General Electric (GE) ha acordado la venta de su negocio de electrodomésticos al grupo sueco Electrolux por 3.300 millones de dólares (2.547 millones de euros) en efectivo.
Con la mayor adquisición de su historia, el segundo fabricante mundial de electrodomésticos amplía su presencia en Estados Unidos y busca hacer frente en este mercado a su mayor rival, Whirlpool.
"Las marcas de alta calidad de GE complementan nuestras marcas icónicas y mejorarán nuestra presencia en Norteamérica", ha explicado Keith McLoughlin, presidente y consejero delegado de Electrolux.
In the late 19th Century, Thomas Edison baked cotton threads and shredded bamboo to create some of the earliest commercial pure carbon fiber for use as the first glowing filaments in light bulbs. Industrial engineers are no longer baking bamboo, but carbon fiber is still a subject of fascination as a super material.
La empresa de origen sueco busca comprar la unidad de electrodomésticos de General Electric, valuada en unos 2 mil 500 millones de dólares; la empresa estadounidense busca destinar recursos a negocios de mayor crecimiento.
In a Manhattan office, a small team of engineers, marketers, and product designers is plotting the future of medical devices. With hopes of “disrupting” the market, the group is using a limited budget to streamline the development of a new PET/CT scanner while addressing customer concerns over price, performance, and ease of use. “The reason why TurboTax became so popular is because you didn’t have to become an expert in tax regulation,” one person says during a brainstorming session. “TurboTax for oncology!” another shouts.
GE and Pivotal said they built the first industrial-scale “data lake” system that could supercharge how companies store, manage and glean insight from information harvested from machines connected to the Industrial Internet.
The system, which has already tracked more than 3 million flights and gathered 340 terabytes of data, can analyze data 2,000 times faster than previous methods and cut costs tenfold. It is so powerful that it crunched through a complex task that would have taken a month to compute in just 20 minutes.
Sweat can be a smelly messenger, but one that also carries a trove of valuable information about how our bodies are feeling. Scientists at several labs are now trying to pick its lock with nanotechnology, including know-how transferred from GE’s jet engine research, to develop flexible, Band-Aid-like wireless sensors sensitive enough to detect a drop of biomolecules found in sweat in 2.5 million gallons of water.
When I took over as chief marketing officer at GE, the mandate from CEO Jeff Immelt was to make marketing a vital operating function that could drive organic growth. We realized early on that it wouldn’t be enough for marketers just to focus on advertising and external messaging. We were in a unique position to integrate ideas and teams across the company, and to draw insights from the outside world. So we signed up to fight in a bigger way for the market and GE’s place in it.
Inside the biomedical electronics lab at GE Global Research in Niskayuna, New York, Jeff Ashe, a principal engineer, holds up a mechanical pencil and points to its thin graphite point. That, he says, is the size of the new wireless brain implants GE is developing. The hope is that smaller, more biocompatible implants will help the paralyzed walk and provide a more effective way to treat diseases that affect the brain.
More than a century after Thomas Edison got into the light bulb business, his bright idea is getting brainy.
Engineers at GE, the company Edison founded, have helped develop an affordable LED light bulb that can talk to its owners’ tablets and smartphones. The bulb, which starts at just under $15, contains a chip that can wirelessly connect to the Internet and communicate with users via a mobile app called Wink.
Wink is also the name of a new software business launched by the collaborative design company Quirky.
GE will partner with the innovative Southern California venture capital firm Frost Data Capital on a business incubator focused on machine data, predictive analytics and the Industrial Internet. “Frost is looking to incubate really big problems that drive revolutionary change,” says Bill Ruh, vice president of GE Software. “That’s how we found them.”
