传奇

(Credit:
Foresee Results)

Freed noted that higher customer satisfaction ratings often translates into loyalty and purchase intent. Of the 40 websites, who were rated on a 100-point scale, only Amazon and Netflix finished with scores above 80. More than a quarter scored 70 or below, and almost 40 percent saw their satisfaction rankings drop year-over-year.

Still, the annual report from Foresee Results found that scores for most of the 40 online retailers it tracks remained the same while one-fourth registered improvements from 2007.

“Holding flat was a pleasant surprise,” said Larry Freed, the company’s president and CEO. “Obviously, the economic pressures and price concerns were on peoples’ minds. But this bodes well after we get past this economic bump in the road and the economy improves.”

With the nation on edge, you might assume that every Internet retailer worth their salt would have extended red carpet treatment to shoppers during the traditional end-of-year shopping rush.

In fact, more than one-third of the 40 online merchants surveyed in a report on retail satisfaction finished with lower scores than they did during the same period a year ago.

(The following is a partial list of the rankings. You can find the full report on the Foresee Results Web site.)

Beyond the raw numbers, however, no single aspect of customer satisfaction applied across the board as a measure of overall satisfaction. In some cases it was price, in other circumstances the range of merchandise or the functionality of the Web site held sway.

Amazon and Netflix turned out to be favorites with online shoppers during the holidays, finishing first and second, respectively in the rankings.

“Up until a couple of years ago, the pure plays led the way and the multichannel players trailed by significant margins,” Freed said. “But they’ve since closed the gap.”

One other takeaway from the report is clear: Despite the strong performance turned in by Amazon and Netflix, the previous gap no longer separates so-called brick-and-mortar outfits, which migrated to the Web, from pure-play Internet retailers.

Wrong assumption.

Speaking with Japanese, Korean, and Chinese manufacturers and service providers here revealed that while they’re not panicking yet, there’s definitely some worry over a lack of credit and the turbulent markets.

While major companies are sure to feel the pressure of a global credit crunch brought on by the failure of several Wall Street banks in the past few weeks, I decided to find out if or how it’s affecting smaller regional companies too.

Click here for more stories on Ceatec 2008.

“I am not familiar with this financial crisis,” he said several times.

CHIBA, Japan–The world’s electronics companies are busy here at Ceatec 2008 showing off some of the contents of their R&D labs, but meanwhile the world financial system is in chaos.

“The up and down currency is too crazy. We have to buy chips (for our product) from Texas Instruments. It’s harder to buy when currency is not stable,” she said. Plus, the U.S. is a major market for SBNTech’s products, and a depressed economy in there could lead to fewer sales for them.

Still others, like Masashi Sakaoka, a sales manager for mobile phone software maker Multisoup, expressed confidence in Japan’s economic system for companies like his employer.

Obtaining credit will be harder for Japanese wireless provider E-Mobile in the current environment, said Hiroyuki Yokoyama, an employee in the company’s enterprise sales division. “We can’t (borrow) money from banks like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and UBS” as easily, he said. Yokoyama added that he anticipates the current crisis to be an issue for him and his company for at least the next two years.

And a research director for Panasonic’s advanced technology development labs was happy to talk about his work on 3D imaging, but clammed up when asked about his opinion on the current economic environment.

Don’t we all wish we could say the same?

(Credit:
Erica Ogg/CNET News)

Attendees stream toward Ceatec 2008 just outside Tokyo.

Sarah Yoo, who manages overseas marketing for Seoul-based SBNTech, a maker of VoIP video phones, expressed frustration with the financial turbulence.

Though the general buzz inside the Makuhari Messe convention center here is generally buoyant, the people and companies here aren’t immune to what’s happening outside the walls.

“My company is very small, so the damage is very little,” said Sakaoka. He credits Japan’s more stable banks as the reason he doesn’t have to worry as much.

Of course, not everyone was very talkative. Wang Xuan, of China’s Kepo Electronics, maker of alarm security systems, said only that he remained confident in his company’s ability to do business in the U.S.–they have an office in Detroit. He did allow that his company is indeed “concerned” about the conditions on Wall Street.

Just today as I was reading The Daily Yomiuri on the train ride from Tokyo to the convention center where the show is being held, one of the front page stories caught my attention: “Confidence at Japanese companies falls sharply.” The quarterly Bank of Japan survey of businesses’ impressions of economic conditions revealed that “major Japanese manufacturers are the gloomiest they’ve ever been in five years.” Japan is the world’s second-largest economy, and lowering profit forecasts and a slowdown in capital spending appears to be on the rise here, according to the survey.

It’s also somewhat ironic that eBay it touting its success with Skype when for some time the common wisdom has been that its much-hyped acquisition of the VoIP company had been viewed as a failure.

In a release, eBay attributed its strong quarter to several factors, including global business classifieds, growth at its Skype and PayPal units, and “net transaction revenues” from Marketplaces.

eBay announced Wednesday its second straight $2 billion quarter and said its first-quarter revenue was up 24 percent from a year ago.

The auction giant said that it brought in Q1 revenue of $2.19 billion, up 24 percent from the $1.77 billion it brought in during the same period a year earlier. In addition, the company’s Q1 profit of $460 million, or 34 cents a share, was up 22 percent from its Q1 2007 earnings of $377 million, or 27 cents.

Among the milestones eBay trumpeted for the quarter were 100 billion total Skype-to-Skype minutes, 3 million total vehicles sold on eBay motors, and the repurchase of 37 million shares of eBay common stock for about $1 billion.

Also during the quarter, John Donahoe assumed the CEO position, succeeding longtime leader Meg Whitman.

The quotable Colbert: 'Me, me, me, me, me.'

NEW YORK–The 12th annual Webby Awards Gala on Tuesday night was, unsurprisingly, an evening devoted to all things Internet. “Without the Internet, someone like Tila Tequila would have five or six friends, max,” host Seth Meyers of Saturday Night Live quipped about the Web’s ability to roll out cult micro-celebrities. “Without the Internet, only Ron Paul would know who Ron Paul is.”

Worst play on words: Conde Nast’s Style.com picked up an award in the Fashion category and used its five words to say, “Guess we’re still in fashion.”

Runner-up: VH1’s Best Week Ever, in the Celebrity category, “Who let the blogs out?”

Geekiest acceptance speech: A representative from ad firm Saatchi & Saatchi picked up an Interactive Advertising Webby for a Toyota Tacoma ad campaign, held up the Slinky-like metal trophy, and said, “My robot costume is complete.”

Best onstage stunt: Picking up the People’s Voice award in the Best Practices category, Digg marketing manager Aubrey Sabala chugged a glass of champagne and proclaimed, “Webbys ‘dugg’ for the free drinks.”

Most predictable acceptance speech: Geek hero Stephen Colbert, receiving the Person of the Year award for his portrayal of an egomaniacal blowhard pundit on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, went onstage as Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” played, and proclaimed, “Me, me, me, me, me!”

The glitzy ceremony, held at a Greek Revival building that once housed the New York Stock Exchange and New York Merchants Exchange and now houses the upscale Cipriani Wall Street event space, celebrated just that. In a pastiche of entertainment awards shows, a moderately impressive red carpet featured Internet-famous folk in the line of “Obama Girl” and Ben Huh, the twentysomething guy from Seattle who’s responsible for “I Can Has Cheezburger, as well as a few “real” celebrities like rappers Ludacris and Will.I.Am, and music icon David Byrne.

Most professionally appropriate speech: The American Bar Association’s ABA Journal, in the Law category, “Had we lost, we’d sue.”

The “And it sounds even better in your sulty Greek accent” award: Liberal news pundit and IADAS member Arianna Huffington, receiving the award in the Blog – Political category, proclaimed “President Obama sounds good, right?”

Most memorable acceptance speech: Browser start-up Flock picked up the judge-chosen Webby in the Social Networking category, and the company founder used his five words to say, “No s***, we beat Facebook!” (Facebook went on to win the People’s Voice award in the same category.)

Least shocking surprise of the evening: In between rounds of awards, host Seth Meyers said he was going to show a video tribute to members of the Web community who had died in the past year, and showed part of Rick Astley’s corny “Never Gonna Give You Up” video instead. Seth, Rickrolling is so over.

Corollary: Colbert’s pop-culture influence was reflected in Facebook’s acceptance of the People’s Voice award in the Social Networking category–”One million strong for Colbert!”–as well as FactCheck.org’s acceptance speech in the Politics category, “Where truthiness goes to die.” FactCheck won another award later in the evening; the site’s second acceptance speech was, “No, Obama’s not a Muslim.”

Best use of two awards: The “Happiness Factory” ad campaign for Coca-Cola picked up two awards; the representative accepting the award from agency Shift Control Media used his first five words to say “Seth, your fly is open” and his second, an hour later, to say, “Still down, Seth, getting creepy.”

It was a marathon ceremony. With two awards given in each of a seemingly endless number of categories–a judge-chosen Webby and a vote-chosen “People’s Voice”–there were so many winners that, in Webby tradition, each acceptance speech was limited to five words. So here, in an attempt to sum up the awards show without taking three more hours to do so, here are the Meta-Webbys: the best of the best of the Web’s acceptance speeches.

Most productive speech: “We’re hiring, send us resumes” from ad agency Tribal DDB in one of the Interactive Advertising categories.

Most shocking surprise of the evening: In an interview on the red carpet, Ben Huh, the owner of kitty humor site I Can Has Cheezburger said that he’s allergic to cats. Clad in a white suit and a massive hat shaped like a cheeseburger, I guess he also gets the Best Dressed nod.

(Credit:
Comedy Central)

Software plays a large role in any discussion of this type, and again Sun thinks it has something that can rattle NetApp and EMC.

In the early part of this decade, Sun learned all too well just how disruptive (“good enough” technology at a significant discount) can be. Customers moved away from products built on Sun’s own custom microprocessors and software to cheaper servers that relied on Intel processors and the open-source Linux operating system. While larger customers still wanted Sun’s high-end hardware for some tasks, the Intel-and-Linux combination could satisfy the majority of most customers’ needs.

The key for Sun will be to sustain this growth. It won’t be an easy task, but customers should be cheering as Sun lowers the cost of storage and improves choice and flexibility through open source. NetApp may not like it, but then, Sun didn’t like getting beaten up for its former proprietary intransigence, either. Sun learned its lesson. Will NetApp also learn?

commentary

Sun spent years fighting this trend toward “good enough at a great price,” but now it’s wielding the weapon of open-source software and commodity hardware (as well as its not-so-commodity hardware). It seems to be working. The Register reports that Sun grew its market share in the external disk storage market faster than any other vendor in the second quarter of 2008 at 34.7 percent to NetApp’s 22.9 percent growth.

Sun Microsystems has spent years getting bludgeoned by commodity hardware and software. Now it’s planning to apply those painful lessons to its competitors in the storage industry, as highlighted by The New York Times reporter Ashlee Vance:

So the new Socialtext will let users subscribe to wiki pages and to the activity stream of other users, to see when files are edited, and when tasks are accepting and finishing. The product also displays comments left on wiki pages. But the feature that lets users ask free-form questions to their workgroup is missing.

You can't have it yet.

Mayfield says that just giving users a Twitter clone doesn’t solve the dual problems of information overload on the one hand, and personal isolation at work on the other. He believes that the most important communication between workers in a company is what they are doing. “When I work,” Mayfield says, “I’m sharing knowledge as a byproduct of getting work done. In the enterprise, what someone does is more important than what they say.”

These functions, plus a revised and streamlined user interface, will be embedded in the Socialtext suite, along with a new feature that records a running stream of who’s doing what and where on the system, which users can subscribe to from their profile pages or their dashboards. It’s almost, but not quite, Socialtext’s own Twitter for enterprise customers. Missing is the capability for users to post free-form, Twitter-like items into the stream. That function is coming later, according to Ross Mayfield, chairman, president, and co-founder of Socialtext.

(Credit:
Socialtext)

What’s the hold-up? Mayfield showed me a prototype business nanoblog called Socialtext Signals, as if to prove that the company could make such an app. (It didn’t take long, he admitted). But he said of the app, “We’re going to throw it away”–the code, that is–and start over to build a more robust business nanoblog that offers what people in a workplace really need.

I’m glad to see a contemporary groupware company like Socialtext taking the longer view of the Twitter concept than upstarts like Yammer and Present.ly. In this space, I’ve been a fan of Socialcast more than those apps, because it’s based on the larger vision of integrating information from numerous group applications. That’s what Socialtext is doing, too, and it’s the right thing for business. “The end state for this kind of application is a connected collaboration platform, not standalone microblogging, which is relatively shallow,” Mayfield said. But I still believe that the company should hustle up and get its Twitter-alike product into the hands of its customers. Not everyone appreciates the long view.

Related Webware reviews:

Yammer: A ‘Twitter for the enterprise’

Present.ly is smarter than Yammer

Socialcast is FriendFeed for your business

Enterprise social software company Socialtext is releasing Socialtext 3.0, with the features we previewed here in April: the corporate social network Socialtext People, and a revised home page for business users, Socialtext Dashboard.

Mayfield told me Socialtext will eventually release a standalone, desktop version of Signals that lets users “Twitter” to their co-workers. A private beta of the app is entering testing now.

Socialtext 3.0 gets a social network and a quasi-Twitter function.

I’m not sure Socialtext’s delay is due to a lag in development or if it’s strategic. I suspect the latter. Mayfield, who speaks in somewhat Delphic riddles regarding the nature of work, says, “The updates box (in Socialtext Signals) is less about trying to have conversations. It’s about surfacing conversations that people are having in workspaces.”

While the biography of Obama on Baidu is largely celebratory, this is not a formal endorsement of the candidate. It is, however, an endorsement of his Web-savviness. Clicking on the Obama-adorned logo on Baidu redirects to a Chinese-language biography of the candidate and links to various media; the central talking point is Obama’s status as a young politician who has successfully leveraged digital media and the Web to rise to fame. Of particular note, according to his Baidu page, is his speech about race in Philadelphia that soared to the YouTube stratosphere after appearing on television earlier.

But of more local relevance, the Baidu site about Obama also highlights the high volume of Chinese search queries for both Obama and his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. Charts and graphs detail politics-related searches both Chinese and international. There are also information resources pertaining to what the U.S. presidential election means to China, and what Chinese citizens think about it.

A cartoon version of Obama is depicted next to a donkey, the Democratic party emblem. He’s holding a net as though casting it, and attached to the end of the net is a computer mouse–get it? It’s the Internet.

(Credit:
Baidu)

“State and world affairs have become the most popular topics of concern for Internet users,” a translation of part of Baidu’s page about Obama reads. It doesn’t seem to mesh particularly well with the Chinese government’s rigid stance on the spread of information, particularly political rhetoric, on the Web.

Nor was it clear whether the Obama campaign would react positively, considering the tense relationship between the U.S. and China. Calls to the campaign’s press office for comment were not immediately returned.

U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama appears in cartoon form on the logo of Chinese search engine Baidu.

This is part of a “person of the month” feature that Baidu has instituted since November, the blog Shanghaiist explains. Each month, Baidu selects a real-life or fictional personality who has ranked high in its search queries. As Shanghaiist explains, it’s “a bit like Google Trends meets Time Person of the Year on a monthly basis.” Barack Obama is the sixth installment in the series.

Chinese-language search engine Baidu has an unusual new mascot atop its home page: U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

The series is hosted on the domain renwu.baidu.com; “renwu” means “historically important person.”

First, at least one of each new album run must be tested. So on one side of a room that long ago was used as a room for record release and signing parties–Hank Williams Jr. had a party thrown for him here when he was 16, Millar said–a woman is sitting and bobbing her head as she listens to songs on headphones, making sure the new record has no problems. If it does, United Record Pressing will have to tell the record company what the issue is.

This is still a small enough phenomenon, of course, to barely register on Apple’s radar. iTunes is safe, in other words.

On Monday, as I swung through Nashville on Road Trip 2008, I was lucky enough to get to visit the production facilities of United Record Pressing here and get a firsthand look at how LPs are made. Before you scoff at the notion of making records, consider that over the last few years, the format has made a big comeback, with sales skyrocketing and turntables moving off store shelves like they haven’t in years.

“People don’t need their discs to be compact anymore,” said Millar, “because you can’t get much more compact than MP3. So it’s back to the big discs.”

There’s also the small matter of putting the records in their sleeves–something I saw two people tucked away in a corner of one room doing. They had their process down pat: grab an LP, inspect it quickly for obvious defects, pick up a sleeve, slide in the record, repeat.

And it’s not just black either. The company also makes records that are red, orange, blue, and gray. Sometimes, it takes all the discarded vinyl from several pressings and mixes them together into a kind of hodgepodge color.

Then, the biscuit is placed in the middle of a machine and then it is joined together with a fresh supply of vinyl, and together they are smashed between a plate and the stamper. A blade then shears off the excess vinyl, and voila! A brand new record slides out of the machine and onto a rack.

Millar showed me a room in the basement of the building that contained thousands and thousands of folders–really, they seemed like extra-thick album covers with no art–that contain the masters of every record the company has produced over the years. This is a treasure trove bar none, since United Record Pressing works with pretty much every major label you can imagine.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

The lacquer is then delivered to United Record Pressing, which begins the process of actually making the LPs.

Still, for audiophiles who used to buy CDs, this gives them a way to have a physical disc to listen to the music on, as well as a way to easily tote it with them.

“It really started picking up when iPods started coming onto the scene,” Millar said. “Everything got so sterile with digital that people were not spending time” with the physical manifestation of their music.

First, a separate company with facilities nearby takes the original recording–which can come in the form of an audio tape, but (audiophiles, cover your eyes here) more often comes on CDs since many artists are using software like ProTools to cut their tracks–and uses it to cut the familiar circular grooves into an object called a lacquer.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

For a company like United Record Pressing, that’s been great news, as its sales have been going up steadily as more and more artists turn to records as a way to get their music into the hands of people who care about it.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

According to Jay Millar, the marketing and sales manager for United Record Pressing, it has everything to do with the emergence of Apple’s oh-so-ubiquitous MP3 player.

At United Record Pressing in Nashville, Tenn., LPs are still made the old-fashioned way: with lots and lots of vinyl. This is a bin full of little vinyl pellets that will be melted into records.

Why? The reason is pure irony.

The mother is then pressed into what is known as the stamper, and this, too, has ridges. The stamper actually is the basis of every record that comes out of this factory.

First, the vinyl is melted down into what is called the biscuit. This is the center of the record, the round part with no grooves and the little hole. To this is added the label, which is pressed onto the biscuit, a step that doesn’t require any adhesive. Rather, the biscuit is so hot from the vinyl being melted down that the label sticks right on.

In fact, it is these digital downloads that may be heralding the re-emergence of the LP and the death of the CD. That’s because many artists are now offering record buyers a one-time free download of all the tracks on the album as a bonus.

To ensure that labels don’t bubble up after being pressed onto a record, the labels are baked in an oven to remove any moisture.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

NASHVILLE, Tenn.–When people think of the Beatles coming to America, they usually conjure up images of The Ed Sullivan Show and screaming teenage girls chasing the Fab Four on the streets of New York.

The labels, which are printed here by the thousands, are actually baked in a special oven so that they retain no moisture, something that could cause bubbling on the actual record.

At this point, it’s all about raw vinyl, millions of little chunks of the material that resemble Pop Rocks.

At United Record Pressing, black is not the only color of vinyl that is used. There’s also red, orange, blue, gray, and even a mixture made from the cuttings of the other colors.

A record-pressing machine at United Record Pressing. The company is one of only three in the United States that still produces LPs in any meaningful amounts.

In other words, as iPods began to dominate the music world, people were leaving their CDs on the shelves, and iTunes downloads, as well as those via file-sharing services, took over.

Inside each folder is the master, and a full set of all the associated materials: the master, a label, an album jacket, and anything else that might be included, such as liner notes. And these days, as with an Elvis Costello album Millar showed me, the folders may also hold an insert with information for a digital download of the album.

The master is then used to make what is known as the mother, a metal version of the record that can, itself, actually be played.

When all is said and done, it’s actually a remarkably simply process. But there’s still much more that must happen before an LP leaves the facility.

But here in Music City, there’s something else to commemorate the earliest stages of the British Invasion: the fact that the first American Beatles 7-inch record was produced by United Record Pressing–then, as now, one of the largest makers of vinyl in the world.

First, the lacquer is sprayed with a layer of silver, which, after it sets, is then peeled off. The resulting sheet is known as the master, and it is the opposite of a record, because it has ridges rather than grooves.

So how is a record made?

But for audiophiles used to actually handling some sort of disc, this change has led to a reversal of fortune for the LP, a format long thought to have gone the way of the floppy disk.

It’s the first time Sony has ever made such a move, but the company’s financial circumstances give it few options. Sony is predicting an operating loss of $2.9 billion for the current financial year ending March 31, the electronics giant’s first annual loss in 14 years.

To stem continued losses, Sony said Thursday there will be no pay increases for non-managerial employees this year.

Sony doesn’t give automatic raises every year based on seniority–unlike many other Japanese companies–but instead awards them based on responsibility and performance, according to Reuters.

It has already resorted to closing several factories, laying off 16,000 full-time and contract workers, cutting salaries for managers, and trimming bonuses.

Sony is just one of many Japanese electronics companies that have been hurt by the global economic downturn and a stronger-than-expected yen.

“The Google TV Ads platform is making television advertising more accountable and measurable and we’re pleased with our progress to date,” Tim Armstrong, Google’s president of Advertising and Commerce, said in a statement. “Our partnership with NBCU will help us bring the power of television to a broader set of advertisers as well as give our current advertisers increased reach through our system.”

NBC Universal will offer advertising time from several of its cable networks for Google to sell through its Google TV Ads service as part of a multiyear advertising, research, and technology partnership, the companies announced Monday in a joint statement.

The Google TV Ads service, which launched in partnership with EchoStar Communications in May, can report second-by-second TV usage data, allowing advertisers to measure viewership of their ads more precisely.

Google announced last October that it was partnering with Nielsen to allow companies that buy its Google TV Ads to find out how many people actually watch the ads. The partnership gave Google access to Nielsen’s demographic data from aggregated set-top boxes so advertisers can see which ads are effective and can get additional aggregate information about the viewers, such as age and gender, according to Nielsen.

NBC Universal and Google also plan to work together to adapt the Google TV Ad service for use in local TV markets. They are also collaborating on custom marketing and research projects using Google TV Ads to survey audience trends.

Google officially entered the television ad business in April 2007 when it announced it was partnering with EchoStar to sell commercials over the Dish satellite broadcaster’s 125 national programming networks. Under the EchoStar deal, advertisers use Google’s AdWords automated auction interface to bid on ad spots. Advertisers can upload their TV commercials and select the desired time of day and channel, as well as choose regional or national area coverage.

The partnership will focus on the Sci Fi, Oxygen, MSNBC, CNBC, Sleuth, and Chiller channels, with the possibility of adding more channels in the future, the companies said.

“With the addition of NBC Universal inventory, advertisers using the Google TV Ads platform can reach NBCU Cable’s national audience and gain access to viewership data at an unprecedented scale,” NBC Universal and Google said in a statement.

Google is partnering with NBC Universal to act as broker for TV advertising times on some NBC cable channels.