According to No-Vacation Nation, a report from the Center for Economic & Policy Research, America "is the only advanced economy in the world that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation." Turns out, if you like taking extended summer vacations, Europe is the place to be. By law, most European countries guarantee workers 20 paid vacation days per year, with some offering up to 30 days. And this doesn't include paid holidays which range from 5 to 13 days per year. The U.S. government doesn't require companies to offer paid vacations or holidays, leaving 1 in 4 Americans with no paid vacation or holidays. The average American worker receives about 9 paid vacation days and 6 paid holidays. Here's how a few of our OECD counterparts stack up:
Netflix Beats BitTorrent’s Bandwidth
Wired reported that for the first time in internet history, the largest percentage of the net’s traffic is content that is paid for. Sandvine's Global Internet Phenomena Report, Spring 2011, which measures total traffic and averages it over 24 hours, shows Netflix, with 22.2% of traffic, overtook BitTorrent, with 21.6%, as the largest component of Internet traffic on North America’s fixed access networks. At peak times, Netflix hits 30% of all traffic. Sandvine's spotlight report Netflix Rising boldly proclaims "Netflix is now the undisputed bandwidth king of the Internet in North America." Netflix has 23.6 million subscribers, up 6.7 million subscribers in just the last half year. A few factors leading to that growth; Streaming is now available on Nintendo Wii and Sony Playstation without a physical disc, and Apple began shipping a version of the AppleTV with integrated Netflix streaming.
The top 4 devices driving the most Netflix usage are all game consoles: Playstation 3, Xbox 360, PC and Wii. They account for more than 85% of the total Netflix traffic. Those same Netflix game console users also exhibit the largest daily data consumption of around 2.5 GB per day.
It doesn't look like Netflix will be giving up their bandwidth crown any time soon. They are rumored to be expanding outside the US and Canada into Europe, Latin America, and Asia. And, they just announced a deal to air exclusive content, the television series “House of Cards”, reportedly outbidding major networks including HBO and AMC.
Casual Friday: Career Voyeurism
How about a field trip of sorts? We have all wondered what it would be like to have a career different from our own, so what follows is a list of confessions, that is, a list of book titles all starting with Confessions of. They give us insider perspectives into professions that may be very different from our own, and at the sake of sounding like a salesperson, it’s fascinating to read the life lessons that others have derived from their own unique first-hand experiences. This compilation represents an interesting slice of real no-fiction-here lives, though it is by no means 100% complete. ISBNs are included should you want to locate a title for yourself. And now, in no particular order:
• …A Street Addict- 9780743224888 ("Street" in this case refers to Wall Street.) • …A Serial Entrepreneur- 9780787987329 • …A Public Speaker- 9780596801991 • …A Municipal Bond Salesman- 0471771740 • …A Radical Industrialist- 9780312543495 • …An Event Planner- 0470160187 • …A Record Producer- 0879308745 • …A Master Jewel Thief- 0375508392 • …A Video Vixen- 9780060892487 • …An Economic Hitman- 9780452287082 • …A Prairie Bitch- 9780061962141 • …A Subprime Lender- 9780470402191 • …An Advertising Man- 1904915019
P.S. I can vouch that the Master Jewel Thief and Event Planner titles are fun reads.
The Mobile Movement from Google Think Insights
Google's Think Insights has a great video out about understanding smartphone user behavior. Did you know that 39% of us use our smartphone while in the bathroom? Does this mean smartphones are the new magazines? Also, about 1 out of 3 smartphone users say they'd give up chocolate before giving up their phone. Other things we'd give up before our phones include beer, high heels (that's an easy one!), Super Bowl tickets and Cable TV. You can see the complete report here and check out the video below for the highlights.
Crunchbase for Private Company Research
Researching private companies can be difficult especially if you can't afford expensive databases. Crunchbase is a "free database of technology companies, people, and investors that anyone can edit." Crunchbase covers both public and private companies but since public company information is usually easily accessible from a number of sources, Crunchbase is my go-to place for private, tech companies. Their company profiles include things like company descriptions, screenshots, company milestones, executive names and titles, recent news and funding information. Information will vary. Sometimes you'll find extra videos, names of competitors and website traffic and other times you'll only see a company description. You can simply plug in the name of a company you'd like to research or you can search their database by geography, category, funding or status. If you've found a company profile that you'd like to share with others, you can share it via Facebook or Twitter but you can also use their embedded widget code to share it on your website. Then as the Crunchbase database gets updated, so will your company widget. We introduced you to Hipmunk a couple of months ago and below you'll see their Crunchbase widget.
Got a source you like to use for private company information? Tell us about it in the comments.
Top 100 Brands for 2011
bizologie has covered the top social media brands, but which brands have the most value overall? Millward Brown Optimor, with The Financial Times, Bloomberg and Datamonitor, developed the BrandZ Top 100 Most Powerful Brands. The BrandZ Top 100 fuses consumer measures of brand equity with financial measures to give each brand a dollar value, so the brands with more loyal customers have higher values. As Advertising Age reported, for the first time in 4 years the Google brand has been knocked from the top. Can you guess who finally toppled the king of brands? Yep, Apple. With their sales of ipads they moved to the top spot. This year Amazon just beat Walmart as the most-valuable retail brand with its brand rising to $37.6 billion as Wal-Mart's fell to $37.3 billion. Wal-Mart still has more than 10 times the sales and more than five times the market capitalization of Amazon, but BrandZ's calculation subtracts tangible assets from market value, so Amazon benefits because they have no physical stores. The largest increase in growth was Facebook up 246% (now worth $19.1 billion). The Chinese search engine Baidu saw the second largest growth with a jump of 141%. Even with their tough year, Toyota's brand still rose 11%.
You can get a full copy of the 2010 report for free from BrandZ. Here's a look at the top 10 for 2011:
Prom Spending
Visa did a phone survey of 1,000 families to see what they are spending on prom this year. Parents who make less than $50,000 will spend on average $778 and parents who make more than $50,000 will spend an average of $916. Not all families buy into the hype of prom though, 22% of families who have teenagers will not spend any money on the prom, probably indicating their kids aren't going. This Good Morning America video features a mom and daughter who spent way over the average. This 15 year old girl spent $3000 on her outfit - that included tanning, hair extensions, teeth whitening, designer shoes and bag, and to top it off a $1700 dress. I'm pretty sure I didn't spend that much on my wedding ensemble. But as Quinn Fabray pointed out on Glee - "you can get married as many times as you want, but there is only one Junior prom." Here's a breakdown of prom spending by region:
*featured photo - prom circa 1988
What's in a Name?
Ever wonder how some of your favorite companies and brands get their names? Strategic Name Development, a brand naming company, does just that. They employ a team of linguists from all over the world to assist companies with naming products or even changing the name of their company. According to the SND web page, about 1900 companies change their name every year. So what makes a good product/company name? Strategic Name Development says good names should roll off the tongue. They should be short, pronounceable and "harmoniously balanced with vowels and consonants alternating evenly throughout." Some examples they give for harmonious, balanced brand names include Amazon, Toyota, Coca-Cola, Lexus and Panera.
Strategic Name Development also has a great monthly publication called "This Month in Branding". Here are just a few of the interesting facts I found:
- The Today Show debuted in 1952. Its proposed name was "The Rise and Shine Revue."
- Monopoly was invented in 1935 after a redesign of a game called "The Landlord's Game."
- The application for the trademark for Milk Duds was filed in 1983. Its name is derived from the large amount of milk in the product and the failure to produce a perfectly round shape.
- Yahoo! was incorporated in 1995. Yahoo was first used in the book Gulliver's Travels for a person who is repulsive in appearance and barely human. The founders of Yahoo!, David Filo and Jerry Yang, jokingly considered themselves yahoos.
- People magazine's first issue debuted in 1974. Its name was borrowed from the popular People page in Time magazine.
- The Hershey's Take5 candy bar brand name was first used in 1966. Named for its five ingredients: milk chocolate, peanuts, caramel, peanut butter and pretzels, it also capitalizes on the colloquial expression "Take 5" for a 5 minute break.
- On April 1st in 1976, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne formed Apple. The name was inspired from Steve Jobs' former job at an apple orchard.
- Eggo was first used as a brand name for frozen waffles in 1935 on April 27th. It was originally named Froffles, a portmanteau of frozen waffles, however, people started referring to them as Eggos for their eggy taste. In 1955, the company officially adopted their nickname.
Catchword Branding is another product/company naming firm. They give some helpful naming tips in the video below:
More Ways to Google for Market Research
Last week in the Tracking Down Free Market Research post, Laura revealed one of our secrets to finding expensive market research reports using Google. Here's another trick to use when you aren't lucky enough to find the entire research report. Look for excerpts of that report, especially charts and graphs, highlighted in PowerPoint presentations. You can look in SlideShare, where you will find lots of presentations posted, but don't limit yourself just to that site. Do an advanced Google search and limit to the specific presentation file types or just add the shortcut filetype:PPT or filetype:PPTX to your keywords. Here's an example of a slide about the US Biodiesel Market that features a graph from Euromonitor International:
Itty Bitty Bit of Branding
For my first contribution to this blog, I figured it would be fitting to start small. Really small. 16x16 pixels to be precise. The favicon, or bookmark icon has become a somewhat ubiquitous visual moniker for that we rely on and appreciate when browsing through multiple open webpage tabs or a long bookmark lists. A few examples are the favicons for Wired Magazine website, the Amazon website, this bizologie blog, and Google Calendars (which features the date). I say somewhat ubiquitous though because while many established institutions, especially those with popular recognizable brands have been using favicons for some time, small businesses sometimes overlook this opportunity to display their brand image. In a deeply sweeping and precise scientific survey, I did a Google search for the words: Austin coffee, and opened 10 pages from the first Google results page. Four of the cafes had a favicon and six of the cafes did not. In a second search for the words: San Diego pet boarding, only two of the 10 boarding centers from the first results page sported favicons.
How does a small business go about remedying this? Visit an icon generator page like this one from Project Fondue. Upload an image or logo, or use their editor to create one from scratch, download the finished product, and use a website editor to embed the code.
As Harvey S. Firestone, founder of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, said: “Success is the sum of details."
Casual Friday: Google Chrome Ads
Everyone get your Kleenex ready, Google just launched it's Chrome TV ad campaign - their biggest offline campaign ever - and the first two ads are real tearjerkers. There is a tactical reason for all that emotion. As explained in the New York Times article, Google wants to appeal to users who are not interested in the technical benefits, but just want to see see what they can do with Chrome. The Dear Sophie ad shows a father creating an online scrapbook for his daughter in Gmail by sending her notes, photos from Picasa, Google mapping their first house, and videos of dance classes and birthday parties. The It Gets Better ad , first aired this week during Glee, shows people using Chrome’s toolbar to record videos for the Dan Savage project of the same name to encourage gay teenagers that they can make it through the tough times. How can you not tear up during these ads? Makes me want to switch to Chrome right now, so I guess it's working!
Tracking Down Free Market Research Reports
Update: Check our Free Research Reports page for a list of current free reports available. One of our missions here at bizologie is to help our readers find business information for free whenever possible. But what can you do when that great market research report you need costs anywhere from $500 to $5000? Well, that's when you put your mad library skills to good use and start doing some creative Googling. For example, we know that Gartner, Inc and Forrester Research offer all kinds of market research reports in the information technology space. I also know that Gartner calls their reports "Magic Quadrants" while Forrester uses the title "Forrester Wave". These reports are very expensive to purchase but sometimes other companies will post them freely on their websites. As an example search, we'll use a Gartner report. I've chosen "mobile enterprise applications" as a subject I'd like a market research report on. Using Google as my search engine of choice, I type in "gartner magic quadrant mobile enterprise" and then choose "advanced search". Under "file type" I use the drop down menu to choose PDF. Then I click the "Advanced Search" button and...bam! First hit: Gartner's "Magic Quadrant for Mobile Enterprise Application Platforms". And I've just saved $1995.00.
Now sometimes you won't know that Gartner has this report available. I can still type in "mobile enterprise application" and limit my search to PDFs. As a shortcut, you can just add "filetype:PDF" to your search string rather than using the advanced search feature. That particular Gartner report is still the fourth item down in my search. And now I'm not limited to only Gartner reports but reports from other firms, as well. Some other research firms you might look for include IDC, Frost & Sullivan, Jupiter and Aberdeen.
We'll be honest and say it doesn't work every time, but I'd say I have good luck finding reports about 70% of the time. Obviously, the newest reports present the biggest challenge, but even if you can find one that's a year or two old, it can still be very valuable information. Some research firms also offer the option of buying just a section of a report for a discounted price. For example, let's say you find a report that is $5000. You might see that the information you need is in chapter 7 of a report and they may be willing to sell you just that section for say $700.
If you've never seen one of these reports, they're usually maybe 20-30 pages long and include things like a graph of players in the space, an overview of the industry, strengths and weakness of players in the space and maybe a forecast of future expectations for the industry. Below you'll find examples of Magic Quadrants and Forrester Waves. Happy Searching!
Private Cloud
Gartner knows that most large enterprises see private clouds in their future. They see companies trying to determine whether to invest in building a cloud service or buying from cloud service providers. To make the best decision, companies need to be able to evaluate the private cloud computing trend, vendors and road maps. For more information on private cloud, create a free account with Gartner and then watch this webinar to learn:
- What private cloud computing is and how will it evolve?
- How to choose between public and private cloud computing?
- Who are the vendors?
- How should a private cloud computing strategy be developed?
This short video from David Mitchell Smith, Gartner VP provides a short intro to Private Cloud:
Inc's Hiring Tool Kit
The Business Owner's 2011 Hiring Tool Kit from Inc. features information on hiring, orientation, training, and performance evaluations. But it's not just a few helpful hints there are also checklists, forms, and policies - everything a small business needs to grow.
Here's a sample of what you can find:
- How to write a job description
- Interview questions to ask - Do you volunteer within the community?, What weakness has most impacted your ability to succeed at your career?
- Rejection and job offer letters
- Tips for the first day on the job
- Vacation policy
- Non-compete agreement
- How to start an online training program
- Performance evaluation form
A Quick Video Tour of QR Codes
We recently talked about QR Codes and why you might use them. The video below from Rocketboom Tech shows several examples of how QR Codes are being used, different QR reader applications and how to make a QR Code yourself.
Casual Friday: A Tour of Westminster Abbey
Didn't get an invitation to hang out at Westminster Abbey today? Never fear. There's an app for that, of course. With Abbey 3D, you can tour the Abbey right from your smart phone. The app features an internal scaled replica of Westminster Abbey and includes several historical facts and figures about the Abbey along the way. The app "uses the latest laser scanning technology combined with 3D modelling to create a super realistic version of the Abbey, a technique commonly used in film production but rarely applied to mobile devices." It's a bit pricey at $4.99, but proceeds from sales will be split equally between the Prince William and Miss Catherine Middleton Charitable Gift Fund and Westminster Abbey Foundation, which is responsible for the care and upkeep of the Abbey. It's available for Android and iPhone. You can view a demo below and check out the procession route in 3D on Google Earth. Happy Friday, y'all!
New Wii arriving in 2012
Nintendo just announced that they'll be coming out with a new Wii in 2012! And for good reason, their profits are plummeting. Our reporters on the floor of the Consumer Electronics Show report that Nintendo didn't even show up to the party since they couldn't compete with the Kinect. There is no news yet about exactly what the new Wii will look like or what awesome features it will offer. But, "Nintendo is looking to repeat past successes in the gaming market. The Wii took the industry by storm five years ago by offering motion-based gaming that appealed to a broad audience rather than just 'core' video game fans." Mitsushige Akino, Chief Fund Manager at Ichiyoshi Investment Management believes that these gains won't be possible because they are now competing with the smartphone market that didn't exist in 2006. "Core users and game lovers will certainly buy it, but I think it will be hard to capture buyers outside of that group," he said. That competition might be killing all the big game companies. According to VGChartz all hardware sales in the Americas are down 79% overall.
Personally I can't wait to see what the new Wii has to offer, but honestly I can't imagine how they can improve bowling or American Idol karaoke.
Economic Impact of The Royal Wedding
All eyes are on London this week for the wedding of William & Kate. Like everyone else, we at bizologie are excited to see the dress and all the pomp and circumstance. But, as usual, we've got our business socks on and are wondering things like: How will this impact London's economy? How many tourists and how much money will they spend? Here are some economic predictions about the Royal Wedding:
- According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, the wedding will bring in about £107 million or around $178 million for the city of London.
- Over two-thirds of visitors will go shopping while they are there and well over half intend to visit bars, clubs and restaurants. 58% say they will visit tourist attractions while they are in London, with 36% of visitors budgeting to spend between £75 and £99 per person per day on tourist attractions.
- According to Visit London, the official tourism agency, over 1 million people are expected to visit London for the wedding. If everyone attends the procession, that's 400,000 more than lined the parade route for Charles & Diana's wedding in 1981.
- Some economists believe the wedding will actually cost the UK economy upwards of $50 billion--$35 million alone spent on extra policing and overtime for the city. In addition, many UK citizens will take not just the day off for the wedding but several--the wedding comes between two long holiday weekends in England which allows many workers to receive 11 days off while only claiming 3 vacation days.
Unfortunately, we at bizologie can't take 11 days off to celebrate. However, we've got our TiVos fired up and are anxiously awaiting the big day. We're hoping to get our hands on some of the crazy souvenirs available. Here are some of our favorites:
- Will & Kate commemorative refrigerator from GE. Yes, yes I would put this in my kitchen.
- Papa John's Royal Wedding Pizza.
Can't wait until the big day? Here's a little preview of what you can expect to see inside Westminster Abbey this Friday:
Using LinkedIn for Company Research
We know LinkedIn is a great place to start when you're researching individuals but it's also a great place to find some pretty helpful company statistics. In the LinkedIn Search box, change the drop down menu to search for companies and plug in the company you're interested in finding out more about. Using Whole Foods as an example, on the first page I can find out who I'm connected to at Whole Foods, who some of the new hires are, new job postings and position changes within the company. One really cool feature is in the right hand sidebar: "Check out insightful statistics about Whole Foods Market employees". On this page I can see that 66% of Whole Foods employees have a bachelor degree and that before going to work for Whole Foods, most employees worked for Wild Oats Market and Starbucks. There's even a tab showing where most employees went to college. In this instance, most employees went to the University of Texas at Austin. Which, of course, makes sense as Whole Foods' home office is in Austin. What's interesting is that there are also several employees from Colorado State University and the University of Colorado at Boulder. This also makes sense as we know that most employees came from Wild Oats which had its headquarters in Boulder, Colorado and was for a time owned by Whole Foods. It's important to remember that these statistics are based solely on the information provided by employees on LinkedIn, but it's easy to start to paint a picture of the culture and types of employees.
Are you using LinkedIn or another social media tool in different ways to do business research? Tell us about it in the comments.
Social Media Plan Template
Marketo is offering a free Social Media Plan template. The plan includes the tactical objectives you can use to accomplish two primary goals of social media. Download the Social Media Tactical Plan Template below, and find out where to budget your time and resources to maximize your organization's social media efforts. The customizable social media tactical plan helps you:
- Measure the value of social media strategies
- Efficiently create tactical objectives
- Drive more unique traffic to your website
- Convert anonymous traffic to known visitors
It's a simple template, and you probably actually know what you should be doing already, but the template will help you outline the necessary steps to keep track of your social media and provide you with some ideas for how to measure your success.
