Entries Tagged 'Business' ↓

Most people who go to a lot of conferences or are in anyway involved in the purchasing department of a company know all about the kind of promotional items that come with product launches. Now, most of this stuff is garbage that gets tossed in the garbage can immediately. However, occasionally something so cool comes along, like some awesome shoes or imprinted electronic products, that you just decide to keep and cherish them.

A perfect example of this is The Simpsons movie launch last year. They did a promotional deal with Vans and ended up releasing some pretty awesome Simpsons shoes:

Another great example of awesome promotional computer and tech gifts are all of the promo, specially engraved iPods that have been making their rounds over the last few years. Though they are a higher end promotional product, who is going to throw away an iPod?

There have been many other cool, promotional items over the years. We’ve seen a lot of frisbees with really cool designs, beer can sleeves, and water bottles that people really seem to enjoy and keep around. One of the best parts about these promotional items is that they don’t only promote to the people who get them, they promote to everyone who sees them.

As we’re sure you know, we here at humemes know a bit about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO.) In fact, it’s how we keep the lights on, food on the table, and the server’s humming. Over the past few years that we’ve been doing this professionally, we’ve come to understand a few key things about SEO. The first is that not every person who claims to offer it as a service knows what they’re doing. The second is that quality is still king on the Internet.

This second issue, that of Quality, is what we’d like to discuss today. When many new website owners are approaching the Internet, they’re often tempted to avoid paying money for a developer and instead choose to do their website, website copy, and SEO themselves. When they realize that their site is still getting no hits, they tend to look in the direction of Pay-Per-Click advertising companies, such as Google’s Adwords. However, what they don’t understand, is that since the quality of both their site and their copy is so poor, they will end up paying a far higher premium than a competitor who has a website that is better designed and has better copy.

Without a doubt, many millions of dollars a year are lost by small, new, or un-hip companies due to poor design, poor copy, and poor SEO. We’d personally like to see that change. This has been your yearly public service announcement. Thank you.

There is a very interesting and well-written post over at dive into mark about what is going to happen when Microsoft stops supporting the MSN Music DRM.

I’ll let Mark Pilgrim do the talking:

So what happens on August 31, 2008? On that day, Microsoft will turn off the servers that they maintain for the sole purpose of validating that the songs that people have already “purchased” through MSN Music are still theirs to play. Those people (hereafter “the victims”) will not notice the change right away. The victims will only notice it when they purchase a new computer, or when they upgrade the operating system on their current computer, or when the hard drive in their computer dies and needs to be rebuilt/reinstalled. At that point — transferring the music files they have “purchased” to another drive or a new computer — the Microsoft music player running on the victim’s PC (like iTunes, but all Microsoft-y instead of Apple-y) will make a call to Microsoft’s validation servers to verify that the music files were legitimately purchased. This call will fail, since the servers are not responding, since Microsoft has intentionally turned them off. The Microsoft music player will then conclude, incorrectly but steadfastly, that the music files were downloaded illegally and that the victim is a filthy pirate, and it will refuse to play them. In this case, the left hand knows exactly what the right hand is doing: they’re both giving you the finger.

Benoit Hardy-Vallée at Natural Rationality posted an article about how the Dictator Game may have come into play with Radiohead’s recent “It’s Up To You” pricing method.

From the article:

The situation is thus similar (but not exactly) to a Dictator Game: player A spits a “pie” between her and player B, but B accepts whatever A offers. Thus, contrarily to the Ultimatum Game, B’s decisions or reactions has no influence on A’s choice behavior. Radiohead fans were thus in a position similar to A’s position. If we make the assumption that they framed the situation as a purchasing one in which they choose how much of the CD price they want to split between them and the band, and given that a CD is typically priced £1o (roughly 20 U.S.$), then the fans are choosin how to split 10£ between them and Radiohead. Usually, experimental studies of the Dictator Games shows that 70% of the subjects (A) transfer some amount to Players B, and transfer an average of 24% of the initial endowment (Forsythe et al. (1994). Hence if these results can generalized to the “buy Radiohead album” game, it would suggest that about 70% of those who download the album would pay an average of £2.4 , while 30% would pay nothing.

I recently joined Kiva, a non-profit organization which “… lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world.” After joining the site, you can look at a list of owners of small businesses in developing countries and choose to loan them money for a length of time. The loan lengths are generally about a year and currently you can only loan $25 at a time.

Once the loans are made, the money is distributed to a lending agency in the country the business owners originate from. The money is then distributed from these lending agencies. There are reviews of the different lending agencies, including a trust value, and how often the loans have been paid back. You are able to cross reference the trust level of the lending agency with each business owner.

Occasionally the individuals that have accepted the loans will post journals of the progress they’ve been making since receiving the loans and what they are doing with the money. Though some businesses post more often than others, it is an interesting way to stay connected with the people you’ve loaned too.

It was started by a group of people who have worked at a wide variety of different companies like Google, PayPal, and TiVo and has been operating as a non-profit since 2004. I’ve created an account at http://www.kiva.org/lender/ezkl and have made 3 $25 loans to a few different businesses in Azerbaijan, Ecuador, and Bolivia.

I hope to see more and more of these kinds of organizations springing up. I believe that if we begin to focus more on the intangible human interest accrued when people are able to support themselves and not so much on the interests in our own bank accounts, we can end a lot of unnecessary suffering.