|
SubscriptionsSites I Read
|
|
|
|
| Links http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2009/11/02/daily55.html?ana=e_bjtt,
http://www.polaris-inc.com/index.php?action=resources.ArticleInfo&rowid=104 Until last night, I did not realize how prevalent copycat advertising is. Did you know Duracell introduced its own rabbits before the now famous sunglass-wearing, drum-beating Energizer bunny that keeps going and going and going? http://www2.sandbox.google.com/search?hl=en&q=duracell+rabbit&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g1 A more recent example is the AT&T-iPhone apps vs. Verizon Wireless maps battle. Initially this strategy seems counter-productive. After all, wouldn't consumers simply be confused? Will they actually choose your product over the other? In some competitive scenarios, the pro's outweigh the con's: incurring lower creative development costs, minimizing risks by adopting a concept that's proven successful, and lessening the competitor's advantage... AT&T has filed a law suit against Verizon Wireless. The company says the 'ads mislead viewers into thinking AT&T has coverage gaps. AT&T wants a temporary restraining order against Verizon Wireless, saying the ads -- which launched in October -- have caused the telecommunications giant to lose market share.' Here are two clips my professor showed us in class last night: Nike has a football (or soccer) team fighting ninjas http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfZMfMihBjc, and Adidas has Beckham and team overcoming their own adversaries http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2Oecf8lenE. Which released first? I personally like the music that a random Internet user added to the Adidas clip. Let me know if you've found interesting examples of copycat advertising. | | |
| Article arbridged from http://boston.bizjournals.com/boston/stories/2009/10/19/story1.html?b=1255924800^2270241&ana=e_bjtt IBM Corp. is sending some of its best and brightest to work in developing countries on projects that, for the most part, have absolutely nothing to do with technology. But they have a lot to do with building leaders and team players. The company has chosen top employees, from all ranks and all global locations, and is sending them in teams on month-long journeys to work on projects that are about marketing, say, kente cloth instead of Thinkpads. By the end of this year, IBM will have sent 52 teams of its Corporate Services Corps to countries including Vietnam, China, Malaysia, Brazil, Tanzania, Ghana and Turkey. Their aim is to meet project goals in countries where resource challenges force them to be nimble and creative. Each team also is asked to informally assess what would be the right conditions for IBM to make a larger investment in these developing countries. “The admission into this program has tougher odds than Harvard,” said Cathleen Finn, IBM’s corporate citizenship and corporate affairs program manager in New England. “We wanted it to be selective but we didn’t want to discourage people from participating.” Teams vary in size from 8 to 15. They work on the ground with local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that operate a range of community projects in the various countries. They spend about 60 hours before their trips studying the countries and regions to which they will be working and meeting by phone with other team members from around the world, an international collaboration that Corps members said builds a new type of corporate camaraderie. | | |
| http://sacramento.bizjournals.com/sacramento/stories/2009/10/12/daily64.html?ed=2009-10-15&ana=e_du_pub Squaw Valley USA needs to hire 800 seasonal workers. Its winter job fair will be 11/7 from 9 AM - 2 PM at the Olympic Village Lodge (past the old fire station, at the base of the resort). Interviews will be conducted on site -- and in many instances, jobs offered on the spot. Applicants should bring a résumé and/or a completed application to the job fair. Print an application at www.squaw.com/winter/jobs. Job fair attendees from out of town can stay at the Squaw Valley Hostel overnight for $10. Management seeks mountain hosts, lift operators, ticket sellers, retail sales associates, parking attendants, ski and snowboard instructors, kids ski instructors, cable car and funitel operators, reservation agents, ski and snowboard rental shop technicians. Perqs for Squaw Valley employees include a free season pass to the resort’s 4,000 acres, which are located just five miles north of Lake Tahoe along the Truckee River on Highway 89. Disclaimer: snow bunnies are not guaranteed. FYI - I owned the Vanilla Ice 'To the Extreme' album on cassette tape in elementary school. | | |
| For the full essay by Andrei Codrescu, visit the link http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113034536The treadmill and the iPod are for my generation what the hammer and the sickle were for the early Bolsheviks — articles of faith. I've been running my miles and listening to my music for a year, and if I could write while in motion I'd have a memoir by now. Each song comes with a memory; I must have chosen them attempting to recapitulate episodes in my life that they were the soundtrack for. I used to think that life would be a lot more interesting if it had a soundtrack like the movies... Imagine my shock when my iPod died. It was like my memory died. And then Laura, my wife, said, "Use mine!" So I put her music in my ears and started running. Man. Not only did I have no memories to go with some of her music, but I didn't even know what some of it was. She has pretty eclectic tastes, from bluegrass to gospel to R&B and classical... I used Laura's iPod for a week and had a voyeur's trip through her life. Her music made so strong an impression, I started dreaming what had to be her dreams, because I found myself in places totally strange to me. It's a good way to really know a person. I am now starting an iPod exchange club among my friends, so we can all live our past lives vicariously. I think that this is what it means to grow up: From being a memoirist, you become a novelist. You start to see what others saw. | | |
| For the extended version, visit the following link www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/09/20/project_gaydar_an_mit_experiment_raises_new_questions_about_online_privacy/?p1=Well_MostPop_Emailed3 It started as a simple term project for an MIT class on ethics and law on the electronic frontier. Students Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree wondered what online masses were unknowingly telling the world about themselves. The pair weren’t interested in the embarrassing photos that can shock parents or potential employers. Instead, they wondered whether the currency of social networks - the simple act of “friending” someone online - might reveal secrets a person would prefer to keep hidden. They made a striking discovery using data from Facebook: just by looking at a person’s online friends, the students' Project Gaydar could predict whether the person was gay. Their software looked at the gender & sexuality of the friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. The students had no way of checking all of their predictions, but based on their own knowledge outside the Facebook world, their computer program appeared quite accurate for men, they said. People may be effectively “outing” themselves just by the virtual company they keep. The work has not been published in a scientific journal, but it provides a provocative warning note about privacy. Who we are can be revealed by, and even defined by, who our friends are: if all your friends are over age 45, you’re probably not a teenager; if they all belong to a particular religion, it’s a decent bet that you do too. The ability to connect with other people who have something in common is part of the power of social networks, but also a possible pitfall. If our friends reveal who we are, that challenges a conception of privacy built on the notion that there are things we tell, and things we don’t. Project Gaydar is part of the fast-moving field of social network analysis, which examines what connections between people can tell us. The applications run the gamut, from predicting who might be a terrorist to the likelihood a person is happy or fat. The idea of making assumptions about people by looking at their relationships is not new, but the sudden availability of information online means the field’s powerful tools can now be applied to just about anyone. University of Texas at Dallas
For example, Murat Kantarcioglu, an asst. professor of computer science at the Univ. of Texas at Dallas, found he could make decent predictions about a person’s political affiliation. He and a student (who later was hired by Facebook) took 167,000 profiles and 3 million links between people from the Dallas-Fort Worth network. They used three methods to predict a person’s political views. One prediction model used only the details in their profiles. Another used only friendship links. And the third combined the two sets of data. These researchers found that certain traits, such as knowing what groups people belonged to or their favorite music, were quite predictive of political affiliation. But they also found that they did better than a random guess when only using friendship connections. The best results came from combining the two approaches. University of Maryland, College Park
Other work, by researchers at the Univ. of Maryland, College Park, analyzed four social networks: Facebook, the photo-sharing Web site Flickr, an online network for dog owners called Dogster, and BibSonomy, in which people tag bookmarks & publications. Those researchers blinded themselves to the profiles of half the people in each network, and launched a variety of “attacks” on the networks, to see what private info they could glean by simply looking at things like groups people belonged to, and their friendship links. On each network, at least one attack worked. Researchers could predict where Flickr users lived; Facebook users’ gender, a dog’s breed, and whether someone was likely to be a spammer on BibSonomy. The authors found membership in a group gave away a significant amount of information, but also found that predictions using friend links weren’t as strong as they expected. | | |
|
