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Saturday, July 16, 2011
We're Old Media...Out and Proud!
by Jonathan Rauch With my triumph over the blogosphere complete, and my guest-blogging stint over, I'd like to leave with two words of advice to my friends in old media: Fight back. There are plenty of problems with old media....
Ovation's Audience Feedback App
Looking for ways to spice up your presentations? A new app called Ovation aims to get the audience involved and give you valuable feedback on your performance.
Here’s how it works: Each event gets its own URL that audience members can open on their smartphone browsers. Then, throughout the presentation, they can simply slide a button up or down to indicate how much they’re enjoying the show (the two extremes are Love It and Hate It). A line graph will appear showing them how their individual responses compare to those of other audience members. As the presenter, you can watch live results during your presentation to tailor your content accordingly. Or, if that’s too nerve-wracking, you can download the feedback in chart form to analyze afterwards.
Ovation, which works on iPhones, iPads, iPod Touches, and Android devices, is in free beta testing. For now, it only works with audiences of up to 10 people, though it says it is willing to work with users to accomodate larger crowds. Check out the app's FAQ page for more information.
Apple beats Android to the punch, offers seven-day refund policy in Taiwan: Is the UK next?
Android?s 15-minute refund window is hardly enough time to decide whether an app hits the mark. Though short, that?s still 15 more minutes than iOS users have with purchases from the App Store — until today. Apple has amended its terms and conditions for the Taiwan App Store, including a statement saying users can be ...
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Get Fans With Cool Swag
Creating brand merchandise can strengthen customer loyalty and enlist fans to spread your name"but you don't want to make just another oversized T-shirt.
Reddit's extensive online shop grew out of a first fight co-creators Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman had after securing their first $70,000 in angel funding. Ohanian wanted to invest some of the money in merchandise to sell on the website; Huffman was skeptical. Ohanian got him to agree to a small run that cost a few thousand dollars, hoping to break even at worst.
"Fortunately, they ended up selling out in first 24 hours," he says. "There was just a hunger. Particularly because we weren't abusing [our readers] with advertising, they were looking for ways to support us, and this was a great way."
Reddit, a site that curates links from all corners of the Internet, has a rabid fan base. The most fervent of those fans go to the store and buy one of a many items with the alien mascot on it, including soap, golf shirts, and baby onesies.
Creating brand merchandise is a great way to create new loyalties with your customers and enlist them to spread your name to new audiences. But you have to do it in a way that creates viral sensations, not just oversized promotional T-shirts that end up at the bottom of someone's closet.
Purveyors of some of the hottest brand merchandise around offer these simple tips to follow.
Getting Started in Making Merch: Begin With Baby Steps
Ohanian used his success with Reddit to go on to create more promotional material for his other projects, Breadpig and flight search engine Hipmunk. He learned the key is to test the waters a bit before you invest in a bunch of swag with your logo on it.
"It's not something you do until you've got some funding, got some traction," he says.
When Ohanian worked to publish a collection of web comics by XKCD, he kept the first run limited to a few thousand copies so the initial expense was manageable.
"Know there's some demand out there before you fill your home with a lot of books," he says.
Near Charleston, South Carolina, Firefly Distillery—which makes the popular Sweet Tea Vodka and other southern-flavor-infused beverages—was just getting the business going when it first printed shirts with the logo.
But co-owner Scott Newitt says the company treated the items as free promotional material at drink nights and bar events. The company didn't start selling them until they opened a tasting room the following year. By then, the vodka was already a smash hit, ubiquitous at bars, stores, weddings, and other events throughout the South. The offerings grew to include more apparel, beer cozies, hats, visors, belt buckles, signs, and more.
When the distillery was starting, they used local vendors so they could buy in small increments and keep an eye on cash flow as they built a fan base.
"They're billboards walking around, which is great," he says. "The beer companies have done it forever."
Dig Deeper: Branding on a Budget
Be Creative When Considering What Products are a Good Fit
Ohanian says that if you're passionate about your company, you're in luck.
"The nice thing with Reddit and each thing I've been working on: the target market is also me," he says. "If I can make something I think I will want, presumably other people will like it too."
For Reddit users, that means USB flash drives and posters of inside jokes from the site. For the simple interface site that is Hipmunk, that means putting the company's cute aviator critter on basic T-shirts.
Newitt knows that the fans of his vodka are typically Southerners in the 21 to 29 year old range, and those are the kinds of people who are frequently spotted donning visors, polo shirts, and large belt buckles.
"It's really geared toward my demographic," he says. "That's really why we did it. It's great branding when someone sees that shirt somewhere at a concert or whenever."
Dig Deeper: Ordering Shirts Online
Stay Focused on Quality
The excitement of being at a sporting event and catching a rolled up T-shirt as it's shot out of a cheerleader's cannon is immediately deadened when you realize the shirt is two sizes too big, an ugly shade of white, and packed with as many logos as a NASCAR driver. Creating boring merchandise is a good way to ensure your logo won't be worn anywhere outside of desperate laundry day.
Experts say instead to focus on products people will actually wear and use. Atlanta-based e-mail service MailChimp has seen its shirts become a hot commodity due to an attractive design incorporating the company's monkey mailman mascot on soft American Apparel tees.
"We try to make it the shirts that people actually enjoy wearing. It's not just a cheap shirt with our logo on it," says Mark DiCristina, the company's brand manager. "People really love them and wear them all the time. It's not like people would feel like they're wearing a big Coca-Cola logo."
Firefly and Hipmunk also print on American Apparel tees. The shirts cost more than run-of-the-mill fabric, but they say the high-quality cotton and fit are worth the extra expense.
Ohanian does most of his designing in-house and works with a production team over the phone or via e-mail for his simple products, such as the Hipmunk luggage tags that were produced in China. But he says if you've got something more complicated in the works, it's worth a plane ride to sit face to face with the overseas team.
"You could half-ass it. You won't pay a lot for it of course, and you'll get very poor quality," he says. "It definitely takes a lot of time to know what you're getting into."
For another product—magnetic poetry of lolcats speak that was sold on Breadpig—Ohanian was able to easily find a skilled person to make them quickly and easily by doing simple online research.
"If you're willing to do a little bit of work, you can figure out how to make just about anything," he says. "Its really just a matter of tracking down a matter of who can get it done."
Dig Deeper: 10 Habits of Quality-Focused Companies
Consider Your Merchandise Advertising, Not Revenue
No matter how good your brand merchandise is, experts say you shouldn't expect it to become a significant part of your company's profits.
For all its success selling T-shirts and other sweet-tea vodka paraphernalia, Firefly merchandise only accounts for about half a percent of total sails, Newitt says.
"It’s a great way, if you're a new brand, to get your product going," he says. "I always look at it as advertising. If I can break even on it, I'm happy."
MailChimp doesn't even sell its shirts, limiting them only to just promotional events and customer rewards.
But the company goes even further: they created an app that let customers sign up for the batches of T-shirts as they get released. Through the app, they have the option to subscribe to the newsletter to learn about future promotions and company news.
"It just created a kind of cool little experience we could give people," DiCristina says. "It was a way for us to capture people who were interested in knowing more about MailChimp and giving them the opportunity to know more about it."
Ohanian says when you're making high-quality products, your product margins won't be very big, but the potential for viral advertising pays off.
"In a lot of ways, we're benefited by the fact that people just want to support us," he says. "If there's a cool and interesting way to do so by buying a cool and tangible thing, they'll buy that."
Dig Deeper: 10 Tips for Bootstrapping Your Marketing
Don't be Invasive
To find the Hipmunk merchandise, you have to notice the small "store" at the bottom of the mostly plain home page. The company relies on other means to promote its merchandise, including Facebook photos of customers snapping pictures with their Hipmunk luggage tags around the world.
"We won't ruin the actual search experience with advertising," he says. "It'll all be fairly non-invasive promotion of it."
Certain Firefly brand items are exclusively available only to people who visit the South Carolina distillery, which encourages some 20,000 people a year to visit.
Ohanian's Breadpig offered limited-edition shirts available only for a short time, which boosted sales in bursts, and help keep costs down by limiting the number he had to order.
Once you pique their interest in your company and its cool merchandise, it's sometimes easy to make the sale.
"It’s a wonderful captive audience, you've already convinced them they want to buy it," he says. "You just need to show them the link."
Dig Deeper: The New Rules of Branding Your Business Online
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Acer Iconia A500 - Honeycomb on a Budget
Next in our series of Honeycomb tablet reviews is the Acer Iconia Tab A500. The A500 was the second Honeycomb tablet to go on sale, and is one of four on the market at present, all of which are very similar. They share basic specs—10.1” 1280x800 displays, NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 underhood, 1GB LPDDR2 RAM, 16-64GB onboard NAND, front and rear facing cameras with HD video capture, basic wireless connectivity options, and stock versions of Android 3.0/3.1 Honeycomb (albeit with different preloaded software packages). The hardware similarities makes things like design and price that much more important, and the latter is where Acer seemed to have an edge.
Long a sales leader in the budget notebook market, Acer jumped into the tablet game with a price advantage—the Iconia A500 came in at $449, in comparison to $499 for the iPad and $599 for the WiFi-edition Motorola Xoom (though it is worth mentioning that the Xoom comes with twice as much onboard storage as the Iconia and iPad). ASUS released the $399 Eee Slate Transformer soon afterwards, but supply issues meant that the Acer was the cheapest readily available Honeycomb tablet for some time. More recently, some retailers have dropped the prices of the Iconia, with MacMall selling it on their eBay store at one point for just $379. On paper, that’s a screaming deal, but it's decent even at MSRP. How does the Acer hold up in real life? Read on to find out.
Using 3-D Printers To Mock Up New Teeth
Scientists have found a way to quickly and with pinpoint accuracy fabricate new teeth for dental patients. But teeth are just the first step toward rapid prototyping of all sorts of body parts.
The days may be numbered for those late-night, finger-stuck-on-a-coffee-cup Poli-Grip commercials. Imagine if dentists could fabricate exact replicas of your teeth to replace any that might go missing. Using existing technologies in 3-D printing, biocomposite material, and medical imaging, it might already be possible. And once we can print teeth, printing other body parts can't be far behind.
Dentists already use machines to make accurate fake teeth. But current techniques involve plugging an MRI into a milling machine and cutting the new tooth from a block of polymer. It's a time-consuming process, and not all that accurate. Teeth are actually a complicated shape, and it's hard to fashion one by milling that fully mimics each tooth's unique shape.
But Iranian scientsts have recently figured out that printing them layer by layer--as a 3-D printer does--allows the formation of a much more accurate denture. More importantly, it could happen almost instantly. Go to the dentist, have them print out some new teeth, be on your way (painful dental procedures notwithstanding).
Problems of recreating them aside, teeth are actually fairly simple, with no joints or moving parts. Once we've mastered the printing of them, however, other items may soon follow. Prosthetics made with bones that accurately mimic the lost bone could be wonderful (indeed, the Iranian scientists also worked on printing out parts of the jaw). Once we can remake our body's building blocks with pinpoint accuracy, the possibilities for medical science become much broader.
[Image: Flickr user B Byers]
iPhone 5 delayed due to faulty processors?
Rumours of delays have dogged the upcoming iPhone 5 for months now, but the latest chatter from those apparently in the know suggests that the new iPhone may be held back until early 2012.
The reason behind the hold-up, sources say, is that the dual-core A5 processor that Apple is intending to use has been overheating.
Many have speculated that this will see Apple waiting until the A6 chip is available, which won't be until the beginning of next year.
Note the 'if'
If true, this could mean we will see a slightly updated iPhone 4S launch in autumn (another recurring rumour), with a more major upgrade made public after Christmas.
It's getting harder and harder to know what to believe on the iPhone 5 front.
The rumours in this instance come from Sohu.com, which is not a site we've ever dealt with before so we can't really vouch for the legitimacy of their intel.
We'll just settle ourselves down firmly on the fence for now; roll on autumn.
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