David Pitlyuk

Viral marketing is a great way to get some major promotion to your product or service for cheap. The hard part is coming up with a clever campaign, especially if you want it to generate a lot of buzz. An interesting one I was just reading about was done by Nissan, where they created 200,000 sets of fake keys that they are putting in places like bars, clubs, concerts, etc. The keys feature a tag that promotes their intelligent key with push ignition, so it would no longer need a regular set of keys. This is a great concept for marketing the technology, and is definitely creating a buzz (hence this blog post). People that find the keys can go to AltimaKeys.com where they can enter some sort of code and they will win a prize.

Nissan spent $100,000 on this campaign. It may seem like a lot, but when you compare it to one TV commercial, it’s much cheaper when you factor in the budget to produce the commercials and the air time.

Have you done any viral marketing for your site/blog? If so, what did you do, and how did it work out for you?

Would you like to know what the ultimate piece of art is for a car enthusiast? How about a Lamborghini hanging on your wall. That’s exactly what millionaire Vintner Richard Moriarty did. He took a 1974 Lamborghini Countach and bolted against the wall of his $2 million Newport Beach, CA home.

It took a 70-ton crane, crew of workers, and a hole in the ceiling to get the car in the house and on the wall. The engine was removed from the car prior to getting in the house, leaving at around 1,000 lbs.

Believe it or not, this isn’t the first time a Lambo has been mounted to a wall for display. The more expensive Diablo hangs from the wall at the Lamborghini Museum in Bolognese, Italy.

Richard bought his Countach for $60,000, and if you’re interested in doing the same thing,there’s one for sale with low miles on eBay for a mere $127,000. Or perhaps the Diablo better suits you for $219,000. For the high-rollers, try the Lamborghini Murcielago LP640 on your wall…just make sure to send me pics!

Have some old cars laying around? Donate a car towards a good cause! You can also donate your boat or donate a RV to your favorite charity. There are benefits to vehicle donations including tax deductions for you. Read car donation FAQ today.

A sweet product from a Korean company called SNT announced an in-dash PC at CeBit this week. The negative….it’s most likely for the Korean market only, but we can still drool and hope stuff like this comes our way.

A bunch of tech sites posted about this prior to CeBit, but I haven’t read any updates yet and none of them knew what kind of price or hardware specs were going to be available. They did post some interesting tid bits though. It will be powered by WindowsXP and equipped with GPS and touchscreen. It supports something called T-DMB which can be used for viewing live TV and later be recorded to a hard drive. It can be hooked up to the internet constantly through HSDPA. The fact that everything is built into the entire unit, it will be such a clean installation, especially in cars that support double DIN.

I can really appreciate this because I had an in-car PC setup in my 350Z. We had to custom fabricate a way to fit the screen, run all the wiring throughout the car, etc. This is a much simpler solution. Here’s the setup I had in my Z:

I didn’t think it was possible to have an ugly Lamborghini, but John Ferci made that happen. John somehow acquired exclusive rights from Lamborghini to build custom versions and still retain the name and official badge. In the beginning of the month a rendering was released:

Not so good….but hey, it’s just a rendering, so maybe the final version will look much better. Think again! Autoblog has the what are supposed to be first official shots of the Lamborghini Alar.

That just looks horrific. The only good thing to say about it is that it should produce over 700hp and have a top speed of 223mph. Here are some of the classic comments from Autoblog in response:

• someone must die for this. - Ben
• The designers of this car should be sent to an island where they’ll never be able to hurt anyone ever again! - JC3
• Another reason to say NO to crack… - Eric

What do you think about the car?

Update: An official production picture can be found at Autoblog.

This was brought to my attention by my roommate Jason who owns a 93 RT/10 Dodge Viper. He was browsing the Viper forums and happened to come across a thread he knew I would like. Check out this picture of a new Viper SRT Coupe with matching helicopter:

Look closely and you’ll see a M60-D door gun hanging out. Apparently the guy that owns the Viper and chopper is the owner of Northwest Helicopters, a company that specializes in rebuilding helicopters. Here’s a picture of their oh so sweet facility, with 16 helipads:

They were building up the yellow helicopter for a show (I believe it was the Heli-Expo), and they wanted one that would stand out of the crowd. So they all got in a car and drove around all the new car lots looking for a color that stood out, which happened to be yellow. They said the best yellow they could find was Viper Racing Yellow, which was the color of the owners new Viper. They got the paint codes for the yellow and silver, painted the helicopter to match, and attended the show in Orlando, FL. According to the owner, the paint scheme was a big hit. I found a picture of the chopper at the actual trade show on display.