Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Experiential Marketing - IKEA Hotels

Excerpted from March 21, 2003. Experiential Marketing™ (by Augustine Fou)

IKEA hotels. Given the commoditized status and lack of differentiation of many hotel chains like Hampton Inn, Fairfield Inn, Red Roof Inn, Motel 6, Comfort Inn, etc., imagine if a particular chain partnered with IKEA to decorate their rooms with simple, clean and comfortable bedroom furniture. This fact alone would give that hotel chain a significant point of differentiation. The hotel chain also gets the economic benefit of furniture at prices that are even better than wholesale prices on generic furniture. IKEA gets significant "consumption-experience level" exposure to target customers at a fraction of the expense of TV ads or building vast new retail stores.

Consumers get to experience IKEA furniture "in action" which undoubtedly would give them enough first-hand experience information to make future purchase decisions. Finally, some creative "consumer insights research" opportunities can even be built in, such as allowing visitors to select from among differently decorated IKEA hotel rooms and tracking such decisions to gather which items are most popular or even how to make IKEA's in-store bedroom sets more appealing.

In summary, both the hotel and IKEA achieve "experiential marketing" which drives greater marketing effectiveness (i.e. hotel chain differentiates themselves from others; IKEA lets customers actually experience their products prior to going to a store), delivers a more impactful experience to customers, and even reduces costs for both parties.

How to lose a billion? The impact of the Internet on industries

The theme throughout is the shift of power to the consumer and away from the seller, who used to control supply, distribution, and "marcom" (marketing message).

Getty Images (GYI) -- minus 33% ($1 billion) in 10 days

- supply replacement - vast online collections of photos and microstock collections serve as alternatives to traditional stock agency offerings (given a choice of thousands of rose pictures, a $1 rose picture will probably be perfectly sufficient for a buyer's needs, versus a rose picture that comes with much more complex license terms or is more costly.

- demand displacement - new use cases, better findability, greater ease of use, more flexible license terms, and lower cost shift demand away from traditional stock agency offerings; so while the number of photos that are licensed and used may skyrocket (everyone can add photos to blog posts), the dollar value of the overall market "pie" will shrink when the average price per photo approaches $0.00 (free). And market share will also scatter away from traditional dominant players to the multitude of smaller alternative players.

Blockbuster (BBI) -- minus 42% ($0.7 billion) in about 4 months

- demand displacement -- the same supply of "entertainment content" made easier to access and view by online rental services (e.g. NetFlix), on-demand cable, bite-sized downloads (e.g. Apple iTunes), and distributed sharing technology (e.g. BitTorrent).

Newspapers (Classifieds industry)

- better timeliness of Craigslist postings mean users could get their apartment rented even before the listing hits print

Telecom (Long distance charges)

- calling over the internet has been around for years, but now practically every instant-message program has "voice" features and voice-over-IP providers are routing voice data over internet pipes and avoiding the tolls charged by traditional telecom companies

Music (distribution of plastic discs and promotion of selected artists)

- the world did not fill up overnight with music-pirating grandmas or cats (RIAA sued someone's cat); rather, the shift of power towards the consumer is manifesting itself in the evaporation of demand of plastic discs -- consumers don't want to buy a CD with 16 tracks on it when they only want 1 track; consumers want to use the music they did purchase on the devices of their choice; consumers balk at the mental "cost" of DRM; and consumers want music that is actually good and original, not music that has been heavily promoted and in heavy rotation on radio because of such promotion.

Jonathan Klein on Getty Audio and User Generated Music Content

Source: http://www.stockphototalk.com/phototalk/2007/08/gettymusic.html

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

"Don´t worry. We are not going be selling music at 99 cents a song for the iPod market.

We are not going to try and discover the next hot or not so hot Ecto band.

We are focussing on licensing. What we want to do is to revolutionize the way music is licensed for commercial use.

The music industry today is much like the imagery business once was. It´s highly fragmented, it´s complex".

Augustine: diversification to other types of digital content MAY help Getty survive a bit longer, but there are already other alternatives to music licensing which is more "user and artist friendly."

PodSafe Music - original music contributed by artists themselves for use in podcasts FOR FREE, with attribution
http://music.podshow.com/

Creative Commons music (use FOR FREE with attribution)
http://www.spinxpress.com/
http://www.owlmm.com/index.html

Monday, August 06, 2007

How to Sell Documents, Web Templates, Videos or Pictures Online

Augustine: amazingly simple idea turned into a useful service

from Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

Torsten is looking for a convenient system to sell his PDF eBooks on the internet - as soon as the user makes the payment via Credit Card or PayPal or Google Checkout, he should get a link to download the file in his email inbox and the link should expire after a given time.

sell documents online PDF eBooks - or for that matter any downloadable product including blog templates, Flash presentations, MP3 music, podcasts, video clips, digital photographs, ringtones, software utilities,.. can be sold on the web very easily through a service called PayLoadz Express.

All you have to do is upload the file (that you want to sell) to PayLoadz and they'll immediately give you a link where your site visitors can click and buy the document through PayPal or Google Checkout. It's an extremely smooth transaction.

PayLoadz will also expire the download link after a limited time and also monitors downloading IP addresses to prevent excessive downloading of the file. There's no transaction fee if the monthly limit is $100 and the size of the uploaded files is less than 50 MB.

This Google Video shows a sample transaction - customer makes a purchase and downloads the document:

Popout

express.payloadz.com/ [Upload and Sell Documents in a Click, PayPal Only]

Payloadz [More options, supports both Paypal and Google Checkout]

Prototype display adjusts pixels for your viewing (angle) pleasure

from Engadget by Darren Murph

We've certainly seen displays that look right back at you for interactive purposes, but a new system developed by Wayne Cheng and Chih-Nan Wu at the Photonics and Display Institute, National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan could enable the LCD to alter itself based on your viewing location. The researchers have devised a solution in which a camera tracks the eyes of the onlooker and subsequently uses software to adjust the "orientation of liquid crystals in the display and the power fed to light-emitting diodes behind each." The result is an image that remains clear and sharp regardless of how you're looking at the screen, and while the developers admit that it can only respond to one set of eyes at a time, they're hoping that "doctors and surgeons who use LCDs to view scans or X-rays" would be among the first to benefit.

Thomas Hawk's excellent side-by-side comparison of photo collections

Source: ThomasHawk.com - Getty Images vs Flickr

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Thomas Hawk: "Below are three searches that I selected at random. Las Vegas, candle and clouds. Now click through to the search pages for these terms at Flickr and at Getty Images. Which one is better? Is it clearly better? If you were a marketer would it make a difference to you which one you pulled your images from?

Las Vegas Getty
Las Vegas Flickr

Candle Getty
Candle Flickr

Clouds Getty
Clouds Flickr

Now let's take this a step further and enter into the long tail of stock photography let's do a search for Tujunga (a small town in the San Fernando Valley where I grew up) and Mount Tam (a local mountain in Marin here in the Bay Area).

Tujunga Getty
Tujunga Flickr

Mount Tam Getty
Mount Tam Flickr

Interesting what you get here isn't it? You see with 400 million images in their library Flickr is the better stock agency for long tail stuff for sure. The problem just is that Flickr hasn't figured out how to turn this on yet."

GYI: The Internet transforming yet another industry

Minus a third (nearly $1 billion) of its market cap in 5 days, Getty Images (GYI) is seeing the tangible effects of ...

1) supply replacement -- vast collections of photos online serve as alternative supply for people searching for photos to use/license.

2) demand displacement -- new use cases such as use of photos on blogs require new licenses such as royalty free or Creative Commons -- the terms of traditional rights managed licenses simply don't work for such use-cases, regardless of the price.

While more and more photos will be licensed and used (e.g. to decorate blog entries etc.) this additional demand will likely be satisfied by photos which are $1 or less, photos which are taken by eye-witnesses and immediately available (e.g. directly uploaded from cameraphones), and photos which are more readily found (e.g. users do image searches online from their favorite search engine).

Gulf Ethanol Advances Production Plans Based on Texas A&M Sorghum Plant

HOUSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Gulf Ethanol Corporation, (OTC:GFET), has advanced its plans for an enhanced ethanol production facility along the Texas Gulf coast that could use the new sorghum plant developed by Texas A&M as its primary feed stock, Texas A&M University and Chevron Corp (NYSE CVX) recently announced the major new alternative fuels initiative.

The development of "freakishly tall sorghum plants" was designed as an ideal feedstock for Ethanol production by Texas A&M. "Standing nearly 20 feet tall, these plants are more than twice the height of regular sorghum and yield double the crop per acre. They can survive on little water. They have been bred not to flower, thus trapping more energy within." (Source: Brett Clanton, Houston Chronicle)

"This is a new paradigm for bioenergy production," said Bill McCutchen, deputy associate director at Texas A&M's Texas Agricultural Experiment Station.

The Department of Energy has announced nearly $400 million in funding for the establishment of three bio-energy research centers, "while oil companies including BP (NYSE BP), Exxon Mobil (NYSE XOM), and Chevron (NYSE CVX) have given money to universities for biofuels research."

"Because we see sorghum as the ideal non-food feed stock for ethanol production in Texas, we embrace the Texas A&M initiative as a key step forward in providing economical feed stocks for our Texas ethanol plants," JT Cloud, Gulf Ethanol's President explained, "The long term success of ethanol as an alternative fuel must be based on the development of efficient non-food sources for ethanol production."

Last month, Texas Gov. Rick Perry outlined a new bioenergy strategy that will encourage more research at state universities on noncorn ethanol and other renewables, with an eye toward getting them to market faster. As part of the effort, he pledged $5 million to Texas A&M for research.

About Gulf Ethanol Corporation

Gulf Ethanol is focused on developing ethanol production along the Gulf Coast. Gulf Ethanol is committed to using non-food feed stocks for the production of ethanol rather than corn or sugar cane, which have now been shown to be expensive fuel sources that negatively impact food prices. For more information please visit our homepage at: http://www.gulfethanolcorp.com/gulf_ethanol_investors.htm

Panasonic's Oxyride vehicle breaks 65mph on AA batteries

from Engadget by Darren Murph

Filed under: Transportation

Sure, watching a wee remote controlled, all electric vehicle hit nearly 200 miles-per-hour is quite impressive, but moving a vehicle large enough to stuff a moderately sized human into with just AA cells is, well, world record worthy. Reportedly, the newly revamped Oxyride managed to maintain an average speed of just over 65mph and hit a top speed of 75.8mph, all while being powered by 192 AA batteries. Unsurprisingly, the promotional stunt rocketed Panasonic into the Guinness Book of World Records for speed attained with a vehicle solely driven by dry-cell AA batteries, but we still wouldn't look at purchasing 192 batteries (each way) as an efficient method of powering your commuter car.

[Via AkihabaraNews]

Google Maps add YouTube Videos

from CenterNetworks - by Allen Stern

Google Maps Alright so you read the title and said, "WTF" out loud. Why would anyone want to tie YouTube videos with a Google map? Unlike the absolutely stupid and useless street viewer option, this one makes sense.

Imagine you are planning a trip to Los Angeles and want to see what the clubs are like that Paris Hilton goes to. Now you can. Or if you are heading to Paris, check out which bistro has the best steak before you get there! In all seriousness, I could see this as a huge plus for travelers. But see below for the negative, videos must be geotagged and not everyone will do this.

Check out some additional release information on Mike Abundo's Blog. For the mashup to work effectively, videos must be geotagged when uploaded and then you need to install the mashup. Took four seconds to install.

Firefox Tip: Override disabled username and password autocomplete

from Lifehacker by Gina Trapani

Does your online banking or company intranet never remember your username and password? If you save your passwords in Firefox but still have to type 'em in by hand on certain sites, they probably disable login credential autocomplete. The How-To Geek says that the right Greasemonkey user script can re-enable that handy functionality on some sites. (Sadly it didn't on my bank's login page, but on others it will.) If a site disables password-saving, it's probably doing that for good reason, so use this tip at your own risk. And remember: if you are saving passwords in Firefox, lock 'em down with a single master password .

Why Doesn't AutoComplete Always Work in Firefox? [The How-To Geek]

Lanner rolls out four-bay NS04-3100 NAS server

from Engadget by Donald Melanson

Filed under: Storage, Networking

While there's not a great deal to distinguish it from the multitude of other NAS servers out there, Lanner's new NS04-3100 looks like it should easily satisfy those with hefty storage appetites, offering four bays for some SATA drives of your choosing. Otherwise, you'll get just about all the features you'd expect from a high-end NAS, including built-in WiFi, UPnP AV media server capabilities, iTunes server and DLNA support, and support for RAID 0, 1, 5 and JBOD configurations. Lanner is also promising "ultra-quiet operation" and minimal power draw from the server's Marvel 88F5281 processor. No word on price, but it's apparently available immediately for "sampling." [Via Akihabara News]

Tesla announces its first dealership

from Engadget by Ryan Block

Filed under: Transportation

We knew Tesla had plans to open up dealerships in some of the, how should we say, more affluent markets in the US, and according to the company its first dealership and service center will be opened in one of the richest neighborhoods in the States, Menlo Park (just an electric hop, skip, and jump away from its San Carlos-based HQ).

[Via AutoblogGreen]

Amazon vs. Paypal vs. Google Checkout

from GigaOM by Om Malik

Amazon, in its bid to become the underlying utility of the new web world, today confirmed what had been rumored earlier: a payment service that will compete with PayPal and to some extent, the nascent Google Checkout services.

Just to be clear, Google Checkout and Amazon FPS are not building their own payment service, where PayPal has a clear lead. Instead they are using the credit card infrastructure to enable payments and online transactions.

As a discrete offering, Amazon Flexible Payment Services (still in beta) may seem like a me-too service. However, when juxtaposed against the whole gamut of web services being offered by the company, it is a Trojan horse like strategy, one that can start to eat away at PayPal’s business.

It is not a surprise, that both Google and Amazon want a slice of PayPal’s cake. In the most recent quarter, PayPal had net revenues of $454 million, up 34% over the $339 million reported in Q2-06. More importantly, PayPal Merchant Services transactions jumped 57% to $4.92 billion globally from the $3.13 billion reported in Q2-06.

PayPal has become a defacto standard in the online transactions and payment services, and for anyone to have a chance to beat them there are two options: use money (and price) to lure the eCommerce players, as Google is doing with its Checkout Service. The second option is to offer a developer friendly service, that can allow developers to embed a payment solution into their offerings. Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon explains it best:

Using a capability called “Payment Instructions” developers can easily create the charging model that works best for them. For example, they can charge customers in small increments until their accumulated balance reaches a limit, pay a percentage of a digital transaction as a royalty, earn a commission on a marketplace transaction, or allow one customer to pay for another customer and limit their usage to a specific amount.

As developers who are already using Amazon’s EC2 and S3 web services start to embed FPS, what they are doing is slowly shifting the momentum away from using PayPal and other rivals. Allowing the buyers to use their Amazon credentials to buy the goods (or services) from these developers, they are also increasing their economic opportunity.

A small web-app developer can now build, host, process and get paid for his efforts right over the Amazon infrastructure, without having to spend money upfront. As Amazon Web Servies team notes on its blog:

Seriously, the 69 million active Amazon.com customers can now use FPS to pay for the applications that you’ll undoubtedly want to build. On the other end, the first wave of FPS applications will be available very soon.

While I can’t put it as eloquently as uncov does, but I do agree with their thesis that this is going to cause major headaches for PayPal.

Remember Webvan? So Does Amazon

from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington

Check out Amazon Fresh - a new invite only service from Amazon that looks eerily similar to the quintessential 90’s Internet flameout, Webvan.

The new service promises speedy at-home delivery of groceries, including fresh produce, at “competitive everyday prices.” It’s available only in Seattle currently, and has not been officially announced. But at least one person caught a glimpse of an Amazon Fresh truck driving around downtown Seattle.

Users select and pay for groceries on the site. They can then choose to pick up the items themselves locally, or, with a minimum order size, have them delivered next day within a one hour time slot. Groceries will also be delivered to doorsteps pre-dawn in a temperature-controlled container.

A year ago Amazon began experimenting with sales of non-perishable food and household items, but did not deliver them directly and perishable goods were not available.

If you are a Seattle reader, keep your cameras handy. We want a picture of the delivery truck.

Webvan, which had a spectacular IPO and quickly expanded to 26 cities, went bankrupt in 2001. Before closing down, Webvan had acquired competior HomeGrocer. Coincidentally, Amazon was an investor in HomeGrocer.

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