WURLWIND Solutions

Unraveling iPad 3 Release Rumors

admin — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 18:30:54 +0000

The internet has been buzzing for several weeks with rumors of an expected iPad 3 release in 2012. There has been speculation that it will be an upgrade, to the iPad2, and not necessarily a new generation of iPad. Apple is struggling with trademark issues and containment of counterfeit products in China, with a possible ban on sale of iPads there. Some sources in China confirm that Foxconn is in full production mode and 65 Million orders for the touch-screen displays have been placed with several manufacturers. Other notable tech-xperts affirm that the iPad3 will be launched at about the same time as the iPad 2 last year, in early March. Quite a few analysts have applied what I call “crystal-ball algorithm” and point to a precise release date of March 7. While others are focusing on the secondary market and planning how to implement the best iPad2 re-sell strategies. For Apple-philes and non-believers alike, the countdown has already begun with echoes of “I want my iPad3”.

London Olympics is Petri dish for new TV Metrics

admin — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 19:34:29 +0000

NBC Universal is investing a LOT of cash in developing a new cross-platform metric. It has partnered with Google and comScore to create a “single-source” metric, which will more accurately measure viewership and program engagement across broadcast, cable, internet and mobile. This is ground-breaking. NBCU’s “BillionDollar Lab” will be the upcoming 2012 Olympic Games in London, a sort of uncontaminated Petri dish. If successful, the new metric protocol will transform the way we historically measure television ratings, and Nielsen boxes will become a thing of the past. This will not only bring the television industry, one of the slowest sectors to embrace new technologies, into the 21st century; it will prove a valuable tool for allocating advertising dollars. Stay in the know at www.wurlwindsolutions.com

Best Movies for Business Inspiration

admin — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 18:20:56 +0000

Do you LOVE your business? If you’re a small business owner who loves what you do, sacrifices long hours to get it just right, and lays awake at night dreaming up new ways to make your business better, then you deserve some inspiration today. Here is a list of memorable films that have captured the true spirit of entrepreneurship, with unlikely heroes who have persevered against all odds. Submit your favorites at www.wurlwindsolutions.com

Moneyball (2011)
The Social Network (2010)
The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)
The Aviator (2004)
Startup.com (2001)
Pirates of Silicon Valley (2000)
Chocolat (2000)
Office Space (1999)
Jerry McGuire (1996)
Forrest Gump (1994)
Tucker: A Man and His Dream (1988)
Cocktail (1988)
Baby Boom (1987)
Out of Africa (1985)
Ghostbusters (1984)
Rocky (1976)
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967)
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
Citizen Kane (1941)

Daily-Deals offerings: Real Value or White Noise.

admin — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:01:15 +0000

It appears that the hype over daily deals has slowed down considerably. Daily-deal is the new phenomenon of social-selling: offering huge discounts to a large demographic in order to gain new customers. As consumers tune out the daily-deal emails, or unsubscribe altogether, popular sites like Groupon and LivingSocial are re-structuring their product lines to better serve small businesses.
For consumers, the novelty has all but worn off. A report from Forrester Research finds that up to 80% of people who take advantage of these offerings are already customers, so not a huge impact on their buying decision. Yet another study, from Rice University, reveals that only 20% of those so-called new customers returned to make a non-discounted purchase.
Biggest complaints from retailers have been about demand for deals offered outrunning their supply on hand, and being inundated with customers at peak hours, stressing staff and resources. There are also hidden costs to these campaigns, like hiring and training additional personnel. Another substantial cost is investing in additional inventory, lots of it. The resulting response can mean a lot of hard work and small profit margins, so it is important to analyze the return on investment before jumping onto the daily-deal trend.
Daily deal providers are rethinking their strategies and coming up with solutions to predict and track consumer spend-and-return behaviors. Also, more companies are taking the reins of their direct marketing campaigns, choosing to publish their own deals and not splitting profits with daily deal providers. Some in the industry contend that small business should have a bigger say in choosing their target market, have direct access to qualified leads, and be allowed to offer more focused offerings, with tighter parameters.
Social Sales is only one of many marketing solutions available to small businesses. Daily Deal Media is one good resource for searching which daily-deal provider is best suited to your company’s particular needs, niche industry, and intended market segment.
Groupon’s business model makes up to 50% profit on merchants’ sales. While it raised $700 million from its 2011 IPO and is leading the pack, newcomers like Bloomspot, who raised $51 million without much fanfare, are not far behind.
How has your company taken advantage of the daily-deal trend? Have your engineered your own daily-deal campaign? Share your thoughts at www.wurlwindsolutions.com, your Return on IT Investment Partner.

Is 12345 your “secure” password?

admin — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:35:57 +0000

Israeli media agency Haaretz reported this week that 78 email accounts at the
offices of Syria’s President were recently hacked. On
Monday the Anonymous collective leaked hundreds of emails from the
office of President Bashar al-Assad. A report later revealed that
Assad’s aides and advisers had used ‘12345′ as their secure password.
The number sequence 12345 is considered one of the worst passwords of
all time. So are variations of that theme: 123456, 1234567, 12345678,
123123, and 111111. A list compiled by SplashData reveals other popular offenders:
password, passwOrd, qwerty, and iloveyou. The point of a secure password being NOT to make it easy
for people to remember. The logic is to make it unique to you, and
difficult for everyone else, which certainly does not apply to baseball and football,
which also made the list. When was the last time you changed your
personal and office passwords? Do you have robust passwords in place to
safeguard sensitive financial and business information? Does your
business have protocols in place to prevent hacking and data attacks?
We can help. Call Wurlwind Soutions today at 1-866-907-6161 to schedule a no-cost
security evaluation with one of our Security Specialists.

Revisiting Web Marketing 101

admin — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:50:52 +0000

If you are in business to sell a product or service, it is essential that you turn each visit to your website into a sales lead. For this you must gather information about your customer to then establish a relationship which could potentially blossom into a future sale. This is relatively easy to do if you adopt a quid-pro-quo mindset. Most visitors are looking for value they can take away at little or no cost. In exchange for basic contact information, you can provide them with something they can’t find anywhere else: useful information about your product or service. Devising interesting ways to engage your customers also helps to put your business in perspective. Free Reports and Voting Polls are industry standards. Your interface should be user friendly, and be sure to follow up with your own headline about how many reports have been ordered to date, or the final vote count by a specified date. Offering Product Samples is similar to getting a taste of that new cheesy spread on a cracker at the supermarket. This method will involve minimal shipping costs, so size and weight do matter here. This is particularly effective for penetrating new products into existing markets. One variation is to offer e-Coupons which are valid on future purchases. Writing a Blog, and linking to your website, is another no-cost way of providing customers with added value. Find topics that are trending in your industry and focus your writing there. When it comes to writing, practice makes perfect, so keep at it, and soon you will develop your own individual style, and followers. Producing a Demo-Video to show case your product or service, known in sales as a demo, is as easy as turning on your webcam and uploading the resulting video to YouTube. No need to spend millions here; while kitschy and quirky can work for some market segments, when communicating what your product/service can do, honesty is always the best policy. You can take it a step further and add video testimonials, so don’t forget to request customer feedback, and embed the video to your company’s website. Wurlwind Solutions can help you incorporate these and other web marketing strategies into your business model. Call us today for a free consultation at 1-866-907-6161, or visit us at www.wurlwindsolutions.com

Apple Reinvents the Textbook

admin — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:13:46 +0000

http://www.apple.com/education/ibooks-textbooks/

Recently, and rather quietly, Apple unveiled its iPad Textbook initiative at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. Apple’s new publishing and authoring tools will enable educators, as well as kitchen-sink authors, to publish textbooks for the iPad platform. This initiative will no doubt help struggling traditional textbook publishers, and potentially revolutionize education altogether, bypassing the publishing companies, the distributors, and the ‘old-school’ textbook purchasing protocol altogether. Wisely, the three major textbook publishers have partnered with Apple on this product launch, Apple bringing all the bells and whistles of interactive technology and publishers to ensure that the integrity of the content is not compromised.

At last count, there were 1.2 million iPads in use by students, and more than 20,000 apps developed for iPad. With education in the U.S. seriously lagging behind the rest of the world, and 30%-40% of kids not graduating High School, this could be the perfect time for Apple to tackle the education market. After all, Apple’s first product laboratory was the public school system: remember the Mackintosh PC?

Because iPads are relatively affordable, most kids are already exposed to them by the time they enroll in school. At a price point of $14.99 for High School level texts, the new textbooks for iPad are also quite affordable, and can be sold directly to students.

The iTunes-U app is also part of the mix, with a large percentage of those downloads being college lectures. A marriage of iPad to iTunes-U can free classroom teachers to be more creative and engaged, not to mention what it will do for remote learning.

Business applications here are obvious: interactive procedure manuals, compliance training, and development learning for staff. How can your business benefit from this innovation? Call us today for a free consultation, 1-866-907-6161, or find us on the web at www.wurlwindsolutions.com

Facebook killed the MySpace stars

admin — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:50:32 +0000

Mark Zuckerberg Facebook

The recent Facebook IPO filing reveals new and juicy information about the company that has Wall Street and web wizards abuzz with speculation: Could Facebook become the next MySpace? Not so fast, amigos. Facebook recognizes 845 million monthly active users, 483 million daily active users, and over 425 million monthly active users, including users of their mobile products. Facebook has not only learned from the AOL and MySpace experiences, they are in the trenches and ready for battle.

The public filing documents state, in straightforward language and with impeccable candor, all the potential risk factors that could impact Facebook, the company. Being candid as to how the business may be significantly harmed in the near and long term is a requirement of the filing process. For the rest of us, is it a magnifying glass into for-profit opportunities.

Facebook will be in trouble if they fail to retain existing users or add new users, and if current users decrease their level of engagement. Agreed, likely to happen? not so much. Keeping users interested is Facebook’s biggest challenge. Yet $5 billion will go a long way in developing strategies to keep the product fresh and relevant, which Facebook is already doing with its Timeline and Open Graph extensions.

Of course, any company would suffer from the loss of its leadership, but with the loss of Steve Jobs, Apple is still rewriting that page of history. Facebook would no doubt embrace those lessons and adapt quickly.

According to the filing documents, “the business is subject to complex and evolving U.S. and foreign laws and regulations regarding privacy, data protection, and other matters. Many of these laws and regulation are subject to change and uncertain interpretation, and could harm our business”.

Albeit an unstable regulatory environment, consumers are actively exercising their voice and vote as to the body of laws governing internet communications and e-commerce, and that voice has proven to be a potent lobbying force. In Mark Zuckerberg’s own words: ”We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.” More than a player at risk, expect Facebook, to be a player with plenty of political clout.

One area of significant concern to Facebook, on paper at least, is the growth in mobile use. Facebook has launched mobile products where they do not currently display ads. “Facebook user growth and engagement on mobile devices depend upon effective operation with mobile operating systems, networks, and standards that we do not control”. Should we worry? Not yet. Facebook not only has an edge in display ads over Google; mobile ads are expected in the very near future. And with a very healthy cash infusion from this IPO, we are certain to see more mobile-related acquisitions, as well as better Facebook apps across the major mobile platforms.

Wake up, America.

admin — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:57:12 +0000

Chrysler teams up with \’Dirty Harry\’ to invoke the American spirit.

Super Bowl XLVI won’t be remembered for M.I.A.’s obscene gesture, 57-year-old pop icon MDNA’s less than riveting halftime show, or Giselle Bundchen’s post game commentary on the performance of Patriots receivers; no, not even for the 11^th hour Eli Manning winning touchdown… again. We were not amazed by any new cell phones, or websites, or techno-cars. Instead, we were served a predictable slew of babies (so 2011), dogs, horses, polar bears, apocalypse, and over-the-hill celebrities, at a cost of $3.5 million per 30-second spot. What will indeed resonate the longest with the 100 million viewers, in this time of economic uncertainty, is the message from Dirty Harry (Clint Eastwood):

“This is half-time America”.

Thank you Chrysler, for a much-needed dose of reality and hope.

www.wurlwindsolutions.com, an American company.

Pinterest 1.0

admin — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 15:18:32 +0000

Pintrest 1.0: Pinterest, described by CNN as one of the top 50 new tech tools of 2011, is not just for designers and fashionistas whose focus is very visual. The business-to-business aspect of Pinterest is also growing. The site presents current trends as searchable information, which is organized elegantly by ‘pinners’ into ‘boards’. Many post their portfolio, photos, or “how-to” articles, and these pins are categorized and tagged. This combination of fun and information is social because of the ‘following’ aspect, and searchable like Google and Twitter. Google and Bing are picking up the links behind all those images as authoritative links. The more people “repin” those items, the more strength they yield, and retailers have caught on. Pins and repins of retail offerings translate into potential customers. According to Google Ad Planner, the demographics of Pinterest reflects an audience between the age of 25 and 44, household income is $25K to $75K per year, 25% are well educated, and 80% are women, which is great news for retailers, as women are largely responsible for purchasing decisions. Pinterest is now in the top 10 social networks, with 11 milion total visits each week, and considered the top traffic driver for retailers by Mashable as of January 30, 2012. Is your business pinning? Let Wurlwind Solutions show you how. www.wurlwindsolutions.com