QR Codes–Are people using them? Do I need one?

QR codes (quick response codes) are everywhere these days--on products, on real estate listings, even on buildings. But how effective are they? Are people using them? It turns out, we dig QR codes. According to Mobio Identity Systems, QR scanning growth exceeded 1200% in the last half of 2010. Women make up the majority of scanners with 64% and while we mostly scan things to gain more information about a product or service, payment scans accounted for 5% of all scans. Starbucks uses QR codes for their mobile payment app. I'm patiently awaiting the day when I can pay everywhere with my phone. According to JumpScan, 57% of Facebook and Twitter users say they've scanned a QR code at least once and  iPhone users represent the bulk of scanners with 68%. MGH recently published a QR usage and interest survey. You can read the full survey here, but here's a breakdown of their usage statistics for QR codes:

So if you want to join the cool kids and make your own QR codes, check out Kaywa or JumpScan. And if you need a QR reader for your phone, there are several available. QR codes might even help your library run more smoothly. The Orange County Library System in Orlando is using them to offer discounts at the Friends' bookstore and to offer patron access to a map of the library. Pretty Cool.

Are you using QR codes for something cool? Let us know about it in the comments. Happy Scanning!

Free web hosting for nonprofits

The good folks at myhosting.com saw our post on GuideStar and wanted us to tell you about their awesome service for nonprofits.  myhosting.com believes in giving back to the community and reciprocating to organizations and groups that help contribute to the greater good. They  established the myhosting.com Non-Profit Web Hosting Endowment which donates free web hosting and email to:

• Registered Non-profit groups and organizations
• Organizations making positive contributions to their communities
• Educational or Governmental organizations providing for the greater good

Help us spread the word by letting any nonprofits you work with know about the myhosting.com program.

Casual Friday: Google, YouTube & Wolfram Alpha April Fool's

Google has been entertaining us on April Fool's Day since 2000, skipping only 2001 and 2003. Their first April Fool's hoax in 2000 was Google Mentalplex which promised search results if we simply projected a mental image of what we wanted to find. My favorite of the Mentalplex FAQs is: "Does MentalPlex violate my privacy?

While MentalPlex does have the potential of probing your deepest darkest secrets and desires, this information is only used in aggregate and rarely sold to advertisers unless they ask very, very nicely"

Knowing what we know about Google +1, this seems almost true. My favorite was Google Romance from 2006. "Those who generally favor the 'throw enough stuff at the wall' approach to online dating might find it useful to employ our Batch Profile Uploading option." bizologie co-founder April Kessler is from Kansas, so Google's decision in 2010 to change their name to Topeka was her favorite.

Today Google brings us GMail Motion:

And YouTube celebrates 100 Years:

And Wolfram Alpha changes its name:

Google's +1 is active--Do you "like" it?

Google just launched their new +1 service which allows you to "publicly give something your stamp of approval". Or in Facebook terms, "like" it. Right now it's still part of Google Labs and you have to opt-in to try it out, which you can do here.  I gave it a spin today and there are some cool and not-so-cool things about it.  It all depends on how comfortable you are having your name publicly associated with the links you choose to endorse.  And "endorse" is a good word since your +1's can be used in Google Ads.  So it's important to have your Google Profile set up with the right privacy settings so that you can make sure your Picasa Web Albums and the like aren't available to just anyone. That said, I like that once you've opted in, you'll have a new tab on your Google Profile keeping track of all the links you've +1'd along the way. Do we say +1'd now instead of "liked"? So hard to keep up. You can choose to make your tab public or not, but either way it's a nice handy list to refer back to: The video below will tell you a bit more about how it works and you can read more about it on Google's +1 Page. Tell us what you think about +1 in the comments section.

Smartphones and Retail Shopping

A new study by Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies shows that smartphone owners use their phones while shopping to compare prices, find other store locations and check for discounts. The study of over 1,400 consumers shows over half of consumers are using their smartphones to enhance their shopping experience. According to their research both genders equally use smartphones while shopping, but women look more for discounts while men look more for reviews. About 2/3 of smartphone owners under 35 use the phone while shopping, but only 1/3 of owners over 50 do. Surprisingly, not that many people are making purchases with their smartphone yet - only about 25%. And, the most common purchase transaction made via the phone is for entertainment (music, movies, TV) - followed by banking. You can download a free copy of the report by providing some basic contact information.

bizologie Favorite Apps: Business Card Reader

If you're like us, you collect a fair amount of business cards while attending conferences. They get thrown into your purse or laptop bag and then maybe, eventually entered into your contacts. The Business Card Reader app for iPhone helps you get rid of all those cards and import them easily to your contact list. You simply take a photo of the card and the app scans it and enters the data into your contact list automatically. The app supports several different languages and is available in the app store for $2.99. You can see it in action in the video below:

C200: The Committee of 200

The C200 is an exclusive membership association of 400 of the world’s most successful women entrepreneurs and corporate leaders representing over 100 industries in the US, Europe, Asia, Canada and Latin America. C200 members employ more that 2.5 million people and generate more than $200 billion in annual revenues. C200 co-sponsors one-day Outreach Seminars for women MBA students. Seminars rotate among the nation's top business schools, and at the seminar they award C200 Scholar Awards to enterprising first year women MBAs enrolled at the hosting school. At the Outreach seminar held in Austin with the University of Texas McCombs School of Business the day was about empowerment and success of women. Lynn Utter the President and COO of Knoll North America served as the keynote speaker and kicked off the program by discussing her work and how she took a big risk with the support of her family to make a major move to Knoll to take on more responsibility and lead an entire organization. The program focused on entrepreneurship, leadership,  climbing the corporate ladder, business negotiations, and being a successful women in business. Here are some words of wisdom from the day:

• There is nothing wrong with being ambitious
• Get an expert to do what you can't
• Hire people smarter than you
• No matter what the offer, negotiate
• Be passionate about what you do
• Know more about your company/industry/competitors than anyone else
• Reward innovation and the money will follow

My favorite quote of the day was from Gay Gaddis President and CEO of T3. Gay's mother used to tell her that "a kick in the pants is step forward."  Thank you ladies for inspiring us all!

Casual Friday: Amazon Appstore for Android

The Amazon Appstore for Android opened this week . The new store allows Android users to view apps online before they buy online and it offers Amazon's recommender service. But the really exciting news is that you can get Angry Birds Rio free for a limited time and they offer paid app for free app each day. If you spending some time today perusing the site, do be careful. TechCrunch is reporting just how easy Amazon makes it to buy these apps. If you have one-click set up in Amazon it's automatic for Appstore for Android and one-click in the wrong place could get you an app that you didn't want and you only have 15 minutes to get a refund. Let us know if you find a new favorite Android app and we'll feature it next week.

bizologie Favorite Apps: Momento

March 24, 2011. Dear Diary, we've got a new favorite app. Actually, the diary app Momento is one of our new favorite apps. Momento starts out just like you'd use an old fashioned diary: log the date and start writing about that cute boy in math class. But the great part is that Momento lets you import feeds from all of your social networking sites and then organizes them by date. You simply add your Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram, Foursquare and Gowalla accounts and suddenly you've got an automatic record of each day and you didn't have to write a thing. From there you can search by dates or tags or events and reminisce about special dates in your life. You might see that on February 27th you checked in on Gowalla at the coffee shop, uploaded a picture of your BFF to Flickr and attended a fabulous Oscar Party. Momento also allows you to lockdown the app so that you don't catch your little brother snooping through your diary. Momento is available on iTunes for $2.99 and the company is considering expanding to Android.  XOXO, bizologie.

NCES - Education Statistics

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), analyzes and provides data on education. NCES is run by the U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences. There are more education stats here than you can imagine. You can find school district demographics, drop-out rates, early education, adult literacy, school locators, and even international education comparisons. There are published reports or you can create custom tables. Some examples of stats available:

• Medium income for High School grads is $25,000 and for Bachelor's degree or higher it's $45,000
• 1.5 million kids were home schooled in 2007
• The most popular major is business with 335,000 degrees conferred
• Educational systems that outperformed the US in 4th grade science were Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong SAR, Japan, and Singapore
• 57% of children ages 3 to 5 and not yet enrolled in kindergarten were enrolled in a center-based program

Gimme That Filet-O-Fish

I was going to write about the economic impact of Lent but what I really wanted to know about was the McDonald's Filet-O-Fish. You may have already picked up on my obsession with Mickey D's. I will admit it, I LOVE McDonald's, but back to the sale of fish sandwiches. In 2009 it was reported that McDonald's sells about 300 million Filet-O-Fish sandwiches annually - 25% of which are sold during the Lent season. Some Kentucky regional stores reported selling an additional 7,700 sandwiches during Lent last year. That is a lot of fish! It turns out the Filet-O-Fish was invented for Fridays and for Lent. In 1962 Lou Groen was operating a McDonald's in Cincinnati, Ohio but he was about to go under because most of his customers were Roman Catholic and abstained from meat every Friday and during the 40 days of Lent. So Lou came up with the idea for a fish sandwich. He took the idea to Ray Kroc. Kroc had his own ideas for a meatless sandwich - grilled pineapple. In a head to head sales competition the fish sandwich won hands down and the rest is history. The Filet-O-Fish became the first additional to the McDonald's original menu.

You may remember this catchy tune from 2009. Sorry if it stays with you the rest of the week.

Famecount: Social Media's Most Popular Brands

Last week we talked about corporate use of social media and today we're going to see which brands and companies are the most popular. Famecount keeps track of brands, celebrities, media, sports, games, music and politicians on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. They'll give you rankings for each service by region and they also break down each category so you can come up with some pretty specific charts. On the "Facebook Stars" tab, I can break down the brand category to Auto, Food & Drink, Fashion, Restaurant, Retail and Technology. These charts will show me the total number of fans as well as fans per month, week and day:

I can also see most popular brands over all channels combined:

And trends of the fastest growing brands:

Famecount gets their data directly from the sources and you can read more about how their data is calculated here.

Casual Friday: Google Recipes

Google recently launched Recipe View and while it's not quite perfect yet, it seems like it will be a nice way to search. You simply search for a food, ingredient or holiday and then click "Recipes" on the left side of the page. This limits your search to only recipe sites so you won't search for hamburgers and get an article about hamburgers or a restaurant site. Once you've got your list of recipes, you can limit by number of calories or preparation time.  I also like that you can limit by ingredient, so if I want to make a birthday cake for a friend who hates coconut, I can limit my search to cakes without coconut. One thing to be aware of, especially if you run a food blog (or like food blog recipes), is that you need special coding on your site to make sure you're listed in Recipe View. You can find instructions here.

St. Patrick's Day - Spending o' the Green

We may not all be Irish but that doesn't stop us from celebrating St. Patrick's Day. According to the National Retail Federation over half of Americans will take part in the holiday. That's 122 million people going to parties, decorating with four-leaf clovers, drinking green beer, and eating green mashed potatoes. Total spending for the green day is expected to reach $4.14 billion! My favorite St. Patrick's Day treat is the McDonald's Shamrock Shake. To learn more about the famous shake, including history, old ads, and nutritional facts (I'll warn you, you may not really want to know about that), check out the Ultimate McDonald's Shamrock Shake Guide. If you want to get yourself some of the minty goodness today, check out the Shamrock Shake Locator to see if they have been sighted  in your area.

March Madness: The Big Dance for Advertisers

It's March Madness and while we can't help you with your brackets, we can help you research the dollars and cents of college basketball. According to Kantar Media, about 280 marketers have spent over $4.8 billion on national television advertising during March Madness over the past decade. In 2010 alone, ad revenue topped $613 million, up 4% over 2009.  And since games are streamed online, digital advertising represents a small but growing segment of March Madness advertising. Digital advertising represented only 1% of the ad revenue for 2006, but grew to almost 6% in 2010. The NCAA playoffs are also the #2 most lucrative post season sports franchise for ad revenue, ranked only behind the NFL playoffs. Top advertisers included GM, AT&T, Coke, Capital One and HP. Speaking of Coca-Cola, this is a big year for their Powerade division. According to AdAge, Powerade will launch its biggest marketing program yet as this year's "Official Sports Drink of the NCAA". Powerade products will be on the sidelines for all 88 games and they'll launch their new "Game Science" campaign during the first game with an ad featuring Chris Paul from the New Orleans Hornets. Powerade currently holds about 27% of the sports drink market share with Gatorade leading the category with 71%.

Estrogen Based Entrepreneurs

Bizologie is proud to be a new member of Estrogen Based Entrepreneurs. Jill Murphy started the Facebook page after writing a blog post about the challenges of the entrepreneurial/creative life. One of her friends, Sara-Mai Conway, reposted it on her page with a note about how she was going through the same thing as well. At the same time, Jill was launching My Close Strangers and another friend Bess Eckstein was starting At Your Service. Jill thought that Estrogen Based Entrepreneurs would be an excellent way to connect women who were working on new ventures so they could commiserate, share info, support each other. What a great idea and a super way to  meet some awesome entrepreneurs!

Jill is embarking on quite an adventure with her My Close Strangers project. Over the next 18 months, she will be walking, biking, driving, and flying to coffee shops, restaurants, and bars across the country to sit down with as many of her US-based Facebook friends as possible. She is interested in learning "how to be a good neighbor in a world where neighbor is being redefined in real time." We hope to meet Jill on her travels.

Happy Pie Day! Er, Pi Day?

Since my geometry days are a few years behind me, I thought we'd celebrate Pie Day instead by taking a look at the business of pie. While other industries struggle during a recession, the pie industry is, according to Mark Grandanetti, president of Rocky Mountain Pies, recession-proof. According to Baking Management, the sales of fresh baked pies topped $222 million for the 52 weeks ending January 24, 2010.  That's about 6.7% higher than the previous year's sales. So while Americans may be dining in more often, they still like to splurge and enjoy dessert at home. Pie sales in all categories including fresh, refrigerated and frozen all increased over the previous year. And what's our favorite flavor of pie? Apple is in the lead with 47% of those surveyed saying they prefer it best:

Casual Friday: Austin Margaritas in Google Fusion Tables

Amy Rushing, Metadata Librarian extraordinaire,  shows bizologie how to put Google Fusion Tables to good use. Amy has spent two years testing margaritas around Austin and rating them. Using Google Fusion she has given us Margarita Ratings: Austin, Texas - a map of restaurants and their margarita rating. You can see her rating scale in the File>About section of the Table. With Google Fusion you can create charts, graphs, and all sorts of different visualizations including maps. And, you don't have to be a metadata librarian to do it. It's easy. To create a map, make a spreadsheet with the data in Excel or Google Docs. One of the columns has to be address with zip code to map the locations. Amy used HTML code to create to the stars and fractions for her ratings. Then just import the spreadsheet into Google Fusion.

Let us know if you are inspired to use Google Fusion to map your passion. We'd love to see your masterpiece. And, Amy, we here at bizologie commend you and hope you continue your good work.

Corporate Use of Social Media

Recently we talked about how SMBs are using social media and today we're going to take a look at how some of the larger corporations put social media to work for them.  Burson-Marsteller has a great report out entitled "The Global Social Media Check-up 2011".  It's a great report and gives us insight into how some of  the Fortune 100 companies use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, etc.  Over the past year, they report "an 18% increase in FortuneGlobal 100 companies using Twitter, followed by a 14% growth in YouTube channels and a 13% growth in companies using Facebook pages."  And typically corporations have more than one account: On average they have 5.8 Twitter accounts, 4.2 Facebook accounts, 2.7 YouTube channels and 6.8 blogs. IBM alone has 76 Twitter accounts! That's a lot of communication, but who's listening? Corporate accounts average about 5,076 followers on Twitter and 87,979  "likes" on Facebook. According to eMarketer, most people follow a brand "to get updates on future products":

Fans and followers can get anything from customer service to a new job. TiVo is among the many companies who post jobs on their Facebook page:

And Glaceau's smartwater is hoping their new YouTube video will go viral:

The Yoga Market

Since I skipped my yoga class, I'm covering the yoga market to make up for it. If you have never taken a yoga class you might think it's breathing, stretching, hippy nonsense, but if you belong to a hip studio, have all the latest towels, mats, props, and stylish workout clothes, you know that yoga is big business. A $6 billion business to be exact. According to the 2008 Yoga In America Study released by Yoga Journal, these yogis are a pretty affluent group. Of the US yoga practitioners 44% have household incomes of more than $75,000 and 24% earn more than $100,000. Business Week reports the latest craze to hit the market is trademarked yoga styles. You have probably heard of Bikram yoga - the sequence of 26 poses practiced in 105F heat. In 2002 Bikram Choudhury trademarked and copyrighed that yoga style and now "charges fees for instructor training ($10,900), studio setup ($10,000), and franchise royalties (up to 5 percent of gross monthly revenues)—all contributing to $5 million in annual revenue." With results  like that others were sure to follow. Since 2001 more than 2,000 trademarks have been filed relating to yoga styles and products. A lot of these styles appeal to a certain non-traditional yogi or to anyone who doesn't have a lot of time. Now you can practice BROga®, Circus Yoga®, Snowga®, and my new favorite Hillbilly yoga®.

On a side note the  Indian government doesn't take to kindly to what it calls yoga theft. "Since 2001 their government has been cataloging more than 1,000 postures in a compendium created to protect against intellectual property infringement." It doesn't seem to be stopping anyone though. The creators of the styles claim that although they didn't invent the forms they invented a new style or sequence of how they go together. Even if the courts one day decide you can't trademark yoga, there are still lots of books, clothes, props and classes still to be sold.

Namaste