BUSINESS FILTER
How many Easy Buttons have been sold?
Brandweek
Get ready. It’s 1.5 million. At $5 a pop, that’s $7.5 million in revenue. The revenue is gravy, and to their credit, Staples donated the first $1 million dollars earned to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. But the ultimate ROI? A Staples brand icon made it into our cultural currency. Alan Siegel, CEO of the branding firm Siegel + Gale, admits that it’s a testament to good advertising, but also that it’s ‘‘an elegant metaphor for the fact that everyone is frustrated as hell about how hard it is to get things done today.’’
Wired
The Meganiche
A meganiche is "a thin slice of the Web that nonetheless represents roughly a million users." It's a new category caused by the fact that there are now 1 billion people online. Do the math. Ten years ago, one-tenth of 1 percent of Web users amounted to about 36,000 people. Today, the same one-tenth of 1 percent is 1 million people. That's why a site like GaiaOnline that caters to anime fans can rack up more page views that MSNBC or Oprah. Meganiches grow at low cost and through word of mouth. What they have is authenticity and a laser focus on one thing that 0.1 percent of the world cares passionately about.
Red Herring
Companies that inhale
It's cool to inhale, when it's your medicine. Companies like Boston-based Cambridge Consultants, Cambridge-based Alkermes, and Waltham-based Syntonix are developing breakthrough convenient inhalers for medicines. Doctors may be taking a wait-and-see approach until more data is available on the long-term effects of medicine on the lungs, but clinical trials are underway for inhaled insulin and inhalers that treat osteoporosis or infertility or even prevent the flu. Cambridge Consultants has a four-cent inhaler aimed at addressing pandemics. Lots of money to be made here and potentially, lots of happy patients.
BusinessWeek
Wal-Mart's crisis
It's been a bad year for Wal-Mart. Same-store sales for October rose just 0.5 percent, the smallest increase in nearly six years, and the company has come under fire for everything from the low wages it pays workers to the small retailers it pushes out of business. The largest retailer in history is now in a full-scale reputation crisis; 2 to 8 percent of the company's customers have stopped shopping there "because of negative press they have heard."
Technology Review
Visual search
Like.com lets you search for hard-to-describe items by using pictures instead of words. Browse through celebrity photos, and if you love a certain pair of black stilettos, click on the picture and Like.com will search over 200 online stores for shoes that look like Britney's. It's hard for computers to extrapolate context from a photo. Like.com is still trying to figure out how to do a visual search for shirts. Turns out that the same shirt -- on a mannequin, lying flat, or on people -- looks different in pixels.
NewsForge
Liberating iPods
About 70 million iPods and more than a billion iTunes songs sold make Apple the biggest target for the anti-DRM (digital rights management) movement. Apple's DRM means that if you download a song onto your iPod, it will play only on your iPod -- nowhere else. In response, an iPod Liberation Event was held in Cambridge recently where users were walked through the process of hacking their iPods to circumvent the built-in DRM. Post-hack look for lowered battery life, increased crashes, and the loss of your iTunes music.
MIT Advertising Lab
Earth, by Microsoft
Microsoft's answer to Google Earth is Virtual Earth 3D, just launched with its first 15 cities, Boston among them. The place is "peppered with billboards" provided by Massive, the in-game ad system Microsoft bought earlier this year. Unlike Google Earth, the maps are displayed in the browser (via some hefty plug-ins) -- Internet Explorer only, that is. The buildings are textured with images of the real buildings. It's free. Check it out.
