A class of S3 Business pupils at Dunoon Grammar school received a pleasant surprise last week when Tony Fadell – dubbed the Father of the iPod – tweeted words of encouragement for a learning experience the pupils were working on.
The pupils studying Business were working on a creative team exercise – tasked to rebrand Apple’s iconic iPod and devise an effective marketing-mix to breathe new life into the flagging sales of the once all conquering multimedia player.
With mobile phones now catering for the media wants of many consumers, the pupils had to identify untapped gaps in the market to re-launch their niche products to.
The pupils displayed a fantastic understanding of marketing strategy – presenting a number of innovative solutions to the problems faced by the iPod during a series of pitches, the details of which were tweeted on the Dunoon Grammar social media site.
Ideas included the iSwift a music player for water sport athletes and the iPod A, a device for children too young for mobile phones.
Pupils were delighted to learn that Tony Faddell had tweeted a message of support to the Dunoon pupils to his 174,000 followers.
Faddell served as the Senior Vice President of the iPod Division at Apple Inc. from March 2006 to November 2008 and is known as one of the “fathers of the iPod” for his work on the first generations of Apple’s music player. In May 2010, he founded Nest Labs, which announced its first product, the Nest Learning Thermostat, in October 2011. Nest was acquired by Google in January 2014 for $3.2B. Until recently, Fadell has been leading the development of Google Glass.
It was therefore a fantastic achievement for the Dunoon Grammar pupils to impress the world famous technology innovator and stir him to tweet his approval of their work.
“To all the Dunoon Grammar students – Love your ideas! You’re on the right track – activity specific iPods, that’s the future… Very cool.”
Head Teacher David Mitchell commented:
“This is a fantastic gesture from Tony Faddell, clearly a very busy and successful technology entrepreneur. It is testimony to the creativity and marketing knowledge of the pupils involved that Mr Faddell felt compelled to share his approval for their work. I am sure our young people are inspired by his encouragement and I am confident that many will prove to be successful technology entrepreneurs of the future.”
