Milliondollarhomepage.com

We all came up with our pure play businesses, but none of us thought of doing this.  Twenty-one year old Alex Tew came up with the idea of creating a website displaying 1,000,000 pixels.  He would charge $1 per pixel to advertisers.  When you click on a pixel or a group of pixels bought by the advertiser, you will be redirected to the website of their choice.

After his first 1,000 pixels bought, Tew made enough for a press release that generated interested in advertisers from several countries.  And as of now, it's all sold out.

Take a few clicks around and see what you come up with.  When I visited this website I just realized how jealous and dumb I am for not thinking of this.  He's got no college debt anymore.  Congrats to this kid, anyway.

http://milliondollarhomepage.com/

ShopSavvy Is The Ultimate Bargain Hunter

What is one thing that everybody and their mother own these days? The correct answer would be: a cell phone. Some people even have “smart phones”, which may seem like some sort of new drug judging by the dependence I see from my friends on a daily basis. It only makes sense that marketers would flock to the new hot thing. And so now we have “mobile marketing”, or marketing through mobile phones.

One product that colors me “awestruck” is ShopSavvy made by the Dallas based company Big in Japan. This is an application that allows you to take a picture of a product’s barcode from your camera phone and it will give you a plethora of prices for that product, both on the internet and from competing retailers.

Here are some useful features for consumers:

· Reviews of the scanned product can also be sought out on the spot.

· Price Alerts will notify you when the product you are seeking drops to a price in your given price range.

· Wish Lists enable you to organize and recall products you’ve scanned. As one reviewer says, all you have to do is forward the list you scanned to grandparents a few weeks before a birthday.

· History lets you view everything you’ve scanned, which will make it easy to go home and order a product online after checking it out at a store.

So what does this mean for the people selling and marketing products in competitive areas? Retailers should learn to use the internet in an effective manner regarding their inventories. If a retailer makes the products it sells available for online searching, then potential customers using the ShopSavvy application (or similar ones) will be able to locate the retail store, along with the prices offered and the proximity of the store to the user. (For an overview of internet search engine use, a good webpage to check out would be: http://www.kurtkomaromi.com/internetmarketing/2010/04/presentation-search-engine-marketing-paid.html) Google, along with other media sources, have been giving ShopSavvy the attention it needs to get off the ground and into smartphone users’ downloads. This product spreads simply by word of mouth and internet buzz.

Retailers will have to make more competitive price ranges now that they may be competing directly with online stores, once more consumers start using ShopSavvy, etc. The target audience for this convenient price shopping tool is the smart phone market. More specifically, it’s for bargain hunters that are comfortable using a cell phone and the internet. Anybody with a smartphone who is into finding the best available deal would fall into the market ShopSavvy has entered, which is a fairly broad target. And in these times, most everybody is looking to save any money possible.

The ShopSavvy application is not like any marketing channel I’ve heard of ShopSavvy itself. The ability to engage the consumer with this program is through the roof. Unlike receiving text message updates from a preferred retailer or company, the consumer seeks out the different prices, which ultimately will lead to the best deal for the consumer. The content is easily delivered to anybody who knows how to effectively utilize this type of technology. It’s more or less like shopping online with every available price comparison that is relevant to your specific shopping want or need. With the local store price listings, location-based marketing also comes into the picture. It’s truly amazing that a service offers the price ranges and suggests where you can seek out the product from your current location.

I was able to check this out over winter break on my friend’s iPhone. We simply took a picture of a CD case’s barcode and it brought us options ranging from the closest Barnes & Noble to Amazon.com’s selection. As I stated before, I was very impressed. I can understand that any bargain hunter could use this to its maximum potential. Reviews from the New York Times and NPR also seemed to be generally impressed by this device.

It’s possible for ShopSavvy to force retailers to adjust their prices to a more competitive marketplace. Smartphone users can potentially save a good deal of money by using this application. I look forward to seeing where ShopSavvy ends up in the grand scheme of things. It’s got a considerable amount of consumer buzz and is easily downloaded from Verizon’s Android phone or an iPhone. This application’s use is just another chapter in the internet’s role of shaping marketing and consumer buying. What’s next with marketing and ShopSavvy? Perhaps coupon notifications via text message are the next step in securing the best possible prices for consumers. Just scan the barcode of the coupon sent to your smartphone when making the purchase and that’s it. Not to mention, it’d also save tons of trees if coupons were made scan-able from your phone. The possibilities are endless.

With functions that I previously discussed, I wouldn’t be surprised to see next generation’s “everybody and their mothers, too” using ShopSavvy to hunt down the most attractive deal, either online or at a physical retail location.

To actually see ShopSavvy in action you can check out this video:

(Shameless) Free Self Promotion Via The Internet

Did you know I'm in a band called Robbin' Pain? Oh you didn't!? Well let me tell ya:

There are websites called "Social Networking" sites that are free to use, all while being great vehicles to get whatever you have to share across.

One example is Myspace. You might see a link that looks something like this, which was chosen at random to exemplify what I'm trying to say:

http://www.myspace.com/robbinpain

Basically you can listen to the band's music for free and get any updates by checking the website and networking with other bands, fans, etc. Maybe you should check it out, just to get a hang of social networking sites.

Super (Infringed) Mario

Honestly, I didn’t know it was possible to distribute console videogames illegally online until reading an article on the subject matter. I didn’t even know the “Super Mario” series was still being made. However, very similar to illegal music distribution, it’s possible to upload a videogame for Nintendo Wii through peer to peer channels. This is the case of a recent “blunder down under” in Australia when a 24 year old Australian man uploaded and distributed the latest Super Mario game for Nintendo Wii, going against Australia’s Copyright Act of 1968 and later revised in 2006 (according to wikipedia.org). After understanding and applying course concepts, it is clear this defenseless pirate would have been sent to the convict paradise we know as Tasmania, had this been in Australia’s colonial days.

The managing Director of Nintendo in Australia, Rose Lappin, summed it up best when she said, “It wasn't just an Australian issue, it was a global issue.” Once somebody uploads a file, anybody in the world can access the file through our extremely communal internet systems. However, there are means to protect oneself against copyright infringement, which include: work used for criticism, commentary, news reporting and teaching reasons. By the end of the court case, James Burt was found guilty of copyright infringement for a Nintendo product. We will now explore the reasons James Burt was charged a $1.5 million fee settled out of court (on top of his legal costs) by comparing his actions against fair use factors that we discussed in class.

The first fair use factor I will talk about is the purpose for using the copyrighted works. The two aspects that really come into play for this factor are commercial and non-profit motives. Obviously, loading the Super Mario game did not result in profit for James Burt. It did cost Nintendo and its numerous retailers a great deal of loss, however. If Burt posted some information about what he thought after playing the new game as an online review, he could have gotten away with posting the copyrighted information. This was not the case at all. There is a huge difference between posting a review and posting the actual game to download and play. Though Burt did not post Super Mario for a profit, he has bleak odds of winning this case in court. It seems this is strike one for Burt.

The second part of fair use factors deals with the nature of the copyrighted work. When defining nature, it is important to mention: is the work factual or fictional? In most cases, factual work is more difficult to defend against copyright infringement when compared to fictional work. If the facts are facts, then it’s very difficult to copyright it for exclusive rights. Here's an example: last time I checked, Ben Franklin’s birthday was January 17, 1706. Nobody can hold exclusive rights to that fact and copyright it. Any author could publish this information in a factual book. However, last time I checked the concept of Super Mario, it was purely fictional. It’s clear that the Australian court system did not believe James Burt if he claimed to have made up the new Super Mario game, or claimed the game was factual. Super Mario is a fictional made up game registered and legally owned by Nintendo. That’s two strikes for the copyright offender.

The third aspect of fair use factors that we learned about in class was the substantiality of use. In other words, how much of the copyrighted material was used by the accused infringer? According to the Sydney Morning Herald, James Burt “illegally copied and uploaded one of [Nintendo’s] new games to the internet ahead of its release”. James Burt did not duplicate the character of Super Mario (or to a lesser extent just Luigi!) and paste it into a game he created independently from Nintendo featuring those characters. He deliberately uploaded the entire videogame to the internet and shared it amongst thousands of downloaders. This is similar to somebody uploading an entire music album before its release date and sharing it with the entire world, as opposed to just sampling a brief piece of the song. The entire functioning videogame was posted for people to download; therefore, Burt had no case for this piece of the fair use factor list. That puts James Burt at three strikes against copyright infringement, but we can take a look at a “bonus round” before he strikes out for good.

The final part of the fair use factors list we discussed is a major component in this case. The question is: did this affect a potential market? Was it a neutral result from loading the games or was there lost revenue? The answer is: there was lost revenue. As Miss Lappin states in the article, "It's not just about us. It's about retailers and if they can't sell the games then they have to bear the costs associated with that.” Nintendo wasn't the only organization missing out. The reason for the $1.5 million settlement was to recoup lost profits from all the downloads, which resulted in fewer purchases of the physical videogame. Unfortunately for Burt, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act did not change the rules for his copyright infringement. He shared the pre-released game and less people bought the game as a result. There’s no reason to actually buy the game if you already downloaded it. So it’s safe to say that James Burt did cause lost revenue, which officially disqualifies him from this aspect of fair use for this copyright. James Burt just earned his last strike.

After analyzing all of James Burt’s potential defenses that were discussed in class, it’s safe to say he is rightfully guilty. He did not use the videogame for anything that would qualify as fair use and each factor I evaluated throughout this post came up negative for Burt. The case of James Burt in opposition to Nintendo’s Australian division was most likely won by a landslide (the winner being Nintendo). I believe this is a prime example of copyright infringement by way of the internet in our contemporary society.


Article used for this post:
http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/games/nintendo-pirate-to-pay-15m-20100209-np4i.html

Case Study 1: Walking Into the Future

The Digital Age has once again proved to be amazing. As companies’ internet marketing shifts from mass production toward the concept of mass customization, each and every one of us can (as Burger King puts it) “have it our way”. We can customize our Dell computers then order specially recommended books and music from Amazon.com. Then we can customize our shoes on the internet and walk into the future with one-to-one and mass customization marketing offered by so many companies today.

As a company focuses on a customer’s specific needs, the company can truly individualize its product. This means less emphasis on mass production to the numerous options and styles a customer might prefer. And so this is what Nike and Puma both achieved, respectively with their NikeID and the Puma Mongolian Shoe BBQ websites.

Compare and Contrast: Nike vs. Puma

Starting with the NikeID, the first screen proves this is a global phenomenon that’s connected via the internet. To make things easy, I chose to customize my shoe in the English language. The website is colorful and incredibly intense. As Nike is often perceived for the sportsperson, the website caters from running shoes to action sports shoes, which can be used in sports such as skateboarding, for both men and women. The website is very interactive and very futuristic looking in general with its metallic background and high tech buttons to press. The impression that I get from the NikeID is they’re very serious about giving the consumer a shoe fit exactly for the consumer’s chosen activity or lifestyle, while adding the specific flair the consumer wishes to wear. On first glance, the options that Nike’s site offers is almost overwhelming.

I had almost too many options, which is impressive

On the other hand, Puma’s website seems lighthearted when compared to the Nike website. The website starts with a quick tour of a restaurant and then gives a menu to engage the consumer’s creative side. The consumer isn’t exposed to a very serious first approach like Nike chose, but a more fun and kind of humorous fashion. By giving the consumer a digital “chef’s hat”, he or she can begin to design the desired shoe with three blank pre-styled shoes that are not for specific sports or lifestyles. Unlike Nike, Puma gives the consumer a few “laid back” or casual shoes that are not terribly specialized for a specific sport or activity. Overall, NikeID’s website exudes a very serious, specialized shoe for a serious athlete with some spare money to spend. This will appeal to consumers who are highly involved in their sport of choice. Puma’s approach gives the idea that the consumer doesn’t need to be a star basketball player to wear Puma shoes, but he or she has the ability to add a custom spice to make the shoe his or her own shoe for many occasions.

My First-Hand Customer Experience

On Nike’s website, I browsed through the extensive variety of athletic shoes that I was able to design. I went with a running shoe, since I often run. As I previously mentioned, at first I was a bit overwhelmed by the choices, colors, designs and everything else the flashy website bombarded me with. Once I got my bearings back and began designing, the process was fairly simple, though I feel Nike can make it even simpler for less tech savvy consumers. Nike certainly used advanced technology to display my custom shoe throughout the process by offering multiple angles of the shoe at any time. Clicking and dragging the shoe image allowed me to view even more angles that the pre-selected views didn’t offer. Along with different angles I could zoom in and out with quality images of the shoe. The design process was especially interactive by letting me click on the exact part of the shoe I want to change, whether it was color or type of sole depending on what surfaces I’d mainly run on. Once I finished, I had the option to imbed the image of my custom shoe on Web 2.0 websites, such as facebook and twitter, so I can show the world my personally designed Nike shoe…all because of mass customization.

The Puma website was easier to begin designing the shoe with three clear options of the desired style. While this approach is simpler and less difficult to use, it does have its limitations. One limitation included Puma’s inability to see every possible angle, like Nike offered. However, like Nike, Puma’s website gave you a step by step guide to choosing colors and materials for each bit of the shoe. The technology on Puma’s website was easily satisfactory, but it didn’t quite have the standard Nike adopted, which I would consider a competitive advantage on Nike’s behalf. Puma didn’t engage me on the level Nike was able to. Overall, Puma’s website technology was simpler and easier to use than Nike’s, but it was also less impressive. The concept of the Puma site was interesting, as it cited the history of a Mongolian BBQ and how everybody has his or her own tastes and preferences. This shows Puma’s desire to practice mass customization by using the internet’s technologies and capabilities.

Easier to use, but less impressive

While both companies are certainly willing to charge a premium for every consumer’s custom taste, the idea of mass customization is interesting. These companies won’t enjoy the pleasures of buying and selling in economies of scale, but it demonstrates the companies’ ability to adapt to ever-changing technology. As Web 2.0 shows, the consumer is empowered by collaborating with the company to design a shoe. The consumers can then later post it on their social networking pages and share a personally created shoe with the entire world, which is a great example of companies utilizing Web 2.0 technologies in the Digital Age for everyone’s advantage.

Coming to stores in Spring of 20-NEVER, the brand new Nike Running shoe cleverly deemed: The “SCOTTW”