Stores magazine's May 2007 issue turns retailers' gaze toward Second Life in the article 'First Look at Second Life.' Author Susan Reda examines the attention this "virtual world" is generating with firms like Circuit City, Sears, Dell and Adidas, and describes their experiences in Second Life. Second LIfe 'residents' spend more than $1.5 million a day buying clothing, real estate and much besides. "Retailers need to figure out how to deliver an experience that's on brand, sustainable and participatory. Second Life is a world where businesses need to challenge the norm," opines Nita Rollins of Resource Interactive in Columbus, Ohio. Read more in the current issue in Jackson Library.
If you think preparing your taxes every year is a pain think about what large corporations have to go thru every year when they report the state of their internal finances to the Securities and Exchange Commission who then publishes it for the entire world to sift thru. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 made reporting more detailed and costly for many companies. Those most hard hit by SOX were small companies who had to jump thru just as many hoops. Last week the SEC heard their pleas and beginning on December 15, 2007 will make audits less costly for companies with a market value of under $75 million. Read more.
The American magazine (May/June 2007) reports that white collar criminals are not being sent up the river to comfy minimum-security facilities these days. Instead, they're entering a scenario more out of a Hollywood prison movie. Alfred A. Porro Jr -- aka Prisoner # 20532-050 -- found guilty of wire fraud and filing false taxes, gave author Luke Mullins a depressing account of his life behind bars. Expecting a cushy stay, Porro was shocked to learn that his prison camp was not just fellow 'white collar crooks', but a motley crew of drug dealers and other offenders. Not quite the horrors of maximum security prison, but enough to make mischievous executives think twice in the future. Read about tips and tricks of prison survival, government 'rats', sperm-smuggling schemes, and more in the current issue in Jackson Library.
"And the top ten list for tonight ... " No, it's not David Letterman. Guy Kawasaki is at it again, with another of his own "top ten" lists. This time it's 'Top Ten Reasons Why PR Doesn't Work'. Actually, they're courtesy of Margie Zable Fisher of ThePRsite.com, who supplied them to Mr Kawasaki. Headings include "the client doesn't understand the publicity process", "the client and the PR person / firm are not a good match, and "clients get upset when the media coverage is not 100% accurate or not the kind of coverage that they wanted." If you're having your own PR problems, you might want to read all ten at his blog.
The "green" I am referring to are the hedge fund millionaires who reside in Greenwich, Conn. This town of 61, 000 has in recent memory its fair share of mansions and other trappings of wealth. Its new claim to fame is that it is now a stop on the presidential campaign trail. All the major players have come to town in recent weeks hoping to get major bucks from those who have made their wealth in the hedge fund arena. Read the New York Times article and happy election season to you all!!
The feature article in June issue of Business 2.0 magazine reveals the identity of Kevin Ham, the mogul of the “real estate on the Web”. The ownership of 300,000 domains generates Ham around $70 million a year in revenue. However impressive and timely Ham’s enterprise in acquiring domains names is, there are other “domainers” who are also successful and competitive. What distinguishes Kevin Ham from the rest is his scheme of banking on possible typos that people make while searching via direct navigation, e.g. bypassing the search engines and entering the url in the browser. Yahoo registered yahoo.cm domain where extension cm identifes Cameroon. Ham made a deal with the Cameroon government, and every person mistyping 'com' for cm ends up at Agoga.cm, the site owned by Kevin Ham and filled with advertisement which generate a “per click” revenue for Yahoo, Kevin Ham, and Camtel of Cameroon. Find more details by reading the story.
The Fischbowl blog highlights the 2nd annual K-12 Online Conference, designed for teachers, administrators and educators around the world interested in the use of Web 2.0 tools in classrooms and professional practice. This year’s conference is scheduled over two weeks, October 15-19 and October 22-26 of 2007, and will include a pre-conference keynote during the week of October 8. The conference theme is "Playing with Boundaries."
There will be four conference 'strands' -- two each week. Two presentations will be published in each strand each day, so four new presentations will be available each day. Each presentation will be given in any of a variety of downloadable, web based formats. Interested parties are encouraged to submit proposals now; deadline for proposals is June 18.
Keynote Presentation: The Digital Decade – What the Past Five Years Can Teach Us About the Next Five, by Brian McAndrews, Pres. & CEO, aQuantive Inc.
• Ultimately all media will become digital.
• In the next 5 yrs, a significant shift to the digital, 2-3 times larger, multichannel, and a key development will the with TV – by 2008, 60% of all households will have video on demand, e.g. TiVo.
• Same-time viewing becoming less and less common.
• Inserting dynamic ads into TV.
• Economic model – view ads in return for free programming.
• More fragmentation, multiple channels always on, video on demand, mobile channels, games, etc.
• Web site is replacing the 30-sec spot as the central expression of a brand as one can engage the customer for 30 secs, 3 mins or 30 mins – this is where marketers are heading today.
• M&As? At aQuantive, we are driven by what the customers want – more platforms, buying media, buying search, scale & scope, and especially geographic coverage.
• Global expansion is both an offensive move and a defensive move.
• Integration? The model of the future is that we have to think about all the channels upfront.
• Mobile? No advertising standard yet, need to sort out what content is suitable for mobile ads.
• Social media? Consumers are defining the marketplace. People will interact, express opinions, and share contents. Viral may become the new broadcast media.
• Marketers need to listen to consumers – go to blogs, the big focus group, to see how people are reacting to your brand messages.
Network execs fed up with the jaded attitudes of the traditional media are turning to the blogoshere to promote new (and old) shows. According to an article in the Tuesday, May 15 Wall Street Journal, Hollywood is actively courting bloggers, offering them freebies such as DVDs and other promotional material. And for big players, the biggest perk of all -- access. Mainstream media may have strict guidelines for accepting gifts, but there are no such rules in the blogosphere. Bloggers are invited to visit actual shows in production, meet the stars and maybe even a get a bit part. And the payoff? Great reviews in widely read blogs. I am now re-evaluating my blogging focus, since I know that if I get even one small part, I will surely be ... "discovered" !
Ray Anderson the founder of Interface, a carpet and tile manufacturing company, decided in 1994 that his company would follow the path of "do no harm". His company would from now on do it's best to be environmentally responsible. He challenged his colleagues to set a deadline for Interface to become a “restorative enterprise,” a sustainable operation that takes nothing out of the earth that cannot be recycled or quickly regenerated, and that does no harm to the biosphere. The deadline they ultimately set is 2020, and the idea has taken hold throughout the company. Read more about it.
The 'Bird of Gold': The Rise of India's Consumer Market, a study written by McKinsey, discusses how the Indian consumer will (if India continues on its current high growth path) have incomes that will almost triple over the next two decades, and the country will climb from its position as the twelfth-largest consumer market today to become the world's fifth-largest consumer market by 2025. The study forecasts that aggregate consumption in India will grow fourfold in real terms, from Rs 17 trillion at present to Rs 70 trillion by 2025. Traditionally expenditure on food, beverages and tobacco will see a remarkable drop as a proportion to overall expenditure by 2025. They may remain the single largest category in terms of spend, but their share will drop to 25% from 42%.
So which markets will thrive? Transportation (new cars, airline travel) and healthcare will become the second and third largest consumer markets.
The New Yorker (May 21) celebrates the career of Milton Bradley, pioneer of the American game industry. The piece 'The Meaning of Life' puns off of Bradley's first and most famous game, the 'Checkered Game of Life', which made its appearance in 1860. Its centennial version, issued in 1960 as the 'Game of Life', was in many ways a far cry from the original, but it has endured (this author himself enjoyed the 1960 version, with its pop-up plastic structures, as a child.) A new version is due this year. The article weaves the life and times of Bradley, his New England ancestors, and their own experiences of life into the story of the board game, from ancient India through the 'Royal Game of Goose' in Renaissance Florence to the British 'New Game of Human Life' of 1790. Also interesting is a sub-theme of Bradley as educator and school supply magnate (he invented the one-armed paper cutter.) Read an asbstract, or the full article in the New Yorker issue on the Current Periodicals rack in Jackson Library.
With all the Wolfowitz news buzzing throughout the aether, you may be interested in GSB Professor Bob Sutton's take, he of The No Asshole Rule. All the evidence may not be in, but Sutton opines that Mr Wolfowitz may be a, well, you know what. He bases this on a Guardian story that ran where, apparently, Wolfowitz "sounded more like a cast member of the Sopranos than an international leader." Sutton emphasizes that all press reports must be subject to healthy scepticism -- but if the article is true, Wolfowitz is guilty of some of the classic dysfunctions of the powerful.
Money magazine conducted a survey among one thousand adults about money and ethics that is how people handle different situations which involve money issues. For example, should you loan money to a relative, or what would you do if a borrowed from a neighbor power mower died while you were using it, or what would you do for a promotion? The results of the survey and some insights into peoples’ attitudes towards the situations where money and morale are interlinked are described in the article of June issue of Money magazine. You can find a magazine in Jackson Periodicals display area or if you read it online, you can also take a poll yourself.
BusinessWeek (May 21) talks about the push by US companies to extract more profits from the economically disadvantaged. The article 'The Poverty Business' chronicles the struggle of Native American Roxanne Tsosie and others, as they attempt to make ends meet by borrowing on credit, often at exorbitant rates. The working poor are borrowing increasingly to buy cars and computers and TVs. Their lives mirror a larger problem in America, where the debt of the poor is getting progressively more expensive. FDIC chair Sheila C. Bair captures the overall picture when she says, "It's not only that the poor are paying more; the poor are paying a lot more." And Connie McBride, whose own life has been tough, sums it up for her more affluent readers: "If you have money to begin with, you don't have these issues or these kinds of bills."
According to a New York Times story of May 11, the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) will now consider smoking in films one of the criteria for assigning ratings along with violence, sex and language. Under the new policy, a film will be rated on all tobacco use -- not just use by teenagers, as was the rule in the past. The change in policy is the result of pressure from anti-smoking groups. Many an adult smoker of the past was influenced by the sexy Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart or Paul Henreid and Bette Davis sharing a cigarette in Hollywood's golden age.
Maybe it was plastics when The Graduate came out, but today it's 'plasticity'. This afternoon in GSB South 150 alum Alvaro Fernandez and his colleague Dr Elkhonon Goldberg of the School of Medicine, NYU, discussed the science and practice of brain fitness, describing some recent research findings being employed by their firm SharpBrains. Dr Goldberg made the case that brain neuroplasticity demonstrably continues throughout life -- giving our brain the ability to generate new neurons. SharpBrains sees itself as a one-stop shop for those seeking practices to encourage neuron growth and ongoing mental acuity, using games and other tools. While some questions remain unanswered, this is clearly an area ripe for further research and development.
Chris Anderson (The Long Tail) on his blog of the same name comments on Nathaniel Talbott's ruminations on the analogy between the transcontinental railroad and mid-American real estate, and iTunes and the musical marketplace of today. Even as the 1869 railroad enabled folks from the crowded East coast to move to the 'long tail' of the interior, iTunes enables listeners to move away from the 'hits' in music. What would Leland Stanford, head of the Central Pacific RR, say about this?
See these and other interesting observations by Anderson -- such as his review of the analysis of the Long Tail in the media by Lex Miron of CIBC's World Markets' Media and Entertainment practice, or his praise of Rupert Murdoch as an Old School tycoon who may be surprisingly well-poised to flourish in the New School of the media world.
Charles River Ventures. Watch the three winning pitches of the first ever CRV Entrepreneur Idol (coming to a grad school near you soon). Judges George, Bill Tai and Susan Wu of CRV, as well as Silicon Valley famed blogger and journalist, Matt Marshall chose their top 5 contestants out of 60 MBA candidates. The top three got to present their pitches to the audience, and the ultimate idol winner was selected by the audience.
Winners included Ned Tozun - Solid state LED for the developing world, Foreverbright, Rohin Dhar - Online job recruitment services, PersonForce, Jeff Piper - Hedging instruments for residential real estate market.
So you want to write the next great novel and have it stay at #1 on the New York Times Bestseller list. It's a matter of pure luck if that happens some would say. A New York Times article describes what happened when Curtis Sittenfeld’s first novel, “Cipher" was submitted to book publishers. In a word no publisher except Random House wanted to take a chance on it's success. Random House published “Cipher” in January 2005, renaming it “Prep” and backing it with a clever marketing and publicity campaign. Read what happened next.
Richard Stearns, President of World Vision, answers ten (or so) questions from Guy Kawasaki (Art of the Start, The Macintosh Way.) Stearns, with a bachelor's degree from Cornell and MBA from Wharton, and a former corporate president, heads this Christian relief and development organization dedicated to helping children and their communities worldwide reach their potential by tackling the causes of poverty. In today's troubled world, where the word 'religion' is all-too-easily associated with violence, learn about a faith-based initiative that may be making a profound difference.
GSB alum Alvaro Fernandez sends us word of the Mind & Life Institute, co-founded and chaired by fellow GSB alum Adam Engle (MBA '86). The Institute sponsors the 'Mind and Life Dialogues', started in 1987 as an experiment to determine whether a meaningful exchange could occur between modern science and Buddhism. MLI has now sponsored 14 dialogues between the Dalai Lama and neuroscientists over the last 20 years, with the result that the Institute has become a recognized world leader in the emerging scientific investigation of the effects of contemplative practices on brain and behavior. Inspired by the Institute, let us hope that the Oceanwide ( = Dalai ) Lama and his scientist friends can continue to navigate the vast seas of consciousness together.
The New York Times is introducing a new online section on small business that will feature resources for entrepreneurs, managers, and all those interested in starting a business. Look for regular columns such as the 'Entrepreneurial Edge' by James Flanigan, 'Tool Kit' by Paul Brown, and 'Shifting Careers' by Marci Alboher. Check out news, features and more at www.nytimes.com/smallbusiness.
Coleridge's words seem disturbingly apt today. "The water crisis is now. As major cities battle drought and pollution, they are turning to a handful of Western companies to manage the problem." So says an intriguing article, The Rise of Big Water, in the May 2007 issue of Vanity Fair. Author Charles C. Mann asserts that one out of three persons on earth already lacks reliable access to fresh water. According to the UN, by 2000 governments in 93 nations had begun to privatize drinking water services. Global corporations are busying themselves acquiring water systems everywhere. How shall we meet the challenges of the future? Read about undertakings on a scale hitherto undreamt -- such as China's plan to bring water to half a billion of its people with the largest water project in history, involving three massive 700-mile channels to transport 12,000,000,000,000 gallons a year. Feeling thirsty?
Analysis of U.S. consumer activity at top online properties and categories for February 2007 introduced a new suite of metrics based on site “visits.” The “visits” metric, defined as the number of times a unique person accesses content within a Web entity with breaks between access of at least 30 minutes, is a way of measuring the frequency with which a person views content, thereby illustrating a key component of user engagement. More at: comScore Media Metrix.
Information on environmental issues such as energy use and carbon emissions for countries around the world is available from Energy Information Administration (EIA)'s Country Environmental Briefs.
For example, China is the second largest emitter of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions after the United States. China's share of world carbon emissions is expected to increase in coming years, reaching 17.8% by 2025. Information under Country Analysis Briefs -- China: Environmental Issues.
Wired magazine April 2007 issue offers us the Wired 40, their tenth annual list of the top 40 'wired' companies in the world. "They're masters of innovation and technology," the magazine proclaims, "global thinkers that dominate their industries and point the way to the future." Honorees include the usual gang of suspects: Google, Apple, Samsung, General Electric, Medtronic, Netflix. But they're joined this year by some new kids on the block: Baidu, the 'Chinese Google', and Japanese giant NTT DoCoMo, for example. Also included are 6 hot business trends for 2007. Scope out the issue on the Jackson Library Current Periodical rack.
For those of you tracking the progress of the bestselling book The No Asshole Rule, author Professor Bob Sutton offers us an update on his blog. The ripples from the initial impact continue to widen, Sutton reports, as his evangel of decent management calls him to various venues to present his ideas and his book. His current busy-bee schedule includes an invitation from fellow GSB Professor George Foster to speak to his class of executives from the NFL this June, a chance to write occasional pieces on politico (politica?) Arianna Huffington's Huffington Post blog, and an interview on May 5 at CNN. A while back this author jokingly reminded Bob that his blog was in danger of becoming engulfed by 'all things asshole' -- but hey, he's riding the crest, having a great time, and making a positive impact to boot.
This is my third in a series of blog entries focusing on ethical questions surrounding natural resources. Although not much is written about gold mining it too brings with it complications not unlike oil and diamonds. Up to this point ¾ of the world’s estimated gold has been mined, which means mines have had to dig up to 4 miles deep to get to the gold and strip mining has become more widespread. One way to test for gold on land is to apply cyanide, and mercury is used to dissolve gold for use in alloys. Among the world’s largest gold producers are some of the poorest countries in the world such as Ghana and the Congo. A journalist with the Observer in her article Dilemma: Should I wear newly mined gold ring? wanted to find out exactly what went into a simple gold ring. It turns out somewhere between 18-20 tons of waste and around 5 tons of water. A campaign launched two years ago by among others Oxfam and Earthworks, called No Dirty Gold has been pushing jewelers to sign an agreement to use gold from mines which use more responsible mining to extract gold.
Do you know how to train the most important but least understood muscles in our body? Major media like Time, CBS News, and the Wall Street Journal have recently started to cover what many neuroscientists have argued for years: that our brains are composed of a number of areas and functions, "mental muscles", that we can train with targeted practice.
Come hear the co-founders of SharpBrains explain the scientific findings that underlie the emerging field of 'brain fitness'. Learn about the rapidly evolving landscape and trends of the high growth industry, and see live demos on what brain training is all about. SharpBrains, a partnership between neuroscientist Elkhonon Goldberg and educator and GSB alum Alvaro Fernandez (Stanford MBA, MA in Education '01), offers the first online brain fitness center. Give your brain a workout on Thursday, May 17, Noon - 1 PM, GSB classroom S-150. For a preview on some of the ideas, read a conversation with Dr Goldberg.
BusinessWeek just released the result of their annual "The World's Most Innovative Companies" survey of senior executives. The survey was conducted jointly with the Boston Consulting Group. This year, just 46% of respondents said they were satisfied with their return on innovation spending, a decrease from 52% last year. Only 23% of respondents called it their top concern, a drop from 32% in 2006. Check out the sortable list of the 50 innovation leaders and a breakdown of the World's most innovative companies by industry sector in this special report.
Do you know your business preference profile? Check out our new database – Country Navigator – and fine out whether you are better suited to doing business in China or in Russia. This month’s JacksonLine will tell you this and much more.
As always, your feedback is welcome.
The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) has published a list of the top 25 largest purchases among EPA Green Power Partners. These purchases help drive the development of additional green power resources nationwide. To become a green power partner "your organization must replace a portion of its annual electricity use with green power. EPA has developed a sliding scale purchase requirement based on an organization's total electrical usage." View the list at the EPA site.
The Deal magazine continues to publish special supplements in the series Eyes on World Markets. The spring '07 supplement is dedicated to China and its present state of investment industry. The articles are mainly written from the perspective of foreign investments in Chinese companies and touch upon such topics as new China M&A rules adopted last year in September, or how Chinese public companies change their reporting and disclosure system, or statistics on the top PE investment transactions and more. Find China supplement in the display area of Jackson library together with The Deal.
As the presidential campaigns heat up, Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig is calling upon both political parties to eliminate any unnecessary restriction of speech. "Technology has exploded the opportunity for people to comment upon, and spread political speech," Lessig says. "Democracy is all about encouraging citizens to participate in that debate. And all of us, whether Democrats or Republicans, should push to remove unnecessary burdens to that participation." On his blog he posts two letters, one to the RNC and the other to the DNC, requesting, among other things, that no debate get official sanction of these bodies unless contract terms specify that video footage will be put into the public domain, or licensed under a Creative Commons (Attribution) license, so that after the debate the video will be free for anyone. The list of signatories is impressive and bipartisan, including Lessing himself, Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia), political author Arianna Huffington, conservative columnist Michelle Malkin, Kim Gandy (President of NOW), Matt Margolis of GOP Bloggers and Blogs for Bush, Jay Harris of Mother Jones, and Adam Green of MoveOn.org. It will be interesting to see how this affects the ebb and flow in the partisan battles to come.
Two reports by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University conclude that a lack of uniform regulations allow independent mortgage lenders to operate with less oversight of how they comply with the law, which is supposed to prevent discriminatory and unfair lending. Both papers can be read on the Joint Center for Housing Studies site.
The best website metrics is to understand the bottom line, i.e. for example, how much does it cost to get a reader for your website. A reader is a visitor who enters the site and does not bounce off. Cost-per-reader is determined by combining the CPC with the clickthrough rate for the landing pages, thus:
In the above example, a company pays $2.50 per click in advertising, and 35 percent of people who click the ad leave without going beyond the landing page. The net result is that it costs $3.85 to get someone to read the site.
Web analytics at iMedia.
Seth Godin brings you his Post Bubble Treasure Hunt. On his blog he displays a poster of bubble bigshots from several years back, many of whom are nowhere to be found on the current scene. With the help of a friend, he now offers all of us the opportunity to use an interactive site to identify who's who -- or who was who. Some are easy to spot, others not so. Want a challenge? Interested? Just bored? Try your luck and see if you can find fallen heroes of the Silicon Valley of yesteryear.
* Post Bubble
Double check that parking ticket on your windshield before you send in your check! It may not be yours. According to San Francisco Chronicle columnist David Lazarus (Friday, April 20) the scam is easy. The scammer finds a ticket on his / her windshield, picks it up, walks or drives a few blocks, finds someone potentially in violation, and puts the ticket on their windshield. There's virtually no downside for the scammer, who is betting that the victim will simply accept the ticket and pay it. And if not, the scammer is no worse off, because most municipalities send out a courtesy notice before the original ticket accrues fines. If the scam fails, the scammer can still pay without accruing penalties. The moral of our story? Read first, pay later.
Sony’s 'Spider-Man 3' sets records in Europe and Asia including Japan, France, Germany, Italy and South Korea. Italian estimates gave "Spider-Man" $4 million from 900 screens, making for the country's biggest one day bow ever. Sony spent some $3.3 million on marketing "Spider-Man 3" in Italy. Domestic launch this Friday on 4,253 theaters, the widest North American opening of all time.
Reported at Variety.com.
This is my second in a series of blog entries focusing on ethical questions surrounding natural resources. Much has been written about diamonds which are mined in countries where their sale helps in the purchase of weapons to aid in civil wars. These diamonds are often called “conflict diamonds”. The recently released movie Blood Diamonds takes a good look at the role diamonds played during the civil war in Sierra Leone. An article in the Christian Science Monitor discusses the movie and the controversy surrounding it. The World Diamond Council claims they didn’t know about conflict diamonds until 1999 although it is well documented that diamonds provided financial support for wars during the 1990’s. In the book Heartless Stone Tom Zoellner gives a great overview of this history of diamonds and how the industry is growing and learning from the past.
GSB Professor Robert Sutton on his blog asks a question for all frequent flyers -- "Do you make air travel miserable for the rest of us?" His answer: the Flying ARSE (Asshole Rating Self-Exam.) Inspired by his recent bestseller The No Asshole Rule, Sutton addresses those unfortunates among us who may need a little help introspecting about how to cope with the sardine transport systems contemporary aviation has become. Be sure to check out Sutton's hilarious -- and heartening -- anecdote of the unflappable Virgin Airlines gate attendant and her irate customer, definitely overdue for an ARSE maintenance check.
As an update, over 80,000 people have taken the ARSE. Based on results, some 6,000 people are 'certifiable' you-know-whats. Thousands of others are marginal. But be of good cheer, nearly 50,000 are not. So -- here's to flying with the Fortunate 50,000 !
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