ImaginativePRO Blog

FACEBOOK TO LAUNCH FACEBOOK STUDIO SO AD AGENCIES CAN SHOWCASE THE BEST PRACTICES FROM THEIR SMM CREATIVE CAMPAIGNS

Facebook, continuing its aggressive pursuit of the ad world, in early April plans to launch Facebook Studio to "showcase best practice examples from agencies worldwide for the creative campaigns they've produced." The news comes six months after the social media giant brought in Jennifer Kattula from Microsoft to head up agency marketing, just after Facebook's launch of real-time targeted advertising.

"We think agencies are poised to be thought leaders for savvy social marketing, and we've created this online tool to help them share their great creative," a Facebook rep told Online Media Daily . "The site will be open to all agency submissions around the globe, and to the public as well."

 

"We'll be there," tweeted New York-based Red Tettemer + Partners, with the agency's executive creative director Steve O'Connell adding: "It's fantastic. Hopefully, it will result in agencies pushing each other and moving the whole category of social marketing forward a bit."

Jonah Goodhart, co-CEO of Moat.com -- which offers its own creative ad-sharing service, but for banner ads -- called Facebook Studio a move in the "right direction" and a "great thing for the industry." Goodhart said he agrees with Facebook that "advertising is about emotional engagement," not clicks.

One measure of engagement in the social media world is how many people become "fans," Goodhart said. But Sam Weston, director of social for Interpublic's Huge, said that once they "like a fan page, the vast majority of users ... rarely go back to it." If Facebook "really wants to see big changes ... they need to tell their user base how to engage," he noted.

Weston applauded Facebook's move to improve ad creativity, but added: "I don't think that's what's holding advertisers back." For greatly increased ad revenues, he said, Facebook must change advertiser expectations.

Marketers will not commit to comprehensive social-marketing campaigns costing from $60,000 to $100,000 per month until Facebook comes up with ROI and metrics to match, he explained. "They need to standardize the expectations and make it easier for companies to see the value in spending real money. They don't need to change opinions with creative, but with the purchasers themselves."

"Because it's still so early on, we don't know what the value of a fan is," Nicola Mendelsohn, chairman of London-based agency Karmarama, told The Financial Times, which broke the Facebook Studio story.

In the same article, Kattula said people claim that "Facebook is not a place to be creative because the ad unit size is so small, and there's no sight, sound and motion .... The idea is that social is creative. It's more than just ads."

Successful Facebook campaigns, Kattula said, have used clear, conversational language to engage directly with consumers. She gave the example of Oreo asking wall questions like "What's your favorite part of an Oreo -- the cookie or the creme?" and Threadless, a T-shirt company, asking its fans to vote for which designs to put on a T-shirt.

Facebook has also teamed up with The One Club's One Show for what they are calling Facebook Studio Live, a day-long "dialogue with Facebook engineers, marketers and product teams to learn how to use Facebook to build campaigns that are social from the ground up." The event will take place May 12, as part of The One Club's Creative Week in New York.

COMMENTARY:   You would've thought that they would've had samples of successful advertising agency best practices a long time ago.   I have seen several examples of case studies describing successful social media advertising campaigns.   

Adding Carolyn Everson as Facebook's Executive Vice-President, Global Advertising, is a step in the right direction, and demonstrates a serious endeaver by Facebook to sell advertising to the ad agencies, who have been reluctant to commit serious advertising buys, because of their concerns over its effectiveness and problems measuring ROIs.   Ad agencies understand traditional media, but those media have well established metrics methods for measuring ROIs.

I highly recommend "Social Media Best Practices: How To Create A Successful Program" by SocialMedia404.  This is one of the best whitepapers on social media best practices that I have seen.  I use it regularly when developing marketing plans for clients.   Online marketing firm TopRank put out an excellent blog article titled, "Best and Worst Practices Social Media Marketing"

Courtesy of an article datd  March 28, 2011 appearing in MediaPost Publications Online Media Dailhy

By TwitterButtons.com   

LESSONS LEARNED FROM JAPAN'S NUCLEAR DISASTER, MAYBE NOW WE WILL GET SERIOUS ABOUT ALTERNATIVE ENERGY

An earthquake-and-tsunami zone crowded with 127 million people is an unwise place for 54 reactors

The 1960s design of five Fukushima-I reactors has the smallest safety margin and probably can't contain 90 percent of meltdowns. The U.S. has six identical and 17 very similar plants.

Every currently operating light-water reactor, if deprived of power and cooling water, can melt down. Fukushima had eight-hour battery reserves, but fuel has melted in three reactors. Most U.S. reactors get in trouble after four hours. Some have had shorter blackouts. Much longer ones could happen.

Overheated fuel risks hydrogen or steam explosions that damage equipment and contaminate the whole site--so clustering many reactors together (to save money) can make failure at one reactor cascade to the rest.

Nuclear power is uniquely unforgiving: as Swedish Nobel physicist Hannes Alfvén said, "No acts of God can be permitted." Fallible people have created its half-century history of a few calamities, a steady stream of worrying incidents,  and many near-misses. America has been lucky so far. Had Three Mile Island's containment dome not been built double-strength because it was under an airport landing path, it may not have withstood the 1979 accident's hydrogen explosion. In 2002, Ohio's Davis-Besse reactor was luckily caught just before its massive pressure-vessel lid rusted through.

Regulators haven't resolved these or other key safety issues, such as terrorist threats to reactors, lest they disrupt a powerful industry. U.S. regulation is not clearly better than Japanese regulation, nor more transparent: industry-friendly rules bar the American public from meaningful participation. Many presidents' nuclear boosterism also discourages inquiry and dissent.

Nuclear-promoting regulators inspire even less confidence. The International Atomic Energy Agency's 2005 estimate of about 4,000 Chernobyl deaths contrasts with a rigorous 2009 review of 5,000 mainly Slavic-language scientific papers the IAEA overlooked. It found deaths approaching a million through 2004, nearly 170,000 of them in North America. The total toll now exceeds a million, plus a half-trillion dollars' economic damage. The fallout reached four continents, just as the jet stream could swiftly carry Fukushima fallout.

Fukushima I-4's spent fuel alone, while in the reactor, had produced (over years, not in an instant) more than a hundred times more fission energy and hence radioactivity than both 1945 atomic bombs. If that already-damaged fuel keeps overheating, it may melt or burn, releasing into the air things like cesium-137 and strontium-90, which take several centuries to decay a millionfold. Unit 3's fuel is spiked with plutonium, which takes 482,000 years.

Nuclear power is the only energy source where mishap or malice can kill so many people so far away; the only one whose ingredients can help make and hide nuclear bombs; the only climate solution that substitutes proliferation, accident, and high-level radioactive waste dangers. Indeed, nuclear plants are so slow and costly to build that they reduce and retard climate protection.

Here's how. Each dollar spent on a new reactor buys about two to ten times less carbon savings and is 20 to 40 times slower, than spending that dollar on the cheaper, faster, safer solutions that make nuclear power unnecessary and uneconomic:

• Efficient use of electricity. 
• Making heat and power together in factories or buildings ("cogeneration"). 
• Renewable Energy - Half the world's new generating capacity in 2008 and 2009 was renewable.  In 2010, renewables, excluding big hydro dams, won $151 billion of private investment and added over 50 billion watts (70 percent the total capacity of all 23 Fukushima-style U.S. reactors) while nuclear got zero private investment and kept losing capacity. Supposedly unreliable windpower made 43 percent to 52 percent of four German states' total 2010 electricity. Non-nuclear Denmark, 21 percent windpowered, plans to get entirely off fossil fuels. Hawai'i plans 70 percent renewables by 2025.

The last two made 18 percent of the world's 2009 electricity (while nuclear made 13 percent, reversing their 2000 shares)—and made over 90 percent of the 2007 to 2008 increase in global electricity production.

In contrast, of the 66 nuclear units worldwide officially listed as "under construction" at the end of 2010, 12 had been so listed for over 20 years, 45 had no official startup date, half were late, all 66 were in centrally planned power systems—50 of those in just four (China, India, Russia, South Korea)—and zero were free-market purchases. Since 2007, nuclear growth has added less annual output than just the costliest renewable—solar power—and will probably never catch up. While inherently safe renewable competitors are walloping both nuclear and coal plants in the marketplace and keep getting dramatically cheaper, nuclear costs keep soaring, and with greater safety precautions would go even higher. Tokyo Electric Co., just recovering from $10-20 billion in 2007 earthquake costs at its other big nuclear complex, now faces an even more ruinous Fukushima bill.

Since 2005, new U.S. reactors (if any) have been 100 percent-plus subsidized—yet they couldn't raise a cent of private capital, because they have no business case.  They cost 2-3 times as much as new windpower, and by the time you could build a reactor, it couldn't even beat solar power. Competitive renewables, cogeneration, and efficient use can displace all U.S. coal power more than 23 times over—leaving ample room to replace nuclear power's half-as-big-as-coal contribution too—but we need to do it just once. Yet the nuclear industry demands ever more lavish subsidies, and its lobbyists hold all other energy efforts hostage for tens of billions in added ransom, with no limit.

Japan, for its size, is even richer than America in benign, ample, but long-neglected energy choices. Perhaps this tragedy will call Japan to global leadership into a post-nuclear world. And before America suffers its own Fukushima, it too should ask, not whether unfinanceably costly new reactors are safe, but why build any more, and why keep running unsafe ones. China has suspended reactor approvals. Germany just shut down the oldest 41 percent of its nuclear capacity for study. America's nuclear lobby says it can't happen here, so pile on lavish new subsidies.

A durable myth claims Three Mile Island halted U.S. nuclear orders. Actually they stopped over a year before—dead of an incurable attack of market forces. No doubt when nuclear power's collapse in the global marketplace, already years old, is finally acknowledged, it will be blamed on Fukushima. While we pray for the best in Japan today, let us hope its people's sacrifice will help speed the world to a safer, more competitive energy future.

COMMENTARY:   Recently, I have mostly for additional nuclear power investments or subsidies because I felt nuclear power technology was relatively safe, cost-effective and reliable--available 24/7, 365 days, something you cannot say about solar and wind.  

The Fukushima nuclear reactor catastrophe has changed that perception.  The above articles makes a pretty good case why future nuclear reactor investments should not be made.  However, some studies show that nuclear energy is feasible.  

• A recent MIT study, makes the case that nuclear power is cost-effective and the there is a plentiful supply of uranium.  
• In my blog post dated February 21, 2011 titled, "The Looming Aging Crisis of America's Nuclear Power Plants - Built To Last 40 Years, Can They Last For 80 years",  I cite a Nuclear Fissionary study that calculated the total cost of electricity production by kilowatt hour, and although the construction cost of a nuclear power plant is running $6,000 per kilowatt, the weighted average operating costs per kilowatt make nuclear power a bargain when compared to renewables, namely solar and wind.   Please refer to the following graphs and charts.  

Many countries have placed a moratorium on new proposed nuclear power projects, cancelled other or temporarily stopped construction of others, I am afraid that this will become the situation again.   The danger of long-lasting radiation contamination due to nuclear fallout caused by unpredicable accidents like Fukushima, makes you pause and re-evaluate the whole nuclear power thing.   Personally, solar and wind is the way to go.  They are expensive, but you can build solar and wind farms relatively quick when compared to building nuclear power plants, they produce clean energy, and this a much better alternative tio combat CO2 gas emissions and stave off global warming.  This is much better alternative over importing oil, which is strangling our economy.  Time is of the essence, the world is already at "peak oil", and we will probably run out of oil by 2050, a scary proposition.   I have a feeling that after this fiasco, that goverments eveywhere will expidite investments in alternative energy. 

Courtesy of an article dated March 28, 2011 appearing in GreenTechMedia

By TwitterButtons.com  

WARREN BUFFET CALLS GROUPON AND TWITTER VALUATIONS "MATHEMATICALLY INSANE", WARNS OF SOCIAL NETWORK BUBBLE

Two of the most successful businessmen and investors alive today have warned against what they say is a growing bubble in the value of social media companies over the last couple weeks. But both Warren Buffett, chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, and Barry Diller, founder and chairman of IAC, also conceded that there will still be long-term winners along with all the losers, affirming the real value underlying social media as a revolutionary new communications technology. However there's still going to be a lot of carnage.

Speaking in New Delhi, Buffett was clear about the prospects of most social media companies in remarks quoted by Bloomberg: "Most of them will be overpriced... It's extremely difficult to value social-networking-site companies."

While Buffett declined to name specific companies he felt were overpriced, this general opinion echoed statements made by Diller a few weeks ago during an interview at the South by Southwest conference, where he dismissed multi-billion-dollar valuations for Groupon and Twitter as "mathematically insane" and observed that the bubble is "puffing... up pretty nicely."

As for potential winners among all the investors, Diller allowed that "some of them -- a very few of them -- won't turn out to be dumb." Again, Buffett ventured a similar opinion in his own observation that "Some will be huge winners, which will make up for the rest."

Fortunately, Diller noted, so far most of the investments in social media have come from venture capitalists and other rich investors -- a big difference from the first Dot.com bubble, which was fueled by stock market hysteria: "All the money that's going to be lost is going to be lost by people who can lose money. So who cares?"

Of course, that could change when social media companies start rolling out initial public stock offerings. In fact, it could be even worse this time around precisely because of the delay, as every new report of venture capital activity helps prime the market psychologically for a feeding frenzy when the IPOs finally hit. 

COMMENTARY:  I am glad that someone as respected as Warren Buffet, has spoken up and rung the warning bell about Social Networks.  This supports everything that many social media experts have been saying for sometime.  You will find a lot of simialr articles HERE. 

It's true that big investor's are going to be the ones to lose their ass in the event of a social network bubble, but let's not forget the employees that work for startups like Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, Groupon, etc.  Without their hard work and loyalty, these startups would not be where they are today. They stand to loose all their sweat equity.  

A social network bubble will also have a boomerang affect, affect the values of other internet segments, temporarily stalling new venture capital investments in startups built on similar business models.   I think it is definitely going to be bloody.  

Courtesy of an article dated March 29, 2011 appearing in MediaPost Publications  The Social Graf

 

GROUPON TALKING WITH BANKERS ABOUT AN IPO, VALUED AT $15 BILLION TO $25 BILLION

 

Groupon Inc. has held talks with banks about an initial public offering that would value the online-coupon company at as much as $25 billion, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions.

The two-year-old startup’s IPO may happen this year and is unlikely to assign Groupon a valuation of less than $15 billion, the people told Bloomberg Businessweek. They asked not to be identified because the talks were private.

Groupon, the top provider of online daily discounts, has pushed into hundreds of new cities and doubled its subscriber base over the past three months. That’s helped its valuation soar since December, when it turned down a bid from Google Inc. (GOOG) for $6 billion. The company now has 70 million users and reaches more than 500 markets, up from 300 when Google made its offer.

Closely held consumer Internet companies like Groupon are “being valued as though they are going to be the next Google or EBay or Amazon,” said Claire Enders, the founder of London media-consulting company Enders Analysis. “But their business models may reach their limits a lot more quickly, or not work in as many markets.”

Groupon was valued at about $1.3 billion last April, when it raised $135 million from investors, including Digital Sky Technologies. It contemplated more funding at a $3 billion valuation in November, shortly before Google’s offer. An investment of $950 million, completed in January, pegged Groupon’s worth at $4.75 billion.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Morgan Stanley (MS) have discussed handling an IPO for Groupon, a person familiar with the talks said in January. Those meetings focused on a $15 billion valuation for a future IPO, the person said.

A $25 billion valuation would put Groupon’s worth above Google’s when that company went public in 2004. Google, the world’s biggest Internet-search provider, had a valuation of $23 billion at the time of its IPO in August 2004.

Julie Mossler, a spokeswoman for Groupon, declined to comment.

Groupon, based in Chicago, offers daily discounts of as much as 90 percent from local businesses, such as restaurants, nail salons and clothing stores. It then keeps a portion of the revenue.

While Groupon leads the daily-deal market, it faces mounting competition from rivals such as LivingSocial. That company is close to raising as much as $400 million in funding that would value it at more than $2 billion, two people with knowledge of the talks said this week.

Even so, Groupon may have an edge as the biggest company in the industry, said Alex DeGroote, a media and technology analyst at Panmure Gordon & Co. in London.

The daily deals business “is hot as anything, and no one knows where it’s going to tap out,” DeGroote said. “The experience of Internet companies shows that margins and profitability tend to accrue very substantially to the market leader.”

COMMENTARY:  Since late 2010, I have been covering and analyzing Groupon and the group buying space.  Groupon and LivingSocial, its closest competitor, rank #1 and #2 in the group buying space with an estimated combined 92% share of the total market.  Both startups were launched in early 2010, and experienced very rapid growth, but you have to wonder just how much staying power group buying sites like Groupon have over the longterm.  

Groupon's valuations are another great example of the "Facebook Halo Effect".  Groupon's valuations appear to change almost on a monthly basis. Supposedly Groupon turned down an offer of $6 billion from Google, but turned it down because they were concerned the deal would not be approved by the FTC.  

According to various reports, Groupon was considering an IPO in 2011, but when I heard that Groupon believed it was worth between $15 billion and $25 billion in an IPO, I was completely blown away.  

I don't know where those numbers are coming from, but if you use Groupon's estimated revenues of $500 million (probably closer to $300 million), this works out to a multiple of between 30 and 50 times revenues.  This is a ridiculous multiple for an internet startup only about a year old.  Not even Google commanded that much when it filed its IPO in 2004 and was valued at $27 billion on revenues of $1 billion. Google's market capitalization today is $186.55 billion.  It's revenues for the year ending 2010 were $29.32 billion. That works out to a multiple of 6.32 based on revenues.

The group buying space is much more crowded today and getting even more crowded by the day, with Google and Facebook, testing daily deals offerings of their own. It seems daily deals startups are cropping up everywhere.  Industry consolidation is eminent or an outright bubble.

Like many experts, I believe that the daily deal business model is not sustainable over the long run. Merchants very not too happy about results, and many are dropping out like crazy.  Groupon commands a 50% piece of the action, which means the merchant is losing money on each deal.  It appears that the only one making money is Groupon.  This is not a win-win, but a win-lose type of arrangement.  I have never heard of such a thing.

In a blog article dated February 28, 2011 titled, "The Group Buying And Deals Sector Entering A Period Of Slow Growth And Industry Consolidation, Investors Beware", I pointed out all of the problems with group buying and daily deals.      

Courtesy of an article dated March 17, 2011 appearingi in Bloomberg

By TwitterButtons.com  

SOME ADVICE FOR ENTREPRENEURS ON HOW TO DEAL WITH POTENTIAL INVESTORS

The “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” analogy might not be that far off when comparing venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. I spent four years as a VC, and I’ve been the CEO of an e-commerce startup for the last two years, so in yesterday’s opening piece, I gave some pointers to VCs, and particularly associates, on how to better work with entrepreneurs. Today, I’m going to give some advice to entrepreneurs based on my personal experience on how to work smarter with VCs.

• It’s a numbers game. Expect casualties.I’m not kidding. Preparing to reach out to VCs, particularly if it’s your first time, is not unlike the preparation one does when preparing for battle (and this comes from a former air force pilot). You should prepare for a process that can take six or nine months or even a year, depending on the market conditions. You need to prepare for people with little knowledge of your technology or market who are comfortable telling you that there is no market for your technology.

  With VCs investing in very few companies, a successful entrepreneur has about a 2% chance of securing funding. This means that if you had a good meeting, the chances have just gone up to 4%. If you had a mediocre meeting, the chances have gone down to zero.

  Therefore, my recommendation for a first time entrepreneur is to meet with as many (tens) VCs as possible so that according to the numbers and of course, the quality of your offering, you can potentially get to the term sheet level with two VCs.
  I’m not writing this to discourage anybody. The rewards are sweet when striking an investment and ultimately, a partnership with a VC who can help you take your company to the next level, but there are many obstacles in this path, and every entrepreneur should understand the difficulty and frustration of this process.

• Develop a VC pitching strategy. Because of the challenges in securing VC funding, I strongly recommend that entrepreneurs develop a strategy which includes casting a very wide net of VCs to contact. You should divide perspective VCs according to key parameters such as investment history, industry focus, relevance of portfolio / connections (to your needs), potential conflict of interests and geographic location. Then rank the VCs according to your key criteria.

  I’d recommend beginning the VC outreach process with the lower ranked VCs who are also less likely to invest in your company, so that you can get some practice under your belt, and if you make a mistake, it won’t be critical.

• You need to play your cards right. The VC community is pretty small and close knit, so it’s likely that most of the VCs with whom you’ll meet will know each other. And like most communities, the VC community has its patterns of action. Given the inherent risk involved in VC investment, VCs like to know who else is considering investing in your company because they too tend to follow a herd mentality. If you can somehow covey the feeling that you are sought after by many VCs, it could definitely help you.

  Also, if you are negotiating with several VCs, they may try to communicate between themselves in order to consider investing together (split the investment between them). Having two VCs that you’re negotiating with join forces can hurt your negotiating power. It is much better to keep both horses competing against each other in the race for as long as you can (term sheet). Divide and conquer. Once they join forces your valuation goes down.

  Therefore, until you’re at the term sheet stage, it’s best not to disclose to other VCs the names of the VCs with whom you’re talking.

• Don’t seek funding under pressure. As I noted above, the fundraising process can take a long time, therefore it’s important to begin early, and not when you’re under pressure to raise funding. VCs will sense this pressure, and will use it as leverage in order to extract better deal terms. How does the VC saying go: “you should raise money when you can and not when you need it”?

VCs can be tremendous partners that enable a business to soar. But just as more than 50% of marriages end in divorce despite the best intentions, given the risk inherent in venture capital investment coupled with the 10% success rate of investing in start-ups, there are many potential obstacles that await the first (or even) second time entrepreneur reaching out to VCs.

COMMENTARY:    I would also recommend that entrepreneur have some skin-in-the-game. Don't expect investor's to take on all of the risk.  They are going to want a bigger piece.  Raise as little as possible.  Bootstrap as much as you can.   If you can launch without outsiders, so much the better.   I also recommend crowdfunding like Kickstarter and Crowdcube.  Here are a few links that might help:

• 9/9/10 - "Crowdfunding: The New Way To Fund Projects Through A Network Of Fans And Individuals"
• 11/22/10 - "Scott Wilson Designs A Kit to Convert Your iPod Nano Touch (Shuffle) Into A Watch, Raises $275K On Kickstarter" 
• 2/15/11 - "Crowdfunding:  How This New And Social Funding Sector Stackup, Kickstarter, Indiegogo and MyMajorCompany At The Top"  (Final tally was over $900K)

Unless you are very lucky, or have the Deal of the Century, expect to wait months, maybe even years to get funded.  One last thing, don't forget to wear pajamas and Adidas sandals.  

Courtesy of an article dated March 24, 2011 by Tomer Tzach appearing in VentureBeat

By TwitterButtons.com  

TESLA MOTORS SAYS THEIR 1,500 ROADSTER CARS SOLD TO DATE LOGGED 10 MILLION ELECTRIC MILES, PLUS A LOOK INSIDE THE FACTORY

Over 1,500 Tesla Roadsters around the world have now driven more than 10 million real-world miles, the greatest distance covered by any electric vehicle maker to date. Said Tesla CEO Elon Musk: "We owe this achievement to Roadster drivers around the world and their pioneering adoption of electric vehicles."

The Roadster launched in 2008 as the only highway-capable EV in the world, and today it still has no equals. Roadster 2.5, the fourth iteration of the vehicle, demonstrates Tesla's continuous innovation and close feedback loop with engineers and customers. It continues to break new barriers.

Most visitors to Tesla Headquarters in Palo Alto probably don’t notice it. On the way to the front entrance, a building houses Tesla technicians and engineers busily testing and analyzing the Model S Alpha fleet.

Transparency is vital as Tesla revolutionizes the traditional approach to vehicle development. To this end, Tesla recently took the initiative to invite journalists to tour the Workshop and speak with some of the key figures behind Model S -- including VP and Chief Engineer Peter Rawlinson and co-founder and CTO JB Straubel.  Read some of the articles from outlets including Bloomberg, Autoblog and GigaOm. 

Large windows provide plenty of natural light. On the right side of the photo, front and rear sub-frames are being prepped for installation.

Vehicle Techs assemble a front sub-frame.

Vehicle Techs work on Tesla Roadster VIN 7 – slated to undergo durability testing.

Tesla Roadster VIN 7 inspection.

Cars not long for this world are painted orange. In crash tests, the orange paint helps engineers analyze the body structure. 

Wiring is installed on Tesla Roadster VIN 13, one of the orange crash safety vehicles. 

Tesla Roadster VIN 8 will be used to test prototype manufacturing tools. In his blog post, VP of Manufacturing Gilbert Passin describes the process by which the Model S will be mass-produced at a rate of 20,000 per year at the Tesla Factory in Fremont, California. 

Under the hood of Tesla Roadster VIN 8. 

The rain doesn’t stop the testing! These two have been hitting the mean streets on a daily basis.

COMMENTARY:     Man, that's one small assembly plant, but Tesla Motors has big plans for the future.  In May 2010, Tesla acquired the old Toyota NUUMI plant located  in Fremont, California because of a slowdown in Toyota sales.  The new plant is where Tesla will build the new premium Tesla Model S sedan and all future electric cars.  The new plant is scheduled for completion in early 2012.  Unfortunately, Tesla will stop producing the Roadster EV sports car in 2011.  So, if you want a Roadster, better get your order in NOW.   Prices: $109,000 to $128,500 for the regular Roadster and the Roadster Sport respectively.    

Courtesy of an article dated March 28, 2011 appearing in the Tesla Motors Blog

By TwitterButtons.com  

FACEBOOK ECOMMERCE IS PROJECTED TO BE HUGE, BUT FACEBOOK NEEDS TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO DO IT WITHOUT PISSING OFF USERS

Social commerce is a symbiotic activity between platforms like Facebook and Twitter and traditional and mobile e-commerce. The question for marketers is how many eggs to put in the Facebook basket. E-commerce sales will hit $197 billion this year, per Forrester. But while Amazon has about a 10% share of that, for Facebook to generate even 5% of that total, it would need to spend millions upgrading infrastructure to support the retailers, buyers, devices and payment options that Amazon does, according to a new report from WebMediaBrands' SocialTimes Pro.

Still, social and mobile commerce is huge. The firm cites third-party data suggesting that:

• 34% of shoppers clicked on an ad in response to a location-specific message. 
• 51% of consumers have made a mobile payment within the past three months. 
• 60% of all time spent on the mobile Internet is on social networking sites. 
• 27% of the top 100 retailers have a "like" button on their product pages.

Among the trends the research group identified are:

• The larger revenue opportunity is beyond the social network and includes retailers' sites.
• Mobile devices and startups launching their own platforms. 
• Facebook sales are less than 10% of the monthly revenue for most retailers with virtual Facebook storefronts. 
• Industry experts say the volume of transactions for physical goods on Facebook will top $250 million by 2011. 
• Retail revenue generated from Facebook this year is likely to be between the $75 million and $100 million range, conservatively.

Says Tameka Kee, author of the study:

"When I went into this, I thought it was all about buying stuff on Facebook. But you realize that it's a piece of a bigger thing fed by mobile, core e-commerce and all of these functions together. Facebook is one of the more exciting parts but not the only part."

SocialTimes Pro went to some startups and marketers in the social space to examine what they are doing on Facebook. Among them are:

• Roy Hessel, CEO of six-year-old prescription eyeglass retailer EyeBuyDirect. 
• Wade Gerten, CEO of 8thBridge, a social shopping company that powers Facebook storefronts for Delta Airlines, Avon and Lands' End. 
• Eric Best, CEO of Mercent, online channel marketing company for retailers like Bass Pro, Guess? and REI. 
• Kevin Ranford, VP of online marketing, mobile and social media at 1-800-Flowers.com.

Best argued that the majority of large retailers Mercent works with see social platforms as tools for dialogue and brand awareness in a less forceful way than advertising. He says that for them, transaction isn't the point. EyeBuyDirect's Hessel shared that sentiment, saying Facebook sales are less than 5% of the company's monthly revenue, "and increasing that to 10% or more is not something we are aiming for." He said the real growth opportunity is from using social media platforms to enhance the user experience at EyeBuyDirect. com. The company created its own social experience on its site that Hessel says has increased sales. The platform, a Facebook-like experience called "Wall of Frame," lets consumers do things like upload pictures of themselves and modify them with different glasses.

The risks of using Facebook for commerce are obvious: turning off people for whom Facebook is a digital living room. Best said the retailers Mercent worked with are trying to figure out how to do social shopping programs without violating users' trust. "The last thing an established brand wants to do is go out and start pitching products to Facebook fans unless they've been asked for it," he said.

Ranford said knowing when not to pitch Facebook users is as important as knowing when to do so. He said when the company first pushed offers to Facebook, it got pushback from consumers. "They told us they wanted less sales and more content, like insights into what kinds of gifts they should give, and when," he said. That tactic worked, Ranford said, doubling its fan base in advance of Valentine's Day.

Perhaps the most critical issue is one of marketer dependence on Facebook data, which is not available through Facebook transactions now but might be if Facebook decides to sell it. That means if marketers become dependent on Facebook to do digital sales, they will become like sharecroppers forced to buy Facebook data because that's where they grow their crops. "At some point," said Hessel, "Facebook's data will have greater impact on retailers' conversions than paid search."

Says Kee: "I want to be clear that Facebook said they have no plans to sell data. But who's to say what will happen?" She says this isn't such an issue for small or large retailers, but for those in the middle, "they need to worry about it more. For small ones it's all upside and a gigantic retailer has the money. But companies like EyeBuyDirect have to be more cautious."

SocialTimes Pro's study projects that $20 million flows across transaction expediter Payvment's Facebook storefront each month from 500,000 Facebook users, which adds up to $240 million in yearly transactions. If that were extrapolated to five other vendors at similar rates, the projection tops $1.2 billion, the firm notes. But 8thBridge's Gerten says all retailers will more likely generate a more conservative $75 million to $100 million in revenue for sales on merchandise on Facebook this year.

COMMENTARY:  $240 million in yearly transactions through Facebook ecommerce is so insignificant as to be irrelevant, or worth writing about.  It amounts to 1/1,000th of 1% of 2011 ecommerce revenues.  It computes to about 41 cents per Facebook user.  Such big spenders. Those kinds of numbers is not exactly lighting my fire.  

Many social media experts believe that social networks like Facebook are not effective advertising platforms.  A WebTrends survey showed that Facebook ad clickthrough rates are abysmal, worse than search engines like  Google Product Search, Amazon.com, Nexttag, Top10Tag, Priceline.com, Overstock.com to name a few. 

There's just too much user resistance to online ads and those LIKE buttons tend to classify you as interested in a product.  However, evidence shows that clicking the LIKE button does not correlate with an actual buying decision.  Adding ecommerce to Facebook is just adding more barriers and screwing with the total Facebook online experience. 

If the advertiser wants to have an ecommerce presence on Facebook, have at it.   A better solution would be for Facebook to provide a built-in price comparision lookup tab or search engine feature similar to Google Product Search, Amazon.com, Nexttag, Top10Tag,  Priceline.com, Overstock.com to name a few. You could provide filter's like product type, product name, product reviews, product prices, and where to buy.  I think there would be a lot less resistance to ecommerce offerings.  It becomes more voluntary from the user perspective. Facebook would know the kinds of products users are looking for, preferred price range, preferred retailer, and so forth.  It's providing product information, adding value to the Facebook experience, but it's really a form of "disguised" advertising.  I thick clickthrough rates would really climb, and really mean something.  You include a LIKE button as well.  Go work on it Zuck, my boy. 

Since so much sales activity is moving towards mobile, I would recommend that Facebook merchants provide customers a convenient mobile app for their ecommerce store or product catalog.  This sort of thing is really quite simple.  It's just that Zuck and his hacksters don't know all the consumer buttons to press.  They are still figuring out how to make money off of their gargantuan user base.   

Courtesy of an article dated March 23, 2011 appearing in MediaPost Publications Marketing Daily

By TwitterButtons.com  

 

THE GREAT ECONOMIC APOCALYPSE OF 2011/2012

US economy faces a grim outlook in 2011 as Washington's steps taken to handle the financial crisis, including money printing, have put the country on the verge of "bankruptcy," an expert says.

In an interview with Press TV's Max Keiser, Karl Denninger of market-ticker.org noted that neither Europe's austerity measures nor United States' money printing could solve their economic crisis.

"They are both wrong in that neither of these elements proposed in taking those people who made bad loans and holding them to account," Denninger said.

"You have to take these institutions like these banks or whoever has it, and forces them to take the writedowns and mark discredit off," he added.

"The problem is if you do that they are insolvent. So, we have a political system both in the United States and in Europe that is unwilling to stand up to these bankers and say you are bankrupt," Denninger argued.

He said that the US has suffered a "total systematic indebtedness to GDP" over the past 30 years that could shape a destiny similar to Greece and Ireland for the US.

"It's just a question of how long it will go on. And what happens Max is the same thing that happened to Greece and Ireland. Everything seems to be Okay one day and the next morning you wake up and bonds are blowing out and auctions are failing. That has been the history on this crisis and it's going to continue," he concluded.

A recent study has found that around one hundred US banks, which have been rescued by the federal government, are facing the prospect of bankruptcy again.

A total of 98 unsteady banks that were bailed out by Washington authorities and received more than $4.2 billion from the Treasury Department under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) are now sinking toward failure again, a recent analysis of federal data by The Wall Street Journal revealed.

According to the study, TARP was originally created in the middle of the US financial crisis to help only healthy banks.

The Great Economic Apocalypse of 2011-2012  

COMMENTARY:   I have been through all the recessions in the 70's, 80's, 9o's and the Great Recession which began in 2007.  The current financial condition of the U.S. government and banking system has never given me cause for hope.   The U.S. economy is slowly showing signs of recovery, the unemployment rate is down and retail sales are up, the stock market has risen by 10%, but under that thin veneer there are some terrible signs.  

There  have seen several financial collapses and bubbles:  

• Financial meltdown of September 2008 - Wall Street firms and the entire U.S. banking system was on the verge of collapse.  Several went out of business.  The federal government intervened with an emergency bailout of $876 billion. 
• Sub-prime real estate bubble -  The period of "cheap money" which lasted from 2003 through 2006 and a period of very lax lending policies led to an eventual real estate bubble has resulted in over eight million foreclosures.  Foreclosures continue to this date.  A record 3 million foreclosures are projected for 2011.  Real estate values continue to drop and several economists are predicting a second real estate bubble in 2011, and this could easily lead to a double dip recession.  
• Commercial real estate bubble - Most American's are not aware that there is was a commercial real estate bubble during the Great Recession.  Over 4 million construction jobs were lost.  Commercial real estate values dropped by 30% to 40% in some markets and vacancy rates of 20% to 30% are quite common.  Beginning in 2011. $1.5 trillion in commercial loans are scheduled for rate adjustments or come due.   
• The financial collapse of several EU countries - Green, Spain, Portugal and Italy are at the highest risk of bond default.  Greece has already been bailed out.   
• National debt - The total U.S. debt now exceeds $14 trillion, or roughly $48,000 for every man, woman and child in the U.S.  
• Monetary policy solution - The U.S. treasury department is printing money to buy back maturing bonds.  This kind of situation can not  continue without resulting in runaway inflation.
• Over-the-Counter Derivatives - The banks are holding nearly $40 trillion in investment securities that are based on the the value of other assets (real estate, foreign currencies, commodities and so forth).  If any of those assets should take a sudden drop in value, the banks will have write down their derivatives, and I don't have to tell you what will happen next.

Those are just the major items under that hidden and very delicate veneer.   Although the unemployment rate was  8.9% at the end of February 2011, most of the decline is the result of unemployed worker's who have given up looking for work because there simply aren't any jobs where they live.  The actual unemployment rate is 18% to 22%.  The Department of Labor Statistics ignores people who quit looking and counts part-time workers as full-time workers.    

Corporations are mostly not hiring, although there are some bright spots.  In February 2011, 192,000 "new" non-farm jobs were added.  Still don't have the numbers for March.  Employer's are "sort of" hiring.  Let me explain this.  A lot of employer's are practicing a new form of employment discrimination--hiring only worker's that are "currently employed".  Those were not really new jobs, but are counted as such.  The bulk of the remaining jobs were part-time and seasonal jobs.

Banks are not really lending.  A lot of what you are seeing are renewals of revolving lines of credit. Many banks require that the old line of credit be fully paid off, usually for a period of 30 days.  If the borrower can satisify this requirement, and is still creditworthy, the line of credit is usually renewed.  The banks count this as new loans, when in fact there was no net new lending.  In fact, banks have reduced their loans to SMB's by $48 billion in 2010.  How are small businesses to survive?

There is a student loan crisis because college graduates owe on average about $50,000 in colleg student loans.  40% of college graduates have not gotten full-time jobs, many are working part-time, many working several part-time jobs, just to make ends meet.  60% of college graduates have moved back with mom and dad.   This situation has given rise to a potential Student Loan Bubble. It's not a small amount either, about $860 billion in outstanding student loans, to be exact.   

The turmoil in North Africa and the Middle East has caused oil prices to exceed $100 per barrel. Gasoline now averages $3.81  nationally, and $4.20 in California.  In some areas, the price is already at $5.00 per gallon.  Some oil experts predict that the national price of gasoline will reach $5.o0 per gallon by early summer.  This could put a sudden stop to economic recovery.  We have yet to see how the turmoil in many of those affected countries will affect the availability of Middle East oil and oil prices in general.

The U.S. has undergone the largest shift in wealth from the lower and middle class to the top 3% of the wealtiest Americans.   We didn't have not experienced those kind of levels since the Great Depression, and we all know what happened then.  

Food prices worlwide have increased by double digits, and some economists predict food prices in the U.S. will reach record levels that we haven't experienced since 2007 and 2008.  In some part of the globe, there are already food riots, with the countries in North Africa and Middle East leading the way.

Anybody that tells me that everything is hunky-dory is a fool or just doesn't understand basic economics, living in a bubble or already rich and just doesn't give a damn.  If your basic barometer for an economic recovery is the increased value of your 401(K) or stock portfolio, then you will be again caught off guard again when there is a major market adjustment.   Remember, those are just paper profits.  When the banks, Wall Street investment firms and rich get out of the market, a lot of people will be left standing without a chain when the music stops.

Similar problems are happening in other countries.  Japan has a debt loan twice that of the U.S. on a per capita basis, and unemployment is nearly 8%, something unheard of in Japan.  Japan's economy has been in a funk since the late 1990's, and remains so even now.  This is a warning the the U.S.--we're next.  

I have been ringing the alarm bells for quite sometime going as far back as 2006 when I prediced the real estate prices could not be sustained and that there would eventually be a real estate bubble.   

Courtesy of an article dated February 10, 2011 titled, "The Great Economic Apocalypse of 2011/2012"

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SETH GODIN'S COMPARISON OF DEATHS CAUSED BY DIFFERENT ENERGY SOURCES, COAL IS WORSE THAN NUCLEAR

 

The Fukushima meltdowns may have derailed hopes that American will be upping its investments in nuclear energy anytime soon. And no wonder: It wasn't but a couple days after the tsunami that you regularly saw misguided "environmentalists" claiming there's no way we can prevent disasters like the one that struck Japan.

But the fact is, these arguments aren't based in fact, and this simple, utterly powerful infographic by famed business writer Seth Godin illustrates why. What you see are the deaths per terawatt hour of energy produced:

Shocking, huh? The data it's drawn from is about as reliable as it gets: The World Health Organization's figures on worker deaths in various industries. As Godin writes:

Vivid is not the same as true. It's far easier to amplify sudden and horrible outcomes than it is to talk about the slow, grinding reality of day to day strife. That's just human nature. Not included in this chart are deaths due to global political instability involving oil fields, deaths from coastal flooding and deaths due to environmental impacts yet unmeasured, all of which skew it even more if you think about it.

This chart unsettles a lot of people, because there must be something wrong with it. Further proof of how easy it is to fear the unknown and accept what we've got.

We're betting that the tragedy in Japan sets back nuclear energy in the U.S. by at least a decade. But make no mistake: That's not because of science or facts. It's because of politics, and an irrational fear we have of nuclear power that's a relic of the 1950s.

Do you have an opinion about nuclear power? About the relative safety of one form of power over another? How did you come to this opinion?

For every person killed by nuclear power generation, 4,000 die due to coal, adjusted for the same amount of power produced... You might very well have excellent reasons to argue for one form over another. Not the point of this post. The question is: did you know about this chart? How does it resonate with you?

I think that any time reality doesn't match your expectations, it means that marketing was involved. Perhaps it was advertising, or perhaps deliberate story telling by an industry. Or perhaps it was just the stories we tell one another in our daily lives. It's sort of amazing, even to me, how much marketing colors the way we see the world--our reaction (either way) to this chart is proof of it.

Comparing deaths/TWh for all energy sources

I (Seth Godin) wrote this back in 2008 and with one new death that is somewhat nuclear energy related (a death at one of the japanese nuclear plants following the 8.9 earthquake) the statistics are not changed. Japan should have had sealed backup diesel generators or updated some of their designs. However, nuclear still compares very, very well to the other energy sources. The air pollution data is mainly from the World Health Organization and the european study Externe. The World Health Organization compiled peer reviewed health studies on air pollution from many institutions. Occupational health and safety statistics track the deaths of workers in the different industries. 

Energy Source                    Death Rate (deaths per TWh)

Coal – world average             161 (26% of world energy, 50% of electricity)
Coal – China                     278
Coal – USA                        15
Oil                               36  (36% of world energy)
Natural Gas                        4  (21% of world energy)
Biofuel/Biomass                   12
Peat                              12
Solar (rooftop)                 0.44 (less than 0.1% of world energy)
Wind                            0.15 (less than 1% of world energy)
Hydro                           0.10 (europe death rate, 2.2% of world energy)
Hydro - world incl Banqiao)      1.4 (about 2500 TWh/yr and 171,000 Banqiao dead)
Nuclear                         0.04 (5.9% of world energy)

COMMENTARY:  The problem with this comparision of deaths caused by different energy sources, is that they are just estimates, and deaths can occur any number of ways and they occur over lengthy periods of time.   For example, of the 400+ workers asked to work on the Chernobyl disaster, only one is alive today, and she is having a variety of health issues related to exposure to radiation.  

Precautions to prevent the safety of nuclear power plant workers and civilians are extremely tight, and thankfully, there haven't been that many nuclear accidents other than the highly publicized Three Mile Island (US) nuclear reactor near meltdown, Chernobyl (Russia) and the Dai-Ichi nuclear reactor plant at Fukushima, Japan.   Those are the three major ones.   It is beginning to look like the Dai-Ichi nuclear reactor plant at Fukushima, Japan may match Chernobyl for nuclear fallout intensity.

We all know that the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan that killed 250,000 Japanese instantly.  At least three to four times more died due to radiation poisoning in the after-math of the explosiions, and countless more died from the effects of radiation exposures.

The key difference between deaths caused by nuclear energy and other sources of energy, is the fear factor that nuclear fallout and exposure to radiation causes civilians.  Radiation can go through four feet of concrete.  Simply closing the window or door doesn't stop being exposed to nuclear radiation.  That's the difference between smoke or carbon emissions from coal plants, gas and oil.   

You don't know the total number of casualties for years or decades.  With nuclear fallout the ground, buildings, flora, water, everything that was exposed to nuclear radiation, remain dangerous for decades or thousands of years.  It leaves a permanent scar on the landscape that will always be there for many, many years.   

If you were to compare FEAR by different energy sources, nuclear energy would be the big black bar.

Courtesy of an article dated March 25, 2011 appearing in Fast Company Design and an article dated March 13, 2011 appearing in NextBigFuture

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MILAN DESIGNER MAKIO HASUIKE'S INGENIUS LEATHER BRIEFCASE WITH A ZIP-ZAG ZIPPER AND FOLDS FLAT

Thanks to an innovative, zig-zagging zipper, Buccia packs dead flat. But is that really what we need in a briefcase?

If you travel constantly, chances are you're a fiend for anything and everything that packs flat: umbrellas, pillows, nose-hair trimmers -- you name it. Now you can add this sleek -- but flawed -- little briefcase to the list. Designed by Milan-based Makio Hasuike and available at the MoMA Design Store for $198, Buccia collapses flat as a pancake with just a yank of the zipper.

The innovative zipper zigs and zags all the way around the briefcase, letting you unzip the fabric completely, as if peeling an apple in one deliciously deft move. That, in turn, transforms the luggage into something compact and easy to store (or so the thinking goes). An added benefit: The zipper provides endless ways to access the contents of your case. Want to pull your laptop out of the front of the bag instead of the top? Go right ahead.

We worry, though, that the zipper creates more problems than it solves. For starters, a briefcase isn't exactly a bulky item thatneeds to be flattened -- this briefcase, in particular, is already pretty damned tiny. If you can't store it in your suitcase or your hotel room as is, you probably won't be able to store it flat, either.

More troubling, the asymmetrical zipper doesn't make tons of sense when you think about what people actually pack in a briefcase: laptops, yes, but also papers, pencils, iPads, and other little gadgets. We'd hate to unzip the front of the case, only for all that stuff to spill out and make us look about as smooth as Leslie Nielsen. Briefcases -- and purses and wallets and most other luggage -- have right-side-up zippers for a reason: People carry things right-side-up.

COMMENTARY:   That's one slick bag.  Sort of reminds you of one those bags that CIA undercover assassinations use to store all their guns, scopes and other goodies.

If you visit Makio Hasuike's site you will find that he designs all kinds of luxury items including furniture and kitchen counters and cabinets.  The stuff he does is very cool.

Courtesy of an article dated March 25, 2011 appearing in Fast Company Design

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