Category Archives: Economics

Listen Up! Two-Way Communication Key Lesson In Crowdsourcing Research Paper

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

How can businesses tap into the collective wisdom of the crowd? Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams explored mass collaboration in Wikinomics as well as Macrowikinomics. Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li focused on how digital social technologies facilitate consumer-corporate collaboration in their book, Groundswell: Winning in World Transformed by Social Technologies.

A undated research paper (2011?) from Carnegie Mellon [1] analyzes participation at IdeaStorm.com (@IdeaStorm), launched by Dell in 2007 as a way to tap suggestions (“idea generation”) from its customers.

Continue reading →

Carnival of Journalism: Journalists As Capitalists

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

My entry in the January Carnival of journalism. This month’s theme comes from Michael Rosenblum: “Can a good journalist also be a good capitalist?”

Videojournalist Michael Rosenblum asserts (without evidence or explanation) that “there is an instinctive aversion to the idea of making money amongst most journalists.”

There are a lot of  journalists who aren’t allergic to making money. Think Barbara Walters or George Will. And business journalist median income exceeds the median income for the U.S. as a whole. Most journalists are in the 99% like most Americans. So?
Continue reading →

Ticketmaster Customers: Check Your Spam Folder

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

From the “you may have missed this in real time” department:

If you are an online Ticketmaster customer, you may be eligible for a $1.50 per purchase discount on tickets purchased from 2012-2016. No joy, it seems, for those who buy tickets from November 2011 until the settlement is finalized and discounts distributed by email (not before May 2012).

The announcement subject line is “Notice of Proposed Settlement of Class Action;” the sending email, ticketfeelitigation@tgcginc.com. You not only need to check your spam folder; you need to think about old email addresses. How many people have kept the same email address on their Ticketmaster account for 12 years? I haven’t.

Continue reading →

Online Video: Calling Apple A Market Leader Is An Understatement

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

The headlines from two days ago trumpeted Wal-Mart’s success in buying Vudu but the real story is that Apple holds two-thirds of the online movie market, based on revenue. The dollar amounts are, umm, less than stellar, however.

According to IHS Screen Digest Media Research (press release), Apple’s iTunes store had captured 65.8 percent of consumer spending for electronic movie sales and Internet video on demand (iVOD) during the first half of 2011.

Continue reading →

MyHabit and Kindle Social: Amazon’s Latest Mobile Moves

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

It landed in my in-box today:

We’re excited to introduce our valued Amazon.com customers to our new private-sale website, MYHABIT.

Save up to 60% every day on fashion for women, men, children and home.

Earlier this month, someone mentioned on Twitter (sorry, I don’t recall who) that Amazon seemed to be cultivating a social network among Kindle owners, something RWW calls Kindle Profiles. Both moves represent quiet forays into the “mobile” computing space.

Continue reading →