As consumers grow increasingly comfortable online, price-wise and technology-focused, established brick-and-mortar players and fledgling e-commerce sites are finding they need each other. With sales under pressure, traditional retailers, which have struggled to establish a unique online identity, are trying to tap into the innovative, fast-paced start-up mentality. At the other end of the spectrum, young Internet companies, facing fierce competition and the limits of their growth, are warming to deals with industry giants that have substantial resources and significant distribution outlets.
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Chris' Note: In Feb., Nordstrom acquired HauteLook for Flash-Sales technology and talent. Making interesting investments in digital businesses.
Will the present period from 2008 to ~2017(?) be classified as a shallow depression? Perhaps, but this will not be declared such until several years after it is over. Rather, the proper way to assess this economic episode is to measure its deviation from the long-term exponential trendline, and not for the US, but rather in relation to World GDP.
Facebook attracts 167 million unique U.S. visitors per month. These users spend an average of 6 hours and 33 minutes on the social network each month. Twitter, Tumblr, and the up-and-coming digital pin-board site Pinterest, may all be growing in popularity, but they clearly can’t compete with Facebook in terms of attention and engagement.
Ignoring Facebook for a second, Pinterest and Tumblr are standouts when it comes to average time spent on site. Tumblr is the second-most engaging social site; its members spend an average of 1 hour and 38 minutes using the community-centric blogging tool each moth. And Pinterest isn’t far behind; users average 1 hour and 17 minutes of Pinterest activity per month. No other social network — Twitter and LinkedIn included — comes close to approaching these striking engagement figures.
A look at the graphic also shows that nascent Google+ already commands a commendable 18 million unique U.S. visitors per month. The traffic figure seems impressive until you notice that the average American visitor spends a total of 6 minutes on the social network each month.
Questions are critical catalysts to creative insights. And innovators were even more likely to successfully launch new ideas when they combined an ongoing instinct to formulate and ask the right questions with other innovator’s DNA skills. In other words, executives and entrepreneurs who ask questions as they observe the world, like anthropologists, discover more than those who don’t. Leaders who ask questions as they network with polar-opposite people (holding vastly different perspectives) discover more than those who don’t. Leaders who ask questions as they experiment and prototype discover more than those who don’t. Ultimately, questioning combined with the other innovator’s DNA skills can truly turbocharge innovation results—or you and your company.
More generally, and for both monetary as well as nonmonetary incentives, an effective incentive system needs to meet six criteria. First, people know their roles and understand exactly what is expected of them. Second, people have the capabilities, authority, information, and resources required to deliver on the results expected. Third, people know exactly what good looks like, so the key factor in unleashing higher performance is motivation and the will to demonstrate the required behaviors. Fourth, bonuses are appropriately tied to good behavior and good outcomes. Fifth, the organization uses a fair and accurate system to measure outcomes and assess performance (while controlling compliance with regulations and policies). Sixth and last, people get frequent and constructive feedback on whether and how past performance deviates from desired standards.
Isn’t it time for more and more CEOs to understand that business is more about customers than products? CEOs must focus on customers and what differentiates their business from their competitors. It certainly isn’t the products, but rather understanding customers needs and selling superior solutions to their problems than their competitors.
Society thinks and moves forward in fits and starts. When we think about saving stuff on the web like images of products, it's fair to see how people will eventually want to save all sorts of things. Resumes, Poetry, Homework, Books, Picture Books, Medical Records and more. Pinterest is in the early stages of re-imaging how we use the Web. Over a decade ago, during the late 90's, a small team of DC executives (myself included) set out to create a new platform where anyone could take local product advertisment and save it their own catalog - and then show it, share it, consider buying it, and more. We all thought if we could push all the advertising in the world up into this system, and allow people to push other product images up as well, that people would want to relate with it. Advertisers would love it because we were extending the shelf life of a traditional ad - and also expanding the reach of both traditional and online ads. Individuals would love it because we would more quickly show them where they can purchase what they see - and allow them to interact more personally with the images. It would be less about advertising to people, and more about collecting and seeing "things of interest to me". The DotCom days came and went, and our business, Dozuki!, did not take off as expected. My leadership team disbanded and we all went our separate ways. Fast forward 12 years and now we see Pinterest, a new (but not so different) platform that allows us to relate to images differently, more personally - and even pull it close to us. We can show others, and ourselves, our interests all organized in one place. This is what they do today. The value for that is a few millions of dollars. But lets look forward... What if they provide merchants with Pinterest "like" buttons to save products that interest us to our pinboard. (to "like" something on Facebook is somewhat less personal). And then, what if Pinterest lets us create catalogs (multiple sub-boards under one user profile) and then allows us to share them with others so that different users' boards combine or merge together. This is not lost on Pinterest. They know that the products behind our likes and interests can be all sold to us - for a reasonable price. This platform is the perfect advertisers (merchants) platform and we (people pinning) are building our own sell sheets for advertisers to use against us. We gladly add content because its free and fun. But nothing is free. There is a cost to us somewhere. Consider how this might work. Example: Nancy likes a silver picture frame she sees in the MOMA museum store in NYC. While in the store, she uses her mobile to “pin” it to her pinboard. That data gets sent to her pinboard, but it also gets redirected back into Pinterest, and/or the designer of the picture frame. An ad could be generated - at some limited discount price and entered into a marketing nurturing (drip marketing) program - and the bidding/selling starts. Later, Nancy continues to pin items to her pinboard and advertisers keep building a mountain of data to analyze about her. If you actually come out and tell the advertiser that you like a specific product it's so much easier to sell that product to you. Instead of wondering and watching, Nancy is telling the world what she wants. All the advertisers/marketers need to do is figure out how to get it to her. (we know what the "it" is now). Pinterest can extend this idea of posting ads, to posting resumes, and then selling that board (or catalog; if you combine boards into a catalog of boards). Pinterest could be the ultimate platform for personal one-to-one advertising. It can also be a mountain of data to use against us. We are removing some of the friction between an advertiser showing and our buying. We are making it easier for others to sell something to us. We are cutting their costs, effort, time associated with turning us into buyers. That is why I believe it has the potential to mirror Facebook at $100B valuation someday. Christopher Mengel http://www.linkedin.com/in/christophermengel(Note: I've been hearing some noise about how people are starting to want a Facebook/Pinterest type platform that is build and owned by them. If you had such a system, then, instead of giving away your data for free to be used, you could sell, organize, understand your own data. Then, you could become a utility - a datastream of business intel - that can be kept, saved, sold etc. Consider this: What if you could turn this whole model inside out and instead of giving the power to the few, provide an income stream for all. In that future, there could be whole, entirely new, industries created around consultants or personal assistants that help us organize, make sense of, and sell our own data.)
A report last year by the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the consulting firm, projected that the United States needs 140,000 to 190,000 more workers with “deep analytical” expertise and 1.5 million more data-literate managers, whether retrained or hired.
There are a few big job opportunity themes worth noticing. Data analytic, predictive analytic opportunities for those who love numbers. And then there is 3D Manufacturing. I think that will start getting big in 10-20 years.
Pinterest (http://www.pinterest.com) has the potential to be bigger (users and revenues) than Facebook. Here's why...
About 12-14 years ago (pre-dotcom fall), my partners and I created a local product advertising platform that would (1) extend the shelf life of a retailer's traditional ad by scanning it up to the Web, and (2) allow users to create catalogs around specific types of product advertising, and (3) allow users to share these catalogs with others in their network. (this was way before anyone was talking about "social media" or "social networking").
Merchants had a specific problem back then. They would spend money and push an ad up into a newspaper. Their total target audience was spread across multiple news venues, and the merchant had to decide which venues to budget and spend into. A disconnect occurred when the prospective buyer of a specific product did not see the product ad that the Merchant placed into a different ad spend. (i.e. - the Merchant places a great ad with discounts in the Times, but the ready-to-buy Consumer reads the Post instead and doesn't see the ad).
We thought that if we aggregated all the advertising in the world into one big database, and allowed people to search and interact with that ad (and click through to buy), that we could move the standard ad metric focus away from Cost Per 1000 Impresssions (CPMs) and over to Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), which would persuade advertisers to want to spend $10-50 per click instead of $0.05 to $0.75 per impression or click. (Boy, things have changed since the 90's!).
Anyway, the thing was...we figured that if we could get people pulling together ads and products into custom catalogs and have them keep and share them with friends, then the advertising model would be turned upside down. Merchants woud have that true, real relationship between the Consumer and their product - on the Consumers terms. Consumers would finally be able to use advertising as something meaningful for them to carry, consume, watch, share, interact with - and pull toward them not push away. And the ad (which was in the middle) would regain new life as a real, meaningful and important character in the Consumers world.
We self-funded the company for years, but ultimately could not get the additional funding we needed to scale, prove out the technology and the model, and gain mass acceptance among the necessary mix of Merchants and Consumers.We "sunsetted" the business and watched as company after company came out with some variation that was close but not taking the right approach to create a home run.
Enter Pinterest. With today's technology and with our own behaviors now shaped by 7-9 years of social media platforms, easy signup forms, social networks where we share everything with our friends and networks, - we are ready to consume content more approapriately. We all seem to be fine with giving up our privacy rights to Facebook. We are now used to accumulating and saving and sharing interesting pieces of content. And we are all used to accessing social systems and accessing our systems with Facebook and Twitter API bridges. This all means we don't need to adopt new behaviors (like we did many years ago).
Pinterest is perfectly positioned to be the next big thing. People will find, collect and share stuff and marketers will find ways to slice and dice and micro-target hundreds of millions of "audiences of one". Credit card companies and Merchants will start to consider how to tap into that huge network of ad-ready consumer profiles. Pinterest will start to consider how they scale and advertising will stand out as a viable model for growth. (If they haven't done so already).
I believe there is more inherent "friction" in the system/relationship between consumers, ads, Merchants and Facebook than there will be with Pinterest. This company is perfect to scale and go "viral" and when it hits a threshold, it will be very good at driving a consumer that is already interacting with the product or ad, to move toward a purchase decision.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/christophermengel
Facebook is considered so valuable because it is more than the sum of its users. More than the world’s largest social network, it is a fast-churning data machine that captures and processes every click and interaction on its platform.
Every time a person shares a link, listens to a song, clicks on one of Facebook’s ubiquitous “like” buttons, or changes a relationship status to “engaged,” a morsel of data is added to Facebook’s vast library.
A team of physicists at Cornell University has created a wrinkle in time. Actually, it’s more like a teeny tiny moth hole in time. Inside it things can occur that are entirely undetectable, at least to ordinary observers. It’s as if they never happened.
In 2006, IBM said 16% of its revenue came from growth markets, By last year, that figure had reached 21%. By 2015, the percentage of revenue the company expects to earn in growth markets will approach 30%.
Under Palmisano, IBM has already outlined a corporate strategy through 2015 that also calls for continued development of "higher-value" services and software, and an entirely new category of services and software it calls Smarter Planet.
Last year, IBM announced a plan to spend $20 billion to buy companies through 2015. That's more money than it spent in the previous 10 years. Many of those acquisitions will involve business analytics, cloud services and related software.
Business Analytics is going to be a game changer...
For a brand to be number one or two it has to occupy one of the following positions in customer’s minds:
- Be the best in its class.
- Have a unique set of attributes.
- Be the cheapest.
If a brand does not “fit” one of these perceptions then it has a “fuzzy” value proposition for most customers. Brands exist in the mind and represent a collection of experiences over time. The mind is like a dripping sponge of brand value perceptions and the only way anything new can get in is to replace what already exists with a newer better brand value perception.
Typically brands lose positions as the result of the introduction of faster, better, or cheaper solutions. This is particularly apparent in the telephony, computer, and software markets where many of the pioneers like Nokia, HP, and Microsoft are rapidly losing share of mind to more nimble competitors who are introducing a plethora of new devices and operating systems that allow consumers to experience a much richer overall life experience and a level of socialization never before available.
Every CEO must carefully compare their firms’ unique resources with specific customer’s changing requirements and select those that the organization can satisfy better than their competitors. When this is done well and promoted effectively your brand will “own” a position in the mind of a certain set of customers.
Been hearing this for years, but so few take this good advice.
Software firm Jobs2Web, a cloud-based recruiting platform that lures top candidates through social networks such as LinkedIn and Twitter, has been acquired for $110 million in cash.
The Minnetonka, Minn-based company, which appeared on the Inc. 500 for the third year in a row this year, will be acquired by California-based SuccessFactors, a human resources software vendor that is itself being acquired by German company SAP.
Jobs2Web acquired for $110M, with 2010 revenues of $9.9M. Interesting.
Autodesk's SketchBook apps for phones and the iPad are best-sellers that have been downloaded seven million times. It doesn't add up to a huge amount of revenue: perhaps $15 million. But there's more than money to this innovation story. With its first consumer hit, Autodesk now has more customers than it did in all its previous 29 years combined.
"It's the best advertising we've had in years," says Autodesk CEO Carl Bass. What's more, the home-grown apps are teaching Autodesk how to reach a fast-growing new audience that uses tablets and phones. Last year, Autodesk launched a new consumer products division, which includes SketchBook and other design programs that don't require users to have high-end computers.
interesting...
A startup called RedCritter is taking a new approach, with software that turns the task of measuring performance and sticking to a schedule into something more like a game. And managing software projects is just the beginning. The company's founder, veteran entrepreneur Mike Beaty, wants to apply these techniques to other business problems, like increasing sales leads and improving customer service.
RedCritter's software, called Tracker, is currently designed to work specifically with so-called agile software development methods, in which programmers launch themselves into short, well-defined tasks called "scrums" that allow rapid improvement of code. Agile development is the programming method of choice for many startups, especially those developing Web-based systems. Tracker uses video-game-style points, badges, and a Twitter-style conversation stream to turn the often deadly boring business of managing a software project into something programmers can enjoy.
For all the differences among them, the juggernauts of social media rely on a common business model: create free services, then sell ads against users' information. In a dramatic departure, a new social network plans to give its users a 50 percent commission—or even let them sell their own ads and keep all the revenue.
Chime.in is built around users' interests—think photography, politics, or travel—as opposed to friends, professional contacts, or news. The site's founders hope that by creating pages around those interests, the users will attract people with similar affinities, an attractive combination for targeted advertising.
"Because social is going to be so powerful, I feel that the people who are creating the engaging social content should have some stake," says Bill Gross, the serial entrepreneur who is the CEO of both Idealab, a startup incubator, and Ubermedia, a social media developer that launched Chime.in. "Right now that's sort of a heresy—but I almost like it that people think it's heresy. It gives me more of a lead."
Thousands of people every day use the link-shortening service Bitly to tame unwieldy Web links to share on Twitter and other social media sites. Few realize that they're simultaneously helping the New York company peer into the Web's future. Bitly analyzes the pages pointed to by the 80 million short links it generates every day to predict changes in the public's attitude toward people and companies. Now Bitly is set to get access to a slew of new data that could make its Web crystal ball even better at forecasting the future. Bitly has reached a data-sharing agreement with Verisign, based in Dulles, Virginia. Verisign acts as a kind of telephone directory for the Internet. Any address typed into a browser is sent to servers at Verisign or one of a handful of other organizations, which help turn that URL into a numerical address that a computer can use to find the Web page it needs.
Verisign looks up over 50 billion URLs every day and, like Bitly, gets a handle on what people are doing online as a result.
Recent advances in information technologies may be driving people out of work and enriching the already rich, a new book argues. The book challenges the long-held view that new technology displaces workers in the short term but always creates more jobs in the long term.
New approaches to manufacturing are set to take hold over the next few years, challenging the basic assumptions of industrial production. Much like the Big Bang, we’ll see manufacturing fragment and recombine along several dimensions:
- From centralized factories to distributed workshops
- From global centralization to highly local cottage industries
Traditional assembly lines have long placed limitations on where and how objects can be produced. But emerging additive and flexible manufacturing technologies are opening possibilities in personalization, democratization, and design that break free from traditional assumptions. While 3D printers have been around for a while, their use is reaching an inflection point and a new generation of home models promises to bring the means of production into peoples’ homes. Applications extend from printing jewelry and toys to printing organs and houses.
Interesting...
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