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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 years ago

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#3yrsago Keep your scythe, the real green future is high-tech, democratic, and radical

"Radical ecology" has come to mean a kind of left-wing back-to-the-landism that throws off consumer culture and mass production for a pastoral low-tech lifestyle. But as the brilliant science journalist and Marxist Leigh Phillips writes in Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff, if the left has a future, it has to reclaim its Promethean commitment to elevating every human being to a condition of luxurious, material abundance and leisure through technological progress.

Phillips is a brilliant writer and an incisive scientific thinker with impeccable credentials in the science press. He's also an unapologetic Marxist. In this book -- which is one of the most entertaining and furious reads about politics and climate you're likely to read -- he rails against the "austerity ecology" movement that calls for more labor-intensive processes, an end to the drive to increase material production, and a "simpler" life that often contains demands for authoritarian, technocratic rule, massive depopulation, and a return to medieval drudgery.

It wasn't always thus. The left -- especially Marxist left -- has a long history of glorifying technological progress and proposing it as the solution to humanity's woes. Rather than blaming the machine for pollution, Marxists blame capitalism for being a system that demands that firms pollute to whatever extent they can, right up the point where the fines outweigh the savings.

As far back as Engels, Marxists refused to countenance the idea of limits to human growth. While Malthus was (incorrectly) predicting that humanity would exhaust its food stores any day now and plunge into barbarism, Engels wrote, in Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy:

Even if we assume that the increase in yield due to increase in labour does not always rise in proportion to the labour, there still remains a third element which, admittedly, never means anything to the economist – science – whose progress is as unlimited and at least as rapid as that of population.

But how can a finite planet sustain infinite growth? Through improvements in material processes. We use a lot less to make things today than we ever have, thanks to science -- and capitalism. The less labor and material used in a process, the less it costs to make and the more profit there is. But growth under market conditions also requires pollution/extraction/waste/overproduction:

The firm not be able to pay for new materials or labour or the upkeep of its machines and will go out of business. This is why capitalists, left to their own devices, have no choice but to pollute or extract or pump out CO2 or catch fish at a rate that is heedless of what remains of our store of resources. It is not that they are evil or greedy. If one capitalist says to herself “To hell with the profits! The planet is more important!” then she will quickly be beaten by a rival who is not so scrupulous. To keep going, they will have to give up on such high-minded thoughts. And this is true regardless of size, whether a globe-rogering, $11-bajillion-market-cap, Taibbian vampire-squid investment bank or a mom-and-pop corner shop that sells nothing but thimbles of rosewater-scented whimsy and hand-sewn felt puppets of characters from Wes Anderson films. If right next door, a big-box chain-store Whimsy-Mart opens up with vats of all-you-can-eat cut-price Owen Wilson dolls and that small business doesn’t toughen up, then they’re fucked.

Companies can only abstain from harmful conduct when the market is regulated -- no longer "free" -- and they are required to do or not do certain things that the state has banned. If all companies are required to follow the rules, then following them won't mean being undercut by a competitor. But regulation can't solve the problem, because it's always fighting a rear-guard action:

...[H]owever much we want to regulate capitalism, there will always be some new commodity or market inadvertently ‘polluting’ that has yet to be regulated. So the regulator is always playing catch-up. Further, capital’s need for self-valorisation tends to strain at the leash of regulatory restraint, as there is always some jurisdiction where this regulation does not exist. Which means that there is a force in the economy constantly pushing toward pollution that we are forever trying to push back against, a beast we cannot tame or cage. This is why social democracy goes further toward preventing pollution than less regulated forms of capitalism, but cannot absolutely prevent the problem.

The answer, Phillips argues, is a democratically planned economy -- a socialist solution. Not the "green lefty" answer, which requires "de-growth," but growth that is guided by democratic, not market, forces:

• The capitalist says: There may or may not be resource limits, but don’t worry about them! Innovation will come along in time! Full steam ahead!

• The green lefty says: Innovation can’t save us! There’s an upper limit to what humans can have / an upper limit on the number of humans. Slam on the brakes!

• The socialist says: Through rational, democratic planning, let’s make sure that the innovation arrives so that we can move forward without inadvertently overproducing. And move forward we must, in order to continue to expand human flourishing. So long as we do that, there are in principle no limits. Let’s take over the machine, not turn it off!

"Let’s take over the machine, not turn it off!" There's something gloriously anarcho-steampunk about that, right in line with Magpie Killjoy's Steampunk Magazine motto: "Love the machine, hate the factory."

Phillips believes that the green left's anti-consumerist/pastoral view is more aesthetic than political: they don't want to stop consuming, they just want to stop consuming things that poor people like, and limit their consumption to labor-intensive items that are priced out of reach of most of the world. Material abundance is the end of want and immiseration, and it's what progressive activists have demanded for their brothers and sisters since ancient times.

In the wake of the Black Friday sales after US Thanksgiving that in recent years have begun to take place in other countries as well, or Boxing Day sales the day after Christmas in Commonwealth countries, where people line up (or queue) before dawn in the freezing November weather outside the local MegaMart for ridiculously cut-price deals on everything, I’ve begun to notice a welter of Facebook status updates, tweets and ‘news’ articles sneering at videos of the trampling, stampeding chaos and images of people coming to blows over 40-inch plasma TVs, lap-tops or tumble dryers.

A survey of the incomes of those racing through the aisles to get to that hundred-dollar stereo that normally sells for $400 should give the smug tut-tutters pause though. This is one of the few times of the year that people can even hope to afford such ‘luxuries’, the Christmas presents their kids are asking for, or just an appliance that works. In a democratically controlled economy, we may collectively decide on different production priorities, but surely we would still organise the production of items that bring people joy. Why shouldn’t people have these things that bring them pleasure? Is the pleasure derived from a box-fresh pair of Nike running shoes or a Sony PlayStation 4 inferior to the pleasure the subscribers of Real Simple magazine derive from their $2000 coffee table made from recycled traffic signs? Likewise, why is the £59 hand-carved walnut locomotive from a Stoke Newington toy shop any less consumerist than the free plastic Elsa doll from Disney’s Frozen accompanying a Subway Fresh Fit Kids Meal?

The difference is a poor-hating snobbery and nothing more...

Anti-consumption politics almost always seem to be about somebody else’s wrong, less spiritually rewarding purchases. It is perhaps the pinnacle of conspicuous consumption. At the very least, no one should mistake this lip-pursed bien-pensant middle-class scolding for speaking truth to power.

The left once campaigned for better conditions for the workers who make things, now it is preoccupied with buying less of what's made, but "An anti-consumerist model of campaigning simply and ineffectively replaces that of a trade unionist model." Sure, the stuff is made by terribly exploited workers. That needs to stop. But rather than campaigning for a retreat from the comforts of technology, let's campaign for their provision to all who want them: "Inequality should not be replaced by an equality of poverty, but an equality of abundance."

Rather than campaign against Walmart, lets use its supply-chain management to liberate its goods from exploitation!

Yes, Virginia, while Walmart, the third largest employer in the world, operates within the free market competing against other shops, internally, the multinational firm is the very model of planning, as are all firms. Highly hierarchical and, yes, dictatorial, but planned with brilliant efficiency by humans nonetheless. As American Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson has scandalously suggested, strip out the exploitation of its workers and the lack of democracy, and the stunning logistical wonder that is Walmart actually becomes an example of planning that socialists should study with keen scrutiny. Walmart is, Jameson asserts cheekily but with sincere admiration, “the shape of a utopian future looming through the mist, which we must seize as an opportunity to exercise the utopian imagination more fully, rather than an occasion for moralizing judgments or regressive nostalgia.

The only way to create a sustainable future is to soak the left in technological expertise, not to turn our back on it. We need to figure out how to make a lot more with a lot less, more efficiently and effectively than ever before. We have to stop pretending that organic food -- which uses more pesticides and requires more land than high-tech farming -- is better. We have to stop pretending that "GMO" is a meaningful category. We need to figure out how to give people the wealth and comfort and the access to contraception and knowledge that lets them have fewer kids -- not insist that the technologies that feed the kids they have today be banned because they originate with terrible companies. The problem is the companies, not the technology (Edison was a colossal asshole, but I still use battery power and lightbulbs all the time).

The left has done this before, with enormous success, in the area of AIDS activism:

But I also know the tremendous advances that evidence-based medicine has achieved over the last 200 years as a result of the germ theory of disease, sanitation, antibiotics, vaccines, pharmacology, lab technology and genetics. As Ben Goldacre, the doctor and health campaigner who manages to be simultaneously Britain’s most trenchant critic of Big Pharma and of medical frauds such as homeopathy, herbal medicine, acupuncture and ‘nutritionists’, puts it: “Repeat after me: pharma being shit does not mean magic beans cure cancer.” The socialist left, with its historic commitment to reason and science, has to separate itself from the distractions of the crunchy left.

We could do far worse in this regard than learning from the AIDS campaigners of the late 80s and early 90s in organisations like ACT-UP and the Treatment Action Group. They described and continue to describe themselves as “science-based treatment activists.” While engaging in multiple high-profile acts of militant civil disobedience against the pharma giants and both Republican and Democrat politicians, they also soberly, rigorously plunged deeply into the science of their condition, and were willing to change tack upon the advent of new evidence, as happened when early demands of expanded access or “drugs into bodies,” as was the slogan of the time, proved to be insufficiently nuanced. Despite most of the activists lacking any formal medical training, the extent of their evidence-focussed self-education and the quality of their reports and recommendations were such that clinicians began to recognise them as their equals in an understanding of the disease. And through this combination of a grounding in science and militant activism, ACT-UP and TAG changed the course of an epidemic, forcing governments to care about a plague killing queers, drug users and minorities.

Agrarianism isn't intrinsically leftwing. There's something inescapably Tory about the idea of a world as a Richard Scarry village where everyone is a small shopkeeper in a shire. It's the same force than animates xenophobic anti-immigrant sentiment (and there's plenty of people in the green left who also militate against immigration, for the same reason). Small is beautiful only after you get rid of 80% of the world -- otherwise, we need dense, intense, technological living. The more of that we get, the more of the countryside we can be left for wildlife.

We are not in a lifeboat. Lifeboat politics are awfully convenient for thugs who would rather force you to do what they say than convince you. The Earth is imperiled, and it can't be saved by telling the world's majority that they will never enjoy the comfort that the minority of us enjoyed for the past century: "It is important for those who quite rightly care deeply about the threat to humanity represented by myriad ecological problems to inoculate themselves against such thinking, to foreswear anti-modernism and the lifeboat politics of limits to growth."

In the past century, certain leftists pretended that Stalinism's horrors were the price we had to pay for socialist rule. Today, the austere greens tell us that hairshirts, de-growth, and radical population reduction are the unfortunate and inevitable consequence of undoing capitalism's excesses. Neither is right. Dinosaurs walked the earth for ten million years; we've only been here for a couple hundred thousand years. The idea that we'll just stop now, stop progressing and improving on the things we developed, become "steady state" creatures, for the next 9 million years and change is a terrible one. Let's not swear off our futures.

Some people love living in the countryside, genuinely prefer it. But a mass-scale back-to-the-land experiment would be a disaster: "a wistful, sentimental appreciation of nature and lamentation of a lost Eden arises from a certain level of city-dwelling privilege forgetful of the tribulations of rural life and ever-present menace that is the wilderness. It takes a certain kind of forgetfulness to be able to romanticise the hard-knock life of the peasant. The peasant would trade places with the gentleman horticulturalist—or, more latterly, the Stoke Newington subscriber to Modern Farmer magazine—any day."

A sustainable world is one in which we do things better. The better we do them -- the more material abundance we harness -- the more free we will be, both from want and coercion:

As a result of our audacity, our ultimate resource, each of the limits imposed upon us by nature that we have breached—from fire that allowed us to expend less food energy intake on digestion and permitted more energy to be given over to our expanding brain, through electric lighting that allows us to stay up after dark, to the technologies of the bicycle, the washing machine, the pill, abortion, and fertility treatments that have chipped away at patriarchy—has required a growing consumption of energy. All of these natural limits were imposed as arbitrarily as the rules and dictates of any illegitimate government. For this reason, one would think that the most defiant possible demand of anarchism—the political philosophy that challenges not just the power of the state, but all illegitimate authority—would be for the ever greater degrees of freedom delivered by the liberatory power of more energy. Indeed the entirety of the left, not just anarchists, in recognition of this potential for liberation, used to argue not against energy expenditure or technology, but that these advances be shared by everyone, rather than just the elite few.

Energy is freedom. Growth is freedom.

Austerity Ecology marries incisive science writing, radical politics, and blazing prose. It's an important book about climate, and an even more important book about the politics of doing something about the climate.

Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff [Leigh Phillips/Zero Books]

https://boingboing.net/2016/01/12/keep-your-scythe-the-real-gre.html

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yierknives · 3 years ago

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What do I need to pay attention to when buying a new Bluetooth speaker on Black Friday 2021？

Bluetooth speakers are one of the best ways to enjoy your favorite music wirelessly, but if we’re talking about smart speakers, then the value is even higher. As Black Friday approaches, deals will start swinging at you left and right, especially Bluetooth speakers.

More and more people now own smartphones and other gadgets that no longer feature the 3.5mm audio jack, and that means one of two things: they need a dongle or gear upgrades to Bluetooth.Waiting for Black Friday 2021 and Cyber Monday 2021 is the best way to nab yourself a really nice speaker at a proper discount.

We’re setting up to follow the major holiday shopping spree, like Amazon’s Black Friday 2021 sale, Black Friday 2021 offers at Walmart, and Best Buy’s Black Friday 2021 deals.

When is Black Friday 2021 going to start?

The Black Friday deals will kick in on the 26th of November this year. Recently, retailers have extended the duration of the shopping event all throughout the weekend and all the way to Monday, which is now called “Cyber Monday”. Some even start with warm-up deals on the week before Black Friday, so keep your ears perked starting from the 19th of November, just in case.

Will there be speaker deals on Black Friday 2021?

Most definitely. And if you don’t find the one you want, be sure to stick around until Cyber Monday 2021 kicks in. The Mondays are usually reserved to tech gadgets and online sales — hence the name. We expect huge discounts on Amazon’s speakers as well as Bluetooth speakers from major and respected audio companies. Below are our expectations, based on experience from the previous years.

How to find the best deal on Bluetooth speakers during Black Friday 2021?

Well, your best bet is to cross-reference the large retailers and try to grab the cheapest offer you can find before it’s gone. There are a lot of flash sales going on during shopping events, not to mention a lot of the discounted stock is limited. It may also be beneficial to keep an eye on a couple of smaller stores — these don’t get much traffic and may offer a crazy deal from time to time just to get more eyes on them.

Before you go out and blindly purchase a Bluetooth speaker this holiday season, make sure you inform yourself, so you don’t regret your purchase down the road.

Check the model number and price

One common practice technology vendors use for Black Friday is to create special variations for their products during the shopping season. Typically, these models are a blend of the vendor’s various other products. It may sound like a good deal, but vendors usually don’t offer support or warranty replacements on Black Friday models because they’re built specifically for the holiday season. These models will typically state on the box in super small text that there is no warranty support on them. This doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get a bad product in the end, but it’s worth noting that if something goes wrong, you’re on your own.

After you’ve verified the model number actually exists, and it isn’t a specialty model, go ahead and check the speaker’s price. Some speakers may look like they’re on a steep discount, but in reality, the price was recently reduced and could potentially be the new price going forward. While rare, some vendors choose to hike the price a few months before to make it look like you’re getting a discount. Camel is a fantastic resource to check whether or not an item has recently hiked in price or has seen an even greater price reduction.

Is it waterproof?

A portable speaker isn’t so portable if you can’t bring it with you, would it? While it’s not a requirement and highly depends on what you plan on doing with your speaker, water resistance is something you should be looking for.

Electronic devices typically get IP ratings, so you’ll want to do your research on the specific speaker you’re looking for. If you want to take your speaker on the beach, for example, you’ll want IPX7, IPX8, or IP67/IP68. If your speaker has an IPX8 or IPX68 rating, you’ll have the highest level of protection. Your speaker could get splashed by an ocean wave, and it should survive it no problem. Surprisingly, some speakers take it a step further and offer full water protection, even enticing you to let the speaker float on the water.

If your speaker is rated anything less like IPX4, you’ll want to be super careful when using it out and about. It should survive rain, sweat, and things of that nature, but beyond that, you’ll need to be extra careful.

Also, be aware that most vendors will have an IP rating but won’t actually cover you under warranty if your speaker gets water damaged.

Are there additional features?

Many Bluetooth speakers include a battery that can power other devices. This means the speaker can charge your smartphone while you’re on the go.Bluetooth speakers designed to be used at home use an AC adapter that plugs into a wall outlet.Portable Bluetooth speakers run from a battery for on-the-go power. Some speakers offer both battery and plug-in options.

Speaking of camping, some speakers will have an AM/FM tuner. Not only will that allow you to tune into the radio, but it’s helpful if any bad weather is brewing or if any potential threats are in your area.

Some speakers may even come with party lights — yep, you read that right. If you’re planning to use your Bluetooth speaker at a party, it can really liven up the room. Light-enabled speakers come in various shapes and sizes, with some offering strobe lights, multicolored lights. Some may even sync up the lights to the music.

BLUETOOTH SPEAKERS FAQ

Q. Why do I get static and poor sound quality from my Bluetooth speaker? A. Bluetooth speakers offer a maximum connection range of about 33 feet from the source. As you approach 33 feet, the audio quality drops. You also may see lower quality when the speaker’s battery nears empty. Charging the battery while trying to play music may cause static as well.

Q. Why are some Bluetooth speakers called water-resistant and others called waterproof? A. A water-resistant speaker will stand up to splashing or light rain. A waterproof Bluetooth speaker can handle full submersion in water or extremely heavy rain. Look at the IP rating to figure out a speaker’s resistance level. The first digit in the two-digit IP number is the dust-protection number, while the second digit shows water protection. On a zero-to-nine scale, the higher the number, the better the protection.

Q. Why won’t my Bluetooth speaker pair with my smartphone? A. There could be a few different reasons. First, make sure to turn on Bluetooth capabilities on the smartphone. Next, if the smartphone already has a few active Bluetooth pairings going, disconnect a couple of them. If that doesn’t work, try turning off the devices and turning them back on after a few minutes to reset. Finally, make sure the batteries on both devices are charged.

Q. Are Bluetooth speakers safe to use outdoors? A. You can use any portable Bluetooth speaker in dry outdoor conditions. Just keep it out of direct sunlight for extended periods of time to avoid damage to the case. However, if you’ll be using your Bluetooth speaker in wet weather or near water, you need a water- or weather-resistant model.

Conclusion

Whether you’re going to the beach, camping, hiking, or a party, a Bluetooth speaker is essential. Don’t be that person that plays music from your phone’s speaker at max volume. Take a Bluetooth speaker with you and impress your friends, family, or coworkers.

Why choose DINDINMODERN

● A variety of high-quality Bluetooth speakers are available. ● Delivery from the local warehouse, within 3 days. ● Manufactured in our own factory, cost-effective. ● Excellent pre-sales and after-sales service. ● Free returns ● Excellent materials, safe and durable. ● Pursue innovation and optimize design ● We listen to customer needs and feedback.

#Waterproof speaker #Black Friday #portable Bluetooth speaker

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secretcupcakesublime · 4 years ago

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Reducing the risk of design

Light, flexible, do even less, and more. Again and again, design culture encourages us to push rapidly to the point where design is a pure thread in the larger corporate spool and trim research and design operations. Writer and author Nikki Anderson describes the implications of this pressure to perform high speed research: "Once we are asked to synthesize at light pace, user research is a way for teams to take a shortcut — to create conclusions based on quick associations, thoughts, and quotes."

The effect is design based on assumptions, or incomplete user and customer knowledge. For example, a Fortune 500 company (let's call it Company Q) hired me to do a usability test for a complex user interface (usability testing includes a series of one-on-one sessions with actual users who are asked to perform different tasks when using a product or piece of software).

The study yielded what would possibly become identifiable patterns and when I was told to pause and send the results to the client immediately I was halfway through the research. My clarification of the need for more time to perform a detailed and nuanced review fell on deaf ears: "Just send a short video." I reticently submitted a video snippet of a user interface ( UI) struggling participant.

There was no time for context, background or nuance. Company Q product manager remembered the person in the video from a previous experience and dismissed his struggles: "He's a crank, we can't base decisions on him." Without discussing this serious UI problem, the company passed on.

This sales manager had been addicted to his client emotionally (see endowment effect below). This emotional attachment impeded his capacity to objectively assess the strengths and weaknesses of the product. It's no wonder that professionals are forming positive feelings about their products.

Comprehensible but also troublesome. As explained in an article about UX's ROI by UX guru Jared Spool, ignoring user needs carries a high cost: assume you get a lot of support calls, for example, because the design doesn't do anything that users expect. That's a high cost because of a bad judgment on the design. How expensive? The average cost of a single support call in North America is $15,56 according to HDI's Jeffrey Rumburg. Even though support calls only increase by 83,000 per month, the annual cost is more than $15 million.

Conversely, functions to solve interface issues. According to the McKinsey report, "The Business Value of Design": "One online gaming company found that a slight increase in the usability of its homepage was followed by a dramatic 25 percent increase in sales." Note: For this study, McKinsey tracked the design practices of 300 publicly listed companies in multiple countries and industries over a five-year period. This interviewed or questioned their senior management and architecture members. The McKinsey team gathered more than two million pieces of financial information and reported over 100,000 design actions.

Such figures illustrate the direct financial costs of rushing market research and shortchanging customer and company interests. We also demonstrate the financial value of addressing consumer issues. I will shed light on the approaches used in this article to resolve these concerns: carefully choosing a study location; negotiating with stakeholders to provide ample time for review without disrupting the design process; making rational, evidence-based design decisions; engaging in design reduction. 1. Background Over Comfort: Why Location Matters

Where you carry out analysis, matters as much as the method of study. Consider the value of the venue before booking a room for your next interview with users. You may not want to book a quiet meeting room if the users operate with multiple distractions in a noisy environment. The user experience will actually help you determine the best research approach for collecting feedback (interviews, diary analyses, observation / contextual enquiry, usability tests, cognitive walkthroughs, etc.).

That is exactly what happened when our team conducted UX research for a major construction equipment manufacturer. We should have taken machine operators to a quiet showroom to ask them questions about the machinery and what was working well and what was not. That would have been the easy choice but the wrong one. Instead, we traveled to U.S. , Mexico, and Colombia construction sites where we observed operators using the equipment outside where it was dusty, dirty, and noisy.

Observations on the field included: chances of traffic accidents due to noise, and poor visibility in high winds. The challenge faced by shorter operators when they entered the cab for certain controls (operators in Latin America were, on average, smaller than their counterparts in the USA). The rapid corrosion of metal equipment on a construction site near the ocean, caused by salt.Observing consumers in their real-world work environment: Minimized the chance of solving the wrong problem, because we did not rely on sales or product second-hand knowledge (this occurs more frequently than you would think). We (the researchers) were allowed to hear the wind, see the dust and feel the bumps when riding on these massive machines. Given actionable information not collected in an office. Our study at sites in Mexico and Colombia has shown the old adage to be valid. Meeting users where they worked on a daily basis yielded rich, qualitative data which our client used to inform important design decisions. 2. Concession

That was a good result. Real-world problems were identified in the fieldwork in Mexico and Colombia, and stakeholders acted on that information. That's not always the case here. As happened with Walmart when management decided to change aisle and shelving design based on a customer survey, there is a temptation to make design decisions quickly based on incomplete information. When asked to customers if the stores were too cluttered they said yes. Walmart spent millions re-designing stores only to lose sales in excess of $ 1 billion. Sales increased when Walmart reverted to the cluttered aisles. What went wrong?

A poorly worded survey and inadequate study were undoubtedly two factors for the debacle. Walmart depended too much on what customers said and not what they were doing. In consumer and user experience the value of putting significant weight on what applications and consumers are doing is a cornerstone concept.

Underhill, a business and market research pioneer, is completely correct. Unfortunately, even when stakeholders decide to finance research (ride-alongs, shop-alongs, contextual inquiry), tremendous pressure is exerted to move forward when a UX or market study is completed, leaving little time for detailed examination.

The goal is to strike a balance between pace and thoroughness in these situations. Brand managers and other stakeholders have a lot of responsibility and are often under pressure to rapidly transfer goods into the market. Nevertheless, rushing the design process will result in the emergence of research into ignoring key user needs.

Compromise serves two purposes throughout the passage from study review to design. Firstly, it provides ample time for researchers to study, evaluate and report reliable and actionable results that will help the design team move forward. Second, as with any undertaking, a willingness to compromise sets a degree of confidence. 3. Decisions on better functionality

Compromise and trust are a solid basis for establishing a collaborative partnership between researchers, designers and stakeholders. These partnerships lead to an conducive environment for better design decisions. Those points tend to be simple, even transparent.Perhaps straightforward but not easily attainable. Why? For what? Human character. Human beings are subject to what psychologists term the endowment effect, the tendency simply because they belong to you to overvalue objects that you own. A typical example of selling a house is. You are emotionally attached to your house as the landlord, as you have put effort into repairs and upgrades. The house has pretty good memories. You live there, after all. The buyer does not say much of this. She just cares about the objective market value and for the least amount of money, she gets the best house. It is difficult for people to part from the object, a house in this case, once the endowment effect holds onto. Changing a UI or physical object in the sense of design is approximately equal to parting with it. For example, the product manager announced to me and a room full of stakeholders while reviewing a complex UI for a programmable logic controller: "My name is Jim, and I love this product." Honesty points. As predicted, Jim held fast to his conviction when I presented the report that the UI was perfect and didn't need change. He was attached, unsurprisingly, to the computer and the UI.

The evidence supports this statement. According to the McKinsey study listed above: "Less than 5 percent of those we surveyed indicated that their members could make rational design decisions." One of the challenges to making sound design decisions is the endowment effect. See A Designer's Guide to Good Decisions to learn how to avoid other can mistakes in making decisions.

Knowledge of the endowment effect and other decision traps leads to better design, as it helps us to make difficult decisions during the actual process. 4. Reduction of Architecture One such option is whether to delete from an current design or from early iteration of design. For instance, the image below left could easily be an early iteration of a mobile app. Few would dispute the power of simple, elegant, and engaging design. Sometimes, these results benefit from deliberate, thoughtful reduction. From the number and size of the elements on the screen to the simplicity or complexity of the color palette, it's all about the the design to the point that it's simple and easy to use without losing something significant.

A designer could also ask in the cleaner example (above right) if "This Month" and "165: Max Pulse" are required. If not, cutting them will be another downsizing. The point is not to discuss the specifics of the UI for this fake fitness program. Instead, designers will expect the "everything-but-the-kitchen-sink" effect and recommend eliminating unnecessary elements of design. Effective strategies include: Gently remembering the dangers of a high cognitive load to stakeholders and other team members. Sharing cluttered designs with the team (any app or website will do) and asking them to quickly find a particular feature. Their battle to find the feature should make the case.Sharing video clips of your company's past research projects demonstrating how quickly users get overwhelmed while communicating with a crowded UI.

By adhering to this reduction strategy early in the design process, the company gains by reducing the risk of customer frustration, task or cart abandonment, and dissatisfied clients. Design reduction is important for creating engaging, user-centric design but works only when combined with robust user research that leads to informed design decisions. Conclusion

Since analysis, decisions, and the design process go hand in hand, the focus of this article has been on identifying the risks of user testing and design rushing. Mitigating this risk does not demand that research and design teams double in size. We have also introduced four concrete strategies that teams can quickly implement: Meaning over Convenience: Position matters. Either at home, in a café, or on a noisy construction site, perform UX and market research where consumers engage with your product.

Compromise Compromise If market customers can not necessarily demand a detailed review, compromise. The design team will move forward with minor design changes in the direction of the stakeholder, while promising not to make significant changes until the final review of the study is complete.

Better design decisions Allow better choices by keeping an eye out for the all-too-human propensity to get attached to a design you made. Reduction Remove redundant UI components leaving only what users and clients need to complete the task at hand.

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technicallyelegantruins · 4 years ago

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Reducing the risk of design

get in touch with us!

#b2b ecommerce #b2b content marketing #b2b seo #Ecommerce #socialmedia

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coopdigitalnewsletter · 4 years ago

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24 August 2020: 11% of UK food is now bought online. John Lewis will go online first. Loyalty cards.

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it looks at what's happening in the internet/digital world and how it's relevant to the Co-op, to retail businesses, and most importantly to people, communities and society. Thank you for reading - send ideas and feedback to @rod on Twitter. Please tell a friend about it!

[Image: Peter Bond on Unsplash]

11% of UK food is now bought online

Tesco is hiring 16,000 staff in its online business: 10,000 to pick customer orders from shelves and 3,000 delivery drivers. Many of them will be “lockdown temps” already working for the company. This is Tesco’s answer to one of the big lockdown questions for retailers: would shoppers return to the shops as lockdowns ease, or would they stick with online shopping?

💥 Why this matters: the shift to online has been very big and very fast but hasn’t snapped back at the same speed as lockdowns started easing. This suggests that some shopping activity formerly done in store may have permanently shifted online. If so, the virus accelerated online shopping’s share of spend by years.

Three quarters of UK does grocery shopping online: “Waitrose polled 2,000 people across the UK and found that 77% now do at least some of their grocery shopping online, compared with 61% the year before”. If that’s how many people do *some* of their shopping online, how much of total spend is now online? The Office for National Statistics says:

“In July 2020, retail sales volumes increased by 3.6% when compared with June, and are 3.0% above pre-pandemic levels in February 2020. [...] Online retail sales fell by 7.0% in July when compared with June, but the strong growth experienced over the pandemic has meant that sales are still 50.4% higher than February’s pre-pandemic levels.”

Ocado thinks the shift to online is permanent, but that’s their business so they would say that! Research company Retail Economics thinks that “almost half of consumers feel that the pandemic will have a permanent effect on the way they shop” (link to that BBC story because Retail Economics’s site is paywalled).

Benedict Evans’s The ecommerce surge which compares UK and US growth in online shopping in various categories.

Walmart sales up 6% but most of that is from online sales, which doubled.

“We expect John Lewis to be a 60% online retailer”

John Lewis plans to reinvent itself for an era of online, and Chair Sharon White sent a plan to partners (staff) in the group. “We expect John Lewis to be a 60% online retailer, from 40% pre-Covid-19; and Waitrose to rise above 20%, from 5%.”

One interesting part is a new “rental/resale/recycle” option for furniture in which furniture can be rented until purchased, or rented and then returned:

“The scheme means shoppers can use the service to try before they buy - payments stop if they reach the original purchase price before the end of the hire period, and they can keep the item or have it collected. After two 12-month rental periods the items will have been paid for outright.”

The other interesting bit is:

“Private rented housing: As we repurpose and potentially reduce our shop estate, we want to put excess space to good social use. We are exploring with third parties the concept of new mixed-use affordable housing.”

Loyalty cards, membership programmes and delivery costs

Tesco plans to add free grocery delivery to its Clubcard Plus service. Responding to Amazon including free grocery delivery in Prime for some customers, CEO Dave Lewis said:

“I understand the move [from Amazon]. The idea of Prime is very similar to where we are in Clubcard Plus, in terms of bringing a whole bunch of benefits together. So an opportunity into the future for us is to think about how we put delivery into Clubcard Plus. That’s always been the direction of travel.”

Elsewhere in retail, Walmart’s Prime-like membership programme Walmart+ is delayed.

💥 Why this matters: supermarkets are working out how they might recoup delivery costs. One logical end point might be the Costco model, in which the retailer sells goods at 0% markup but finds its margin in membership fees. A big risk is that if the retailer bundles too much or the wrong things into a membership whose fees keep increasing, it starts to look like poor value for money.

UK government and exam results: move fast and break things

The exams results controversy is an early and obvious example of what “life under the algorithm” would be like. Often painful. The problem they were trying to fix (standardised grades that made sense from one year to the next) ended up being a smaller problem than the algorithmic fix (moderating grades downward in a way that ended up disadvantaging pupils from poorer areas). The algorithm’s decisions looked unfair and capricious. The eventual fix was to revoke the algorithm.

Rachel Coldicutt’s piece is good on how the current UK government likes to dismantle things and move faster. It’s not clear that the answer is governance, in that Ofqual no doubt had endless governance process and documentation. Maybe the answer is making sure leaders are empowered to form teams that can achieve the desired outcomes, and held accountable.

💥 Why this matters: it would be good if algorithms were more open and opportunities for redress clearer. “Getting rid of the algorithm is v welcome, but not enough.”

Other retail news

M&S to cut 7,000 jobs over next three months - challenging times ahead for all retail, as job uncertainties increase. Better news: UK retail sales climb back to pre-pandemic levels.

Morrisons considers ditching all 'bags for life' - “It said a full replacement of its bags for life would save 90 million plastic bags being used each year, the equivalent of 3,510 tonnes of plastic per year.”

Google can now read grocery labels for the blind - an update to Google's assistance app adds AI image recognition for food shopping.

Various things

Amazon launches online pharmacy in India.

4 ‘CovTech’ success stories you probably haven’t heard of - Sierra Leone, Bangladesh, Togo and Rwanda responding decisively with digital transformation projects.

Apple’s low-carbon aluminum is a climate game changer - the same metal but a manufacturing process that doesn’t result in the direct release of greenhouse gases. Apple plans to be “carbon neutral across its entire business, manufacturing supply chain, and product life cycle by 2030”.

Amazon is now delivering 66% of its own orders - gradually bringing in house all of its logistics. It shipped 415 million packages in July. But thanks to the virus delivery cos like Fedex and UPS are still growing.

South Wales police lose landmark facial recognition case.

Co-op Digital news and events

Introducing our accessibility policy for Co-op products and services - “The policy makes accessibility standards more tangible because colleagues can see what their responsibilities include”.

Free of charge events:

Andy’s Man Club – Gentleman's Peer to Peer Mental Health Meet Up – Mondays 7pm

PyData Ethics in Data Panel, 24 August 6.30pm – PyDataMcr welcome everyone with an interest in all things data, from beginners to seasoned pros. At next week’s meet up they have our very own Julian Tate from Open Data Manchester and Dr Keeley Crockett from MMU talking everything that is ethical in data. Sign up here.

LGBTQIA – Hackathon – 28-30 Aug

Northern Aze User Group - Meet Up – 2 Sept – 6pm

Motion North – Meet Up – 17 Sept - 7pm

Paid for events:

Invisible Cities - Online Tours of Manchester or Edinburgh – Various Dates & Times

Mandala Yoga – Online Yoga Sessions - Various Dates & Times

Tech Ethics – Meet Up – Various Dates & Times

Future Health Tech – Webinar - 26 Aug - 6.30pm

New & Emerging Technologies: Big Data - Webinar – 26 Aug - 7pm

More detail on Federation House’s events. You can also see how The Federation is planning for a safe return to the co-working floor.

Thank you for reading

Thank you, beloved readers and contributors. Please continue to send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc to @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading, please tell a friend! If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

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hollywoodjuliorivas · 4 years ago

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Opinion

It’s 2022. What Does Life Look Like?

The pandemic could shape the world, much as World War II and the Great Depression did.

David Leonhardt

By David Leonhardt

Mr. Leonhardt writes The Morning newsletter.

July 10, 2020

Credit...Illustration by Zak Tebbal; Photographs from Getty Images

It’s 2022, and the coronavirus has at long last been defeated. After a miserable year-and-a-half, alternating between lockdowns and new outbreaks, life can finally begin returning to normal.

But it will not be the old normal. It will be a new world, with a reshaped economy, much as war and depression reordered life for previous generations.

Thousands of stores and companies that were vulnerable before the virus arrived have disappeared. Dozens of colleges are shutting down, in the first wave of closures in the history of American higher education. People have also changed long-held patterns of behavior: Outdoor socializing is in, business trips are out.

And American politics — while still divided in many of the same ways it was before the virus — has entered a new era.

Continue reading the main story

All of this, obviously, is conjecture. The future is unknowable. But the pandemic increasingly looks like one of the defining events of our time. The best-case scenarios are now out of reach, and the United States is suffering through a new virus surge that’s worse than in any other country.

With help from economists, politicians and business executives, I have tried to imagine what a post-Covid economy may look like. One message I heard is that the course of the virus itself will play the biggest role in the medium term. If scientific breakthroughs come quickly and the virus is largely defeated this year, there may not be many permanent changes to everyday life.

Refer your friends to The Times.

They’ll enjoy our special rate of $1 a week.

On the other hand, if a vaccine remains out of reach for years, the long-term changes could be truly profound. Any industry that depends on close human contact would be at risk.

Large swaths of the cruise-ship and theme-park industries might go away. So could many movie theaters and minor-league baseball teams. The long-predicted demise of the traditional department store would finally come to pass. Thousands of restaurants would be wiped out (even if they would eventually be replaced by different restaurants).

The changes that I’m imagining in this article are based on neither an unexpectedly fast or slow resolution, but instead on what many scientists consider the baseline. In this scenario, a vaccine will arrive sometime in 2021. Until then, the world will endure waves of sickness, death and uncertainty.

Continue reading the main story

Before we get into the details, there is one more caveat worth mentioning: Many things will not change. That’s one of history’s lessons.

The financial crisis of 2007-9 didn’t cause Americans to sour on stocks, and it didn’t lead to an overhaul of Wall Street. The election of the first Black president didn’t usher in an era of racial conciliation. The 9/11 attacks didn’t make Americans unwilling to fly. The Vietnam War didn’t bring an end to extended foreign wars without a clear mission.

Yet if the pandemic really does shape life for the next year, it will probably be remembered as a more significant historical event than those precedents. It could easily be the most important global experience since World War II and the Great Depression. Events that hold the world’s attention for long stretches — and that alter the rhythms of everyday life — do tend to leave a legacy.

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Credit...Illustration by Zak Tebbal; Photograph from Getty Images

Weak companies will die

“It’s only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett likes to say, “that you learn who’s been swimming naked.”

His point is that companies with flawed business models can look healthy in good times. Out of habit, many customers continue to buy from them. But when the economy weakens, people have to make decisions about where to pull back. They often start with products and services that they find the least valuable or that they can replace with a cheaper alternative.

A downturn, says Emily Oster, a Brown University economist, “is an opportunity to revisit inefficiencies.” And the coronavirus is likely to cause a larger version of this phenomenon than a typical recession.

Continue reading the main story

Local newspapers will be one casualty. They were already struggling, because Google, Facebook and Craigslist had taken away their main source of revenue: print advertising. Between 2008 and 2019, American newspapers eliminated about half of all newsroom jobs.

The virus has led to further declines in advertising and more job cuts — and could end up forcing dozens more papers to fold or become tiny shells of their old selves. If that happens, their cities will be left without perhaps the only major source of information about local politics, business, education and the like.

Traditional department stores are another example. In recent years, they have lost significant business to online retailers and quietly lost even more to big-box stores. Many Americans have decided they prefer either specialty stores (like Home Depot) or discount stores (like Costco) over the one-stop-shopping experience that Sears, Macy’s and J.C. Penney have long offered.

Now the virus has interrupted in-person shopping and caused many consumers to shift even more business online, to Amazon, Target and Walmart. “The retailers doing fair to poorly are absolutely not coming out of this,” said Mark Cohen, a former executive at Sears and Federated Department Stores who teaches at Columbia Business School. “Many, many of them are going to fail, have already failed or will fail when they reopen.”

If they do, they will create spillover victims — the hundreds of malls that rely on department stores for rent and foot traffic. The roughly 250 fancier malls around the country, like The Westchester in suburban New York and The Galleria in Houston, are likely to survive, Mr. Cohen predicted. Some will convert old stores into spaces for experiences, like dining, bowling, medical care or a golf driving range.

But many of the country’s remaining 1,100 or so traditional malls are at risk of failing. Even before the virus, Amazon turned two former malls near Cleveland into warehouses, a physical manifestation of changing shopping habits.

A third at-risk industry — higher education — is a bit different from the others, because it’s so heavily subsidized by the government. Yet dozens of colleges, both private and public, are facing real trouble.

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College enrollment in the United States has been growing almost continually since the Civil War. It kept growing even after the baby boomers finished college, because a rising percentage of young people were enrolling. But the 150-plus-year boom appears to have ended about a decade ago. Undergraduate enrollment fell 8 percent between 2010 and 2018.

Why? Birthrates have fallen, and the percentage of young people going to college isn’t rising significantly anymore. The population trends are especially stark in the Northeast and Midwest, where many colleges are. Late last year, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a bracing report called, “The Looming Enrollment Crisis.”

The virus is exacerbating almost every problem that colleges faced. They have already lost revenue from summer school, food service, parking fees and more. Perhaps most significant, the recession is hammering state budgets, which will probably lead to future cuts in college funding.

The immediate question is whether colleges will be able to bring back students this fall, as administrators are desperately hoping. If they can’t, enrollment and tuition revenue are likely to drop sharply, creating existential crises for many less selective private colleges and smaller public universities.

Yuval Levin, a conservative policy expert and the founding editor of National Affairs, put it this way: “The top 20 schools are probably not going to change. But what is actually higher education — more than 4,000 universities — I think will change a lot.”

Of course, business failures can be healthy. They are part of the “creative destruction” that the economist Joseph Schumpeter famously described, allowing more efficient and innovative rivals to rise. The disappearance of many old department stores won’t be a tragedy if they are replaced by stores people prefer.

But some of the virus-related destruction will have damaging side effects. When local newspapers close, corruption and political polarization tend to rise, while voter turnout tends to fall, academic research has found. Cuts to higher-education budgets could make it even harder for poor and middle-class students to graduate.

Continue reading the main story

“The biggest danger that we face as a sector,” Ted Mitchell, a former college president who now runs the American Council on Education, an industry group, told me, “is a loss of the gains we’ve made over the past 20 years in the access for first-generation and minority students.”

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Credit...Illustration by Zak Tebbal; Photograph from Getty Images

Habits will change

If you talk to students, parents and teachers about remote learning during the pandemic — from preschool through college — they’re likely to tell you that it’s been disappointing. It went “very, very badly” last spring, Mr. Levin says, and many parents assume it will not be much better this fall.

But if you talk to white-collar workers about their experiences with videoconferencing, you will hear a different story: It doesn’t replace the richness of in-person conversations, but many meetings work perfectly well over Zoom, FaceTime or Google Meet.

Millions of workers are returning to the office or will be soon. Many have no choice, including teachers, janitors and retail workers. But for many white-collar workers, the remote-work experiment shows no sign of ending — a trend that could depress the commercial real-estate market and business travel long after a vaccine is available.

Twitter has told many employees that they can plan to work from home forever. In New York, several major companies, including Barclays, JP Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, have said they don’t expect to use as much Manhattan office space as they did before the pandemic.

As Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, said this spring, “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.” Working from home creates its own efficiencies — less time spent on traffic-clogged roads, more flexibility for parents and people caring for elderly relatives.

Continue reading the main story

Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, has 200 economists around the world who report to him, and he has noticed that they are more efficient than before the pandemic struck. In the past, he would often get on a plane for a short meeting with a few economists. The virus has caused them to move these meetings online, where they share screens with one another and work on databases at the same time.

“We’ve gotten used to it very quickly and like it,” Mr. Zandi said. “I just don’t see us going back.” Because other businesses are having the same experience, he predicted, “Business travel is going to fundamentally change.”

In-person meetings and conferences will continue to happen. But the threshold for what requires travel, and the time, cost and fatigue it brings, will rise. “Maybe we’ve discovered that we don’t need to travel as much as we did before,” said Cecilia Rouse, the dean of Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. American Airlines and Delta Air Lines recently offered buyouts to employees, and Airbus cut thousands of jobs, signs that the companies expect airline travel to be depressed for years.

The larger theme is that crises can force or accelerate behavior changes. Some of the old behavior will revert when the pandemic ends. But not all of it will. In some cases, people will realize that they were sticking to old habits out of inertia and prefer their new habits.

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Credit...Illustration by Zak Tebbal; Photograph from Getty Images

Politics will shape the economy

The biggest source of uncertainty about the post-virus American economy is political. Past crises have transformed the economy, but almost always because of government policy.

The Civil War allowed Abraham Lincoln and his allies to create a transcontinental railroad and a national network of public universities. The Great Depression led to a raft of federal laws that reduced inequality. The housing crisis that began in 2007 helped elect a Democratic president and Congress that extended health insurance to millions of people.

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If President Trump wins re-election this year, it may not lead to any major new economic legislation, partly because he has not proposed any. But Mr. Trump would continue to have vast regulatory authority, and he is likely to continue giving businesses more flexibility to behave as they want.

One of the key post-virus implications could be further consolidation in many industries, with big companies becoming even bigger. Early signs indicate they are surviving the lockdown better than smaller rivals, in part because they have more cash on hand, better access to loans and an easier time switching to online sales.

Consolidation, in turn, tends to increase income and wealth inequality, in part because the largest companies are run by highly paid executives, typically based in major metro areas, and the companies’ stock is disproportionately owned by the affluent.

“My basic fear,” Heather Boushey, a leading progressive economist, said, “is that it leads to a rule by the oligarchs.”

At this point, however, Mr. Trump is the underdog; he trails Joe Biden in both national and swing-state polls. Democrats also have a realistic chance to retake control of the Senate. (They would need to win five of the 11 races that appear competitive.) If Democrats control both the White House and Congress, they will be poised to embark on a sweeping economic agenda.

Some analysts believe that they may even see some support from across the aisle. A big Trump loss, amid a pandemic and recession, could jolt the Republican Party into being more open to government action. “The debate for Republicans to be having in the 21st century is not big or small government — it’s what do we need from our government,” Mr. Levin said.

Jake Sullivan, a top Biden adviser, said: “Even Republicans — younger Republicans — have recognized that the center of gravity is shifting on the relationship between the state and the market.” The virus, he added, “will only accelerate that.”

Continue reading the main story

True, predictions of forthcoming Republican moderation haven’t fared well in recent years. Yet even if they again prove wrong, Democrats may pursue an ambitious agenda by abandoning the Senate filibuster, as many progressives favor, and passing legislation on a majority basis.

That agenda is shaping up to have two defining features. The first is reducing inequality — through higher taxes on the rich, greater scrutiny of big companies, new efforts to reduce racial injustice and more investments and programs for the middle class and poor, including health care, education and paid leave. The second is acting on climate change, which could cause even more global misery than the coronavirus. “Climate change cannot be solved by the private sector,” Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democrats’ minority leader, told me. “People under 45 realize it.”

Mr. Biden may not seem like a history-altering figure, certainly like less of one than Barack Obama did. But he could wind up presiding over a larger scale of political change than Mr. Obama did, for reasons largely independent of the two men themselves.

Ms. Boushey, who runs the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, argues that progressives are better positioned to pass sweeping change in 2021 than they were in 2009, after the financial crisis. Then, the only major policy area in which Democrats had a comprehensive, politically viable plan was health care — and, not coincidentally, it became Mr. Obama’s biggest policy success.

“Although you had this crisis, you didn’t have the ideas that were ready to go,” Ms. Boushey said. Today, by contrast, progressives have spent years working through the details of plans on climate change, high-end tax increases, antitrust policy and more. And while Mr. Obama’s team had only a couple of months to plan for taking office amid a national crisis, Mr. Biden’s team would have almost a year. “There is a whole vision that I think is ready,” Ms. Boushey added. “And there is a lot more runway.”

Mr. Biden and congressional Democrats would need to avoid getting bogged down in intramural squabbles between the center and the left. But the potential exists for the farthest-reaching period of legislative change since Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

In less than 15 years, the United States has suffered the biggest two economic crises since the Great Depression, the worst pandemic in more than a century and the election of two presidents unlike any before them — and diametrically unlike each other. If there is a single lesson of the current era of American politics, it’s that change can happen more quickly than we imagined.

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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 years ago

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#2yrsago Keep your scythe, the real green future is high-tech, democratic, and radical

• The capitalist says: There may or may not be resource limits, but don’t worry about them! Innovation will come along in time! Full steam ahead!

• The green lefty says: Innovation can’t save us! There’s an upper limit to what humans can have / an upper limit on the number of humans. Slam on the brakes!

The difference is a poor-hating snobbery and nothing more...

Rather than campaign against Walmart, lets use its supply-chain management to liberate its goods from exploitation!

The left has done this before, with enormous success, in the area of AIDS activism:

A sustainable world is one in which we do things better. The better we do them -- the more material abundance we harness -- the more free we will be, both from want and coercion:

Energy is freedom. Growth is freedom.

Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff [Leigh Phillips/Zero Books]

https://boingboing.net/2016/01/12/keep-your-scythe-the-real-gre.html

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concurringconqueror · 5 years ago

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The Best Free Music Download Apps for Android [November 2019]

No art form has seen its distribution model change more in the past thirty years than music. By the early 1990s, most music listeners had switched to listening to their music through CDs instead of cassettes or vinyl, thanks to the improved clarity of sound and ease of use that came with both formats. Music was still consumed either through the radio or by purchasing CDs from a local retailer, whether it be your favorite music shop or a generic shopping center like Walmart or Target. In the late 1990s, IRC, Hotline, and Usenet were all capable of sending files of any kind over the web, but it wasn’t until Napster first appeared on the market that things truly started to shake up. Napster allowed its users to upload and download their favorite songs as MP3s, and although the downloads were typically fairly slow thanks to dial-up service at the time, the advent of Napster and its easy-to-use interface truly shook the industry to its core.

Throughout the next decade, the future of commercial music seemed dark. On the bright side, you had the iPod and iTunes completely revolutionize the market, charging 99 cents for singles (later $1.29) and around $9.99 for downloadable versions of your favorite albums. The ease of access to a full market of MP3 downloads that made it easy to transfer to your iPod or other MP3 player helped keep the market from completely crashing. Outside of iTunes and other similar music offerings, things seemed to be getting worse. Limewire, alongside its alternative counterpart Frostwire, made it easy to download tracks like Napster before it, along with music videos and other collections that, while plagued by spam and poor download speeds, kept people from committing fully to an iTunes-only future.

Peer-2-peer also remained a problem, with the rise of The Pirate Bay, Kickass Torrents, and other similar clients that kept the RIAA on their toes, issuing legal warnings and alerts to users around the United States about their illegal file sharing habits. To say the least, the 2000s ended with the entire music industry looking beat up and in bad shape.

It wasn’t until the arrival of Spotify in July of 2011 that the music scene seemed to find the second coming of an iTunes-like service. Though plenty will argue against Spotify “saving” the industry in any fashion, the switch to a focus on music streaming and subscription services seems to have, at the very least, helped stop a massive amount of people from being pulled towards piracy in favor of using streaming services. Spotify has also done a great job converting free users to paying customers, with forty to fifty percent of users having made the move to paying for Spotify. Now, in 2019, nearly every company—Apple, Amazon, Google, etc.—have made the move to focusing almost entirely on the streaming market over on-demand purchases.

But the free tier of Spotify is still relatively limited, especially when it comes to on-the-go listening. Spotify demands you pay to access the ability to listen to your favorite songs and albums without being forced to shuffle a specific artist. The early days of smartphones, prior to the ability to stream and download music for a low monthly cost in return, featured dozens and dozens of music downloader applications on both iOS and Android, and while those apps still exist, they perhaps aren’t as popular or as bountiful as before.

Still, while Spotify’s free tier on mobile may work in most situations, sometimes you want to ensure you always have that one special song on hand no matter where you are. That’s where something like a music downloader app on Android comes in handy. While you might not use it often, keeping today’s hits on your device ensure you’re always ready to listen to your favorite singles. Plus, certain apps allow you to even save the music video to your device, which can really be helpful when the music video has a different version of a great song (we’re looking at you, Justin Timberlake’s “Rock Your Body”).

But since streaming apps have become the go-to apps for most music-lovers, what music downloader application should you turn to in 2019? It’s a good question—and luckily, we’ve ranked some of our favorite downloader apps in this guide to the essential music downloader applications for Android. From what apps look and feel the best when listening to music to the apps with the most features for saving to your phone, these are our favorite selections on Android today.

Our Recommendation:

Audiomack is not the free music app every Android user might be looking for. It’s centered around only a few genres of music—primarily hip hop and rap, R&B, EDM, and reggae—and if that isn’t the genre of music you’re looking for, Audiomack isn’t going to do much for you. If, however, you are interested in mainly listening to one of those genres, especially new songs of that variety, you’ll find a lot to like about Audiomack, both for discovering new tracks you might not be familiar with, and for finding out about up and coming artists you haven’t discovered yet.

If you’re unfamiliar with Audiomack, here’s what you need to know. Audiomack is a web-based player that, in many respects, mirrors something like Soundcloud, complete with a similar player interface that displays audio levels as you listen to a track. While Audiomack’s browser app features a clean interface, the app on Android leaves a little something to be desired. It feels really busy for something that should be focused solely on music. Ads are included here as well, an addition that is certainly to be expected with most free music download applications. When you first launch the app, you’ll be given the opportunity to subscribe to the paid version of Audiomack for $1.99 per month. It’s not free, but if the ads are bothering you, it’s a lot cheaper than something like Spotify.

Inside the app, the main display featured in the app is “Browse,” which allows you to go through top songs, top albums, and trending content. The trending tab is what you’ll probably use the most, and you’ll find user-uploaded content here from groups and rappers big and small. Adding to our offline music collection was as easy as tapping on the offline icon on our displays, and offline music could be found through the account tab on your player.

Sound quality, as with any “free” music downloader, was hit or miss. Because music in Audiomack is all user-uploaded, it should be obvious that some of the audio quality will likely be lacking depending on who uploaded the track. Some of the music we listened to sounded fine, equivalent to what we would expect from most mobile streaming apps. Still, some of it was clearly sub-200kbps streams, leading to an “underwater” effect where the music sounded muted and muddled.

You get what you pay for—and in this case, free convenience might overpower what we would expect with sound quality. We mentioned it above, but the other problem with Audiomack comes from its lack of genre. Hip hop and EDM fans will find plenty to love here, but even music that revolves around those scenes (LCD Soundsystem for dance music, any major Drake songs outside of some features) was sorely lacking.

Still, Audiomack is a good example of the state of free-but-legal music download applications on the Play Store, something that can’t be said for every app on this list. For what it offers, Audiomack is a great application so long as the music uploaded and hosted caters to your needs. Audiophiles will likely find the app’s quality is pretty hit or miss, but for those listening with the included headphones in the box (or with a pair of cheap Bluetooth headphones), you’re likely to find that Audiomack is one of the easiest ways to grab some tracks offline for free without breaking the law or jumping through a million hoops.

Runner Up:

We went into Trebel with open minds, and we won’t lie—it’s a bit of a mixed bag. There’s a lot to love here, including a modern interface that makes it easy to browse through new songs. You can view new releases from within the entire app, and they’re typically advertised from fairly large artists, including Halsey and Charlie Puth. A search function helps you find specific artists and songs, with a fair amount of options to choose from. At first glance, it seems to be building to a great option for downloading free music, but unsurprisingly, there are some big compromises to be made here.

Right off the bat, some tracks are listed yet marked as “coming soon,” an option that was difficult to explain why, while other albums are missing altogether. Likewise, the entire app is based off a coin system, requiring you to check in at locations, watch video ads, or have friends install the application to earn coins to download new tracks. It’s never clear many coins each track costs, but overall, it’s easy to say that for those looking to download large tracks without dealing with a coin-based ecosystem, you’re better off looking elsewhere.

Everyone else

My Mixtapez

MyMixtapez is the official app for the well-known site that, like Audiomacks and SoundCloud, offers a wide variety of free mixtapes from artists big and small. From Lil Wayne’s Dedication series to smaller rappers like Ralo and Trey Davidson, you’ll find a huge amount of content on their site so long as you’re willing to put in the work to discover new music on your own. The good news, of course, is that MyMixtapez allows you to search for all sorts of content, and though you won’t find unofficially-uploaded songs, listening to classic mixtapes like Drake’s So Far Gone is totally possible with this app.

The interface is fine, if a bit bland, and the ads can get a bit outrageous, but downloading songs is free and easy, and sound quality is solid thanks to some real uploads as opposed to fan content. There’s a lot to like with MyMixtapez, even if its utility is limited. Even more so than with SoundCloud, non-rap fans won’t find much here to their liking; likewise, new releases from bigger names is more or less out the window with this app.

Yep, you right: not only is FrostWire not dead, it’s still in active development, featuring a full client for Android that can be used to download your favorite songs. Despite LimeWire being shutdown in 2010 following major legal litigations, FrostWire remains alive and well on PC and on the Play Store, allowing you to download music like it’s 2007 anywhere on the go. There are a few differences between this version of FrostWire and the one you might remember using.

First, FrostWire made the switch to using torrents several years ago, which means your cellular provider or internet provider may be to detect your downloaded content as illegal torrents if you aren’t careful. Ads were also added to the platform, so you’ll have to deal with some amount of advertisements clouding up your service. FrostWire still works how you remember it, despite the changes in its backend. Typing in the name of your song or artist into the search box in FrostWire brings up all the similar results you could imagine, though you’ll have to scroll through your results to find the correct listing. Audio quality is also hit or miss, but you’ll likely find the service to be usable if you aren’t too picky.

Free Music

The only real positive thing to say about Free Music is that it’s free. Really, outside of that, the app doesn’t offer anything outside what you can find throughout the rest of this list. Though it isn’t advertised as one, Free Music is a third-party suite for SoundCloud, allowing you to download music from the site without using the main application as we described above. In theory, this is a good idea. It can allow you to perform the same actions we described above but without having to download a second app.

Unfortunately, almost everything about Free Music is worse. The app design is hilariously dated and features persistent, full-screen ads that interrupt your music searches. Browsing through content is far harder than simply using the official SoundCloud app. Even worse is the playback interface, with multiple ads taking up space over the player (and playing audio over the music). And the download feature of the app is broken, which means you’ll still need an app like SoundLoadie to download the content from its source. Basically, skip this one. Though it’s one of the first results in Google Play when you look for a music downloader, it’s absolutely not worth the hassle.

This content was originally published here.

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onlinemarketinghelp · 6 years ago

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How to Market a Product: 24 Effective Marketing Tips to Skyrocket Sales http://bit.ly/2wWx2Il

Learning how to market a product can help you grow your store’s sales quickly. When you begin to master how to sell a product online, you give your business a chance to succeed. You’ll need to experiment with different marketing ideas to understand your target audience and market your product to them. In this article, you’ll find 18 effective marketing tips to promote your online business.

How to Market a Product

1.Know Your Audience

It goes without saying that you need to know your audience before you can market your product to them. Before you launch your online store, or new product, spend time doing competitor and market research. This research will not only identify possible audiences but also who else selling similar products, how they market them, and if the marketplace is saturated or not.

Once you know that audience that is perfect for your product you can start planning how to market to them so you know will can easily get in front of them. Look at their user behavior, i.e. what websites they spend time on. Get to know their social platforms, i.e. how and why they use social media. Finally plan how you will set yourself apart from competitors in a way that your audience will identify with. This could be by using a less formal tone of voice on your website, creating a brand mascot that your audience will love, or by simply providing your product in a more efficient way than anyone else in the marketplace.

2. Start with Niche Marketing

It’s always fun to dream about owning an everything store like Amazon or Walmart. But don’t race to it before you’ve landed your first sale. Keep a neutral brand name that doesn’t mention the niche. When you first start building your online store, focus on creating a brand around a singular niche. Through niche marketing it will be easier for you to identify and target potential clients and partners to work with. It will also help you to become an expert in your niche, as you will know which marketing strategies work better for the group that you have targeted. For example, you might start off as a jewelry store. As your jewelry store begins to rapidly grow, you can start expanding into other relevant categories such as bridal accessories, hair accessories, or fashion accessories such as scarves and sunglasses. You won’t know which niche to expand into until you get to know your customers. Why were they buying your jewelry? Was it for prom, a wedding, or everyday use? As you get to know your customers, you can start testing other relevant products to find new customers and expand your brand. Not just your marketing, but your positioning and branding will also benefit as a result of niche marketing, as your profile as a brand will become more credible over time with the niche that you have chosen.

3. Build Strong Customer Relationships

Treat your unhappy customers well and treat your happy customers like your best friend. When customers are unhappy, you need to put in effort to resolve the issue and brighten their day. Imagine yourself being excited about receiving a product only to realize the quality is poor or it’s smaller than you expected or customer service didn’t resolve the issue properly. You’d likely feel frustrated and disappointed. That’s how your unhappy customer feels. Offer a refund, a small free gift and do whatever it takes to make them happy again. Because one bad experience isn’t necessarily going to ruin the relationship – especially if you worked hard to fix it.

Now let’s talk about happy customers. Do you respond to happy customers? Most store owners don’t! But they should– and you should too. If the same customer is constantly engaging with your store, build a relationship with them. Thank customers who write positive reviews. Respond to emails where customers tell you they love the product. By building a relationship with happy customers you begin to turn them into loyal customers. As customers become loyal, they’ll end up spending more money on your store while becoming the type of customer who markets your product for you.

4. Elicit an Emotional Response

To sell products online, you need to elicit an emotional response from your customers. You can do this by adding scarcity and urgency tactics on your store such as countdown timers, showcasing limited quantities and having flash sales. Doing this, will help encourage store visitors to buy right now. You can also elicit an emotional response with your copy such as product descriptions. If your product solves a problem, mentioning the problem and explaining how your product solves that problem can help urge people to solve the problem with your product. Your copy can also create urgency with words like ‘right now’ or ‘today.’ Images on your website can also elicit an emotional response. From the emotion on your model’s face to the colors you use on your website, you can lead customers through your sales funnel. You might want to do some prior research on color psychology to ensure that your eliciting the right emotions on your website. The main part is to understand your target group.

Emotional connection is irreplaceable. Regardless of what your business is or which industry you are in, you need to find an emotional selling point that appeals to your customers, and work towards promoting it through your content. Use the emotional relationships you build with customers to your advantage, and show them, through your content or actions, as a brand that you care about what they care about. Find out what appeals to the specific demographic you are focused on, and create emotional content that captures their attention and moves the users to take action.

5. Personalize the Experience

Personalization is proven to increase online sales, with marketers making as much as 20% more by personalizing their website. You can personalize the shopping experience in a number of ways. You might suggest products based on customers’ browsing experience, through retargeting, sending emails with their name or welcoming them onto your website such as ‘Welcome back Jim’ when a customer is logged in. You could offer them recommended sizes based on a customer’s weight and height to help them determine their best fit.

Personalization, however, is not just limited to consumers seeing their names at the top of an email. It is about providing relevant content to them. Personalization is about creating convenience for your consumers. It should create a feeling that when a page or email is sent to them, they are interested or excited about the information. Overall, by personalizing the experience for your customer, they’ll be more likely to make a purchase. Personalization in marketing is the way forward in creating better relations with your target customers.

6. Creating Gift Guides

Most people focus on creating gift guides during the holiday season, but creating them months prior to it allows your content a chance to begin ranking in search engines. If you sell lingerie, you might create gift guides for anniversaries, weddings, bridal showers, bachelorette parties, Valentine’s Day and more. If you sell men’s apparel you might create gift guides for holidays like Father’s Day, Christmas, Valentine’s Day and more. You could also create gift guides for specific audiences like gift guides for him, her, [niche] lovers, or other relevant audiences. This helps monetize your blog content by recommending products within your store. You can add a buy button for each product on your blog posts.

How To Sell A Product

7. Guest Blogging

You can promote your business by writing content for other blogs. You’ll want to have a link back to your website or product in the article or in an author bio. By guest blogging, you share your niche expertise with others which elevates your expert status. The key to monetizing the traffic from your guest posts is to have retargeting ads on your store running constantly. So if a person lands on your website and doesn’t purchase, you can continue remarketing to them through ads. When choosing websites for guest blogging focus on relevant and complementary niches. For a relevant niche, you might write guest posts on blogs within your niche that don’t have stores. A complementary niche would be one that has a similar audience but sells different products such as a sunglasses store partnering with a sunscreen brand. That’s why guest blogging is one of the ways that you can build relationships that may help you in the long run by developing business opportunities and connections, by setting brand value, and by link building.

8. Reuse Customer Generated Content

As your store grows in popularity, your customers will start sharing pictures of your products. Add the customer pictures on your website and repost them on your social media and tag them. When a new customer visits your website, if they see the customer photo from someone who shared it, they’ll be more compelled to make a purchase since they know what the received product looks like. They also know that others have purchased from your store and liked what they received enough to share their own pictures. It’s almost like a product review.

Some customers may even leave a review with pictures on your store which you can use to share on your social media as well. It also keeps your costs low as it allows you to show off different angles and pictures of your product without having to invest in further product photography. Ask customers for permission before creating ads with their faces on it as it can make them feel uncomfortable for a high level of exposure. You can repost their pictures on social media but remember to credit them.

9. Figure Out What Type of Content You Should be Creating

Content opportunities are numerous — you could use blogs, articles, ebooks, infographics, social media, videos, or anything else to spread your content. But the main question is what type of content you want to invest in. Creating engaging, brand-enriching content will be your way to get noticed online, and to gain attention. You can use tools like BuzzSumo to determine the most shared articles are within your niche, on a competitors’ website and even your own website.

By analyzing what type of content gets shared the most, you can work on improving the type of content you create whether it’s a blog or video. You’ll learn to create better content that provides value to your readers. By providing more valuable content, you increase your odds of having your content shared, increasing your audience size and boosting your sales. You can also use tools like CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer to create headlines that attract higher click-through rates. When you have done your content right, it allows you to connect with your customers in a unique way, and can help build trust and keep your users informed.

10. Create YouTube Videos

YouTube has more than a 1.5 billion monthly users. The platform is so expansive that it can be accessed in 76 different languages, accounting for 95% of the world’s population. That’s why, YouTube provides your brand a unique way to market your content, and for users to experience and share it in an easier way.

YouTube has helped businesses, like Luxy Hair, to promote their products. Creating regular content can help you provide value to your customers, increase your brand presence and improve your store’s sales. The only catch is that you’ll need to commit to creating videos regularly. In the beginning, you might want to create several videos a week and decrease it to once a week once you’ve built up a sizeable audience. If you sell unicorn brushes you could create makeup tutorials. If you sell apparel you could create styling tips videos. If you sell journals you could create videos about goal setting, organization, and mindfulness. Ultimately, you need to determine how to provide value to your customers based on your niche.

Just like we do at Oberlo: lots of our content is shared on YouTube – like this awesome video with even more tips for increasing your sales:

11. Be an Industry Expert

If you own an ecommerce store there is a good chance that your knowledge in the industry is at a high standard. By imparting this expertise through blog posts, webinars, guest speaking, and other forms of knowledge sharing you, not only get ahead of competitors, but you get to put your product in front of a lot of different audiences.

Being an industry expert doesn’t mean that you need to know figures and trends off the top of your head. Building a team of experts behind you who can carry out research, lead focus groups, and help elevate your brand above all others can help to effectively market your product across many more channels, audiences, and geographies.

12. Product Reviews

Customers read reviews before making their purchase. If we look at some numbers Bright Local did a Local Customer Review Survey in 2018 which found that:

84% of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation.

Adding to that, 90% of consumers read less than 10 reviews before forming an opinion about a business

Finally, 74% of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more.

If you’re looking to boost sales, social proof that other customers have purchased your product can help increase your sales. You can use apps like Product Reviews Addon to automate building up your product reviews. It’ll ask customers to leave a product review after they’ve received it. You can also pick and choose product reviews from AliExpress to import into your reviews section such as reviews with customer pictures. The more positive reviews your store has the more likely you are to ease customers into a purchase.

How To Promote Your Business

13. Create an Affiliate Program

Affiliate marketing is performance-based marketing where a business rewards a person who promotes their product for every new customer or visitor brought in by the person’s own marketing efforts. Using the affiliate marketing program in the right way, you will be able to market your products online and gain many benefits such as increased sales, increased traffic to your site, extended reach of your brand, better search engine rankings, and creating the basis for a viral marketing strategy. That’s why creating an affiliate program can prove to be profitable for your business. You’ll only pay for the referrals who purchase from your store, making acquisition costs lower. You’ll need to offer a commission to your affiliate for bringing in that customer.

A popular trend in top ecommerce stores is a ‘Get $15’ link on the top navigation of a store. Get $15 is the reward the affiliate gets for bringing in a customer. You can add restrictions such as minimum spend a customer needs to make in order for your affiliate to get the commission. Be sure to clearly outline the rules of your affiliate program with your affiliates to prevent confusion. If your supplier can add marketing materials to your packages, you can even encourage customers who’ve purchased from you to become your affiliates.

14. Invest in Retargeting Ads

Social Media platforms are ripe with people sharing their psychographic information. Couple this with targeting people who have already visited your website and shown an interest in your business and you have a foolproof way of promoting your product through an effective marketing tactic.

What is even better about retargeting visitors to your website is that you can offer them discounts or limited time offers to entice them back to your website. If you plan your product marketing well enough you can even advertise to people who have viewed or even added a product to cart and left your website so the messaging is highly personalized. And as we have mentioned before personalizing an experience for a browser is a great way to increase online sales.

15. Be Active. Everywhere

A lot of people say they put their brand out there, but they really don’t. You can’t expect organic sales to skyrocket when you’ve posted five times on Instagram. That’s not how marketing works. You need to be on several platforms. You need to be active on those platforms. You need to use hashtags. Responding to messages, engaging with relevant audiences, and building up strong relationships should be a part of your daily routine. You’re not going to hit a homerun with your first post. But if you stick with it, are consistent and active online, eventually, you’ll see results from your hard work. You can automate some of your posts, repost someone else’s content with credit and other tasks so that it isn’t overwhelming to grow your online presence. However, when people visit your social media, it should be active.

Aside from social media, you need to put your brand out there such as guest posting, creating blog content, doing niche specific interviews and more. Make sure people know your brand exists. You need to manage your online reputation proactively. It is always useful to interact with your customers or see what is being said by your customers about you on social media platforms. If you are facing any complaints, or customer queries, respond to them timely, and continue to work on building a real and long-lasting relationship with your customer group.

16. Build Online Community

Constructing an online community has helped numerous brands to build and market their products without having to invest huge budgets into paid campaigns. An online community is a community where people who love your brand connect and discuss their experience of your brand in an environment that is helpful to other customers and to you. Why is it helpful to you? Because you can listen to how your customers view your product and skillfully adjust your brand, product, or service, to improve on it.

Building an online community is a great way to promote not just existing products but new ones too. You can even organize a focus group to test your new products before you bring them to market. Simply engage with your community, discover the biggest supporters of your brands, outreach to them offer a free test product, and gather feedback from them.

17. Create Great Assets

More and more audiences are enjoying many different content forms, and slowing moving away from written content in some markets. Create great assets like infographics, graphs, thumbnails and more can keep audiences engaged for longer. Not to mention great assets can make your brand look more professional and trustworthy.

Once you identify who your audience is, look at how they interact with content, specially what forms of content they prefer. Then you can work on creating information that is important to market your product to this market through their favorite forms of content.

18. Targeted Ads

Once you’ve built up your customer base a bit, you’ll want to continue marketing to your audience since they’re already proven buyers. You can upload your customer email list to Facebook and create ads targeting them. Since they’re already familiar with your brand you’ll need to create an ad that’s for someone further down the sales funnel. You can run ads with new products to avoid showing them a product they may have already purchased. You can let them know about an exclusive promotion you have that’s only for former customers giving them a special discount code like: VIPCLUB. You don’t want to overmarket to your former customers to prevent losing them. However, once every 2-4 weeks, you can run an ad for a special promotion that’s catered specifically to former customers. If the consumers are not interested in what they are seeing it means your advertisement hasn’t been successful with them, or is failing to resonate with them.

You need to hit the nail on the head by targeting your advertisements to customers who will benefit from them, or who are interested in seeing them. By using targeted ads you will be able to develop an efficient campaign, and use your advertising resources more effectively. You will also be able to increase your return on investment (ROI) as targeted advertisements will yield a higher result, for a lower cost, as you will be wasting less money and time on customers who are not interested in what you have to offer.

Effective Marketing Tips

19. Monetize Contests and Giveaways

Contests are usually overlooked as a source of revenue for your website. Whether you are a blogger or run your own ecommerce store, regular contests can be a good way to increase your revenue per user. However, an important decision that needs to be made before monetising your giveaway is which platform you will use. Hosting contests and giveaways is also a great way to grow your email list. After the contest ends, you’ll be able to continue marketing to the people on your email list who happily subscribed in hope that they’d win a prize.

Not winning a prize can be discouraging – fortunately, there’s an easy solution. Tell your customers there’s one big prize they can win. When you go to send an email to the people who didn’t win a prize, send them an email saying they’ve won a runner-up prize. The runner-up prize will be a small gift card to your store that has a minimum spend required so that people don’t take advantage to get something for free. Thus, everyone becomes a prize winner, making them happy while you generate extra sales. When you allow your users to opt in for future competition notifications, you can easily build a list of users who are interested in knowing about any future competitions or giveaways as soon as you launch them.

20. Create a Customer Loyalty Program

Customer loyalty is when, due to positive customer experience or customer satisfaction, a customer is willing to buy from or work with a brand repeatedly. Customer Loyalty is of utmost importance to a brand’s success. Loyal customers can help a business grow faster than acquiring a new customer. It costs a business about 5 to 25 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to sell to an existing one. Additionally, 82% of U.S. adults say they’re loyal to brands. With these statistics in mind, your business could potentially put in effort to make sure you are doing what you can in order to keep your customers satisfied and coming back to you. Loyal customers not only spend more with brands they trust, but they also spread positive word-of-mouth, by telling their friends and family about their positive experiences or provide recommendations.

Since we’re aware that it costs more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one, you could focus on how to activate your loyal customers to bring in new ones. This is where customer loyalty programs come in. A customer loyalty program is when a company offers a reward or benefits to customers who frequently make purchases. These benefits could include free merchandise, discounts, rewards, coupons, or offers on products that are yet to be released.

The best way to sell a product is to send a loyalty program email to your customers a day after they’ve made a purchase on your store. On the link above, you’ll find the exact email template I’ve used that’s generated sales on my store. By automatically enrolling customers into your loyalty program, you’ll be able to help grow your repeat purchases on your store which helps boost your overall sales. Customers who’ve already purchased from you are more likely to purchase from you again than new customers. When welcoming your customers into your loyalty program, offer them a special discount code they can use for life. You should regularly email your former customers to promote special VIP offers to continue boosting sales. You’ll want to market to them occasionally so you don’t lose your most valuable and profitable customers.

21. Special Offers and Freebies

Including a special offer or freebies section on your website can help boost sales and email lists. Your special offers could be a page where you list all the discount codes you have running right now. While discount codes can lower your profit it can also convince a customer on the fence that today’s deal is worth buying. Having freebies under your special offers page can also help build up your email list. If you sell phone cases, you can create and giveaway phone backgrounds on your website. If you sell fashion, you can give away a free pair of earrings with a minimum purchase as earrings can be affordable on AliExpress. You can always play around with the types of freebies and special offers you provide such as buy one get one free offers (BOGOF), free delivery, gift vouchers, student discounts, loyalty points, gift cards, guarantees for higher priced items, or any other types of special offers that might interest your customer group.

22. Make a Mobile App

If your product is one that people like engaging with maybe creating a mobile app is the right way to go. A mobile app can market a product through letting people try it on, or become absorbed in the environment. For example, if you have an online ecommerce clothing store you can create an app where customers can try items on together, even selecting their body type and size for a more realistic experience. Or if you sell furniture you can develop an app that can visual a piece of furniture within your living room.

The options are endless with an app but it needs to make a customer envision them owning a product for it to be a success at increasing sales. Apps that provide no

23. Influencer Blogging

If you’re just starting your online store and need to drive more traffic, influencer blogging is one of the most effective marketing tips. You’ll first need to make sure you have a blog subscription running on your online store so people can sign up to receive updates. Fortunately, this is very easy to do using apps or plugins for most CMS. Then, you’ll need to regularly write content on your store’s blog mentioning influencers in your niche. You might create an article about the best experts in your niche, quotes from an influencer in your niche, or other articles that mention someone with a big following. You’ll then share it with them on social media. Some people will share it with their audiences (but don’t get offended if someone doesn’t). When they share it with their audience, you’ll get free traffic from them which you’ll be monetizing with your email marketing. Remember, when you send out an update to include links to your popular products so that you get traffic to these pages as well as blog pages

24. Partner with Influencers

Influencer marketing can increase your online sales when you don’t have a big audience. Finding the right influencers to partner with can be tricky for a new store owner. You’ll want to be mindful of the type of engagement shoutouts get when they share your brand’s products. Are the comments about the influencer or is it about the product? Does the post get high engagement? Does the same brand repeatedly promote their product with that influencer? If they do, it’s likely because the influencer is able to convert their audience. Some influencers charge hundreds of dollars but generate few sales. You’ll likely want to work with an influencer who has at least 100k followers to actually be able to get sales as smaller audiences might not convert as well unless it is an ultra-niche market.

Want to Learn More?

GDPR Compliance for Ecommerce: What Store Owners Can Do

20 Social Media Marketing Apps to Grow Your Ecommerce Business

How Much Does it Cost to Launch a Dropshipping Store?

15 Ways to Increase Social Media Engagement Quickly

What marketing tactics have you done while growing your online store? Share your marketing tips to help other store owners grow their stores in the comments below!

The post How to Market a Product: 24 Effective Marketing Tips to Skyrocket Sales appeared first on Oberlo.

from Oberlo

How to Market a Product

1.Know Your Audience

2. Start with Niche Marketing

3. Build Strong Customer Relationships

4. Elicit an Emotional Response

5. Personalize the Experience

6. Creating Gift Guides

How To Sell A Product

7. Guest Blogging

8. Reuse Customer Generated Content

9. Figure Out What Type of Content You Should be Creating

10. Create YouTube Videos

Just like we do at Oberlo: lots of our content is shared on YouTube – like this awesome video with even more tips for increasing your sales:

11. Be an Industry Expert

12. Product Reviews

Customers read reviews before making their purchase. If we look at some numbers Bright Local did a Local Customer Review Survey in 2018 which found that:

84% of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation.

Adding to that, 90% of consumers read less than 10 reviews before forming an opinion about a business

Finally, 74% of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more.

How To Promote Your Business

13. Create an Affiliate Program

14. Invest in Retargeting Ads

15. Be Active. Everywhere

16. Build Online Community

17. Create Great Assets

18. Targeted Ads

Effective Marketing Tips

19. Monetize Contests and Giveaways

20. Create a Customer Loyalty Program

21. Special Offers and Freebies

22. Make a Mobile App

The options are endless with an app but it needs to make a customer envision them owning a product for it to be a success at increasing sales. Apps that provide no

23. Influencer Blogging

24. Partner with Influencers

Want to Learn More?

GDPR Compliance for Ecommerce: What Store Owners Can Do

20 Social Media Marketing Apps to Grow Your Ecommerce Business

How Much Does it Cost to Launch a Dropshipping Store?

15 Ways to Increase Social Media Engagement Quickly

What marketing tactics have you done while growing your online store? Share your marketing tips to help other store owners grow their stores in the comments below!

The post How to Market a Product: 24 Effective Marketing Tips to Skyrocket Sales appeared first on Oberlo.

http://bit.ly/2KPFa5n June 13, 2019 at 10:53AM http://bit.ly/2wTdLr5

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lakhwanabhishek · 4 years ago

Text

Reducing the risk of design

get in touch with us!

Source:

whizzystack.co

#b2b ecommerce

#b2b content marketing

#b2b seo

#Ecommerce

#socialmedia

0 notes

secretcupcakesublime · 4 years ago

Text

Reducing the risk of design

get in touch with us!

Source:

whizzystack.co

#b2b ecommerce

#b2b content marketing

#b2b seo

#Ecommerce

#socialmedia

#socialmedia #b2b seo

0 notes

jbaquerot · 8 years ago

Link

When you think of Big Data, you may imagine the billions of rows and petabytes of data many companies are struggling to manage and process on a regular basis. You may also think about the challenges of handling diverse unstructured data such as audio, video, image and text-based files coming from an ever-increasing number of sources. In terms of the three V’s of Big Data, the volume and variety aspects of Big Data receive the lion’s share of attention. However, you should consider taking a closer look at the velocity dimension of Big Data—it may have a bigger impact on your business than you think.

In terms of velocity and Big Data, it’s easy to fixate on the increased speed in which data is pouring into most organizations today, especially from “firehose” data sources such as social media. However, velocity also underscores the need to process the data quickly and, most importantly, use it at a faster rate than ever before. These velocity-related challenges are typically viewed as technical ones, but there’s often more to it than just technology. People, process and cultural limitations can hold your company back from a speed and agility perspective—no matter how fast you collect and process data.

While the volume and variety aspects of Big Data receive most of the attention, the velocity dimension may be the most critical to your business success.

Data is said to age like wine—meaning the longer it’s kept, the more insights you’ll be able to glean from it. While this may be true for some forms of data, this analogy doesn’t apply to all situations. Many types of data have a limited shelf-life where their value can erode with time—in some cases, very quickly. For example, in retail it’s better to know which products are out-of-stock in terms of seconds or minutes rather than days or weeks. The more quickly a retailer can restock its products, the faster it can return to generating product sales.

Using real-time alerting, Walmart was able to identify a particular Halloween novelty cookie was popular in most of its stores—except two locations where it wasn’t selling at all. A quick investigation at those two locations revealed a simple stocking oversight meant the cookies weren’t yet on the store shelves. If Walmart discovered this stocking problem after Halloween, the value of this insight would have already vanished. Data velocity doesn’t just apply to the retail industry—it can apply to many diverse business models and functions.

High-velocity decision making

If your organization is still grappling with how to become more data-driven, the thought of operating at an even faster pace with data may be disconcerting and intimidating—especially when it comes to decision making. Traditionally, business decision makers have been accustomed to waiting days, weeks or even months to have ample information before they can make a high-quality decision based on past business performance. For fast-paced organizations like Amazon, the traditional approach to decision-making is far too slow.

In CEO Jeff Bezos’ recent letter to Amazon shareholders, he emphasized how “speed matters in business” and focused on the importance of “high-velocity decision making.” Bezos suggested, “Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.” Nobody wants to make bad decisions; however, constantly waiting for near-perfect information can lead to atrophy and missed opportunities. For Bezos, it is critical that companies are good at rapidly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. “If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.”

Fried pickles spur a quick, data-driven decision

Recently, Freddy’s Frozen Custard & Steakburgers found it needed to make a quick decision on a new limited-time offer—its tasty fried pickles. Throughout the year, the fast-growing restaurant chain features various limited-time offers such as special burgers, custards, or appetizers that run for 6-8 weeks. The company rolled out a new fried pickle offering, which had a decent response in its Kansas test market but was nothing out of the ordinary. Typically, a limited-time offer will spike in sales over the first two weeks and then drop off significantly as the novelty wears off.

However, Freddy’s was surprised to discover in its new data platform (Domo) that sales of the fried pickles were doubling across all of its locations after only the first couple of days. After double- and triple-checking the data, Freddy’s IT Manager Sean Thompson realized his company would be in a real pickle (sorry, I couldn’t resist) if it didn’t quickly embrace the new offering’s surging popularity. Freddy’s management team made the quick decision to turn fried pickles into a regular menu item, which meant securing a more robust supply of pickles from its distributors and featuring the product more prominently in Freddy’s social media campaigns. By the time positive feedback poured in from its restaurant owners about the fried pickles, the company was already ahead of potential supply problems that had been an issue in the past. More importantly, Freddy’s valued guests could enjoy the popular side dish without interruption.

Real-time data requires agile execution

Real-time data is only as helpful as your ability to execute on it quickly. While high-velocity decision making is important, fast execution is equally critical. Many organizations experience costly delays when the downstream processes and systems are slow and rigid. For example, a high-tech firm discovered it had a technical issue with its online checkout process where using a particular payment option caused a customer’s entire shopping cart to be emptied. Rather than quickly addressing this poor user experience, it took the company nine months to fix the issue due to bureaucratic IT processes and inflexible backend systems. If speed matters to your business, you’re going to need to iron out these kinds of issues that can limit your organization’s ability to respond to insights in a timely fashion. You must create an agile business environment where data insights can thrive—not stumble.

Today, executives place a heavy emphasis on having real-time key performance indicators (KPIs) at their fingertips. However, what good is minute-by-minute updates to these metrics, if your organization takes weeks to make decisions and then months to implement any needed changes? Instead, real-time KPIs must be combined with high-velocity decision making and agile execution. Following the example of companies like Amazon and Freddy’s, data-driven success will be increasingly defined by how organizations turn real-time data into real-time decisions and actions.

#big data #real time

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theemperorsfeather · 8 years ago

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Resilience.org has had a TON of great stuff recently; I’ve been just too fucking fatigued to share any of it here, which makes me sad and grumpy. I hope to catch up on some backlog soon, but anyway, I saw a reference to free trade on my dash and that reminded me of this, which explained things that my middle-aged self had never bothered to get around to learning, and it’s Important so I’ve heavily excerpted from the source:

Why are so many young people – even those with the “best” educations – almost completely ignorant about a huge ongoing threat to human rights, democracy and the climate? Well, I guess it’s not surprising. For years now, elite universities and neoliberal think tanks have been publishing papers which claim that increased international trade leads to poverty reduction, peace, and the spread of democracy. Politicians and CEOs – most of them graduates of these same universities – now constitute the Davos global elite, quietly pulling the strings on trade while no one is watching.

The result is that many young people are completely confused on the topic. How can the TPP be bad if Obama was for it and Trump is against it? Isn’t Trump’s loud anti-trade stance just another point against him – inextricably tied to his atrocious xenophobia and chilling position on immigration?

This widespread ignorance about trade among young voters is deeply disturbing – not least because trade agreements, and their role in hollowing out the American middle-classes, arguably made Trump’s election possible...

But what’s most disturbing is that the ignorance of my friends has been intentionally created: trade agreements are confusing and secret by design. They are sometimes called “vampire agreements” – they grow fangs as long as they remain in darkness, but wither quickly in the light of day. Studies have shown that the more people know about trade agreements, the more likely they are to oppose them...

1. Secrecy. Trade agreements are drafted in secret by specially appointed “trade officials” (experts on trade and corporate law, many of whom originally worked in private corporate law firms). Although more than 400 representatives of special interests and corporations in the US alone have a seat at the table, citizens and their elected officials do not. Because the provisions of these agreements can override both democratically derived national laws and international agreements (like climate agreements), this secrecy dangerously undermines democracy.

2. Investor State Dispute Settlement. Most trade agreements include a little thing called Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) clauses. These give foreign corporations the right to sue any government whose laws or regulations –– such as those protecting the environment, food safety, workers’ rights or local businesses –– threaten future corporate profits. For example, the TransCanada corporation is currently using NAFTA to sue the United States for $15 billion for blocking the Keystone XL Pipeline...

3. Regulatory chill. There is no system of precedents for ISDS suits, so countries cannot know how a tribunal will decide based on past decisions. Nothing is transparent and there is no system of appeals. Moreover, because small and developing countries have little money to pay for lawsuits or settlements, they are less likely to enact regulations to protect their environment and their people, creating a global climate of “regulatory chill.”

4. Climate. On the other hand, trade agreements are making certain that this is the only kind of chill around. The TPP in particular was touted as somehow being “good for the climate.” This could not be more wrong. [the article lists several ways the TPP would encourage more fossil fuel development and use]

5. Labor in ‘rich’ countries. The loss of working class jobs in countries like the US is perhaps the most well-known negative outcome of trade agreements. . . . Trade agreements have rigged it so that it is simply impossible for companies to “compete” if they manufacture their goods in countries with decent pay or adequate labor protections. This leaves millions of people in industrialized countries jobless and struggling to survive – forced to shop at Walmart, where artificially low prices are made possible by the very rigged, exploitative system which left them without a reasonable living wage in the first place.

6. Labor in ‘poor’ countries. . . . The ways that bigger, richer countries use trade agreements to bully and exploit smaller, poor ones are fairly endless.

The TPP was famously supposed to have built-in protections for labor – “the best ever” – but they turned out to be about as strict as its built-in protections for the climate. For example, child and forced labor – slavery and child slavery – are misdemeanors. And because of the agreement’s strange legal structure, even these are practically unenforceable.

7. Regulatory harmonization. Sounds pretty, right? There’s just one problem; the landscape of harmonized regulations proposed in trade agreements doesn’t exactly create a regulatory standard of justice and sustainability around the world. Instead it promotes a global race to the bottom. For example, governments in the EU operate on something called the precautionary principle: this means that new chemicals and GMO foods cannot be sold until they are proven to be safe. In the US, they can be sold unless they have been proven to be harmful – which means that the US has approved over 400 chemicals, as well as numerous GMOs, that are illegal in Europe. In order to “ease trade,” the pending Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), between the U.S. and the European Union, would make them legal on both sides of the Atlantic, and economists say the rest of the world would have no choice but to follow suit or be left behind. Pharmaceutical patents are another area in which regulatory harmonization is a threat. In the US, patent protection periods are exceptionally long, so pharmaceutical companies can charge more for brand-name products for a longer period of time. Harmonization would force poorer countries to adopt these long patent-protection periods, which means more people will die for lack of affordable medicines .

8. Privatization and outsourcing. We usually think that trade agreements are about goods shipped back and forth across the ocean, but in fact they also regulate services – including essential services, like water, power, waste management, public transportation, health care and education. For some time now, trade agreements have been “liberalizing” these sectors, which means systematically taking them from the hands of governments and passing them into the hands of private corporations (including foreign corporations.) As usual, this is bad news for people in poor countries, as well as for the poor in ‘rich’ countries, who can’t afford to pay for high-quality private health care, education, water, etc. Oh, and one other thing: under pending trade agreement CETA, once a service is privatized it must remain privatized forever.

9. Countries handcuffed. To top it off, trade agreements include various ‘handcuff’ clauses that make them nearly impossible to get out of once they are signed. Under CETA, for example, countries are still subject to the ISDS system for twenty years after they withdraw, leaving plenty of time for a new pro-trade administration to come in and reverse the decision to pull out. The TPP had no expiration date, and would have been virtually impossible to repeal.

10. Good for a few rich corporations. So if workers and environments are only harmed in this borderless landscape of financial opportunity, who benefits? A few multinational corporations and global banks, of course! So do the corporate lawyers who specialize in ISDS cases, and actually sit around just looking for new environmental and labor protections to challenge. In fact, they now have started a tidy side business in soliciting investors who gamble on the outcomes.

#trade agreements #trade #free trade #tpp #nafta #i guess the first warning sign is that they call it 'free'#economics

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skanda-shastry · 8 years ago

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Unlocking the Trillion Dollar Opportunity!!

In 1998, Kodak sold 85% of photo film worldwide.Next few years Digital Camara slowly overlap the photo film.

In 2003, Iconic 1100 phone sold more than 500 million units by Nokia in an year. Which is highest selling phone till now.

In 2010, Blockbuster one of the most recognizable brand in the video rental space having around 9,000 stores & more than 60,000 employees. The company filed for bankruptcy protection.

In 2015, All the telecom operator in world together send 20B messages, which is less than 30B message send by the WhatsApp in a day.

All the above well-known & monopoly companies are bankrupt & certainly there business model disappears!!

“People think the CEO/directors of those companies must have been dumb not to see what was happening, but they were not dumb, they were very, very talented people, but they still missed the transition and made assumptions that were shown to be pretty poor in hindsight, but seemed fine at the time”. This highlights the importance of having someone in the organisation asking, constantly, what are our competitors doing to disrupt our business and our business model.

We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope, and complexity, this transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before.This exponential growth transformed our life tremendously, in just a few years.

So what does disruption mean in this context?

Change that occurs when new digital technology & business model affect the value proposition of an existing goods & service, doing business, social interaction & more generally “WAY OF THINKING”.

Welcome to the ‘Exponential age of the Digital ERA’

These are the some area where Disruption is/was/will happened rapidly. & we saw the visible change in our daily life due to the disruption.

Print/Media/Entertainment

The role of traditional media has changed dramatically in the age of the internet-driven, 24-hour news cycle and the proliferation of social media. Technology will change the way of consuming the news. Newspaper no longer been an Ads or promotional channel. New generation consume news via Inshort,Dailyhunt,Buzzfeed,scoopwhoop,Reddit,Flipboard,Twitter,Facebook. & It’s generate more traffic than traditional newspaper,magazine,tv combine together. Its revenue & subscriber drastically reduced.Business model is slowly disappear.

Even world’s largest book publishers like Penguin,Pearson,McGraw-Hill face the heat of ebooks,iReader,kindle,online reader,audiobook,podcast,digital library.

Likewise, Largest music companies like Sony,HMV,T-series, & other bricks and mortar business are fight for the survival. With a plethora of services such as Pandora, Spotify, soundcloud, Hulu,and Scribd, subscription-based entertainment is becoming more and more ubiquitous across different types of media.

another example of digital disruption is the way Netflix is eating into the profits of CBS. Until few years ago, people could watch shows,movie etc only on television sets, home rental services. These shows etc were broadcasted to their TV sets by CBS, NBC, or Blockbuster.With the entry of Netflix and Youtubes the mode of delivery of videos has changed.

Technology giants like Facebook,Google,Netflix,Amazon make a major damage to their business model Bottom 👊🏼👊🏼 ✔️ $16.4Billion vs $17.9 Billion in past year its an revenue of all the news paper together in US vs FACEBOOK.

✔️ In 2011, Netflix suppressed the 20 million subscribers in the USA & Canada, making it the world’s leading subscription service for movies & TV show.

Transportation

The simplest & most famous example I can think of right now is the disruption created by cab companies like Uber/ Ola to private fleets of yellow taxis. The regular taxis relied on hand signals while plying empty on roads — or simply waiting at a taxi stand for a passenger to turn up. With Uber/Ola coming up with an easy to use mobile app to book cabs, there has been a huge digital disruption to regular taxis.

Automatic Car (Driverless car/ SelfDriving Car ) By the year end google & Uber come up with the self driving car. which is Code red for many drivers & other automakers. Most car companies might become bankrupt. Traditional car companies try the evolutionary approach and just build a better car, while tech companies will do the revolutionary approach & looking to reinvent the wheel.

Tesla go further in this research on most energy efficient electric cars & also huge invest in the mass transportation using Magnetic-Levitation system like Hyperloop.

Along with this new Ideas empowered with technology, it will disrupt the whole mode of transportation.

E-commerce & retail

As technology continues to advance, we see a shift in consumer expectations, which, in turn, leads to retailers rethinking their in-store strategies.Amazon already opened a supermarket without cash registers. You walk in, you take what you need and you walk out. Sensors and cameras automatically measure what you take and put everything on your credit card. In addition, Mobile, cloud, analytics,VR,Digital money and social media will be fully integrated into a unified merchandising system designed to vastly improve customer engagement.

Retail Industries are moving from small Kirana shops -> brick & mortar model -> departmental store -> hypermarkets(Metro,Walmart) -> Ecommerce shop (Virtual Shop,Drone delivery)

Bottom 👊🏼👊🏼

✔️ In america, Amazon takes market value $355.9B vs $297.8 market cap of all the retailers together which include Walmart, Target, Best Buy & others.

✔️ India’s E-commerce Revenue is expected to jump from $30 billion in 2016 to $100 billion in 2020.

Financial Services

The financial sector in India is currently experiencing a golden age, and its biggest driver is the effort to move toward a less-cash economy.In India, JAM (Jan Dhan, Aadhaar, Mobile)Enroute to the digital payments gaining the proportions of a mass movement. Majaorly due to the technology Innovation, New Business Model,Demographics,customer experience,mobile, it will disrupt the many vertical of Banking,Insurance,stock broking,payment,wealth management & many more financial services. Established technology firms are developing new products that enable the creation of new business models with enormous existing customer bases.

Trends in the financial sector

✔️Electronic trading now makes up almost 70% of all volume on the New York Stock Exchange and half of that is algorithmic trading. ✔️Electronic clearing of cheque (ECS) like IMPS,NEFT,RTGS,International Remittance make an ease of customer experience and also disrupt the traditional money transfers like checks and money orders. ✔️Starting of new payment bank (Airtel,Birla),small banks & mobile wallet(Paytm,Mobikwik),UPI (BHIM,PhonePe) help to reach the financial services to large audience. ✔️Intraducation of plastic money (Debit,Credit cards) Digital currency (Bitcoin, blockchain) promote the cashless economy. ✔️️Unbinding banking service from financial technology provide seamless experience in online/mobile banking, P2P Payments (Paypal,RuPay),Bill Payments.(Instamojo,billDesk,CCAvenue). ✔️Along with this lot of Fintech companies resolve problem in the different financial vertical like taxes (cleartax),Lending (Lendingkart),Personal Finance(FundsIndia) & many more. reach the common man in the societ

Telecom/Technology

Digitization is profoundly changing the competitive boundaries of the telecom industry. Core voice and messaging businesses have continued to shrink, in part because of regulatory pressures, but also because social media has opened new communications channels beyond traditional voice service.

After Graham bell discover Phone, next 100 years its never change its design.& AT & T realise its importance when mobile phone hit the market. same is in Set Top Box also.

Timeline Postcard →Telegram →Telephone →Radio →OpticalFiber →Internet→Email →Pager →Smartphone →MMS →VoIP

Day where we were charged us for messages to the Free internet, We are come up with the long way of voice to data migration.& also we move from telecom operators (AT &T/Verizon) to technology giants like (Google/Facebook) for communication. In Upcoming days technologies like 5G,MuLTEfire,IoT will completely vanishes the existing communication ways.

We’re at a critical time where Technology has eaten the world. Traditional industries such as automotive, fossil fuels, medical, insurance and real estate will be massively disrupted. IBMs Watson,Google deepmind computer is a perfect illustration of this computing power and it is set to disrupt traditional industries. ✔️Because of Watson, you can get legal advice within seconds and with 90% accuracy compared with 70% accuracy when done by humans. ✔️Adidas setup an 2 robotic shoe manufacturing plant in Germany.which is completely automated. ✔️Tesla is built an Gigafactory in Nevada which has complete automatic production line. ✔️️AI slowly eaten our workforce BPO services replace with bots ✔️Moving from31/2 Floppy to the Virtual Storage system Cloud Computing & big data will alter the definition of the Storage.

In less than 10 years, 📱 replaced:

📟 ☎️ 📠 💽 💾 💻 ⏰ 📷 📹 🎥 📺 📻 📰 💿 💳 💼 📎 📄 ⏳ 🔦 📼 📚 ⌚️ 🎮 📓 ✏️ 📁 🎤 📇 📆 🎰 💵 📬 📝 🆘 🏧 🎫 ✉️ 📤 ✒️ 📊 📋 🔎 🔑 📣 🎼 🎬 📀

Finally:

“In the new world, Its not the BigFish which eats the small fish, Its the fast fish which eat the slow fish”

All the above example, there is one thing is common that Business model move from traditional pipeline model to the Platform model. irrespective of the domain.

Platform business models!! Enable plug-and-play infrastructure into which producers and consumers can directly plug in, and they then govern the market interactions that ensue on top of the infrastructure.

We see pipes everywhere. Every consumer good that we use essentially comes to us via a pipe. All of manufacturing runs on a pipe model. Television and Radio are pipes spewing out content at us. Our education system is a pipe where teachers push out their ‘knowledge’ to children. Had the internet not come up, we would never have seen the emergence of platform business models. Unlike pipes, platforms do not just create and push stuff out. They allow users to create and consume value. At the technology layer, external developers can extend platform functionality using APIs. At the business layer, users (producers) can create value on the platform for other users (consumers) to consume. This is a massive shift from any form of business we have ever known in our industrial hangover.

Even before Internet there Platforms have existed for years. Malls link consumers and merchants; newspapers connect subscribers and advertisers. What’s changed in this century is that information technology has profoundly reduced the need to own physical infrastructure and assets. & increase the Network/marketplace/Communities,technology infrastructure,User/ProducerData. this will create great value to the product.

Platform business models gives lot of flexible in User acquisition,Product Design,Monetization.

Very few areas like Education & Healthcare still we difficult to break the pipe model.

How to survive??

1) Keep innovating, inventing

2) Survival for the fittest

3) keep update with technology

4) Winner take all, there is no second place

5) Mobile phone is entry point for the most of the things

What do Google’s crawlers, Uber’s drivers, and Instagram’s selfie-clickers have in common? In a world of platforms, they create the fuel needed to facilitate economic and social exchanges that power business and society.

“Let the game begin”

Reference

https://thecoverage.my/lifestyle/will-amazed-guy-speaks-changing-times-technology-society/

http://platformthinkinglabs.com/

http://www.ibmforentrepreneurs.com

https://richtopia.com/emerging-technologies/11-disruptive-technology-examples

https://www.slideshare.net/ProductNation/indian-banking-in-a-time-for-change-nandan-nilekani-64679460

http://www.economist.com/node/21542796

https://thinkgrowth.org/silicon-valley-is-right-our-jobs-are-already-disappearing-c1634350b3d8

https://www2.deloitte.com/in/en/pages/technology-media-and-telecommunications/articles/digital-india-unlock-trillion-dollar-opportunity.html

#disruption #digital #technology #invention #business model #business #platform #future #innovation

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mostlysignssomeportents · 7 years ago

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Keep your scythe, the real green future is high-tech, democratic, and radical #1yrago

• The capitalist says: There may or may not be resource limits, but don’t worry about them! Innovation will come along in time! Full steam ahead!

• The green lefty says: Innovation can’t save us! There’s an upper limit to what humans can have / an upper limit on the number of humans. Slam on the brakes!

The difference is a poor-hating snobbery and nothing more...

Rather than campaign against Walmart, lets use its supply-chain management to liberate its goods from exploitation!

The only way to create a sustainable future is to soak the left in technological expertise, not to turn our back on it. We need to figure out how to make a lotmore with a lot less, more efficiently and effectively than ever before. We have to stop pretending that organic food -- which uses more pesticides andrequires more land than high-tech farming -- is better. We have to stop pretending that "GMO" is a meaningful category. We need to figure out how to give people the wealth and comfort and the access to contraception and knowledge that lets them have fewer kids -- not insist that the technologies that feed the kids they have today be banned because they originate with terrible companies. The problem is the companies, not the technology (Edison was a colossal asshole, but I still use battery power and lightbulbs all the time).

The left has done this before, with enormous success, in the area of AIDS activism:

A sustainable world is one in which we do things better. The better we do them -- the more material abundance we harness -- the more free we will be, both from want and coercion:

Energy is freedom. Growth is freedom.

Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff [Leigh Phillips/Zero Books]

https://boingboing.net/2016/01/12/keep-your-scythe-the-real-gre.html

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