Displaying items by tag: Marketing

If you use Dropbox you probably have had a problem with reaching your storage limit at least once. Now, if you are a college student you can get up to 25GB of additional space that will be yours for 2 years without having to pay anything. The promotion named The Great Space Race will run for the next eight weeks and in order to qualify for the extra space there are few requirements that users have to meet. Each participant must be actively enrolled in a higher education institute, college, university, or the equivalent of a university, be over 14 years old, have an active e-mail address from an educational institution and have access to Dropbox obviously. Also important to note is that “Participants must be a part of a Higher Education Institution that has at least twenty-five Participants who signed up for the Program”

For about the last four months we have been talking about the decline of Apple. We are not saying that they are going to die, or go bankrupt or anything like that, but we are saying that they are no longer going to be the company that they once were. There are many reasons for this that we have covered including a lack of real innovation, a closed eco system, and one of the biggest ones; Tim Cook as CEO. To many this one may come as a surprise, but it is not that much of one really. Tim Cook is a businessman first and foremost. He was the one that proposed moving production and warehousing outside the US. He also has been instrumental in making other very business oriented decisions. However, while Tim Cook is good at running the day-to-day operations of a company, he is not the guy you want in charge at a place like Apple.

Apple is claiming that the new iPhone is sold out stating that preorders were “incredible”. The event happened an hour after preorders started which would seem to be a rather big deal for the new phone… well except for that nagging little fact that before the launch Sharp had already stated that they were not going to be able to meet production numbers of screens for Apple’s new phone. This problem was talked about all over the internet as having the potential to hurt Apple after the launch.  We took a slightly different track and felt that Apple would spin the incident at launch which is what they have done.

After seventeen years the famous shopping website has decided that they should change their old logo and replace it with a new, more professional one. The old logo has been here since 1995 when the company was founded as a set-time auction shopping site. Up until now they have had their 4 color letters overlapping one another and in different sizes, but the new logo looks a lot more linear and pretty modern I would say. It represents “a global online marketplace that offers a cleaner, more contemporary and consistent experience, with innovation that makes buying and selling easier and more enjoyable.” according to eBay Global Marketplaces President, Devin Wenig.

Nokia and Motorola have launched their new phones and the mainstream sites have decided to speak. Their verdict is that neither Motorola with their ICS based RAZRs nor Nokia with their Fischer Price colored Lumia phones were good. One of the biggest complaints about Motorola seemed to be that the three new phones that were being shown will only ship with Android 4.0. This is unusual in that Motorola is now owned by Google and you would think that these phones would have the latest and greatest from Google right out of the box. For Nokia it seemed to be the fact that a commercial used gave the impression that it was shot with the Lumia 920’s Pureview camera.

Nothing spreads around the internet like a bad poll with dramatic data. As the launch of the “New iPhone”, or whatever Apple is going to call it, gets closer the ridiculous polls are starting to come out again. One of the latest is predicting that 1 in 5 Android users will defect to the new iPhone when it is released. This staggering study was done by techbargains over the phone to allegedly a random group of 1,300 people.  The poll has gotten quite a bit of exposure, but there are more than a few things wrong with the study and the numbers presented. This type of data manipulation is common in the industry and we have seen similarly limited studies conducted on behalf of Microsoft, Dell, HP, Android, and many, many others. Still when this type of misleading information hits the web it needs to be addressed and explained instead of just spreading it like the gospel truth.

After 25 years Microsoft has finally decided to change company's logo. This time it looks more appropriate for new the new Metro [Ed – or whatever it is called] philosophy of simple Swiss-like design. Microsoft stated that “This wave of new releases is not only a reimagining of our most popular products, but also represents a new era for Microsoft, so our logo should evolve to visually accentuate this new beginning.“. They will release new versions of almost all of theirs products this year, from new Windows OS, both for PC and mobile, to Xbox services.

Back when I was working as a photographer, a friend of mine had a funny name for weddings: The Big Lie. He said that there was nothing worse than two people standing up in front of “God and everyone” and lying to one other’s faces like that. Of course, Wedding shoots were one of his most profitable sessions, so he did not let this interfere with making money. It is this money that motivates many companies to lie to the consumer. It was certainly a motivator when Apple told its Big Lie to the world about their innovations for the iPhone, iPad, and many other products.

Although Facebook is a social networking giant with hundreds of millions of users there are two things that it has been unable to do so far. One if make a working mobile app for either iOS or Android and the other is to figure out how to make advertising work for them. Now the concept of social advertising is very old. It goes waaaayyyyy back to the days of daytime TV when advertisers would market their products to their perceived audiences. In fact because of the tendency to advertise washing powder during mid-day dramas the term Soap Opera was coined. So pushing the right ads to your audience is nothing new.

Marketing is a fickle thing and one that can come back to bite a company when they are least expecting it. What has happened is that the marketing people working now are forgetting that the market has a much longer memory than they used to and, of course, the Internet never forgets.  This is what Microsoft is facing right now as they try to compete with Apple in slim and ultrabooks (as well as regular notebooks and other products).  For years they have portrayed Apple as flashy and overpriced using materials that increase the manufacturing costs without any real benefit to the consumer. Now, however Microsoft is finding itself being bitten by those same marketing campaigns as they work to raise consumer and enterprise interest in Windows 8 (all flavors).