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Posts Tagged ‘economy’

The New Year brings with it the much awaited numbers from online holiday spending. And its good news. For the full holiday online shopping season, $29.1 billion was spent online, showing 4 percent increase versus the same period last year, according to comScore. It looks like consumers spent just over $2 billion online over the past week, as $27 billion was spent online as of last week for the shopping season from November 1 through Christmas Eve. The day consumers spent the most online happened to be on Tuesday, December 15, a.k.a, “Green Tuesday,” with consumers spending a total of $913 million in one day. In fact, Green Tuesday was one of nine individual days to surpass $800 million in spending during the 2009 holiday season. Not too shabby, considering the economy has yet to fully recover from a crippling recession.

With respect to individual product categories, online sales of jewelry and watches rose the most, growing 20 percent from 2008. Consumer electronics came in second with 15 percent sales growth from the previous year. Consumer electronics saw strong sales of flat panel TVs, mobile devices and e-readers. Other product categories that showed a strong performance were event tickets, computer hardware and books/magazines.

From reports over the past few months, the numbers indicated that the total online spending would be higher this year than last, when the U.S. spending was blindsided with a crippling recession. The final shopping weekend before Christmas saw a 13 percent growth rate in online spending from the previous year, thanks to the wintry mess that hit the Eastern Seaboard. And the full week posted a 6 percent yearly increase in spending, setting a one-week sales record with more than $4.8 billion in spending. Online sales numbers from Black Friday and Cyber Monday also appeared to be stronger than last year.

ComScore also reported that larger e-retailers like Best Buy and Walmart outperformed the smaller online shops. The web analytics company says that sales from larger retailers were buoyed by promotions, and offers of free shipping later in the holiday season. Social media was also used as a strategy for retailers. 28 percent of shoppers surveyed by comScore reported that social media promotions from retailers influenced their purchases.

Of course, it’s important to note that these sales numbers are being compared to those from last year, when spending was at a low thanks to the bleak conditions of the economy. But online retailers have reason to be optimistic for next year as the economy steadily recovers, and consumers increasingly look online to find for holiday deals.

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The Media Democracy Survey tries to ascertain America’s entertainment habits. It comes out every year, and this year’s edition just went live. As you might image, the terrible economy played a major role in the way Americans went about their business this past year

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Because of the recession, y’all watched a lot of TV this year

There we go again.

The Telegraph has published an article about some survey which claims social networks such as Twitter are costing British businesses at the very least £1.38 billion (approx. $2.25 billion) a year.

Shocking findings, I daresay!

Morse, the IT services and technology company who commissioned the survey, said the true cost to the economy could actually be substantially higher than the £1.38bn estimate.

How about we settle for a gazillion?

Anyone familiar with internet startup culture knows how little capital it takes to start a tech company these days. With hardware and software costs practically nonexistent for most new companies, the main determinant of whether a promising startup will get underway and off the ground lies with the founders’ circumstances, namely whether they can pay off their personal bills from month-to-month and find a place to work.

This climate should produce an a important, long-term counterweight to the problems of our economy as a whole. While established corporations have been reeling, laying off workers and draining money from the federal budget, tech companies in high growth sectors have continued to sprout up with the promise of new jobs and services. And with costs so low, entrepreneurship – and its concomitant boon to the economy – these days relies overwhelmingly on one factor: the entrepreneur.

Numerous startup incubators over the last few years have emerged in the US and elsewhere to reflect this new state of affairs. Y Combinator led the charge in 2005 and has since been joined with organizations such as TechStars, LaunchBox Digital and fbFund, to name just a few. These firms serve as enablers, giving entrepreneurs just the nudge they need to get started, whether that nudge comes as a bit of money to survive until a larger round of funding or some mentorship that emboldens them into action.

Unfortunately, the pool of entrepreneurs that can benefit from these programs is smaller than it could be due to outdated immigration law. Ideally, an aspiring entrepreneur from Bangalore who has some chops and a wish to start the next Google in San Francisco should be able to immigrate and set up shop here. With a little venture backing, there’s virtually no downside since they won’t be taking out loans or stealing anyone else’s job. If their venture doesn’t work out (a likely scenario), they can pack their bags and head back home.

The potential upside, on the other hand, is obvious and enormous. So why doesn’t this scenario play out more often?

One big reason is that the immigration law that’s most relevant to would-be entrepreneurs isn’t designed with their likely circumstances in mind. A lot of talk about the H-1B visa was made around the election last year, but that visa only covers immigrants who want to become employed by preexisting American firms. The lesser known EB-5 visa intends to help foreigners create businesses in the US, but it involves a couple stipulations that make it unworkable for many modern entrepreneurs.

First off, the EB-5 requires that an immigrant invests $1 million (or $500,000 under certain circumstances) of their own money in a new business. This rule ignores the fact that tech startups are often backed by venture capitalists, and it overemphasizes the role of money instead of assessing a foreigner’s talent and ambition as primary factors. The EB-5 is also only given to immigrants who can promise to create 10 full-time jobs within 2 years, which doesn’t mesh well with the reality that successful startups (while creating plenty of new jobs in the medium and long-runs) often maintain deliberately low head counts in the short-run.

It’s for these reasons that a group of techies and politicians alike have begun to rally around the concept of a Startup Visa, which essentially constitutes a set of improvements to the EB-5 that would make it more useful to today’s entrepreneurs. The Startup Visa concept, which was initially proposed and explored by Y Combinator’s Paul Graham and Foundry Group’s Brad Feld, aims to get rid of the requirements for $1 million in investment and the creation of 10 jobs. In their place, it would establish the requirement that entrepreneurs be financially backed by at least one accredited investor in the US. This rule would serve primarily to validate the foreigner as a promising entrepreneur by leveraging the venture capital community’s judgment as a proxy. It would also ensure the admittance of only entrepreneurs with enough capital to get started.

The StartupVisa movement was first introduced to me by a few of its main proponents – Dave McClure, Eric Ries and Shervin Pishevar – this past September when I was traveling with them through DC on a GeeksOnAPlane trip. One of our trip’s members, Eric Diep, had a particularly poignant story about the difficulties he’s encountered as an entrepreneur from Canada who tries to conduct business in the US. You can watch a video of his story from the trip above.

If you have any personal stories about how difficult it can be as a foreign entrepreneur wishing to immigrate to the US, please share them in the comments. And whether or not you are in such a situation, please provide us with your impression of the Startup Visa concept by answering our poll below. If you wish to support the cause, you can tweet your local representative using @2gov, a service run by David Binetti that enables grassroots communication with House and Senate politicians. US Representative Jared Polis of Colorado has already begun proposing these sorts of changes to the EB-5, but many more politicians will need to get aboard the idea before the new law becomes a reality.

Do you support the idea of a Startup Visa?(polling)

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

We know with the economy the way it is, it’s tough to justify spending money on those luxury items that you want. And we want to help you out. That’s why we’ve teamed up with the Bing-loving people at The Watchery to bring you the chance to a very nice Movado dress watch, just for giving us a shout out on Twitter. Don’t worry, ladies: you can win a women’s model if we pick you.

So how do you win?

Guest author Edo Segal (@edosegal) has launched and sold several companies. In 2000 he founded eNow, a search engine for the Real-time Internet in an age that predated RSS as a popular medium. As such he has had a decade to think about its implications. He ultimately sold the company (renamed Relegence) to AOL in 2006 and today runs his Incubator/Investment vehicle Futurity Ventures. He recently launched a new search engine for wisdom.

In a way we are all virtual stock holders in Twitter. We all have a vested interest in its success. Facebook is soon to monopolize the social stream to the same extent that Google has done with search. That is not good for anyone, including Facebook. I have had many discussions with people in recent weeks about the face-off between twitter and Facebook and also about the high probability of Twitter cutting a deal with Google. When I was asked by Erick Schonfeld at the Real Tiime Stream Crunchup (Video) event about my opinion on Twitter giving Google their firehose feed, I responded that they could do that if they don’t plan to sell their company in the future. In other words, it is my humble opinion that if Twitter was a publicly traded stock its value would drop by 75% the second that deal was announced and for good reason.

Twitter is important. How often does a company come along that really changes consumer behavior? That creates a new form of media consumption and connectivity? For all the thousands of startups covered on Techcrunch only a few have a profound impact on the arc of internet history. Twitter has earned its spot in that pantheon and now it remains to be seen if it can play a bigger role in how to monetize the stream and in the process build a real business.

At this moment in time, Twitter has such a stronghold on this new form of real-time consumption that it has the potential to dominate the category. But its window of opportunity is closing fast as Facebook and others hurl themselves at that prize. The experience of real-time communication and search, that sense you get of unfolding streams of relevant information to your interests and queries flowing in a digital river has arrived with Twitter coursing first through the rapids. But now that we have arrived at this new medium, what next? Does Twitter become an example of a utility that is emulated by others that already have a monetization engine, leaving Twitter to ultimately drift to a respected place in Wikipedia like Netscape? Or does it continue to push the boundaries and create a sustainable and growing business that will allow it to continue to ride the whitewater?

If twitter is to confine itself to being a communications medium, or even worse, a news distribution engine, it will surely perish. By analogy, Google as a business is not a search engine but an advertising business that is printing money at unprecedented rates. Google does this by owning the equivalent of distribution in the digital age.  Its just that the meaning of the word “distribution” in the digital age has shifted. Google, as the entry point for such a vast audience, effectively owns the distribution on the Internet as a business leader and brand. Its lead continues to grow as the audience grows.

Google’s economics lay in the economy of intent. The intent of users to purchase a product or service when they use Google’s search is what drives its money presses. The context of the users’ actions and interests map to an intention which advertisers are eager to pay for. The ability to automate the placement of advertising next to relevant content and map consumer queries to useful advertising stands at the heart of Google’s success.

This is something that has been notoriously missing on communication platforms. See AIM as an example. What was once an omnipresent juggernaut of a product is inching towards being a footnote in internet history. One that has always struggled to monetize its vast audience. The same is true for other communications platforms such as Hotmail and Gmail. They have become strategic traffic drivers in companies with a broader monetization engine. Look further into innovative news aggregation platforms such as Digg, Google News, and Techmeme and you see that it’s pretty tough to generate significant revenues in news, certainly not Google-scale revenues.  Even for pillars of the industry such as the New York Times, big online profits are elusive.  So there are not many prospects for building a sustainable multi-billion dollar business for Twitter either as a communications platform or a news discovery engine.

The way to make Twitter into a sustainable business is to tap into the economy of intent. God knows Twitter has that potential, but it has a narrow window of opportunity in which to execute. The business promise is to create a new type of useful advertising for people that is consumed in the context of a new form of discovery—one that for the moment is unique to Twitter but, alas, not for long.  If Twitter doesn’t pick up the pace at this moment in time and take the path leading to building a business, it will begin to destroy its value. By doing a deal that will give Google unfettered access to real-time results from Twitter in Google search, Twitter will effectively be giving up the fight and losing the war. For if consumers can get the same experience that is currently unique to Twitter on Google, why would they need to go to Twitter to search?  If they don’t bring their intentions to Twitter search, then Twitter is not participating in the Economy of Intent and as such will diminish its value to the single-digit millions.

At the risk of stating the obvious let me throw out some constructs. There has been much speculation about how Twitter will make money. From #pastryto #diabetes, the world of Twitter is self-organizing in a highly effective folksonomy that is vibrant and useful. Today, Twitter users are left to their own devices when it comes to unearthing these gems in the stream. As Twitter further develops its discovery(taxonomy) and search engine, the valuable content streams will be unearthed. Think of the simple impact of auto-complete in the search box to # tags. This is but one simple move which could start to drive traffic to focused streams of information, which could also map to useful advertising, just like on Google. Start with creating a marketplace for advertisers around the #tags, then search queries, and see how valuable the experience Twitter created really is. Throw in the recent evolution in geo-tagging and you add another layer of usefulness. Typing in “amazing restaurant” when you are in Soho should show a fresh stream of nearby locations, recommendations, and warnings. As Twitter make these changes, users will start focusing more on discovery, and it will become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Users will alter their behavior to capture the search queries. The notions of surfacing more advanced trends and audience recirculation present further opportunities. There is so much that can be done in this domain once Twitter has the critical mass of audience and data.

Twitter has a unique opportunity to innovate and create new forms of useful advertising that will truly help both users and advertisers. This was the key to Google’s success and is the key to Twitter’s future. It takes time for advertising to become useful as it requires a significant liquidity of ads. Twitter has to start soon to build up that liquidity in time for the face-off competition for the advertisers. They need for buyers to know they are the go-to place for in-stream advertising. Google is at a big disadvantage at this junction in time. One only needs to set a Google alert to see how latent their Twitter discovery is (I have seen alerts come in for tweets that are 3 days old). Google has not made it a secret that the strategic importance of the real-time web registers with them.

For Twitter to give away the farm (its firehose of Tweets) at this stage is tantamount to suicide and can only be defined as a form of creative laziness. Twitter, you got this far don’t get too comfortable with all that money in the bank. Get off your asses and push, you owe it to history. There are so many things you could be doing short of giving up and serving yourself up on a silver platter. If you must do it, if you do sell your data or yourself to Google – make ‘em pay, they can afford it. If you give away your data to the majors, they wont need to buy you anyway and if you don’t create a solid way to make money, you can’t survive on your own.

Make your own path, and you’ve got it made.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Oh man, Devin is going to be upset.

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Orange France outs the LG GD910’s excessively high price

A little bird sent us these images Swatch’s upcoming Tourbillon collection, the Turn to Her and Turn to Him.

Read the original here:
Swatch to release $8,000 Turn to Him and Turn to Her tourbillons

So the story goes that a 25-year-old man at Foxconn - where iPhones are born - was to send 16 iPhone prototypes to Apple from the Chinese factory, but one was lost somewhere. The Foxconn security department then proceeded to illegally search the man’s apartment and interrogated him.

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Foxconn employee interrogated over lost iPhone prototype, sucide ensues

There are no shortage of job listing sites out there, especially in this economy. But how do you know if the jobs listed on any of them are actually any good? Why not vote on them?

Not surprisingly, that’s a key selling point of Reddit Jobs, a new job listing site branded by the popular social voting site. Just with the regular Reddit site, on the main page you’ll see a list of content — in this case, jobs — and you can give any of them an “up” or “down” vote depending on if you like them or not. “We think this is a pretty sweet opportunity for employers to find great tech-savvy folks and learn more about how they’re perceived by potential employees,” Luke Groesbeck, the co-founder of JobAlchemist (which created the site for Reddit), tells us.

Clicking on any of these job listings will take you to a page with more information about the job. This information is presented in a standardized way that is easy to follow with headers for the position including: “Overview,” “Who You Are,” “What You’ll Do,” “What We Offer,” and “How to Apply.” This page also features a nice drop-down Google Map of where the company is located and has elements such as ways to share job postings over other social networks.

But it’s the actual job posting functionality that could be a key feature. “Employers can either post jobs in a quick 1-2 minute process or build a profile to share more about themselves and get feedback on their listings from the reddit community,” according to Groesbeck. It’s similar to Startuply, another job listing site that JobAlchemist has built, and has seen some moderate success. Reddit Jobs is technically the first white label version of Startuply, and that branding and built-in community should help it grow even faster.

But for posting jobs, there are costs involved — but at least they’re very straightforward. It will cost you $300 to list an opening on Reddit Jobs for 30 days. There are also discounts for listings done in bulk.

So why did Reddit want to make a job board? “Given the state of the economy (and our pool of talented programmers) it made perfect sense for us — and will likely be a great white label solution for other community sites,” Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian tells us. It’s also a nice way for Reddit and parent Conde Nast to make some money. Applying the social voting idea to monetization practices seems to be a hot issue right now. Reddit rival Digg just recently launched the ability to vote on ads on its site.

As a special promotion to commemorate the launch, Reddit Jobs is giving some fast-acting TechCrunch readers who wish to post jobs a steep discount on the rate. The first 50 who use the code “TechCrunch” when listing a job on the site will get $175 off of the listing price.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0