"ONLY one reader’s letter appeared in the first issue of The Economist in 1843. Even today, readers contribute no more than one, or sometimes two pages to the newspaper. But at Economist.com, through comments and debates, they discuss everything from American politics to particle physics.
This is just a small example of what Jeff Howe calls “crowdsourcing”: using an enthusiastic community to provide material for websites or solve problems. Mr Howe aims to show that groups of amateurs can often produce better results and do so far more cheaply than professionals. Mr Howe cites numerous crowdsourcing examples: for instance, Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia written by its users; Procter & Gamble asking amateur scientists for a detergent dye whose colour changes when enough has been added to dishwater; and iStockphoto allowing amateur photographers to earn money selling their pictures. Each one combines cheap and widely available tools, the internet for distribution and talented people with time to spare. Pa" - jan van den bergh
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Certainly, markets have internal dynamics. They’re self-propelling systems driven in large part by what investors believe other investors believe; participants trade on rumors and gossip, on fears and expectations, and traders speak for good reason of the market’s optimism or pessimism. It’s these internal dynamics that make it possible for billions to evaporate from portfolios in a few short months just because people suddenly begin remembering that housing values do not always go up.
Really understanding what’s going on means going beyond equilibrium thinking and getting some insight into the underlying ecology of beliefs and expectations, perceptions and misperceptions, that drive market swings. - jan van den bergh
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An article in the Mirror connects those issues to growing concerns over personal privacy. At the end of August, as the NPC Standing Committee was discussing changes to the country's criminal law that would beef up privacy protections, the paper printed a report illustrating how hospitals sell off their patient's personal information.
A Mirror reporter interviewed a sales manager for a milk powder producer who described how his company spends several million yuan every year to obtain the personal information of expecting mothers, and millions more to curry favor with hospital administration and staff:
The reporter called up the maternity ward of a certain Beijing hospital and asked to buy personal information. The response was severe: "No. personal information here is highly confidential. We would never sell it."
Then the sales manager himself called up the head nurse in the maternity ward. The nurse recognized him and told him to come right over to the hospital to pick up the information. - jan van den bergh
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It does appear that vagueness can actually make one more optimistic about one's own life choices and subjective well-being by allowing one to see what one wants to see—a case of ignorance truly being bliss!" the authors write. "The Blissful Ignorance Effect suggests that individuals have a tendency to expect more favorable outcomes with vague information after taking an action than prior to taking the action."
In three studies, the authors examined participants who made decisions on chocolates, hand lotions, and animated movies. They found in each case that participants felt more optimistic about the choices they had made when they were presented with vague information (such as incomplete nutritional information or sketchy reviews) after they made their decisions. - jan van den bergh
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"Lost travellers in need of a bit of local knowledge will soon be able to receive restaurant tips and theatre show times through Lastminute.com, which identifies the user’s location by their WiFi access point. It is one of the innovations the travel site has come up with through Lastminute Labs, the new department it hopes will help rediscover the travel site’s inner start-up.
Next month marks 10 years since Lastminute’s launch. Its arrival helped to transform the travel industry so that making online reservations for flights, hotels and restaurants has become the norm.
But, while the travel industry was one of the first sectors to embrace the opportunities of the internet, it has not been quick to innovate, according to Saul Klein, the founder of Seedcamp, a London group that offers advice and funding to technology start-ups." - jan van den bergh
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""Our industry is jam-packed full of extremely bright, intelligent, creative, articulate people who spend all of that brightness, intelligence, creativity and articulacy, deployed 24/7, focusing on their clients' business," Gallop says. "They virtually never lift their noses from the grindstone and focus it on themselves and the industry at large. And I do believe that if more of the amazing talent in the industry had done so, we would have a new industry model for today, and the future of advertising would look very different from the way it does currently."" - jan van den bergh
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"Mr. Young brings with him some impressive credentials: In the past five years, he doubled Ogilvy's Asian revenue to $500 million. The agency dominates the increasingly important Chinese market in terms of reputation, and says it hires an average of 1.2 new permanent employees in China every day.
"Miles has built the best agency network in Asia," says Greg Paull, the principal of R3" - jan van den bergh
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"ever since 1980, the advisory role of ad industry has declined because mad ave., the ad industry generally has failed to respond to digital, failed miserably.
Agencies suffer hypocrisy, they are lazy, they don’t want to engage in new opportunities. The conclusion: the decline of advertising as percentage of total marketing spend. the Digital side hasn’t helped because it has invented new nomenclature that clients don’t get." - jan van den bergh
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"most major internet publishers in China still aren't selling advertising in a way that accurately reflects this growing share of audience attention. They sell ads by duration, and not by number of impressions, for example.
Forward-thinking media buyers are fed up with buying on a "cost per time" basis, but online measurement in China is also behind the times in many ways. There is very little trust in publishers' claims about metrics, and that's not surprising, given the way traffic statistics are routinely manipulated, gamed, and lied about in China." - jan van den bergh
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"Tracking visits to e-commerce sites, he says, can sometimes pick up a company's sales numbers before it reports earnings. Tancer is even working with researchers at Stanford to explore a new consumer confidence estimate based on search terms like "gas prices" and visits to thrifty comparison-shopping sites, which have climbed in response to this year's economic pain. Visits to porn sites, by contrast, may signal better times, he says." - jan van den bergh
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"The social networking websites' decision to block Baidu, which controls 60% of China’s search market share, is made on the argument of protecting users who have created original profiles for private audiences and blogs. Since SNS sites are based on a real-name system, they don’t want the automated bots from the search engines crawling the sites and indexing their information. These portals and social networks claim that these actions pose a serious invasion of their users’ right to privacy." - jan van den bergh
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"ONLINE BUCKS THE AD SPEND TREND
Key Findings
· Online ad spend continues to increase despite current economic climate
· Advertisers diverting spend from TV and print media to online
· Search and display set to grow substantially over the next two years
· Advertisers recognising benefits of pan-regional online campaigns" - jan van den bergh
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"there is strong evidence of the continuing shift (which really began in 2007) towards performance-based marketing. As a subset of performance marketing, Search is growing exponentially because of its obvious ROI effects, transparency and targeting. SEO, likewise, has been doing well on a macro level because of its efficiency and cost benefits, if done properly. Premium display advertising seems to be waning alongside declining demand." - jan van den bergh
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"Almost six months after the companies started talking, WPP and Microsoft have reopened talks that could have the software company unloading Avenue A/Razorfish. But the question is whether Microsoft could ever get anyone to buy the digital ad agency for the price at which it needs to sell it.
What Microsoft paid for the agency and what any holding company would shell out are vastly different figures -- although WPP holds an edge over other holding companies because it has assets Microsoft might be interested in, namely the ad-serving technology bit of 24/7 Real Media." - jan van den bergh
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"Every company in the jewellery business is under pressure to varying degrees, he continues. “The difference is that instead of spending one million, [the super rich] spend 10,000. The middle and lower classes have no more spending power.”
To the amazement of the 57-year-old Italian entrepreneur, some high-class jewellers are even launching discount sales. He would never contemplate such brand-damaging desperation, although he admits to “discussing” prices with individual clients.
The luxury sector is in flux. China has honed its manufacturing skills and is now starting to produce high-class products. The exclusive Arab market has been “destroyed”, he believes, by big brands that have flooded the market. “When the Berlin wall came down, the Russians came across thinking Cartier was so exclusive but then they discovered it was everywhere and not so exclusive after all.”" - jan van den bergh
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"As the US Olympic team contemplates the abrupt loss of its longstanding dominance of the medals table to its Chinese hosts, American officials are looking at asking the federal government for money to make sure it never happens again.
In what has the potential to become a sporting version of the cold war, China has poured millions into its state sports system to produce medal winners at the Beijing Games, and the US is positioning itself to retaliate.
The US team, which gets no money from Washington, relies on only $150m a year from sponsors, fundraising and a share of revenues from the International Olympic Committee.
As a result, China has opened up such a comfortable lead over the US in the race for gold medals that it is poised to top the tally of overall medals for the first time, a position the US has held for 16 of the 23 Games in which it has competed." - jan van den bergh
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"Censorship. Totalitarian. Restrictive. Unconscionable. Obnoxious.
Pretty heavy words, right? They've all been in the news this week, referring not to the handful of political regimes that may immediately come to mind, but to NBC. More specifically, to NBC's online coverage of the Beijing Olympics.
Now that the games are underway, the terms and conditions of NBC's online coverage are familiar to most viewers. Given the 180 degree time difference between Beijing and much of the US, most televised NBC coverage of events is time shifted into primetime, and what programming is televised doesn't go onto the Web site until after the TV broadcast. And no one is the U.S. can watch game clips anywhere on the Web but the official site, NBCOlympics.com." - jan van den bergh
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"One of the ironies of markets is that the biggest profits often come not when a good situation turns itself into a great situation... but rather when a bad situation becomes good.
This is because investors are so naturally predisposed toward optimism. So when "good" becomes "great," some of the optimism premium was already built in, and the upside isn't always as strong (until the blow-off phase arrives).
But when bad morphs into good, or even simply to "less bad," there is room for large (and safe) gains, as renewed excitement creeps in after an extended absence.
That's where it feels like we are with China... waiting for the bad to turn good, which it soon could." - jan van den bergh
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"Beijing police plan to detain for a month a resident who applied for permission to hold a demonstration in one of the Chinese capital’s specially designated Olympic protest zones, a relative said on Monday.
The detention of Zhang Wei, who wanted to protest against the demolition of her home by officials, is a stark reminder of the perils faced by ordinary Chinese who challenge authority, even when they do so according to government-set rules.
Beijing last month portrayed its unprecedented creation of special protest zones in three parks as an expression of respect for citizens’ rights. But officials said all demonstrations must have prior approval, which they appear unwilling to grant." - jan van den bergh
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"he Shanghai index (SSE Composite Index) - the best indicator of investing in China - is down 54 percent from its October 2007 high of 6124.04. But, for the preceding 14 years, China has been a great long-term investment. Although you can't invest in the index directly, an investment in Chinese stocks of $10,000 in 1991 (when the SSE index started) would be worth over $600,000 at market highs, before taxes and currency adjustments. Because of the correction, now is a great buying opportunity!
For much of recorded history, China has been an economic giant. According to The Economist:
"China was not only the largest economy for much of recorded history, but until the 15th century, it also had the highest income per capita — and was the world’s technological leader"
In the twentieth century China fell backwards - its GDP accounted for less than 9 percent of the world's output. Primarily because it missed the industrial revolution, experienced in the West . In 2000, Chinese GDP was still only one-tenth of t" - jan van den bergh
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"Waber discovers that the super-connector — the crucial person who routes news among team members — isn't the manager. "The manager is almost always peripheral," Waber says. "It's some random guy." And that person is usually overworked and overstressed. He isn't given enough support to fulfill his role, because nobody in the firm knows he's doing it in the first place. If you study the org chart, the higher-ups are in control. But if you study reality, those same managers barely know what's going on." - jan van den bergh
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"Coke has partnered with Chinese marketing firm Pioco to broadcast commercials via Bluetooth-equipped cell phones through a network of thousands of hotspots the company has set up at Olympics stadiums, restaurants, hotels, clubs and other venues throughout Beijing and Shanghai.
Anyone with a Bluetooth phone in of one of Pioco's hotspots will be text-messaged asking whether they want to receive content from Coke. If they accept, their phone will begin downloading the beverage giant's ads.
Coke, which has worked with Pioco for the last two years, is trying to take advantage of Bluetooth marketing to reach consumers at outdoor entertainment venues.
"Pioco has already enabled us to reach millions of consumers in hundreds of Chinese cities via Coke's Olympic Torch Relay Truck in preparation for the summer Olympic Games," said Michelle Yang, media director for Coca-Cola China. "We're projecting we'll reach millions more local and visiting international consumers over the course of the games."" - jan van den bergh
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