Tuesday, April 8, 2003

GM ads smear public transit -- again General Motors, a company that gutted many of America's great cities by pressuring local governments to eliminate public transit in the 20th century, is running ads in a local Vancouver paper that calls transit riders "CREEPS & WEIRDOS." Another ad complains about the odor of the subway. Between Los Angeles's smog, Aussie brushfires and Middle East wars, I think we can say with confidence that GM's last kick at the public transit can incurred a debt to the human race the company could never repay. Hard to believe they've got the chutzpah to go at it again. Guess they've got nothing to lose. Link Discuss (Thanks, Heidi!) [Boing Boing] Outragious! 3:22:14 PM

Why It's Time To Take A Risk This isn't the first time I've said that now is a great time to be building a company. Everything is cheap - except for capital and customers. However, if you can figure out a way around those two hurdles, it's a great time to build a strong company foundation without as much pressure as during the boom years. And, it's not just startups. Every company should think about ways they can take a risk these days. It's not necessarily frivolous risks - but calculated ones that make sense these days. One of the signs of a strong business is that it looks at the driving forces of the world it lives in, and figures out how to best play off of them. In the boom years, when there was plenty of money floating around, it made sense to get the cash (it was cheap after all), though not necessarily to then go out and spend it on million dollar parties. Nowadays, when everybody is cutting back, a smart business will realize that there are many cheap things out there (office space, people, equipment), and figure out how to use that to their advancement. The companies that use this time only to cut back, won't be in a position to do much of everything when things turn up again. [Techdirt] I've been wondering about this myself, specifically with all the commercial space available in the SF area. Is there an opportunity to change some of these spaces from commercial to residential properties? I'm sure it wouldn't be easy, but is it possible? 3:12:32 PM

Amazon.com As The Web Services Trailblazer For a while there was all this talk about web services, but very few examples of anyone doing anything with them. That's beginning to change. Both Amazon.com and Google are actively experimenting with web services that let others have access to their databases, and, in the case of Amazon, it's proving to be a success. There are a large number of sites out there selling products, all through Amazon's back end using web services. It makes complete sense for Amazon - who has expanded their strategy to running stores for other companies (like Target and Toys R Us). With web services plenty of smaller stores can use Amazon for their backend as well - without Amazon having to do any work. [Techdirt] So, is Amazon competing not only with major retailers, but also vendors of shopping cart systems and transaction processing? As a potential client myself, the opportunity to tap into the rich customer base inside Amazon is hard to resist! 3:04:22 PM

Marketing Translation Blunders REDUX The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty has taken my previous blog entty to task: But I read it on the internet! When Coca-Cola first shipped to China, they named the product something that when pronounced sounded like "Coca-Cola." The only problem was that the characters used meant "Bite the wax tadpole." They later changed to a set of characters that mean "Happiness in the mouth." Uhm... No. Coca-Cola did not run a campaign for "Bite the wax tadpole" in China. They did the research up front. Chinese shopkeepers however, would frequently spell the name phonetically, without regard for translation. When Gerber first started selling baby food in Africa, they used the same packaging as here in the USA - with the cute baby on the label. Later they found out that in Africa companies routinely put pictures on the label of what's inside since most people can't read. Gerber baby food horrified Africans? No. Chicken magnate Frank Perdue's line, "It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken," sounds much more interesting in Spanish: "It takes a sexually stimulated man to make a chicken affectionate." Frank Perdue? 100 people survey, top 4 answers on the board... Still looking. (sorry, my Spanish language experts are in bed at the moment.) The moral of this story? Do your research, and start at Snopes[The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty] I stand corrected. To be fair, I read it in a University of Phoenix online classroom discussion. I'll forward on these comments to the class. This is the second time in as many days that I've discovered course materials that are simply wrong. The textbook says that Victoria Secrets ran a Superbowl ad for their Internet fashion show without telling the webmasters. I'm getting kinda bummed out... this coursework costs a lot of money! 2:45:17 PM