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SAN FRANCISCO — Three weeks after Curtis Kimball opened his crème brûlée cart in San Francisco, he noticed a stranger among the friends in line for his desserts. How had the man discovered the cart? He had read about it on Twitter.“I would love to say that I just had a really good idea and strategy, but Twitter has been pretty essential to my success,” he said. He has quit his day job as a carpenter to keep up with the demand. Much has been made of how big companies like Dell,Starbucks and Comcast use Twitter to promote their products and answer customers’ questions. But today, small businesses outnumber the big ones on the free microblogging service, and in many ways, Twitter is an even more useful tool for them. For many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget, Twitter has become their sole means of marketing. It is far easier to set up and update a Twitter account than to maintain a Web page. And because small-business owners tend to work at the cash register, not in a cubicle in the marketing department, Twitter’s intimacy suits them well. “We think of these social media tools as being in the realm of the sophisticated, multiplatform marketers like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, but a lot of these supersmall businesses are gravitating toward them because they are accessible, free and very simple,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst who studies the Internet’s influence on shopping and local businesses. Small businesses typically get more than half of their customers through word of mouth, he said, and Twitter is the digital manifestation of that. Twitter users broadcast messages of up to 140 characters in length, and the culture of the service encourages people to spread news to friends in their own network. Umi, a sushi restaurant in San Francisco, sometimes gets five new customers a night who learned about it on Twitter, said Shamus Booth, a co-owner. He twitters about the fresh fish of the night — “The O-Toro (bluefin tuna belly) tonight is some of the most rich and buttery tuna I’ve had,” he recently wrote — and offers free seaweed salads to people who mention Twitter. Twitter is not just for businesses that want to lure customers with mouth-watering descriptions of food. For Cynthia Sutton-Stolle, the co-owner of Silver Barn Antiques in tiny Columbus, Tex., Twitter has been a way to find both suppliers and customers nationwide. Since she joined Twitter in February, she has connected with people making lamps and candles that she subsequently ordered for her shop and has sold a few thousand dollars of merchandise to people outside Columbus, including to a woman in New Jersey shopping for graduation gifts. “We don’t even have our Web site done, and we weren’t even trying to start an e-commerce business,” Ms. Sutton-Stolle said. “Twitter has been a real valuable tool because it’s made us national instead of a little-bitty store in a little-bitty town.” Scott Seaman of Blowing Rock, N.C., also uses Twitter to expand his customer base beyond his town of about 1,500 residents. Mr. Seaman is a partner at Christopher’s Wine and Cheese shop and owns a bed and breakfast in town. He sets up searches onTweetDeck, a Web application that helps people manage their Twitter messages, to start conversations with people talking about his town or the mountain nearby. One person he met on Twitter booked a room at his inn, and a woman in Dallas ordered sake from his shop. The extra traffic has come despite his rarely pitching his own businesses on Twitter. “To me, that’s a turn-off,” he said. Instead of marketing to customers, small-business owners should use the same persona they have offline, he advised. “Be the small shopkeeper down the street that everyone knows by name.” Chris Mann, the owner of Woodhouse Day Spa in Cincinnati, twitters about discounts for massages and manicures every Tuesday. Twitter beats e-mail promotions because he can send tweets from his phone in a meeting and “every single business sends out an e-mail,” he said. Even if a shop’s customers are not on Twitter, the service can be useful for entrepreneurs, said Becky McCray, who runs a liquor store and cattle ranch in Oklahoma and publishes a blog called Small Biz Survival. In towns like hers, with only 5,000 people, small-business owners can feel isolated, she said. But on Twitter, she has learned business tax tips from an accountant, marketing tips from a consultant in Tennessee and start-up tips from the founder of several tech companies. Anamitra Banerji, who manages commercial products at Twitter, said that when he joined the company from Yahoo in March, “I thought this was a place where large businesses were. What I’m finding more and more, to my surprise every single day, is business of all kinds.” Twitter, which does not yet make money, is now concentrating on teaching businesses how they can join and use it, Mr. Banerji said, and the company plans to publish case studies. He is also developing products that Twitter can sell to businesses of all sizes this year, including features to verify businesses’ accounts and analyze traffic to their Twitter profiles. According to Mr. Banerji, small-business owners like Twitter because they can talk directly to customers in a way that they were able to do only in person before. “We’re finding the emotional distance between businesses and their customers is shortening quite a bit,” he said.
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Marketing Small Businesses With Twitter |
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An original and brilliant speech about the world's economy. |
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_asia_s_rise_how_and_when.html
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Does New Media Bring Us Closer? |
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The Fun Theory |
Volkswagen sponsored a reward to encourage people find evidence for the fun theory. the fun theory advocates that fun is best way to change behaviour for the better. Check out their website: http://www.thefuntheory.com/
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4 Ways Live and Digital Music Are Teaming Up to Rock Your World |
(Source: WIRED)
By Eliot Van Buskirk
Music fans are increasingly watching live concerts without gassing up cars, driving to venues, or paying for expensive tickets and convenience fees. Music webcasting has shown promise for over a decade, but the stage is being set now for an online live-music renaissance.
YouTube webcast its first-ever live full-length concert last Sunday: U2 at the Pasadena Rose Bowl. It brought in 10 million viewers worldwide in addition to the 100,000 who attended in person. A spokesman said that makes it the biggest event in the site’s history.
Billboard followed suit with the launch of Billboard Live. Sony has big plans to beam shows to its movie theaters over satellite, and interactive features are bringing online viewers closer to the mix, and sometimes into the mix.
Live music and digital music are opposite sides of the same coin. People listen to digital music alone, while concerts are about physical proximity to musicians and the crowd. Developers are finding a new middle ground, although it took a little longer than some of us thought.
Live Concert Webcasting
The audience for live online music has grown substantially since the Tibetan Freedom Concert drew 36,000 viewers in 1996. Live-music webcasting director Marc Scarpa, who helped stream the Tibetan Freedom Festival and co-created of the MySpace Live series, says the internet will soon realize its live music potential.
“‘Live’ music is going to have a renaissance now — the technology is proven, there’s more broadband penetration, people are now realizing that, from an advertising perspective, it can be monetized,” said Scarpa. In addition, today’s users, accustomed to Twitter, Facebook, live blogs and the general quickening of our culture “want entertainment and information in a real-time environment.”
Don’t expect to be able to watch any show you please. Licensing issues delay rollout on the scale of the music video. There’s no standard deal for getting the rights to stream a live show. Each one-off production requires extensive negotiation involving just about everyone attached to the songs and the venue.
Billboard Live streamed this R. Kelly show to web browsers and iPhones.
“It would be incredible if there were a database out there to streamline the process, but unfortunately, there isn’t,” Scarpa said, adding that music publishers in particular tend to hold things up. The rules can sometimes be bent for live shows that only air once, but usually “it’s a manual process,” he said, “e-mail, phone calls, and in a lot of cases the artist has to personally approve things.”
Straight trades between rights-holders and producers have improved the situation somewhat. In return for allowing an outside company to webcast a show, rights-holders often receive the right to sell the resulting recording, and could restream it online as part of a video-on-demand offering.
A Google spokesman said YouTube, which also streamed short live performances from the Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival in late August, plans to webcast more full-length shows like the live U2 concert on a case-by-case basis. But Billboard launched an ongoing concert series, Billboard Live, with a live R. Kelly show from Dallas that let fans choose between four high-bandwidth Microsoft Silverlight streams using partner OWLive’s technology. IPhone users watched the show in near-real time through an app using iStreamPlanet’s first-ever bandwidth-adaptive HTTP stream of live music to a phone. Billboard plans to do the same for shows by David Archuleta, Daughtry, Alicia Keys, Usher and others.
“Having been to about a billion concerts in my life, I can’t imagine anything replacing that energy,” said Billboard publisher Howard Appelbaum. “That said, it’s pretty exciting — seeing it from different camera angles is great. It’s not going to replicate the sound in the venue, or that palpable energy level that goes on, but it bridges the gap.… It’s way better than looking at still shots on a website about what happened at a concert, or reading about it. I think it’s going to find its own sweet spot with the consumers.”
The first Billboard Live show, promoted only on MSN, was responsible for Billboard.com’s second-highest day of traffic to date. Appelbaum said he thinks the licensing negotiations will be easier the next time around, because everyone involved stands to benefit — even concert promoters (the theory being that online shows whet the audience’s appetite to see concerts in person).
Josh Engroff, vice president of digital for Billboard, expects smaller, long-tail bands in addition to stars like U2 to make this part of their strategy. “‘Utube’ pulled in 10 million viewers because they’re U2 and the technology is there,” said Engroff. “But more and more, bands that haven’t been discovered yet are touring more, and ‘live’ is more a part of what they’re doing. They’re not just making CDs, they have to go out and gig a lot. For artists like that it’s also interesting, because they can extend their presence beyond the venue they’re in.”
Live Concert Interaction
The next step is for fans viewing a concert remotely to interact with a show within the venue, putting messages on the stage or even sounds in the speakers.
Deep Rock Drive has been experimenting with letting bands play between massive monitors that show online fans’ reaction to the music in real time, and said it might let fans at home cheer between songs using their own microphones. The payoff for interacting with actual venues rather than that company’s cyberstage is potentially even bigger.
“Instant participatory engagement is becoming key to the consumption of online entertainment, and the only way to do that is to make sure it’s live,” said Scarpa. “The key is participation in live events. That’s something you can’t do with a television broadcast.”
Current implementations let online viewers vote on set lists, appear in the webcast if chosen to be a host, and send in videos of themselves watching the show. “If Linkin Park is your favorite band in the world, you send in a video [of yourself talking about the show and] after the performance is over we can have a couple of these real-time video comments included in the show.”
In addition to the six to 10 cameras that shoot webcast concerts, Scarpa has been experimenting with pulling live video from showgoers’ cellphones and incorporating that into the webcast, and he plans to let the remote audience collaborate musically with bands, contributing riffs or mixes that play over the venue’s sound system.
‘Live’ Music in Movie Theaters, Living Rooms
Sony Club Dates (website offline) strikes a happy medium between the solitary experience of watching a show on your computer screen and the experience of attending it in person, by piping live or prerecorded shows directly to movie-theater screens. Fans watch them together in a surround-sound environment that does the music a lot more justice than your desktop computer speakers do, and at a much higher bandwidth. Tickets cost $10 to $15.
At this point, Sony has experimented with one live and some taped concerts, but once this pilot program is complete, the company plans to beam live shows to theaters bysatellite, selling tickets and sponsorships.
“We’ve converted [theaters] to a digital platform, using digital projectors and a connected environment as we move into the world order that exists today,” said Mike Fidler, Sony senior vice president of digital cinema solutions and services. “Most of the theaters’ demographics are really aligned with music demographics — close to 70 percent of the people attending theaters are under 30 — and so what we thought we’d try to do is bring these events during the week … and do it with emerging or emerged bands.” He said 3D could be the next phase.
Sony’s first such event featured an Aug. 20 Third Eye Blind show viewers could watch in theaters Oct. 22. Up next is Creed, who will appear “live” in some of Sony’s 4,000 theaters nationwide Nov. 19.
Once the program is up and running, Fidler told us, Sony will deliver the shows in high-definition directly to its Bravia line connected televisions, the company’s Blu-Ray players and possibly the Sony PlayStation. He said the concerts are “exclusive to Sony from the theatrical release to this video-on-demand program on the Bravia network.”
Just-in-Time Live Recordings Sold at Shows and Online
Showgoers can buy professionally recorded concerts as they exit a venue on USB stick, CD, DVD or as a digital delivery. While by no means the first, EMI launched a major initiative in this area Wednesday: Abbey Road Live, which builds on the legacy of Live Here Now, which was launched by EMI’s Mute Records label in 2004, and forms the core of EMI’s nearly-real-time live music sales program.
“We’re offering fans the ultimate encore,” said Simon Miller, EMI senior vice president of new product development and the company’s live division. “Being able to take home high-quality recordings of a show they’ve just seen is something we’re seeing great demand for from music lovers, and it’s also a service that artists and labels are very interested in.”
Original Post: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/11/4-ways-live-and-digital-music-are-teaming-up-to-rock-your-world/
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Taiwan Firm Positioned for E-Reader Takeoff |
(source: The New York Times)
By JONATHAN ADAMS
TAIPEI — With the market for electronic book readers set to take off, things are looking up for a little-known Taiwanese company that will probably supply most of the “e-paper” they use.
The company, Prime View International, said this summer that it would pay about $215 million to acquire E-Ink, which owns the technology for displaying text in the most popular readers, including Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader.
Prime View, often referred to as P.V.I., recently sweetened its offer and says it hopes to close the deal by the end of the year. It already manufactures e-reader display modules for the Kindle and the Reader.
“E-Ink is by far the leader” in the field, said John Chen, director of the display technology center at ITRI, a government-financed technology incubator in Taiwan. “P.V.I. is going to strengthen its leadership in the next year or two, before anyone else can catch up.”
Demand for e-paper is expected to rise, with Amazon expanding the availability of the Kindle to Europe and the U.S. book retailer Barnes & Noble creating its own e-reader to compete with Amazon and Sony.
The availability of more content and the ability to download material wirelessly has fueled demand for the devices.
DisplaySearch, a market researcher based in Austin, Texas, forecasts the global market for e-paper, including e-paper used in e-books, to hit $5.9 billion by 2015, from $400 million this year.
This is not the first time Prime View has jumped into a growing market early. It became the first Taiwanese maker of flat-panel screens in 1994. Ten years later, in a crowded market dominated by the likes of Samsung and LG Display, it decided to focus on specialty products like custom displays for medical devices.
In 2005, it acquired Philips Electronics’ e-paper display unit, in an early bet on the industry.
“All the big companies like Samsung weren’t so interested in this market,” said David Hsieh, president of DisplaySearch’s Taiwan branch. “So Prime View found a good niche.”
It was also a good fit considering Prime View’s pedigree. The company is a subsidiary of Yuen Foong Yu Group, a Taiwanese paper and pulp company. The group started making toilet paper and paperboard as early as 1939 and began producing coated paper in the 1950s with Japanese technology, according to its Web site.
Now, one of Taiwan’s first mass producers of paper looks set, through a subsidiary, to become the world’s first mass producer of e-paper.
Analysts say Prime View’s production capacity, which includes factories in South Korea it acquired in 2007, make it the only e-paper company with the scale to meet booming global demand. And the ownership of E-Ink will mean they have no intellectual property issues to overcome and can make e-paper “from head to toe,” Mr. Hsieh said.
The company has its critics. Jeff Pu, an expert on the flat-panel industry in Taiwan, says Prime View has too much exposure in conventional liquid crystal displays. Prime View says that about half of its business concerns e-paper products.
A demand dip could be punishing, said Mr. Pu, who currently analyzes the mobile industry at Fubon Securities in Taipei. For example, he said, Prime View executives told analysts in April that its Korean factories were operating at 30 percent of capacity in the first quarter of this year, and that 65 percent was “break-even level.”
Mr. Pu also sees a price war coming, as AU Optronics, LG Display and others enter the e-paper market. AU Optronics has the most promising e-paper technology after E-Ink, the “microcups” technology owned by its subsidiary Sipix. Prime View will have to cut its prices after it loses its first-mover advantage, Mr. Pu said.
For now, Prime View is shrugging off such predictions. A company spokesman, Stephen Chen, conceded that capacity was low at the company’s Korean factories early this year but said that was because of the unusually bad economic downturn.
Mr. Chen said the company did not plan to license the E-ink technology to others and declined to comment on whether it might make its own e-reader.
“So far, for mass production and quality, E-Ink is the first priority for customers,” Mr. Chen said. “So I think we’ll keep the leading edge for some time — a few years is certain.”
Original Post: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/technology/09iht-epaper.html?_r=1
