Social media has swallowed the news – threatening the funding of public-interest reporting and ushering in an era when everyone has their own facts. But the consequences go far beyond journalism
In the digital age, it is easier than ever to publish false information, which is quickly shared and taken to be true.
Here is the news – but only if Facebook thinks you need to know
Twenty-five years after the first websitewent online, it is clear that we are living through a period of dizzying transition. For 500 years after Gutenberg, the dominant form of information was the printed page:
The former home of the South Wales Evening Post – the title moved to smaller premises two years ago.
The rise of Donald Trump is ‘a symptom of the mass media’s growing weakness’, according to academic Zeynep Tufekci. Photograph: Jim Cole/AP
Check out iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, learn about the powerful iPad Pro, take a look at the new features and bands for Apple Watch, and see the premiere of the all-new Apple TV.
Catch all the announcements from the event. Apple Special Event. September 9, 2015. Streaming video requires Safari 4 or later on OS X v10.6 or later; Safari on iOS 4.2 or later; or QuickTime 7 on Windows. Streaming via Apple TV requires second- or third-generation Apple TV with software 5.0.2 or later.
Tim Cook joined Apple in March 1998 as Senior Vice President (SVP) of Worldwide Operations—he also served as Executive Vice President (EVP) of Worldwide Sales and Operations—and was Chief Operating Officer (COO) until he was named the CEO of Apple on August 24, 2011, when he succeeded Steve Jobs.
NCO eCommerce
A Journey Through the Last 30 Years of Tech.
MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte takes you on a journey through the last 30 years of tech. The consummate predictor highlights interfaces and innovations he foresaw in the 1970s and 1980s that were scoffed at then but are ubiquitous today.
You are encouraged to use your imagination creatively and to…. ..THINK!
Richard Harris was the first to record the song; “MacArthur Park” in 1968.
“MacArthur Park” was written and composed by Jimmy Webb in the summer and fall of 1967.
Everything in the song was visible. There’s nothing in it that’s fabricated. The old men playing checkers by the trees, the cake that was left out in the rain, all of the things that are talked about in the song are things I actually saw.
Richard Harris was the first to record the song, in 1968; it was subsequently covered by numerous artists. Among the best-known covers are Donna Summer’s disco arrangement from 1978 and Waylon Jennings’s version recorded in 1969 and his recording of the song from 1976. Maynard Ferguson,[2] Stan Kenton[3] and Woody Herman all performed big-band jazz arrangements.
Jobs Died: October 5, 2011 Steve Jobs Three stories :
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
# About Connecting the Dots…Again, you cannot connect the dots looking forward you can only connect them looking back…
# About Love and Loss… You got to find what you love….
# About Death… Death is the destination we all share… Death is very likely the single best invention of life… Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition…
Drawing from some of the most pivotal points in his life, Steve Jobs, chief executive officer and co-founder of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, urged STANFORD graduates to pursue their dreams and see the opportunities in life’s setbacks — including death itself — at the university’s 114th Commencement on June 12, 2005.
Learn how Anthony Vincent of 10 second songs went viral with over six million views to his debut video in under a month.
With 6,194,908 Views on Youtube in only 6 weeks
Anthony’s 20 styles of Katy Perry’s Dark Horse was shared all over the internet including: reaching the top of reddit, Rolling Stone, Huffington Post, and many more.
In this interview you’ll learn:
How going viral isn’t all luck.
His real secret to his success (it’s not long curly hair).
What type of goals to set when creating your videos.
The simple offer he used to get big brands to share his video.
Discover more free training on how to grow your online business and marketing.
The perfect time for a product of this magnitude? Welcome to the very latest in mobile design. From now on, we think you’ll be shopping on a #sLablet.
The world’s largest tablet, the 42″ sLablet.
Where Online Mobile Shopping is Fun.
Ocado is the UK’s only dedicated online supermarket, which sells groceries, household products, toys, books, and magazines.
The largest transaction ever completed in Bitcoin, the virtual currency that approximates cash on the internet, was for $1 millionworth of computer hardware. That’s impressive for a currency that’s only been around since 2009, but Jack Sommer hopes to top it — by a lot. The casino owner-turned-developer is selling his 25,000-square foot Las Vegas mansion for $7.85 million, and he’s willing to accept the whole sumin Bitcoin.
“It’s very volatile, and of course… there is a lot of speculation,” Sommer says, referring to the wild price swings that have made some traders rich. “But there seems to be a growing amount of trade and commerce involving Bitcoin as well. So it gives me the confidence that we can accept it as a viable currency.”
Two of Sommers’ seven children have been investing in Bitcoin since around 2010, the very early days of the experimental currency. They convinced their father that the fundamentals were sound even though the currency jumped from around $20 in early 2013 to more than $1,000 by the end of the year. “My kids started picking them up at $5 and then they went to over $1,000 and they were making all this money,” Sommer’s wife Laura says. “What makes gold valuable? What makes a diamond valuable? What makes anything valuable? It’s what people want.”
“WHAT MAKES ANYTHING VALUABLE? IT’S WHAT PEOPLE WANT.”
Bitcoin is not backed by any nation; its exact origins are unknown. Some governments have passively sanctioned it, others have stayed silent, and China hasbanned its use. Bitcoin is also far from mature. It’s designed to have a total supply of 21 million bitcoins, but only about half of those have entered circulation so far.
There is also the matter of the transaction itself. The Bitcoin protocol is designed so that anyone can transfer any number of bitcoins to another person directly, without any third parties or fees — it’d be like handing over a suitcase with $7.85 million in cash. That won’t fly with a large real estate transaction — taxes and brokers’ fees must be paid in dollars and there is normally a 30-day escrow period, an eternity in the volatile Bitcoin market.
In order to accommodate the oddball currency, Sommer expects he would write a contract denominated in US dollars with reference to the equivalent amount in Bitcoin as well as a minimum and maximum range in order to hedge against wild price changes. Other than that, it wouldn’t be much different than accepting euro or yen for the house.
THE GESTURE IS A BIT OF A STUNT
The gesture is a bit of a marketing stunt — since advertising the Bitcoin angle, the Sommers have been swamped with interest from media and, to a lesser degree, potential buyers. They have had some Bitcoiners “sniffing around,” including one who was interested in paying in a mix of currencies, which the Sommers are perfectly happy with. “It could be a blend,” Jack says. “Part cash, part bit. Why not?”
Sommer is bullish on Bitcoin, but he’s also cautious. “I intend to eliminate the risks to the greatest extent possible,” he says. Keeping that much money in Bitcoin would be too risky because of the chance of government interference or a market crash, so Sommer plans to convert the majority of the sum into dollars and keep perhaps $100,000 or more in Bitcoin for speculative purposes.
“It’s actually good that not that many people know about it, because that means there are many more people who are going to know about it,” Sommer says. “I think that it is graduating to become a trend. And hopefully it will sustain itself — at least until we sell the house.”
The world’s largest media owner, according to ZenithOptimedia’s Top Thirty Global Media Owners report.
It estimates that in 2012 Google accounted for 65 per cent of all internet searches across the world 82 per cent of all paid search advertising. With its investment in Youtube, ownership of Google+ and moves into mobile advertising – ZenithOptimedia estimates that Google has 15 per cent of display advertising worldwide
Top 30 media owners for 2012 (ranked by media revenue in $bn).
The Wall Street Journal says that Amazon is building at least two smartphones, including a high-end model with 3D graphics and retina-tracking technology so that users can navigate content by “using just their eyes.” Plus an audio-only “streaming content device.”
Harrumph.
Amazon is almost certainly working on a smartphone and almost certainly planning to release it in 2013. There’s just too much smoke for there not to be fire. And having made its bet on digital content being the growth engine of the company’s future success — 12 of the 15 highlights in Amazon’s recent earnings release were about digital content — a smartphone that makes use of Amazon’s recently expanded app store and burgeoning virtual shelves of ebooks, TV shows, movies, and all other forms of digital content makes way too much sense.
But a couple grains of salt.
Amazon hasn’t made its bones in the tablet market by offering the absolutely latest and greatest technology but by presenting a solid product at a rock-bottom price. So I’m a little skeptical about all the wild 3D speculation — especially because that could be a sweet datapoint plant for the company to identify leak sources. And, in reality, a company the size of Amazon, like Apple, is working on many different projects at any given time. Some of them will come to market, and some of them won’t.
One company that can’t be happy about Amazon impending smartphone plans, however, has to be Google. Amazon has essentially hijacked Android for its Kindle offerings, taking the open-source mobile operating system that Google has developed, stripping out the Google app store, Google apps, and Google branding, and replacing them with its own offerings. Amazon will doubtless adopt the exact same strategy with any smartphone play — as Samsung might as well.
And, given the fact that Kindle is probably the leading Android-based tablet, it has the potential to do well in smartphones as well.
Samsung’s new Galaxy S 4 phone is due to launch globally at the end of April.
Samsung finally pulled the curtains back on the Galaxy S 4, its next flagship Android smartphone, at an event in New York today.
In addition to bumping up the size of the screen from 4.8 inches to 5 inches, the guts of the device also received a significant boost — putting it ahead of the major competition in many technical aspects.
Granted, we haven’t seen the Apple‘s AAPL +0.96% next iPhone model for 2013, but for the time being the specifications of the Galaxy S 4 are a significant upgrade.
In addition, the device also sports some new software features not seen in the competition, like the ability to interact with the phone using eye movement and hand gestures without touching it.
The Galaxy S 4 will be available late April on most major U.S. carriers, and will run the most recent version of Google‘s GOOG -0.46% Android operating system, called Jelly Bean.
In the meantime, here are how the specs compare with its predecessor and the iPhone 5:
Carriers
Like the iPhone 5, the Galaxy S 4 will be sold at the major U.S. carriers, as well as at U.S. Cellular and Cricket.
Screen resolution
Galaxy S 4: 1920 x 1080 pixels
iPhone 5: 1136 x 640 pixels
Galaxy S III: 1280 x 720 pixels
Pixels Per Inch
Galaxy S 4: 441 ppi
iPhone 5: 326 ppi
Galaxy S III: 306 ppi
Processor
Galaxy S 4: Qualcomm Snap QCOM -0.28%dragon Fusion Pro, 1.9 GHz quad-core processor; or Samsung Exynos 5 Octa, 1.6 GHz quad-core + 1.2 GHz quad-core processor (chip depends on market)
iPhone 5: Apple A6, 1.3 GHz dual-core processor
Galaxy S III: Qualcomm S4, 1.5 GHz dual-core processor
Display size
Galaxy S 4: 5 inches
iPhone 5: 4 inches
Galaxy S III: 4.8′ inches
Weight
Galaxy S 4: 4.59 oz
iPhone 5: 3.95 oz
Galaxy S 3: 4.69 oz
Memory
Galaxy S 4: up to 64 GB. 2GB RAM
iPhone 5: up to 64 GB. 1GB RAM
Galaxy S III: up to 64 GB. 2GB RAM
Camera
Galaxy S 4: 13 megapixel rear, 2 megapixel front
iPhone 5: 8 megapixel rear, 1.2 megapixel front
Galaxy S III: 8 megapixel rear, 1.9 megapixel front
Video Capture
Galaxy S 4: 1080p
iPhone 5: 1080p
Galaxy S III: 1080p
Battery
Galaxy S 4: 2,600 mAh
iPhone 5: 1,440 mAh
Galaxy S III: 2,100 mAh
Price
The iPhone 5 and Galaxy S III start at $199 on contract. The Galaxy S 4 has not been priced yet.
Wal-Mart was looking ahead as it turned 50 this year, focusing on mobile, social and e-commerce initiatives aimed at positioning the retailer to serve a fast-changing customer base. “We’ve hired hundreds of incredibly talented people, in Silicon Valley and around the world. We are playing to win,” says CEO Mike Duke. Fast Company magazine
Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, embraces social, mobile, and the startup spirit to compete against Amazon. Will it be enough?
Illustration by Owen Gildersleeve
Jeremy King was ignoring the largest retailer in the world. For a month, he’d been getting calls from a Walmart recruiter. King was used to being wooed, since he was well known in Silicon Valley as an engineer who built key parts of eBay’s infrastructure. The calls kept coming. Finally, he picked up the phone and let Walmart know exactly what it would take to get him to interview. “I was like, ‘Why don’t you get the CEO on the phone–let him talk to me and then maybe I’ll come in?'” recalls King, who didn’t even know who the CEO of Walmart was. “I was being cocky. The CEO of the world’s largest retailer wasn’t going to meet with me just so I’d do an interview.”
The next thing King knew, Walmart arranged for him to join a videoconference with CEO Mike Duke. “It was the strangest thing,” King says. “Mike’s office in Bentonville is the original one that Sam Walton had, complete with 1970s wood paneling. I was looking at this video, thinking, Where is this place?”
Over the next 45 minutes, though, Duke made what King calls an irresistible pitch. After years of seeing his company lag online, Duke swore that digital was now a priority for Walmart. Duke had restructured the company, placing e-commerce on equal footing with Walmart’s other, much larger divisions. He had made serious investments in high-tech talent, acquiring several startups. One, a 65-person social media firm called Kosmix with expertise in search and analytics, was the impetus for Walmart rechristening its Valley operations “@WalmartLabs.” Duke was looking for people who would revive the company’s sites and services, and energize its entire culture. He hoped to turn a company famous for rigid, coldly effective business processes into one that’s flexible, experimental, and entrepreneurial. In other words, Duke wanted to inject a bit of Silicon Valley into Bentonville, Arkansas. In the summer of 2011, King signed up as CTO of Walmart.com. “We’ve hired hundreds of incredibly talented people, in Silicon Valley and around the world,” says Duke of his aggressive moves. “We are playing to win.”
WalmartLabs is now housed in a boxy office tower in San Bruno, California, a few miles south of San Francisco. In just over a year, it has helped Walmart.com revamp its search engine; presciently identified the potential of the now red-hot “social gifting” market, where companies use social media cues to suggest presents; and this fall launched a test that offers same-day shipping to customers.
This last move is a clear signal of Walmart’s serious intent to compete in digital e-commerce–and blunt the looming threat of Amazon, which has its own same-day shipping experiments. Having marginalized Barnes & Noble and Best Buy, Jeff Bezos has his eyes on a bigger target. Amazon has been moving aggressively to sell Walmart staples such as diapers, soap, pet food, and cereal, even letting customers subscribe for items they want to receive regularly. Walmart is the world’s biggest grocer, and a central part of its strategy is that the millions of folks who visit its stores weekly to buy food will purchase a lot of other stuff. That’s a key reason Walmart’s 2011 revenue of $419 billion dwarfed Amazon’s 2011 sales of $48 billion.
In e-commerce, however, Walmart is a distant challenger. The company has never broken out its Internet revenue, though in 2011, the analyst Internet Retailer estimated it to be $4.9 billion. In October, Walmart projected that global e-commerce would be $9 billion in the year ahead. Meanwhile, Amazon has been on a tear, with sales rocketing toward $100 billion annually in 2015. Analysts I spoke to believe Amazon has eaten into Walmart’s sales of books, music, DVDs, electronics, and even toys. “When people started to say that Amazon was going to be the Walmart of e-commerce,” notes Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor, an e-commerce technology and consulting firm, “that’s when we started to see more signs of life from Walmart.”
It would be a radical oversimplification to chalk up Walmart’s digital revival solely to a hungry competitor (and Walmart execs often insist, perhaps a bit too strenuously, that they are not fixated on Amazon). No, Walmart needs to get digital because that’s where its customers are headed. Soon everyone’s phone will be smart enough for easy shopping. With Internet-enabled tablets selling for well under $200, lower-income families are already turning into online customers. “The way our customers shop in an increasingly interconnected world is changing,” Duke says.
“I’m not going to be Chicken Little and tell you the company is going to go away if we don’t get the Internet and mobile right,” adds Neil Ashe, the company’s top-ranking e-commerce executive. “We have an obligation to the mission to get this thing right because the customer expects it of us.” Like the best Internet companies, Walmart obsesses about its customers more than its competition.
In 2012, Walmart celebrated its 50th birthday. In its first 25 years, Walmart became the world’s biggest general merchandise retailer. But Sam Walton wanted to be a grocer as well. “A lot of people said that was crazy,” says Joel Anderson, the CEO of Walmart.com U.S. who joined the company in 2007. “Twenty-five years ago, we couldn’t even spell grocery. People thought we’d never figure it out.”
Anderson says the next 25 years are about becoming a digital company. “In the first few years, were we tinkering and experimenting and not moving? There’s some truth to that. But look at our history. When Walmart leans into something, it’s like a tidal wave.”
In April 2011, Walmart bought Kosmix for a reported $300 million. Kosmix’s expertise lay in simplifying the sprawl of the web for users; its algorithms were novel because they tried to understand what a user wanted rather than just match her query text. For example, if a user searched for “presidential election,” Google would return pages that contain variations on that term. Kosmix could find pages that were part of that topic even if the pages didn’t contain the specific phrase. It then sorted them into categories such as candidate biographies, news stories, and polling data. Only in the past year have Google and Microsoft’s Bing added Kosmix-like topic pages to their search results, but Kosmix’s founders, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, hit upon the idea way back in 2004.
Walmart wanted to apply Kosmix’s artificial intelligence to commerce, but it also wanted the real brains behind the tech. Harinarayan, 45, and Rajaraman, 40, both born and raised in India and graduates of the prestigious IIT Madras university, have been inseparable friends since they met as PhD students at Stanford in the 1990s. Both skinny and short, they have more than a passing physical resemblance, and they operate as a united pair. In the Valley, which loves its duos (such as Bill and Dave, Jobs and Woz, Ev and Biz), they’re known as Venky and Anand.
The pair first tackled the problem of organizing the web in 1996, when they founded Junglee.com. In 1998, Jeff Bezos acquired the company for $250 million in stock. He realized that Junglee’s technology would help its customers compare prices with other online stores, a bold move toward transparency that turned out to further solidify the company’s hold on those customers. Rajaraman became Amazon’s director of technology, while Harinarayan was charged with creating Amazon’s Marketplace, where any merchant could sell its wares on Amazon’s site. “I’d meet with Jeff for a couple hours every week,” says Harinarayan. “What we came up with in 2000 was pretty much what Amazon has executed on since then.” Analysts estimate 40% of the goods sold on Amazon are via Marketplace.
The duo left Amazon in 2000, and after a four-year stint as venture capitalists, founded Kosmix. The company had a unique ability to find meaningful information in the cacophony of the web. An application it built, called Tweetbeat, became one of the hottest ways to explore Twitter during the 2010 soccer World Cup, because it made it easy to discover who was talking about your favorite team or even individual players. That’s part of what lured Walmart execs–they salivated at the idea of bringing this kind of intelligence to shopping. People are always offering clues about products on social media–writing reviews, liking brands, checking into stores, announcing the products they want to buy.
And what lured Harinarayan and Rajaraman, besides the money? They saw an opportunity to do something more interesting than merely replicate their work at Amazon for its rival. (In a delicious irony, Bezos profited from the Walmart deal–he was an early investor in Kosmix.) “What has changed since Amazon became big?” Rajaraman asks rhetorically. “You can connect the social experience, the in-store experience, and the online experience. Nobody could do that.”
When the Kosmix team landed at Walmart in the summer of 2011, they found a mess. “The only thing Silicon Valley about Walmart was that we had an office in Silicon Valley,” says Gibu Thomas, the senior VP who heads up Walmart’s mobile tech team and was one of the first executives to approach Kosmix about a deal. “It was run like a traditional IT organization,” he says, explaining that Walmart used outsourced, off-the-shelf systems to power key parts of its site. Worse, Walmart’s 27 worldwide subsidiaries used incompatible technologies; the sites did not connect seamlessly with the stores or with Walmart’s legendary supply chain.
Walmart.com’s search engine epitomized its failure. “Executives at Walmart–at the board level–were running searches and saying, ‘This is embarrassing,'” says Sri Subramaniam, the WalmartLabs exec who ran the rebuilding effort. If you used Walmart.com’s old search engine to check out “smartphones,” you’d get links to a couple of cell-phone chargers, not the iPhone. A “cotton socks” query returned results for cotton candy and balls of yarn.
The Kosmix team, so deeply ensconced in the ways of Silicon Valley, worried that cultural differences would hamper their efforts to turn the site around. “My first reaction was, Wow, this is going to be interesting,” says Chris Bolte, who works on Walmart’s search marketing systems. But those fears proved unfounded. More than a half-dozen people on both sides of the acquisition say that Kosmix’s integration into Walmart was amazingly smooth. “I think part of it was that Walmart knew that they needed us, that this was a turnaround situation,” Subramaniam says.
Their first job was to create a new search engine. It took just 10 months, with just a dozen or so engineers. Walmart will not discuss specific sales figures, but execs report that the improved search tools have increased the number of people who are converted from visitors to buyers on Walmart.com by as much as 15%. If you search for cotton socks now, you’ll actually find them.
When Harinarayan and Rajaraman transformed Kosmix into WalmartLabs, they put roughly half the staff on such boring but crucial tasks. They deployed the rest as true lab workers, with the freedom to experiment in small teams on far-flung new ideas. “We organize these teams as mini startups with six to eight people,” says Harinarayan, who learned from Bezos’s organizational innovation of so-called two-pizza teams. “One person acts as CEO, and they have a clear business goal. We step out of the way and let these guys run it.”
One of the first projects born from this approach was Shopycat, a gift-recommendation app that Walmart.com launched on Facebook before the 2011 holidays. Shopycat scans your friends’ profiles to identify interesting gift ideas from their stream of likes, comments, and status updates, discerning if the “Ted” your pal is raving about is the geeky ideas festival or the Seth MacFarlane stoner comedy. Shopycat then seeks out an appropriate gift for such a stoner/thinker from Walmart’s product database. Walmart says Shopycat led to an increase in purchases on the site, though it won’t say by how much. For the 2012 holidays, the team built Shopycat into a section of Walmart.com called Walmart Gifts; customers will log in with their Facebook or Twitter account to get personalized recommendations.
Another clever retail application of WalmartLabs’s core technology has been to use spikes in social network chatter to predict demand for out-of-the-ordinary products. Last year, the team correctly anticipated heightened customer interest in cake-pop makers based on social media conversations on Facebook and Twitter. A few months later, it noticed growing interest in electric juicers, tied in part to the popularity of the juice-crazy documentary Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead. The team sends the data to Walmart’s buyers, who right now are only using it to confirm its other research. But as these signals become stronger, execs say it will play a larger role in purchasing decisions.
WalmartLabs has also created projects that just get customers to think differently about Walmart and e-commerce, including Get on the Shelf, an online contest for people to submit their own inventions to go on sale at Walmart. Get on the Shelf was a social marketing blockbuster, garnering more than 4,000 submissions, over 1 million votes, and news hits in small towns across America. Then there’s Goodies, a subscription service in which Walmart customers pay seven dollars a month for home delivery of a gourmet food box–creating a discerning test market for the grocer in the process.
By themselves, none of these projects will single-handedly boost Walmart’s e-commerce business. Taken together, though, they showcase a new dynamism at the retailing giant. “We’re going to find ways to live at the edge,” says Walmart e-commerce exec Ashe. “Every three or six months, you’ll see something come out from us that will make you say ‘Wow.’ ”
The next step, says Harinarayan, is about “scaling up Labs.” But he and Rajaraman won’t be part of it: In June, Harinarayan and Rajaraman announced that they were leaving WalmartLabs. To many outsiders, the abruptness of the founders’ departure seemed troubling. It had been only a year since the acquisition, and they hadn’t completed the “earn-out” phase, meaning they wouldn’t receive their full share from the sale. Was their departure a sign that dynamic tech entrepreneurs felt smothered by Walmart’s corporate culture? Or was it that Walmart could no longer tolerate leaving these hands-off leaders in charge?
Harinarayan and Rajaraman dismiss the speculation. They say they had spent eight years on the startup, and they were simply ready for time off. One Friday not long after the announcement, I meet Harinarayan at a coffee shop across the street from Kosmix’s first office in downtown Mountain View. He’s the picture of a relaxed man. After chatting about Walmart and Amazon for an hour, he told me he was free to keep talking, as he didn’t have anything else to do that day. And he is quite sanguine about walking away from the money. “Given the fortune that Anand and I have had in our careers, if you’re doing anything just for money, at this point it’s going to be the wrong thing to do.”
Jeremy King took over as the head of WalmartLabs, and to get a sense of where he will bring the skunk works, I visit the gleaming new Walmart store off the Almaden Expressway in San Jose where Jonathan Sherman, a WalmartLabs product manager, gives me a peek into the digital dimension being woven into this temple of American retail.
That future begins, like everything else, with a smartphone app. Walmart imagines that as you go through an average day, you’ll remember things you need–milk, bread, a new tennis racquet, a toy truck for your nephew’s birthday–and tell the voice-enabled Walmart app. The app will list each item’s location inside your local Walmart and include product info; eventually, it will also learn your preferences and offer recommendations. And once you’re actually in the store, you’ll be able to summon an associate to help you.
Walmart’s current iPhone app has only a few of these features: The voice-list system works very well, and, depending on which store you’re in and what you’re looking for, the app can sometimes locate your product.
At the moment, though, it won’t show you extensive product info for all items, and it won’t summon store help. The company has begun to test mobile checkout in select stores. As part of it, Walmart presents customers with a running tally of their total bill as they shop, the first explicit nod in my journey through WalmartLabs to the fact that millions of Walmart shoppers are on tight budgets.
This effort to reinvent the in-store shopping experience is an argument that Walmart’s physical stores are a great asset, not a liability. “We are uniquely positioned to give customers anytime, anywhere access to Walmart by combining the smartphone, online, and the physical stores,” Duke says. “Ultimately, that will give us an edge over any competitor.” When I ask Walmart executives about Amazon’s moves to offer more customers next-day and same-day shipping, many were amused. “It’s fun to see them trying to be us,” says Walmart.com CEO Anderson. “We have more than 4,000 forward-deployed fulfillment centers and we’re already doing shipments from some of them. Some people call them stores.”
“If you think about the last 20 years of retail, how people shop in a store has not changed,” Thomas says. “The question we’re asking is, how do you bring to a store the capabilities that have made e-commerce successful? With 200 million customers a week, if you can increase the average basket size by a dollar–that’s billions of dollars every year.” In fact, it’s more than $10 billion–more than its projected annual e-commerce revenue this year.
If Walmart fails in its digital transformation, it won’t be for lack of resources or possibilities. Ninety-six percent of Americans live within 20 miles of a Walmart. No one has as much money; no one has a better supply chain; no one has such a close connection with so many customers. Walmart execs know this. “We’ll spend more on capital expenditures this year than Amazon has spent in its entire history,” Ashe tells me (hyperbolically).
That size, however, is also Walmart’s greatest enemy. WalmartLabs’s two-pizza teams can come up with a thousand innovative ways to improve shopping, online and off, but none matter if the company’s execution is slow and bureaucratic. And the fact is that implementing these ideas will always be complex. Every change to how items are delivered, or how customers navigate stores, or how applications work with the company’s existing IT structure is a maneuver that requires the coordination of thousands of moving parts.
But Walmart can succeed online without becoming the Amazon of the web. The phrase I hear most often from Walmart people is that the only way the company will win online is “by being Walmart.” And they’re right. Walmart doesn’t need to be something radically different. The company that mastered IT in the service of unbeatable prices must now master web technology. It doesn’t need to chase Amazon so much as it needs to identify how a digital Walmart can be as much a part of its customers’ lives as the stores are today.
And it has to think long term. It may take a decade or more for Walmart to be a successful digital retailer. “Somebody at one of the board meetings asked me, ‘Neil, how long is this going to take, and how much is it going to cost?'” Ashe recalls. “And I said, ‘It’s going to take the rest of our careers, and it’s going to cost whatever it costs. Because this isn’t a project, this is the company.'”
Long Island’s first Microsoft store opened the 28th of Sept. at Walt Whitman mall
Thursday September 27, 2012 1:47 PM By Keiko Morris
Microsoft opened its first Long Island store on Friday 28th of Sept, continuing its push to connect with customers by providing a hands-on, face-to-face experience.
The store, at Walt Whitman mall in Huntington Station, takes its bow with a grand opening at 11 a.m., followed by celebrity performances by John Legend and Taio Cruz in the evening. Hall of fame running back Curtis Martin will be playing Kinect…
Már Guðmundsson – Maður Dagsins !www.netkaup.is Greindi helstu tölur og skuldastöðu landsins, framtíðar horfur o. fl. : ” Það eina sem þarf að gera núna er að endursemja um skuldastöðu milli nýja og gamla Landsbankans.” Nýtt skuldabréf sem er til lengri tíma en það sem nú er í gildi. Skuldirnar núna eru til alltof skamms tíma… Þetta má endurskipuleggja… Ísland þarf að passa að skila viðskipta afgangi… Að auki má styrkja innstreymi á erlendum gjaldeyri með aukinni erlendri fjárfestingu hér á landi.
Já Björn Valur Gíslason hélt því fram í Silfri Egils í dag að stjórnvöld hefðu svo sannarlega tekið stöðuna með skuldsettum heimilum en ekki fjármálakerfinu, ég segi bara ja hérna.
Halldór Gunnarsson sagði: ..Lífeyrissjóðirnir töpuðu 500 milljörðum á hruninu og þeir eru með tæpa 5 milljarða í rekstrarkostnað og þetta virðist allt ætla að halda áfram í sama hjólfarinu. Allt þjóðfélagið þarf að horfast í augu við að við þurfum allsherjar breytingu.
When we consider the ways technology is rapidly transforming the media landscape — and our lives — three trends stand out. The first is the seismic shift from presentation to participation. The second is the paradoxical shift from using technology to connect to also using technology to disconnect. And the third is the game-changing shift from using social media as a way to make our lives more fun to using social media to make the world better.
The shift from presentation to participation means that the days of the Media Gods, sitting up on Mt. Olympus and telling us how things are, have long since ended. People are tired of being talked to; they want to be talked with. Ours is a global conversation, with millions of new people pulling up a seat at the table — indeed, nearly 3 billion people will join the Internet’s community by 2020, according to Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler. That conversation has fueled revolutions and allowed media to engage with readers — and brands to engage with consumers — in totally new ways. The success of brands in the future will depend upon their understanding and embracing of this new relationship. So, if the first trend isa Garden of Eden blooming with engagement and self-expression, the second trendis the snake in the garden. For all the powerful tools at our disposal to bear witness and bring about change, there is also the temptation to fetishize the social and viral for their own sake. On a daily basis, I’m invited to media conferences filled with panels devoted to how we can use social tools to amplify our messages. But very few of those panels seem to care what is the message. As Thoreau said in 1854, “We are in great haste, to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”
Luckily there is a powerful, countervailing force using technology to get away from technology, reflected in apps and features like Freedom, Do Not Disturb, and HuffPost’s forthcoming GPS for the Soul. Of course, I realize there’s a paradox in the idea that, of all things, an app can help deliver us from the snake in the garden, but the snake is very wily, so our solutions have to be just as clever. The third trend is the shift from searching for information to searching for meaning. People are using technology to connect with others not just around similar passions and interests, but around the causes that most resonate with them. And the shift isn’t confined to individuals. More and more, brands are identifying with a cause, and making that identification a central part of their ethos.
In the 1990s I wrote a book called The Fourth Instinct, which explored the instinct that takes us beyond our first three — our impulses for survival, sex, and power — and drives us to expand the boundaries of our caring to include our communities and the world around us. That instinct is now driving more and more of our choices — in terms of what we do, what we value, what we read, and what we buy. And technology has given us the ability to widen the circle of our concern.
So the future is hyper-connected — except when it is blissfully, joyously disconnected. And an understanding of these three megatrends can guide us to a place where we are more creative, more effective, more compassionate, and more capable of making things better for ourselves, for our brands, and for the world.
UNDERGROUND 8 online seminar – 11 Exponential Trends For The 21st Century
Yanik talks about “what´s next” in Education and Creating Content on the Internet.
Yanik Silver is a serial entrepreneur, author, adventurer and a great educator.
His story and businesses have been featured in Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fox Business News, TIME.com, USA Today, SmartMoney.com, MSN Money, Entrepreneur.com, The Boston Globe, Denver Business Journal and many others.
Yanik is a highly sought after speaker addressing groups ranging from the prestigious Wharton Business School to international audiences of 3,000 and up.
Yanik is the founder of the Underground Online Seminar and Maverick1000. Maverick1000 is a network of high caliber entrepreneurs connecting and engaging in bold new ways to challenge & support your biggest business accomplishments, live life to the fullest and create a lasting legacy beyond the bottom line.
Dollar Shave Club spent $4,500 on a video that’s had more than 5 million YouTube hits and spawned dozens of response videos in the four-and-a-half months since it’s gone live.
# 1“Think deeply about the problem you’re solving,” Mr. Dubin said. In other words, find the insights that will make people care about the video — which in this case were the same ones that made them care about the Dollar Shave Club brand. Razor blades — both the high cost and the inconvenience of buying them from the locked “razor fortress” in stores — are “an emotionally supercharged subject.”
# 2 “Identify a resonant shared human experience around it and then build your concept around that,” Mr. Dubin said. “In just about every beat of the video … we’re talking about the business and the benefit of the business.”
# 3Keep it brief. “The video is really really tight,” Mr. Dubin said. “This video is a minute-and-a-half long, and that’s really, really important. It was going to be a lot longer, and thankfully the director I worked with who helped me, who I also did some improv with in New York, she really helped me pare it down and keep it brief. Nobody wants to watch your five-minute video. Nobody forwards around a video they didn’t watch all the way through.”
#4 “Don’t give people a video they could have written themselves.” Dollar Shave Club’s video may have been low-budget, but it was created by people, including Mr. Dubin, with years of experience both in improv comedy and video production, giving it considerably more punch than your average $4,500 production. “I would encourage you … to hire some comedy writers. Go down to the local comedy club and bring them into your marketing brainstorm. I studied improv for eight years at the Upright Citizens Brigade as a hobby and loved it. … A lot of my teachers are now on television and in film … and I always thought they were missing a big opportunity, which was to start their own agency.”
The video was so funny that some folks thought it was a spoof, Mr. Dubin admitted. That impression was compounded by the fact that it produced enough hits to crash the company’s website. This led some YouTube commenters to suggest the business was a great idea someone should do for real.
So among lessons learned, Mr. Dubin said, was to have more bandwidth — both the literal kind and in terms of human capital. The biggest thing he’d change is to “spend more time to find the right people,” which has become one of his favorite parts of the job. And, to that end, Mr. Dubin announced from the dais that he’s seeking a VP-marketing, asking folks to contact him at Michael@DollarShaveClub.com.
Like Tom Cruise’s command center in Minority Report, except You are surrounded by Prada, Varvatos & Converse.
Saturday, June 16th, 2012
Editor’s note: Leo Chen is a former product manager at Amazon and is currently the co-founder of Monogram, an iPad fashion discovery and shopping app funded by 500 Startups. You can find Leo on Twitter @leoalmighty.
Death of brick-and-mortar retail
Andrew Chen recently recommended a video to me (please click video), which inspired this post. It’s a keynote by Ron Johnson, the CEO of J.C. Penney, Inc and the man behind Apple’s retail revolution. In the video, Johnson spoke about the history of the department store and why JC Penney has fallen behind.
It wasn’t very long ago that stores like J.C. Penney, Nordstrom, and Gap were the pinnacles of fashion retail. These retailers provided better products at unbeatable prices. Retail buyers acted as personal curators for customers and the in-store experience was exceptional.
Then came e-commerce. Predictable products like books, CDs, and electronics drove the first wave of e-commerce for e-tailers like Amazon. But fashion lagged behind. Consumers want a tactile, in-person experience when it comes to garments. They need to touch and try it on. Even as e-tailers offered lower prices, consumers preferred to shop in stores.
That all began to change when Zappos came along with free shipping and returns; customers are encouraged to order multiple sizes and colors, try on the items in the comfort of our homes and return what we don’t want. For free. Coupled with better product visualizations (large images, multi-angle views – see Warby Parker and MyHabit), consumers are increasingly turning to the web for their fashion needs.
But soon, online retailers will also become less relevant
The bar for e-commerce is rising every day: great visuals and free shipping are fast becoming commoditized. If product, price and service are the same, consumers will grow indifferent towards the seller.
Retailers still drive marketing, supply chain and distribution for designers and brands, but how long before brands figure this out themselves? Social curation and discovery tools like Pinterest and Fancy are leveling the playing field for retail marketing; Amazon is disrupting supply chain and fulfillment (more on this next).
So why are we still shopping at a handful of our so-called “favorite stores”? Because the internet has a noise and discovery problem. I believe that’s where the next wave of fashion tech innovation will take us.
Pinterest
Pinterest has found an optimal balance between aspirational browsing and shopping. Social shopping is more about discovery, conversations and relationship building, something that’s apparent in the way Pinterest users interact.
As Pinterest evolves, they will focus more on monetization and driving direct commerce. They have already experimented with affiliate links and the Rakuten investment is a strong hint at direct commerce. Here’s what I predict Pinterest might do next (purely speculative, of course):
Pinterest could compete directly with Facebook pages by offering brands a better way to showcase products with access to a higher quality audience.
Integrated/Universal checkout
If users are already discovering products through Pinterest but going off to merchant sites to transact, Pinterest should own that transaction and offer a consistent user experience.
For smaller retailers and boutiques, Pinterest could integrate, acquire or build their own version of Shopify and let merchants sell directly on the Pinterest platform.
For large retailers and brands, Pinterest will have to form partnerships and integrate with retailer payment systems: essentially selling products on Pinterest, and having the retailer drop ship inventory. Retailers may resist this initially because Pinterest will effectively render the merchant less relevant.
Brands will be more inclined to work with Pinterest because they see it as an effective distribution channel. Brands can ultimately skip the retailer if they can get distribution through Pinterest. Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) solves the logistics challenges — brands can simply ship inventory to an Amazon warehouse and have Amazon handle fulfillment. Consumers get the added benefit of Amazon Prime.
Create an e-commerce channel
To mitigate the risk of disrupting (and irritating) current user, Pinterest will likely create a separate shopping channel if they decide to focus on commerce (e.g.shop.pinterest.com).
This shopping channel will be product and commerce focused. You won’t find the cute puppies and fortune cookie quotes here, but you can bet Pinterest will leverage all your data for targeting.
Challenges Pinterest will face
As Pinterest scales, the biggest challenge will be surfacing signal buried in noise. It’s the Facebook Newsfeed problem, but much more difficult because of its focus on fashion and other tastemaker products.
Facebook is about people, so to make my newsfeed relevant it has to factor in the quality of my relationships. Who am I closer friends with, who is my family, which fan pages do I interact with most, etc. This is easy because we give Facebook that information every time we look at a friend’s photos, like a status update or comment on a post. Facebook doesn’t care what content we interacted with; it only needs to know who produced that content.
Fashion and other tastemaker products (e.g. home decor) are highly subjective, which means that I don’t necessarily like the same clothes or sofas as my closest friends. If I like a picture of a cute puppy my friend pinned, doesn’t mean I share his taste in fashion. Aside from existing Pinterest categories, they will have to find ways to add deeper tags on the products pinned (e.g. brand, color, style, season, fabric, patterns, etc…) to accurately target.
What’s next in fashion tech?
To date, most fashion tech companies are more commerce than tech. If you look at Gilt and Fab, they’re primarily commerce companies built on fairly standard e-commerce backends with some slight twists. It’s hard to drive disruptive innovation when your KPI is revenue.
In order to fundamentally change the way people shop, we will need teams with fashion experts, product visionaries, deep technical horsepower and growth hackers. It’s a hard combination to find, especially when most hackers in the valley shlep around in jeans and t-shirts — they’re not their own target user.
What will online fashion shopping be like in the future? I believe today’s multi-browser-tab search and filter behavior will feel as ancient as printed maps and yellow pages are today.
When I have a specific purchase in mind:
I picture myself telling Siri that I’m looking for some sneakers as I’m driving home from work.
When I get home, sink into my couch with my iPad or turn on my Apple TV, I’m shown pages of sneakers specifically curated for me, in my size.
I choose a few that I like, tap buy, and the shoes show up the next morning on my doorstep.
When I’m in the mood to browse:
I’m shown the latest collections and recommendations from my favorite designers, fashion bloggers and influencers (without having to search and filter on multiple websites).
Upcoming designers are recommended to me based on my style and preferences. Some of these recommendations are computer generated, some are handpicked by designers or personal stylists.
I won’t just be browsing product photos as I do on nordstrom.com today, it will be an interactive experience with inspiring looks, runway videos and beautiful images. Like Tom Cruise’s command center in Minority Report, except I am surrounded by Prada, Varvatos & Converse.
I can’t tell the difference between product and advertisement because everything can be purchased with a tap or a drag.
If I order by 11am, products will be at my doorstep by 6pm same day (Amazon already does this in China).
J. C. PenneyCompany, Inc. (“jcpenney”) (NYSE:JCP) revealed its plans to become America’s favorite store. In a presentation titled “In Praise of Fresh Air,” Ron Johnson, the Company’s chief executive officer, and Michael Francis, its president, detailed the initiatives that will transform the jcpenney shopping experience by fundamentally re-imagining every aspect of the Company’s business and boldly pursuing change.
“The department store is the number one opportunity in retail today. We are going to rethink every aspect of our business, boldly pursue change, and create long-term shareholder value, as we become America’s favorite store. Every initiative we pursue will be guided by our core value to treat customers as we would like to be treated – fair and square. Beginning February 1, we will have Fair and Square Pricing, making every day a great day to shop. We will create tremendous excitement through monthly promotions that are in sync with the rhythm of our customers’ lives. And we will transform each and every jcpenney store over the next four years with a month-by-month, shop-by-shop roll-out of exciting new merchandise initiatives,” Mr. Johnson said.Fair and Square Pricing and Monthly Promotions in Sync with Customers’ Lives:
During the presentation, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Francis introduced a new pricing strategy called Fair and Square, which includes three types of prices. Everyday, regular prices, which are always great; Month-Long Values, even better prices on the things you need now; and Best Prices, jcpenney’s lowest prices, which always happen on the 1st and 3rd Fridays of every month as jcpenney makes room for exciting new merchandise. These prices will be coupled with a new promotional cadence that is in sync with customers’ lives. Rather than inundating the customer with a relentless series of sales, coupons, rebates and retail gimmicks, jcpenney will host 12 promotional events each year, on a monthly calendar. Each month will include even better values on the things customers are looking to buy during the month and a host of exciting products and services that are unique to the month.Commenting on the new monthly calendar, Mr. Johnson said, “We want customers to shop on their terms, not ours. By setting our store monthly and maintaining our best prices for an entire month, we feel confident that customers will love shopping when it is convenient for them, rather than when it is expedient for us.”Re-inventing the In-Store Experience around New and Transformed Brands:
At the event, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Francis also outlined plans to entirely re-invent the jcpenney store experience, to include Main Street — the entire store merchandised in a series of 80 to 100 brand shops, rather than the confusing and seemingly endless racks common in department stores today. It will also feature Town Square — an exciting new place that replaces the traditional retail center core of a department store with a series of services, which customers will enjoy before they buy, while they shop and afterwards. And, throughout, the new jcpenney store experience will merge the physical and digital worlds, assuring the physical retail stores’ vital role as the centerpiece of retailing’s future.They also gave a sneak peek into the exciting new brands that will be featured in jcpenney’s brand shops. They include Martha Stewart® and l’amour nanette lepore™, which were shown at the event today, among many others. jcpenney also announced plans to transform its customers’ favorite existing brands, including, IZOD®, Liz Claiborne® and The Original Arizona Jean Company®, which were also featured at today’s event, and a number of others. jcpenney expects to feature 30 new and transformed brands by fall 2012.o Launching a new jcpenney brand identity, new logo, new look and Ellen!
In celebration of the complete transformation of its shopping experience, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Francis gave an overview of the new jcpenney brand identity. It includes:o The new jcpenney logo, which combines the elements that have made jcpenney an enduring American brand, by evoking the nation’s flag and
jcpenney’s commitment to treating customers Fair and Square. The square frame imagery will be evident throughout all of jcpenney’s marketing, to remind customers to frame the things they love.o New brand marketing to showcase great product in an exciting new way, to solidify jcpenney’s relationship with its loyal customers and entice new ones. This includes the new monthly book, beginning next month, that millions of Americans will receive, which includes 96 pages of highlights for that month, as well as an entirely new look for jcpenney stores in terms of signage and presentation.o Welcoming Ellen DeGeneres back to jcpenney, as jcpenney’s new brand partner. Ellen began her career in her teens as a jcpenney associate and now, as one of the country’s most beloved television personalities, she will help bring the new jcpenney experience to life in her own fun-loving, sneaker-wearing, laughmaking way.Mr. Francis said, “We are redefining the jcpenney brand so we become a store for all Americans, by offering an experience they cannot get anywhere else. This will start by freeing consumers from the barrage of promotions and undifferentiated shopping experiences they have become used to and replacing it with something entirely fresh and new that is evident in every aspect of our store – new brands, new marketing, unique attractions, and much more. Beginning on February 1, our customers will see immediate changes that give a sense of how we will transform jcpenney over the next four years. It will be a breath of much-needed fresh air and give them reasons to visit jcpenney more often than ever before. Our objective is to make our customers love to shop again and across jcpenney, we’re very excited about the changes to come.”The Transformation Begins on February 1
The Company will begin the transformation of the jcpenney shopping experience on February 1, with the implementation of its new logo, pricing strategy and monthly cadence, including new instore signage reflecting true price clarity as well as edited merchandise assortments for the monthly store set.Then, beginning in August of this year, jcpenney will begin a month-by-month, shop-by-shop strategy to update all stores with new and exciting merchandise and presentation. Two to three shops will be installed monthly, each and every month, over a four-year transformation period, including the debut of Town Square during 2013. These initiatives will culminate in the complete transformation of jcpenney by the end of 2015.For additional information on Ellen DeGeneres’ new role as jcpenney’s brand partner and jcpenney’s new brand partnership with Nanette Lepore, please see the separate press releases that the Company issued today on each of these exciting initiatives.Tomorrow, as previously announced, the Company will hold a presentation and Q&A session for analysts and investors beginning at 9:00 am ET through 10:30 am ET, to discuss the financial components of its transformation plans and financial outlook. For webcast and conference call
dial-in information, please visit http://ir.jcpenney.com.About J. C. Penney Company, Inc.
Over 110 years ago, James Cash Penney founded his company on the principle of treating customers the way he wanted to be treated himself: fair and square. Today, rooted in its rich heritage, J. C. Penney Company, Inc. (NYSE: JCP) is re-imagining every aspect of its business in order to reclaim its birthright and become America’s favorite store. The Company is transforming the way it does business and remaking the customer experience across its 1,100 jcpenney stores and on jcp.com. On every visit, customers will discover straightforward Fair and Square Pricing, month-long promotions that are in sync with the rhythm of their lives, exceptionally curated merchandise, artful presentation, and unmatched customer service.For more information about jcpenney, visit jcp.com.
This release may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements, which reflect the Company’s current views of future events and financial performance, involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause the Company’s actual results to be materially different from planned or expected results. Those risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, general economic conditions, including inflation, recession, unemployment levels, consumer spending patterns, credit availability and debt levels, changes in store traffic trends, the cost of goods, trade restrictions, changes in pricing strategies, changes in tariff, freight and shipping rates, changes in the cost of fuel and other energy and transportation costs, increases in wage and benefit costs, competition and retail industry consolidations,interest rate fluctuations, dollar and other currency valuations, the impact of weather conditions, risks associated with war, an act of terrorism or pandemic, and a systems failure and/or security breach that results in the theft, transfer or unauthorized disclosure of customer, employee or Company information and legal and regulatory proceedings. Please refer to the Company’s most recent Form 10-K and subsequent filings for a further discussion of risks and uncertainties. Investors should take such risks into account when making investment decisions. We do not undertake to update these forward-looking statements as of any future date.
51% of mobile comparison shoppers who research in-store and buy online are between the ages of 18 and 39.
It’s a store retailer’s worst mobile commercenightmare come true. 29% of consumers who use a smartphone to research a product while in a retail store end up purchasing the item online, many fromAmazon.com Inc., according to a new study by market research firm ClickIQ.
Of consumers who used a smartphone to research in-store and then purchase online, 55% were men and 45% were women, says the survey of 406 U.S. consumers who have researched a product while in a store and purchased that product.
For store merchants wandering their aisles watching shoppers on smartphones, age is a key indicator of who is comparing products and buying online. 26% of consumers age 30-39 and 25% age 18-29 recently used a mobile device to research a product while in a store. The numbers fall drastically from there with only 12% of those age 40-49, 6% age 50-59 and 2% age 60 or over researching products in a store using a mobile device.
Some big retailers are being hit the hardest by this m-commerce activity. Respondents possibly visited more than one retailer but the study shows that the retailers most frequented for research were Best Buy Co. at 36%, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. at 30% and Target Corp. at 29%.
To find out what happened after the in-store research was complete, survey respondents were asked to state where they eventually purchased the product they were researching. Best Buy did the best job of retaining the sale. 35% of those that researched at Best Buy ended up purchasing at the Best Buy store with another 14% purchasing at BestBuy.com. However, 21% purchased the product from Amazon.com. The rest did not purchase. Of those that did their research at Target, 29% purchased at the Target store, 8% purchased at Target.com and 21% purchased from Amazon.com. Wal-Mart retained 26% who purchased at the Wal-Mart store and 10% who purchased at Walmart.com. Wal-Mart lost 24% to Amazon.com.
When respondents were asked why they made the purchase where they did, an overwhelming 67% stated price as the determining factor. Lagging behind are availability at 14%, product features at 8%, free shipping at 7%, and already at the store 4%.
Sell out your friends, be an asshole and you will be one of the most successful people on the planet. But that doesn’t mean you won’t Facebook-stalk your exes just like the rest of us. Ever watch a movie and think:“That´s The Story Of My LIFE ?”
By Warren Wooden, Published December 23, 2011 www.netkaup.is
Do you know what the difference is between being successful today compared to being successful 10 years ago? If you said competition, then you are right.
The reason competition makes being successful today a little bit harder is because there is always somebody competing with you no matter what niche you are in or where you are promoting your affiliate products.
The Keys To Being A Successful Affiliate Marketer
1 Use Different Platforms
As an affiliate marketer you can’t just promote products from a website, you need to utilize the many platforms that are available to you. Some of the different platforms that I use and you should to are; Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Youtube and my own website. If you want to be successful, the it is a must to use every platform that you can to promote your affiliate links.
Something that I highly recommend is that you don’t just use one platform for a certain product and another platform for something else, you need to test out which platform will work best for each product. If you can do this, then making sales will come a lot easier for you. Just remember that with affiliate marketing, everything needs to be split tested in order to get the best conversions.
2 Email Marketing
One thing that you need to understand is that you don’t just find an email address and then send an email, you need to make sure that person is interested in what you have to say.
If you want to make money with email marketing, then you need to get people to sign up for your email list by offering something related to what you are going to promote.
I believe that affiliate marketer should practice continued education so that they know everything about their industry as they possibly can.
3 Planning
Something that a lot of people totally forget about is the entire planning stage of affiliate marketing.
4 Never Quit
I should not have to tell you this but I will anyway, you can NEVER QUIT. The reason why I say you can never quit is because you can’t become successful if you don’t put all your time and effort into something. Trust me on this one, anybody will tell you that in order to be successful as an affiliate marketer you must keep trying and never give up.
As you can see, being a successful affiliate marketer will take some work but if you follow the keys to being successful, then you should have no problem. Just know that in order to be successful you will need to put in a good amount of work upfront.
Frá skrifstofu Facebook í New York Reuters : Stjórnendur samskiptavefjarins Facebook tilkynntu í dag að fyrirtækið myndi ráða þúsundir nýrra starfsmanna á næsta ári. Eru það einkum verkfræðingar sem ráðnir verða til fyrirtækisins í New York. Þetta kom fram í máli framkvæmdastjóra Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, á blaðamannafundi í New York í dag en Michael Bloomberg, borgarstjóri New York, var einnig á blaðamannafundinum.
„Við ætlum að vaxa eins hratt og við getum í New York,” segir Sandberg.
Auk þess verða fleiri verkfræðingar ráðnir til starfa í höfuðstöðvum Facebook í Palo Alto í Kaliforníu og í Seattle.
Notendur Facebook eru yfir 800 milljónir talsins í heiminum. Fastlega er gert ráð fyrir að Facebook fari á markað á næsta ári en um þrjú þúsund manns starfa hjá Facebook í dag.
Nú starfa um 100 á skrifstofu Facebook í New York en Sandberg neitaði að upplýsa hversu margir nákvæmlega verða ráðnir til fyrirtækisins í New York.
51% of mobile comparison shoppers who research in-store and buy online are between the ages of 18 and 39.
