From BizDom Blog
ECO ATM
ECO ATM founder Mark Bowles poses for pictures with his company's phone recycling ATM machine from the start-up office in San Diego, California April 20, 2010. The eco-friendly company is building ATM type kiosks that allow a person to be instantly paid for recycling their old cellphone.
Twitter Co-Founder Creates Square:'PayPal for Smartphones
Appropriately named Square, his new business is enabling people to receive payments via their smartphones, using an app and a plug-in device. It started trading just under eight weeks ago. To some it is the future of mobile payment and, if it's a big hit Stateside, will surely come to Europe soon. The big card payment providers could also soon be looking over their shoulders.
Dorsey, presumably not as a clever piece of marketing, does actually live his life in a neat square. His new business premises are opposite his apartment, aptly next door to the US mint and centred around a lovely sun-filled square plaza, where people meet, talk tech and drink coffee.
Procter & Gamble moves from soap operas to tweets
Procter & Gamble Co., whose sponsorship and production of daytime TV dramas helped coin the term "soap operas," has pulled the plug after 77 years. Instead, the maker of Tide detergent, Ivory soap and Olay skincare is following its customers online with a big push on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.
The last P&G-produced soap opera, "As The World Turns," went off the air in September. The show was the leading daytime soap for decades, but had lost some two-thirds of its audience at the end.
Over the years, P&G produced 20 soap operas for radio and TV. But ratings for daytime dramas have been sinking for years, as women, their target audience, increasingly moved into the workplace, switched to talk and reality shows, and spent more time using online media and social networking sites.
The "Smell like a Man, Man" commercials starring hunky former football player Isaiah Mustafa became a YouTube sensation, drawing tens of millions of views and spawning parodies such as one with Sesame Street's Grover, and generated another round of attention with Twitter questions that Mustafa answered in videos -- such as on ABC's Good Morning America when he suggested that President Barack Obama could improve standing with female voters by wearing only a towel and beginning speeches with "Hello, Ladies!"
The last P&G-produced soap opera, "As The World Turns," went off the air in September. The show was the leading daytime soap for decades, but had lost some two-thirds of its audience at the end.
Over the years, P&G produced 20 soap operas for radio and TV. But ratings for daytime dramas have been sinking for years, as women, their target audience, increasingly moved into the workplace, switched to talk and reality shows, and spent more time using online media and social networking sites.
The "Smell like a Man, Man" commercials starring hunky former football player Isaiah Mustafa became a YouTube sensation, drawing tens of millions of views and spawning parodies such as one with Sesame Street's Grover, and generated another round of attention with Twitter questions that Mustafa answered in videos -- such as on ABC's Good Morning America when he suggested that President Barack Obama could improve standing with female voters by wearing only a towel and beginning speeches with "Hello, Ladies!"
Barcelona signs up first commercial shirt sponsor in 111-year history
The Qatar Foundation is a non-profit organisation, which primarily runs education projects aimed at helping the country and other parts of the Middle East. Barcelona has previously refused commercial shirt sponsorship.
The Qatar Foundation will share the shirt space with Unicef, after the children’s charity became the club’s first sponsor in 2006.
The Qatar Foundation, which was set up in 1995, is chaired by Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al-Missned, the wife of the Emir who was central to Qatar’s successful bid to host the 2022 World Cup competition.
Amazon gives Nielsen BookScan to authors
Authors with books for sale on Amazon who have signed up to use Author Central, the site's free author portal, will be able to see the book-sales information starting Thursday morning.
The data, provided by Nielsen BookScan, include nationwide sales information from Barnes & Noble, Target and other big-box brick-and-mortar retailers, from Amazon.com and from some independent booksellers. Nielsen estimates that BookScan captures 75% of print book sales in the U.S. retail market.
BookScan's sales tallies do not currently include sales of e-books, for the Kindle or other devices.
Authors who use Amazon's Author Central will see a geographic sales map of books sold during a four-week window, with a lag of about a week. Early Thursday, the sales figures displayed included Nov. 1 to 28; later Thursday, Amazon expects a new week to load, so the information will span Nov. 8 through Dec. 5.
This is the closest thing to real-time aggregate sales data available to publishers, and it hasn't been cheap. Nielsen's BookScan, now a decade old, began to find widespread enrollment with major publishers in 2004, when fees ran $100,000 and more per year.
It would have been far beyond the reach of most individual authors, if it had been available to them.
In recent years, individual authors have increasingly been asked to take part in the marketing and promotion of their own books. Publishers have faced budget cutbacks, and the Internet has provided authors with more ways of reaching readers -- and potential book buyers. Amazon sees the Nielsen BookScan data as a tool to that end. "The geographic view of print sales will help authors identify trends to help their promotion efforts and enables authors to develop more effective methods for reaching the widest possible audience," Amazon's Kinley Campbell wrote in an e-mail.
Just in time for Christmas, Amazon may be turning authors into an army of booksellers.
Renault sells Formula One stake to Lotus
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