idea is pitched at me I always look for negatives first. If there are too many negatives, it saves a lot of time and you can move on to another idea rather than getting all excited about a non-starter!!
I still don't fully understand exactly what you're looking to achieve though. Are you looking to simply feed finished ideas to the 'Mother Ship' for them to integrate into new products or are you looking to create a brand called 'Create - by Bang & Olufsen' to sell alongside 'Play' or main products in stores?
Lee
Hi All
First off - thank you so much for welcoming us onboard BeoWorld.
It’s a true pleasure to be here and even have a private space for us to engage with each other.
Let me start of by presenting myself.
I’m Anders. A husband of one and father of two. I live in Espergærde north of Copenhagen. Well, actually I’m rebuilding the house right now, so I’m very much in the market for exploring what B&O products to choose for the house – best part of the ‘building process’ if you ask me ;)
I joined B&O back in August 2016, to spearhead BeoCreate alongside Christian Thams, having responsibility on the strategy, marketing and commercial side of things.
So in B&O terms, I’m still the new guy – and I will be so for the next 9,5 years…
On a personal level, I’m not only super thrilled to be working on the inside of this true icon of a company. I’m also super thrilled to experience the passion around our brand in the world around us. Even though I’m born and (B&O) raised in Denmark the love for our brand keeps surprising me positively. The memories from my own childhood in the 80’s with B&O products still stand strong. The BeoVision 5000 was a central part of my parents’ home, but the BeoVision 6000 my grandfather had was always my favorite. I just loved pulling the slider back and forth to unveil and hide the screen. It felt magic every time.
Growing up in Denmark in the 80’s and 90’s, I also experienced first hand how any family (more or less…) owned at least one B&O product. Today, that makes up an entire generation of people like me more or less, that has first hand memories of our brand and products. Quite amazing.
Enough about the past for now. Fast forwarding from my childhood and into my professional career, I hold a Masters in Business Administration and Organizational Communication and I’ve spent just short of a decade in different ad agencies. Starting in the brand activation end of things working first hand with customers and ending up in the digital, strategic and creative end working with a much broader and top level scope. One of the agencies was one I founded in 2013, and after getting both Carlsberg and Republic of Fritz Hansen as clients, we got pretty busy, was acquired and I then acted as agency director of the acquiring agency until joining B&O in August 2016. My experience spands pretty broad and counts anything from Coca-Cola to ‘Kickstarters’, and it’s very much the entrepreneurial spirit, true brand passion and true hunger to make tomorrow better than todayt that I bring to the table in Create.
So in short, that’s me.
Happy to be aboard BeoWorld and I look forward to a range of exiting discussion in the time to come!
Let me start of by catching the ball you’ve just passed Lee in a separate post ;)
Best of regards
/Anders Buchmann
9 LEE: I still don't fully understand exactly what you're looking to achieve though. Are you looking to simply feed finished ideas to the 'Mother Ship' for them to integrate into new products or are you looking to create a brand called 'Create - by Bang & Olufsen' to sell alongside 'Play' or main products in stores? Lee
Hi Lee
Thanks for asking - and thanks for challenging. Let me start off by not being a politician and give you some straight answers:
Are you looking to simply feed finished ideas to the 'Mother Ship' for them to integrate into new product. Finished ideas, no. Inspiration, learning and guidance, yes.
or are you looking to create a brand called 'Create - by Bang & Olufsen' to sell alongside 'Play' or main products in stores? No
Now please let me grab the chance to elaborate a bit. Our newly launched website tells the story of our mission quite on point, we think: http://create.bang-olufsen.com/about-us. In addition to that, I can share with you the three goals in our mission in this fora:
1) Fuel innovation process
2) Re-position brand
3) Build community
So, Create is not set into the world to create of-the-shelf products. Create is more about creating a platform on which B&O as a company can engage ourselves with the world around us in a new and more open way. The primary tools in doing so will be openness and co-creation. Hence Create is not about what Create can accomplish in itself, but what Create can facilitate/initiate between our experts within and the experts in the rest of the world. Because lets face it, many of our current and coming customers are experts in some way.
Coming back to the three points above, I should say they're not in prioritized order. Number 1) we expect to learn a lot, and learn valuable stuff, if we start listening and engaging more with the world around us. It is then our job to feed the learnings back to the 'mother ship' as you briefly touch base with above. Hence we are organizationally placed close to our innovation and concepts people. Number 2) is not something we will actively pursue or stage, but more something that should be a natural effect from doing new things in new ways. And finally number 3) is not about competing with you guys. At all! It's about building up a network of great and inspiring people around us across online and offline channels with whom we can approach our challenges in new ways to hopefully end up somewhere better.
Does the text above come off a bit naive or fluffy you might ask if applying the "what's the point" approach?
One answer would be to not confuse being open-minded and modest with being naive ;) We like the though of applying a start-up thinking in Create. So say we weren't 91 years old, but were just getting started, how might we approach the challenges around us. That's how we would like to approach things. With a great deal of respect for where we come from - of course.
And let me end for now. I'm sure I've left you with tons of questions - so please fire away. I'll try and answers faster looking ahead ;)
Br
/Anders
So, if we were speaking frankly, you're looking to throw open the doors of the old 'IdeaLand' to see if the public can contribute?
9 LEE: So, if we were speaking frankly, you're looking to throw open the doors of the old 'IdeaLand' to see if the public can contribute? Lee
Pls be frank. And let me be the same the other way.
No, we're not looking for 'free' ideas from the public.
We genuinely believe the public can contribute. So this is our way of opening up for a different kind of (co-)creation process.
/A
Sorry if that came across the wrong way - it wasn't meant as an insult, if it looked like that. Sometimes in text things can look different to how you would say them!
I certainly didn't think it was a fishing trip for free ideas - I was just pondering if it was IdeaLand 'opening the doors' so to speak....
I think you'll find plenty of ideas and suggestions here on BeoWorld. Many will be rubbish, but sometimes you'll get one comment from someone (and it's usually a throwaway comment at that) which illuminates a lightbulb!
You'll be well aware that trying to please everyone is a fruitless task, and also on this site you'll need to be a shepherd with a strong hand or the flock may wander!! You can start a thread about a powerlink cable and within 24 hours it will be discussing how medium rare steak is better than ice cream. I kid you not...
I'm very much looking forward to some ideas being pitched. This is quite exciting!
I will bang on about one thing - the one product which has completely changed my view of listening to music is the Amazon Echo - voice control instead of a remote is simply a game changer - I am listening to BL4000s at present with an Echo Dot. I didn't have to search through my 34,000 songs - I just got what I wanted. The only problem is the quality at present of the feed is not good enough - I can also play in the same room with my CX100s through a Beomaster 5500 and iTunes - sounds better but a pain to find what I want. I want B&O quality but good voice control - I did tell Torben that 5 years ago though!
So...... is that where it all ends?
It seems like it is...
Regards Keith....
Maybe not....
In the spirit of BeoCreate, here is a Beolab 2000 re-purposed to work directly with an iPod Touch:-
Or, how about a Beosound 9000 with an LED backlight that activates when the unit is in use:-
Kind regards, Steve.
Hey guys, just to be clear, this is not where it ends! We have just had some great talks with a HW supplier having to make a lot of decisions around our offering based on performance, price and functionality. Right now next to my desk I have a "Recreated" RL45.2 that I'm waiting to test out and then share to you later today to get some feedback from you guys, please stay tuned and I apologize for being this inactive but I don't take showing things lightly, might be a little too much of a perfectionist...
Thanks Christian,
Sounds interesting!
Christian Thams: Hey guys, just to be clear, this is not where it ends! We have just had some great talks with a HW supplier having to make a lot of decisions around our offering based on performance, price and functionality. Right now next to my desk I have a "Recreated" RL45.2 that I'm waiting to test out and then share to you later today to get some feedback from you guys, please stay tuned and I apologize for being this inactive but I don't take showing things lightly, might be a little too much of a perfectionist...
Hey Christian,
Is there any more to Create? It does seem to have ended......
Look forward to hearing from you!
....