“Why don’t you Bing it?”
A year from now, if you hear someone say that — and actually understand what it means — Bill Gates will be a happy billionaire.
That is because it will be a sign that Microsoft is finally making progress in its quest to challenge Google in the Internet search business.
Bing, the name Microsoft gave to the new search service it unveiled Thursday, is its answer to Google — a noun that once meant little but has become part of the language as a verb that is a synonym for executing a Web search. After months of, uh, searching, Microsoft settled on Bing to replace the all-too-forgettable Live Search, which itself replaced MSN Search.
Microsoft invested billions of dollars in those services and failed to slow Google’s rise, so a new name certainly can’t hurt.
Microsoft’s marketing gurus hope that Bing will evoke neither a type of cherry nor a strip club on “The Sopranos” but rather a sound — the ringing of a bell that signals the “aha” moment when a search leads to an answer.
The name is meant to conjure “the sound of found” as Bing helps people with complex tasks like shopping for a camera, said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online audience business group.
And if Bing turns into a verb like, say, Xerox, TiVo or, well, Google, that would be nice too. Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said Thursday that he liked Bing’s potential to “verb up.” Plus, he said, “it works globally, and doesn’t have negative, unusual connotations.”
Some branding experts said choosing the name Bing was a good start, but also the easiest part of the challenge facing the company, since most people turn to Google without even thinking about it.
Michael Cronan, whose consulting firm helped come up with brands like TiVo and Amazon’s Kindle, said Bing’s sound, brevity and “ing” ending were all positives.
“It has a promise that you are going to find what you are looking for, and that’s great,” Mr. Cronan said. “But its success is entirely wrapped up in the quality of the experience that Microsoft can deliver.”
Peter Sealey, a former chief marketing officer at the Coca-Cola Company, said Microsoft should have picked a name that more directly connotes search.
“Bing has no equity; it signals nothing,” Mr. Sealey said. “It is going to be an enormous expense to create an image for this thing called Bing.”
Google’s name is a play on the word googol, which is a 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The company has said the name speaks to its ambitious mission to organize all the world’s information.
Asked about Microsoft’s choice of name at a press conference on Wednesday, Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder, said he did not know enough about the new service to comment on it. Then he deadpanned: “We’ve been pretty happy with the name Google.”
Meanwhile, some tech people were already noting that Bing is also an unfortunate acronym: “But It’s Not Google.”
(the article was originally published at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/technology/internet/29bing.html?ref=technology)
Showing posts with label amazon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label amazon. Show all posts
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Monday, April 27, 2009
Amazon quarterly sales jump 18%
Amazon, the online retailer, underlined its ability to thrive amid the global consumer slump on Thursday, announcing an 18 per cent increase in first-quarter revenues to $4.89bn, and a 24 per cent increase in earnings to $177m.
Excluding the impact of the stronger dollar on the overseas businesses, which account for almost half of its sales, Amazon’s net sales would have grown 25 per cent against the same period last year.
The strong quarter, which delivered earnings per share of 41 cents, beat Wall Street’s expectations and was at the high end of the company’s own forecasts, and continued the strong growth seen in the preceding holiday quarter.
Amazon’s shares, which have almost doubled since early December last year, gained more than 2 per cent in after-hours trading to $82.68.
The company’s robust performance is being sustained by its ability to offer prices on goods that compete with conventional discount retailers, combined with free shipping, and the comparatively prosperous demographics of online customers.
Amazon is also continuing to expand its sales range, recently launching a stand-alone shoe and accessory site in Japan, called javari.com, which is built on the architecture of its US Endless.com site.
It has launched digital music downloads on its German site and launched an online video game trade-in service.
The retailer soundly outperformed leading bricks and mortar rivals, while its growth in North America – up 21 per cent – was roughly twice most estimates of overall US online retail growth. International sales rose 15 per cent to $2.3bn, but increased 29 per cent on a constant currency basis.
The quarter also saw a dramatic 38 per cent increase in Amazon’s sales of non-media products such as electronics, clothing and food, which now account for 42 per cent of worldwide net sales, compared with 36 per cent last year.
Jeff Bezos, chief executive, highlighted the performance of the Kindle electronic bookreader, whose second version the company introduced this spring, saying sales “have exceeded our most optimistic expectations”, but gave no further details.
Tom Szkutak, chief financial officer, said that Amazon’s cloud computing web services business was gaining corporate clients and hedge funds. The company is also starting to market its web services to state and federal government clients.
For the second quarter, the company said it expected net sales to grow by 6-17 per cent to $4.3bn-$4.75bn. It forecast a decline in operating income of $110m-$190m compared with last year.
[the article was originally published at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8463ea90-3046-11de-88e3-00144feabdc0.html]
Excluding the impact of the stronger dollar on the overseas businesses, which account for almost half of its sales, Amazon’s net sales would have grown 25 per cent against the same period last year.
The strong quarter, which delivered earnings per share of 41 cents, beat Wall Street’s expectations and was at the high end of the company’s own forecasts, and continued the strong growth seen in the preceding holiday quarter.
Amazon’s shares, which have almost doubled since early December last year, gained more than 2 per cent in after-hours trading to $82.68.
The company’s robust performance is being sustained by its ability to offer prices on goods that compete with conventional discount retailers, combined with free shipping, and the comparatively prosperous demographics of online customers.
Amazon is also continuing to expand its sales range, recently launching a stand-alone shoe and accessory site in Japan, called javari.com, which is built on the architecture of its US Endless.com site.
It has launched digital music downloads on its German site and launched an online video game trade-in service.
The retailer soundly outperformed leading bricks and mortar rivals, while its growth in North America – up 21 per cent – was roughly twice most estimates of overall US online retail growth. International sales rose 15 per cent to $2.3bn, but increased 29 per cent on a constant currency basis.
The quarter also saw a dramatic 38 per cent increase in Amazon’s sales of non-media products such as electronics, clothing and food, which now account for 42 per cent of worldwide net sales, compared with 36 per cent last year.
Jeff Bezos, chief executive, highlighted the performance of the Kindle electronic bookreader, whose second version the company introduced this spring, saying sales “have exceeded our most optimistic expectations”, but gave no further details.
Tom Szkutak, chief financial officer, said that Amazon’s cloud computing web services business was gaining corporate clients and hedge funds. The company is also starting to market its web services to state and federal government clients.
For the second quarter, the company said it expected net sales to grow by 6-17 per cent to $4.3bn-$4.75bn. It forecast a decline in operating income of $110m-$190m compared with last year.
[the article was originally published at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8463ea90-3046-11de-88e3-00144feabdc0.html]
Monday, April 20, 2009
Major brands learn they'd better respond quickly to Digital
Amazon.com Inc. shut like a book.
Domino's Pizza Inc. was late but eventually delivered.
When the three major brands engaged with their Web-savvy fans and critics in separate incidents last week, their responses demonstrated how corporations are still learning how to control their messages -- and reputations -- in a fast-twitch online world.
The mixed track record so far shows that fluency in the evolving language of digital public relations comes easier to some companies than others.
First, CNN: As Ashton Kutcher edged out the cable TV network last week to become the first to attract 1 million followers to his Twitter account, an odd quirk of the much-hyped race was overshadowed: CNN hadn't actually owned its account until a few days earlier.
For more than two years, the CNNBrk account (for breaking news) had been created, maintained and run by a 25-year-old British Web developer who just wanted a way to beam short news alerts to his cellphone.
But when CNN found out that James Cox had appropriated its name and content, it took a direction that might seem a bit surprising for a major media company. Instead of suing Cox or trying to shut down the account, CNN quietly hired him to run it -- and then acquired it last week when Cox was visiting the company's Atlanta headquarters.
"We've been managing the feed through him," said KC Estenson, the head of CNN's online operation, noting the huge increase in the number of Twitter followers since the November election. "As Twitter took off and became more prominent, we decided it was time to take our engagement and make it a marriage."
Other companies may find that unexpected uses of their brand have a less than fairy-tale quality.
Last week, Domino's was handed a PR nightmare when a video showed up online showing two employees laughing as they prepared food in a deliberately unsanitary way.
The video quickly garnered hundreds of thousands of views.
Domino's initial instinct was to try to dispose of the situation quietly by responding only to concerned consumers who had already seen the video, rather than risk broadening its exposure by making a public statement.
But chatter about the problem spilled over into Twitter, whose expansive micro-messaging network is becoming an online circulatory system for news, pumping information between media organs, consumers and businesses themselves.
The Ann Arbor, Mich., company posted a YouTube response of its own and even established a Twitter account to answer direct questions from customers.
"What we've learned is if something happens in this medium, it's going to automatically jump to the next," Domino's spokesman Tim McIntyre said. "So we might as well talk to everybody at the same time."
When Amazon was faced with its own consumer outcry last week, it decided to forgo the social media route.
Without warning, many gay- and lesbian-themed books began disappearing from the site's search results and sales rankings. The Twittersphere instantly saw red, accusing the Seattle company of discrimination and censorship and demanding a response.
But Amazon stayed mostly mum. It waited most of a day only to cite an unspecified "glitch," and when that vagueness only fomented the outrage, it released a second clipped statement blaming a "cataloging error."
But Twitter abhors a vacuum, and commenters rapidly filled Amazon's silence with boycott threats, petitions and caustic accusations -- an outcome that suggests that the growth of social media may be driving up the cost of inaction.
[read more : http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-twitter20-2009apr20,0,2701874.story]
Domino's Pizza Inc. was late but eventually delivered.
When the three major brands engaged with their Web-savvy fans and critics in separate incidents last week, their responses demonstrated how corporations are still learning how to control their messages -- and reputations -- in a fast-twitch online world.
The mixed track record so far shows that fluency in the evolving language of digital public relations comes easier to some companies than others.
First, CNN: As Ashton Kutcher edged out the cable TV network last week to become the first to attract 1 million followers to his Twitter account, an odd quirk of the much-hyped race was overshadowed: CNN hadn't actually owned its account until a few days earlier.
For more than two years, the CNNBrk account (for breaking news) had been created, maintained and run by a 25-year-old British Web developer who just wanted a way to beam short news alerts to his cellphone.
But when CNN found out that James Cox had appropriated its name and content, it took a direction that might seem a bit surprising for a major media company. Instead of suing Cox or trying to shut down the account, CNN quietly hired him to run it -- and then acquired it last week when Cox was visiting the company's Atlanta headquarters.
"We've been managing the feed through him," said KC Estenson, the head of CNN's online operation, noting the huge increase in the number of Twitter followers since the November election. "As Twitter took off and became more prominent, we decided it was time to take our engagement and make it a marriage."
Other companies may find that unexpected uses of their brand have a less than fairy-tale quality.
Last week, Domino's was handed a PR nightmare when a video showed up online showing two employees laughing as they prepared food in a deliberately unsanitary way.
The video quickly garnered hundreds of thousands of views.
Domino's initial instinct was to try to dispose of the situation quietly by responding only to concerned consumers who had already seen the video, rather than risk broadening its exposure by making a public statement.
But chatter about the problem spilled over into Twitter, whose expansive micro-messaging network is becoming an online circulatory system for news, pumping information between media organs, consumers and businesses themselves.
The Ann Arbor, Mich., company posted a YouTube response of its own and even established a Twitter account to answer direct questions from customers.
"What we've learned is if something happens in this medium, it's going to automatically jump to the next," Domino's spokesman Tim McIntyre said. "So we might as well talk to everybody at the same time."
When Amazon was faced with its own consumer outcry last week, it decided to forgo the social media route.
Without warning, many gay- and lesbian-themed books began disappearing from the site's search results and sales rankings. The Twittersphere instantly saw red, accusing the Seattle company of discrimination and censorship and demanding a response.
But Amazon stayed mostly mum. It waited most of a day only to cite an unspecified "glitch," and when that vagueness only fomented the outrage, it released a second clipped statement blaming a "cataloging error."
But Twitter abhors a vacuum, and commenters rapidly filled Amazon's silence with boycott threats, petitions and caustic accusations -- an outcome that suggests that the growth of social media may be driving up the cost of inaction.
[read more : http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-twitter20-2009apr20,0,2701874.story]
R/GA Creative Director Runs Twitter, RFID Experiment
Interactive digital agency R/GA's Richard Ting has been experimenting with a cutting-edge technology on Twitter. The platform, dubbed touchatag, allows his 20-month-old daughter to trigger tweets by swiping tags affixed to books and toys near a reader that resembles a bar code scanner.
The platform relies on a form of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology known as near field communications (NFC), as well as QR bar codes that when read by a camera cell phone can launch a browser and connect with a Web page.
Users set up the Twitter application through the Web-based dashboard. Tweets are preset; a fixed message is tied to a physical object. The platform comes with software, one reader and 10 Mifare Ultralight tags from NXP Semiconductors, a Philips Semiconductors spinoff. Each time a reader identifies the tag it sends the signal to the Web platform and triggers the Tweet. The starter kit is available through Alcatel-Lucent or Amazon.com.
Alcatel-Lucent has an investment group and incubator for emerging technologies inside Bell Laboratories that supports fledgling companies. The venture group supports about six ventures. Touchatag is one of two the company has made public.
Ting, VP and executive creative director of mobile and emerging platforms at R/GA, bought the kit with the thought that the tags could make physical objects smart by connecting information about them to the Internet. "The RFID tag allows the object to become smart," Ting said. "This would let you tie in customer service, ratings and recommendations. It also lets me listen in to the talk across the overall community."
Once tags are connected, information transmits from readers to PC software clients and onto the Internet. There are many applications that marketers can use. For example, consumers in a shoe store buying sneakers with an embedded RFID chip could transmit a message to download branded content to their cell phone or tweet a message on Twitter. It could provide marketers with a forum to gather ratings and recommendations and share information.
For Ting, the touchatag turned into a communication experiment to examine cross-generation communication -- how senior citizens might communicate with younger generations. While the older generations would rely on land-line telephones and physical letters, kids would use Twitter and Facebook.
[read more : http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=104106]
The platform relies on a form of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology known as near field communications (NFC), as well as QR bar codes that when read by a camera cell phone can launch a browser and connect with a Web page.
Users set up the Twitter application through the Web-based dashboard. Tweets are preset; a fixed message is tied to a physical object. The platform comes with software, one reader and 10 Mifare Ultralight tags from NXP Semiconductors, a Philips Semiconductors spinoff. Each time a reader identifies the tag it sends the signal to the Web platform and triggers the Tweet. The starter kit is available through Alcatel-Lucent or Amazon.com.
Alcatel-Lucent has an investment group and incubator for emerging technologies inside Bell Laboratories that supports fledgling companies. The venture group supports about six ventures. Touchatag is one of two the company has made public.
Ting, VP and executive creative director of mobile and emerging platforms at R/GA, bought the kit with the thought that the tags could make physical objects smart by connecting information about them to the Internet. "The RFID tag allows the object to become smart," Ting said. "This would let you tie in customer service, ratings and recommendations. It also lets me listen in to the talk across the overall community."
Once tags are connected, information transmits from readers to PC software clients and onto the Internet. There are many applications that marketers can use. For example, consumers in a shoe store buying sneakers with an embedded RFID chip could transmit a message to download branded content to their cell phone or tweet a message on Twitter. It could provide marketers with a forum to gather ratings and recommendations and share information.
For Ting, the touchatag turned into a communication experiment to examine cross-generation communication -- how senior citizens might communicate with younger generations. While the older generations would rely on land-line telephones and physical letters, kids would use Twitter and Facebook.
[read more : http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=104106]
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