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Brandon McCloskey

BBC News - Can avatars and hyper-real video conferencing replace business meetings? - 0 views

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    An innovative look at possible new business tools.
Erin Hamson

Consumer How To - Swipe Auctions Saving Consumers Up To 95% Off Retail Prices - 0 views

  • Each bid placed on SwipeAuctions costs users $0.60. By collecting $0.60 for each bid placed, SwipeAuctions is able to afford giving away products on the cheap such as Macbooks for $23.72 or Nikon Digital Cameras for $57.42.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      The "free" business model
  • There is no longer a need to spend several hours online looking to see where the best deal is. The answer is simple. It's on SwipeAuctions! Whereas scouring the internet for to save an extra 5% works for some people, why waste your time when you could save 75%! SwipeAuctions is so much more than economical.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Time v. price
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    Here is an example of a business model that is giving away the "free" stuff and making profit on other things.
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    Exactly today's topic!
Ariel Szuch

Differences Between Classical & Keynesian Economics | Small Business - Chron.com - 0 views

  • Two economic schools of thought are classical and Keynesian. Each school takes a different approach to the economic study of monetary policy, consumer behavior and government spending. A few basic distinctions separate these two schools.
  • Classical economic theory is rooted in the concept of a laissez-faire economic market. A laissez-faire--also known as free--market requires little to no government intervention. It also allows individuals to act according to their own self interest regarding economic decisions.
  • Keynesian economic theory relies on spending and aggregate demand to define the economic marketplace. Keynesian economists believe the aggregate demand is often influenced by public and private decisions. Public decisions represent government agencies and municipalities. Private decisions include individuals and businesses in the economic marketplace. Keynesian economic theory relies heavily on the fact that a nation’s monetary policy can affect a company’s economy.
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  • Government spending is not a major force in a classical economic theory.
  • Too much government spending takes away valuable economic resources needed by individuals and businesses. To classical economists, government spending and involvement can retard a nation’s economic growth by increasing the public sector and decreasing the private sector. Keynesian economics relies on government spending to jumpstart a nation’s economic growth during sluggish economic downturns.
  • Classical economics focuses on creating long-term solutions for economic problems.
  • Keynesian economics often focuses on immediate results in economic theories. Policies focus on the short-term needs and how economic policies can make instant corrections to a nation’s economy. This is why government spending is such a key cog of Keynesian economics.
Sarah Wills

Business 2.0: The do-it-yourself conference - Jun. 6, 2006 - 0 views

shared by Sarah Wills on 28 Oct 10 - Cached
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    even people in the business world like unconferences!
Brandon McCloskey

BBC News - Cloud computing for business goes mainstream - 0 views

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    A good article about how businesses are catching on to the idea of cloud computing.
Brandon McCloskey

BBC News - The business of innovation: Steven Johnson - 0 views

  • The lone genius, beavering away in the seclusion of his lab is how most of us imagine the great moments of innovation have come into being. But is this really the whole story?
  • "[Good ideas] come from crowds, they come from networks. You know we have this clichéd idea of the lone genius having the eureka moment.
  • "And so much of that is because it's wonderfully set up for other people to build on top of other people's ideas. In many cases without asking for permission.
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  • "I think there's this abiding belief that markets drive innovation, corporations drive innovation, entrepreneurs driven by financial reward drive innovation, and while that's certainly true in many cases there's also this very rich long history of important world-changing ideas coming out of the more or less intellectual commons of the universities.
  • So what should companies be doing to foster innovation in their workforces?
  • "One of the lessons I've learned is that so many of these great innovators, Darwin is a great example of this, one shared characteristic they all seem to have is a lot of hobbies."
  • "Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down; but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies, frequent coffee houses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent."
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    How the progress of technology and the economy are affected by creativity. Also the importance of isolation vs collaboration
Brandon McCloskey

Crowdsourcing: Turning customers into creative directors - 1 views

  • "What we think is good for the consumer doesn't matter - it's what the consumer thinks is good that matters."
  • When you link the consumer to the manufacturer there are huge areas of opportunity
  • It's the internet, of course, that makes crowdsourcing possible - on a global scale.
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  • But there are pitfalls. "The biggest caveat is the issue of curation. It's great you opening the gates up to everybody - but all of a sudden you're going to get a lot more stuff."
  • "We later learned that it was this revolutionary business model. I think the reason it's so pure like that is the reason it's worked so well as a crowdsourcing company."
  • "I think that the way companies are seeing crowdsourcing is a lot different from the way we see it. They are looking at it as this new business model, as a way to outsource your work to an anonymous crowd of people. We're more about giving people something productive to do with their passions."
  • it's not so much the software that makes the company, it's the community
  • "It's an affordable way to be ahead. You're able to see what your customers are thinking and what they're dreaming of, and you're able to measure that against what you're doing."
  • His concern is that by "mining" the crowd in this way, the wealth that results from the work done remains concentrated in the hands of the people who put out the call - ultimately endangering jobs and the economy. Mr Lanier also believes that crowdsourcing threatens creativity.
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    Examples of successful crowdsourcing
Gideon Burton

Creating New Business Models with Transactional APIs | Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog - 1 views

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    Content vs. Transactional APIs. As a non-programmer, I've come to learn just how critical it is to understand how APIs articulate services and people across the web. This article explains levels of API openness (perhaps a metaphor for non-commercial entities)
Sean Watson

Facebook Is Making Us Miserable - 0 views

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    Some points addressed in the Harvard Business Review as to why Facebook can make individuals miserable.
Erin Hamson

Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business - 4 views

shared by Erin Hamson on 25 Sep 10 - Cached
Andrew DeWitt liked it
  • zero-cost distribution has turned sharing into an industry
    • Bri Zabriskie
       
      This article is long but well worth skimming. I used a quote from it in one of my latest blogposts, "Free Entertainment?" at bricolorful.wordpress.com
  • Invent something people use and throw away.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Eliminates scarcity
  • By giving away the razors, which were useless by themselves, he was creating demand for disposable blades.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Supply and demand
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  • The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multiplayer online games
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Still need a way to make money
  • The first is the extension of King Gillette's cross-subsidy to more and more industries.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      That is, giving somethings to make you buy others
  • The second trend is simply that anything that touches digital networks quickly feels the effect of falling costs.
  • And that meant software of broader appeal, which brought in more users, who in turn found even more uses for computers.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Cheaper goods brings in more people allowing the standard of living to rise for all.
  • FREE CHANGES EVERYTHING
    • Andrew DeWitt
       
      Wow, this is awesome.  Imagine the world of free electricity.  It makes me wonder what our age of free digital will bring.
    • Kristi Koerner
       
      I actually agree that some things, maybe even more things, should be free. But not as a marketing ploy. And this system seems to go against our capitalist ideals of competition.
  • The most common of the economies built around free is the three-party system. Here a third party pays to participate in a market created by a free exchange between the first two parties.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Where the money comes in.
  • There are dozens of ways that media companies make money around free content, from selling information about consumers to brand licensing, "value-added" subscriptions, and direct ecommerce
  • subscription model of media and is one of the most common Web business models.
  • Isn't it just the free sample model found everywhere from perfume counters to street corners?
  • the manufacturer gives away only a tiny quantity
  • A typical online site follows the 1 Percent Rule — 1 percent of users support all the rest.
  • Yahoo's pay-per-pageview banners, Google's pay-per-click text ads, Amazon's pay-per-transaction "affiliate ads," and site sponsorships were just the start.
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    A seminal post that became the basis of Anderson's 2009 book, FREE (Hyperion) 
James Wilcox

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences - 0 views

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    This is the oldest and longest running scientific Journal in the world.  It has a lot of free open content to keep you busy.
Erin Hamson

The Business Cycle: Krugman vs. Austrian Economic Theory - 0 views

  • Stimulus payments to consumers is analogous to dumping frosting onto a cake mix, before the ingredients have been mixed and baked. All elements of the economy, from raw materials, to intermediate goods, to consumer goods, must return to a supply-demand balance before the economy can gain Krugman’s “traction.” That necessarily takes time, because mining companies and other producers of basic raw materials have time scales for increased output and employment that are very different from the time scales of intermediate goods producers and consumer goods manufacturers.
  • Keynesian economics, as expounded by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, is essentially a black box theory. Stand on the outside of the economic box and dump into it endless baskets of inflationary fiat money, and things supposedly just happen automatically inside the black box to produce permanent prosperity and near zero unemployment.
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    Blog on economic theories
Brandon McCloskey

BBC News - Why companies watch your every Facebook, YouTube, Twitter move - 0 views

  • These days one witty Tweet, one clever blog post, one devastating video - forwarded to hundreds of friends at the click of a mouse - can snowball and kill a product or damage a company's share price.
  • It's a dramatic shift in consumer power. But what if companies could harness this power and turn it to their advantage?
  • At the most basic, these tools measure the volume of social media chatter. Researchers at Hewlett Packard showed that they can accurately predict a Hollywood movie's box office takings by counting how often it is mentioned on Twitter before it opens.
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  • One European clothing company, popular with inner city youth in the United States, admits privately that its social media team is baffled by its customers' ever changing slang, and even the online Urban Dictionary provides little help.
  • Social media is quickly becoming a customer relationship management system, as companies have "for the first time access to people's minds in real-time," says Jorn Lyseggen. The tools on offer provide companies with dashboards that show trends, hot topics, the reach of brands, customer mood and how competitors are doing.
  • Social media may be all the buzz, but in reality "only a few firms get it [and use it], it's of peripheral interest for most", says Tom Austin at technology consultancy Gartner. Few realise that using social media has become much more than customer service and reputation management.
  • many social media tools are poorly integrated into the corporate workflow
  • But there are dangers. Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway warns that the obsession with social networking can make management lose focus.
  • To survive the world of social media, companies have to throw away their old marketing playbook.
  • "don't push... and don't pretend you are hip"
  • "Once companies have worked out that they should do something with social media, they usually don't know how to do it,"
  • "If you want to influence the people who influence your customers, that's a very powerful game, but it's also very dangerous if you get it wrong."
  • it's not about how many friends or followers somebody has, but whether they make an impact.
  • When Virgin America recently launched new routes from California to Toronto, it used Klout to identify a small group of social media "influencers" and gave them free flights. This generated thousands of tweets, triggered press coverage and delivered more immediate impact than traditional advertising.
  • "Consumers are spending their attention on social media," he says, but firms don't know how to repay them properly. "There's no manual for that yet."
  • Social media are dynamic, and today's Twitter may be tomorrow's forgotten website. "Don't assume that what works today will work tomorrow," says Tom Austin at Gartner. "Your model has to be continually adapted."
Brandon McCloskey

Can your social networking profile get you a pay rise? - 0 views

  • by watching his Chatter dashboard, Benioff says he can spot - and reward - pivotal individuals who might not have come to his attention in the past
  • If these tools take off, then perhaps 'pivotal individuals' within companies really will get noticed, and businesses will become better meritocracies as a result.
  • Of 3,500 employees in a range of companies and economies, 58% said they would contribute more ideas to their company if they were more likely to be rewarded for them.
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    More about the importance of collaboration
Margaret Weddle

SHARING THE PROFITS: Businessmen Get a New Religion - TIME - 0 views

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    Capitalism & giving back actually makes more money!
Shaun Frenza

Gaming consol - totally Opensource! - 0 views

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    I thought this might fit into the question of open-source business models... Gaming is a huge part of our society and now its blending with open source!
Erin Hamson

Modern History Sourcebook: Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations, 1776 (Epitome) - 0 views

    • Erin Hamson
       
      The process of specialization was later perfected by Henry Ford, in making cheap, durable cars.
  • This great increase of the quantity of work which, in consequence of the division of labor, the same number of people are capable of performing, is owing to three different circumstances; first, to the increase of dexterity in every particular workman; secondly, to the saving of the time which is commonly lost in passing from one species of work to another; and lastly, to the invention of a great number of machines which facilitate and abridge labor, and enable one man to do the work of many....
  • Man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favor, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater art of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      This is the basis of the Market Economy or Capitalism, exchange based in self-interest that benefits all.
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  • In order to avoid the inconvenience of such situations, every prudent man in every period of society, after the first establishment of the division of labor, must naturally have endeavored to manage his affairs in such a manner as to have at all times by him, besides the peculiar produce of his own industry, a certain quantity of some one commodity or other, such as he imagined few people would be likely to refuse in exchange for their produce....It is in this manner that money has become in all civilized nations the universal instrument of commerce, by the intervention of which goods of all kinds are bought and sold, or exchanged for one another....
    • Erin Hamson
       
      The role/development of money. The problem with money is that it has to be regulated and who regulates it? If we let the governement regulate it, it might become manipulated...
  • The value of any commodity,
  • is equal to the quantity of labor which it enables him to purchase or command
  • Labor, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities....
  • The real price of everything
  • is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Note the difference between the value and the price. The price changes most significantly in relation to how much the consumer wants the product, as opposed to how much time it took the maker to make it.
  • which resolves itself into labor
  • resolves itself into rent
  • resolves itself into profit
  • ordinary or average rate both of wages and profit
  • partly by the general circumstances of the society,
    • Erin Hamson
       
      A man cannot charge above that which can be paid him or he will lose business.
  • partly by the particular nature of each employment
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Some labor is simply worth more
  • ordinary or average rate of rent
  • partly by the general circumstances of the society or neighborhood in which the land is situated,
  • partly by the natural or improved fertility of the land
  • When the price of any commodity is neither more nor less than what is sufficient to pay the rent of the land, the wages of the labor, and the profits of the stock employed in raising, preparing, and bringing it to market, according to their natural rates, the commodity is then sold for what may be called its natural price.
  • The actual price at which any commodity is commonly sold is called its market price
  • he market price of every particular commodity is regulated by the proportion between the quantity which is actually brought to market, and the demand of those who are willing to pay the natural price of the commodity, or the whole value of the rent, labor, and profit, which must be paid in order to bring it thither.
  • A competition will immediately begin among them, and the market price will rise more or less above the natural price, according as either the greatness of the deficiency, or the wealth and wanton luxury of the competitors, happen to animate more or less the eagerness of the competition.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      The results of scarcity *footballs*
  • quantity brought to market exceeds the effectual demand
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Surplus
    • Erin Hamson
       
      ,effect of
  • A monopoly granted either to an individual or to a trading company has the same effect as a secret in trade or manufactures.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      See above
  • When by an increase in the effectual demand, the market price of some particular commodity happens to rise a good deal above the natural price, those who employ their stocks in supplying that market are generally careful to conceal this change
    • Erin Hamson
       
      A monopoly
  • The exclusive privileges of corporations, statutes of apprenticeship, and all those laws which restrain, in particular employments, the competition to a smaller number than might otherwise go into them, have the same tendency, though in a less degree. They are a sort of enlarged monopolies,
    • Erin Hamson
       
      See above
  • THE produce of labor constitutes the natural recompense or wages of labor.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      You get what you make
  • Such combinations, however, are frequently resisted by a contrary defensive combination of the workmen; who sometimes too, without any provocation of this kind, combine of their own accord to raise the price of their labor.....
  • Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labor even below this rate
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Two combinations to react to one another. Like the checks and balances found in gov.
  • The demand for those who live by wages, therefore, necessarily increases with the increase of the revenue and stock of every country, and cannot possibly increase without it. The increase of revenue and stock is the increase of national wealth....
  • It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged
    • Erin Hamson
       
      equality in the pursuit of happiness
  • First, by restraining the competition in some employments to a smaller number than would otherwise be disposed to enter into them; Second, by increasing it in others beyond what it naturally would be; and, Third, by obstructing the free circulation of labor and stock, both from employment to employment and from place to place.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Problems of Mercantilism
  • First,
  • by restraining the competition in some employments to a smaller number than might otherwise be disposed to enter into them
  • and to hinder him from employing this strength and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper without injury to his neighbor is a plain violation of this most sacred property.
  • An exclusive corporation necessarily weakens the force of this discipline.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      the gov is not needed for regulation
  • Second,
  • by increasing the competition in some employments beyond what it naturally would be
    • Erin Hamson
       
      pursuit of happiness
  • by obstructing the free circulation of labor and stock both from employment to employment, and from place to place,
  • Third,
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    Thanks for the annotations and the comments.
anonymous

Newspaper Death Watch - 0 views

shared by anonymous on 20 Sep 10 - No Cached
    • anonymous
       
      It is interesting how newspapers are first and foremost just businesses. Sure they have a noble cause, but they still need to make money. Also the author of this blog has an interesting history with newspapers, but he seems to be making the transition to digital media well.
Jeffrey Chen

Making Capitalism More Creative - 0 views

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    Great article by time magazine by Bill Gates about the modern issues of capitalism and areas for improvement
Megan Stern

Are You Indispensable? An Interview with Seth Godin - The Personal MBA: Master the Art ... - 0 views

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    An interesting interview with a guy who firmly believes in the gift economy. A guide to "making a profit" in a gift economy, in a sense.
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