Ideapad

Blogging since 1998. By David Wertheimer

Page 16 of 128

The all-new Ideapad

August 1, 2013 /

Hello from 2013! This page is still a bit of a work in progress, but I’ve migrated Ideapad to WordPress, after many reliable years on Movable Type. Some visual and structural updates were overdue, and while launching a WP blog is far from revolutionary, it’s a breath of fresh air around here.

In the update, I’ve also, for the first time, done a proper content migration. All my blog posts from 2001 to the present, covering the MT era and prior years in a home-rolled PHP CMS, have been pulled into the new layout. I seem to have lost some paragraph spacing in the transition, but all the entries are properly categorized with working HTML.

At the same time, I’ve managed to maintain my flat-file archives dating to 1998, which I invite you to explore, if only to laugh at the things that were interesting to me a dozen years ago.

Welcome.

My thanks to David Miller for ongoing tech support.

My Google Reader starred posts archive

June 18, 2013 /

Google Reader shuts down on July 1, and as a die-hard fan, I am going to miss it.

While I’m busy exporting my feed list and re-establishing my RSS reading elsewhere, I’m reminded that I often used the starring function to call out posts of note. Of course, the truth is that I rarely returned to my starred items, and with minimal social network tie-ins, those favorited posts never got much exposure.

So I’m resurfacing them here for posterity–fully, more or less, despite the fact that I have a lot of links from 2009 and earlier that make no sense to me now, or that just aren’t interesting anymore. For one reason or another, they were interesting then, and they deserve to be archived. And, naturally, some of my favorite blogs over the six-plus years I’ve been living in Reader don’t seem to have been starred along the way, like Alice and Kev, which will keep you riveted if you read it chronologically.

Regardless. From items I liked to items I wanted to revisit later (and likely never did), herewith, my Google Reader faves archive, in reverse chronological order, with occasional (present-day, in parentheses) annotations.

Digital facts of the day

May 22, 2013 /

There are now around 130 million smartphone users and at least 55 million tablet users in the U.S. market. Among other trends, 15% of ecommerce transactions will be completed on mobile and tablet devices this year, a number that will only continue to grow.
While this is a prime opportunity to gain market share and–still–establish first-mover advantage, 45% of marketers don’t have a mobile presence, either with apps or optimized websites.
When I was working at Ai we would annually update our stump speech for mobile. “2009 is going to be the year of mobile.” “2010 is really the year of mobile–our clients’ stats show smartphone usage on their sites tripled last year.” Now, in 2013, mobile and tablet use is starting to drive the digital economy, in a shift that is not going to turn back around. Yet many brands have not capitalized on the opportunity. If not now, when?

Parallels in Internet history

May 17, 2013 /

April 1999: Yahoo! buys GeoCities.

“A $3.6 billion deal that will further solidify Yahoo!’s position as a frontrunner in the online popularity contest. …

“GeoCities (GCTY) is the third most visited site on the Web behind AOL and Yahoo!, with 19 million unique visitors in December, according to Web research company Media Metrix.

“GeoCities sets up communities of people who share similar interests and allows customers to create their own home page on the Internet.

“A deal would likely propel Yahoo! to the top rated site in terms of traffic, but it’s not clear how much the two sites’ individual audience overlap. …

“Through GeoCities, Yahoo! will be able to distribute a range of editing tools and content published through personal homepages in an array of services. …”

May 2013: Will Yahoo Try to Get Its “Cool Again” by Doing a Deal for Tumblr?

“CFO Ken Goldman … said Yahoo needed to be ‘cool again.’ …

“Tumblr … focuses heavily on user-generated content, largely text and photos, although there is an increasing use of video on the site. …

“Any kind of deal with Tumblr could certainly bring Yahoo a big, young audience. Its worldwide traffic was at 117 million visitors in April, according to comScore. On its home page, Tumblr claims it has 107.8 million blogs and 50.6 billion posts.”

At the time of its acquisition, GeoCities posted a net loss for the year of $19.8 million alongside a $2.3 billion pre-Yahoo market cap. Tumblr generated $13 million in revenue last year and has a reported valuation of $800 million.

Timely Demise: Where are they now?

May 16, 2013 /

A friend recently discovered and fell in love with Timely Demise, my chronicle of the compression of American retailing in the last recession. I hadn’t really looked at the site since it closed, and as I started poking through the archives, I got curious about the final outcomes of the activities we tracked in the moment.

Researching the bankruptcies and acquisitions chronicled in the blog, I was able to get concrete updates on 40 of the larger entities. Here’s how they wound up:

  • Eighteen of them (45%) are gone, either through Chapter 7 liquidations or just closing up shop. Extrapolated across the hundreds of companies we covered, this percentage would undoubtedly be higher, given the amount of smaller brands and mom-and-pop stores we wrote about.
  • Seven (18%) were acquired and continue operating, including individual brands (Stila, J. Jill), retail brands (Crabtree & Evelyn) and multi-store chains (Better Bedding).
  • Four firms continued operating but encountered more trouble after their appearances in Timely Demise, including Fortunoff (which ended up closing all its stores, then reopening a few more targeted stores) and Reader’s Digest (which has returned to bankruptcy but continues to publish).
  • Now to the good news. Five companies emerged cleanly from bankruptcy and continue operations.
  • Four firms shrunk but are still in business in some form.
  • And four firms we wrote about look as though it’s business as usual for them, having weathered the recession and resumed their growth trajectories in recent years, some with admirable results. La-Z-Boy, we recline in a toast to you.

The best-selling albums of all time

January 7, 2013 /

Per independent research, the top 10 albums and millions of copies sold, worldwide:
1. Michael Jackson, “Thriller”: 66,200,000
2. Soundtrack, “Grease”: 44,700,000
3. Pink Floyd, “The Dark Side of the Moon”: 44,200,000
4. Whitney Houston et al., “The Bodyguard”: 38,600,000
5. The Bee Gees at al., “Saturday Night Fever”: 37,200,000
6. The Eagles, “Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975”: 36,900,000
7. Bob Marley, “Legend”: 36,800,000
8. Led Zeppelin, “IV”: 35,700,000
9. AC/DC, “Back in Black”: 35,700,000
10. Shania Twain, “Come on Over”: 35,400,000
Domestically, the U.S. top-selling albums list isn’t all that different, but it’s somewhat cheesier.
1. Michael Jackson, Thriller, Epic, 29,000,000
2. Eagles, Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975), Asylum, est. 29,000,000
3. Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin IV, Atlantic, 23,000,000
4. Billy Joel, Greatest Hits Volume I & Volume II, Columbia, 11,500,000
5. Pink Floyd, The Wall, Columbia/Capitol, 11,500,000
6. AC/DC, Back in Black, Atlantic, 22,000,000
7. Garth Brooks, Double Live, Capitol Nashville, 21,000,000
8. Shania Twain, Come On Over, Mercury Nashville, est. 21,000,000
9. Fleetwood Mac, Rumours, Warner Bros., 19,000,000
10. The Beatles, The Beatles (White Album), Apple, 9,500,000
Just below the top 10 in the U.S. are several of the global top sellers, plus “Boston,” which apparently doesn’t scale on a worldwide level.

How industry consolidation affects you: rental cars

January 2, 2013 /

Renting a car? These are the major domestic options by brand name:

  • Enterprise
  • National
  • Hertz
  • Alamo
  • Avis
  • Budget
  • Thrifty
  • Dollar
  • Zipcar

But this is the corporate landscape, pending FTC approval of two recent deals:

  • Hertz Global Holdings (Hertz, Thrifty, Dollar)
  • Avis Budget Group (Avis, Budget, Zipcar)
  • Enterprise Holdings (Enterprise, Alamo, National)

Nine brands, three car companies. Remember that next time you try threatening the guy at the airport that you’ll walk over to the next counter.

This is the first in a series of summaries of industries whose corporate consolidation has led to a small number of players controlling the majority of the market, creating oligopolies in the mass market.

The year in cities, 2012

January 2, 2013 /

Eighth edition: listed here are the places I visited over the past 12 months. Per the annual rules, only overnights are listed; repeat visits are denoted with an asterisk (even those that I last visited five or 10 years ago; previously, I used a dagger, but it’s gotten redundant).
New York *
Punta del Este, Uruguay
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Orlando, FL *
Washington, DC *
New City, NY *
Livingston, NJ *
Hong Kong *
Blue Bell, PA
Bellevue, WA
Montauk, NY
Gloucester, MA *
St. Thomas, USVI *
Short Hills, NJ
Hawley, PA *
Palm Beach Gardens, FL *
Lake Buena Vista, FL *
Lakewood, NJ

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