Juxi's log - posts tagged 'Business'

Financial Times chickens out, refuses to run Amnesty's anti-Shell Oil ad

Tue, 18 May 2010 13:11:49 GMT

Financial Times chickens out, refuses to run Amnesty's anti-Shell Oil ad

Fiona from Amnesty UK sez,

After raising £30,000 to support an ad campaign exposing Shell's damaging practices in the Niger Delta, Amnesty International and its supporters were sorely disappointed when the Financial Times took a last minute decision to pull their ad.
Tim Hancock, Amnesty International UK's campaigns director, said: "The decision by the Financial Times is extremely disappointing. We gave them written reassurances that we would take full responsibility for the comments and opinions stated in the advertisement. Both The Metro and The Evening Standard had no problems with running the ad.
"The money to pay for the advertisements came entirely from more than 2,000 individuals online, who we'd asked to fund an ad campaign targeting Shell's AGM -- and it really caught their imagination. And I am sure these supporters will share with us our sense of deep disappointment."

Amnesty 'disappointed' by FT's decision to pull ad targeting Shell

Infographic: buying DVDs vs pirating them

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 06:24:04 GMT

Infographic: buying DVDs vs pirating them

This pithy and funny chart does a superb job of explaining how the insertion of a lot of "business model" (FBI warnings, unskippable trailers, THX vanity sequences) makes buying a DVD a lot worse than pirating the same disc online. I rip all my kid's DVDs (not least because she has a tendency to scratch them to hell), and the difference between firing up a movie on a laptop and it just starting versus trying to explain to a toddler why Daddy has to spend five minutes pressing next-next-next menu-menu-menu is enormous. I think it all comes down to the stuff in the DVD-CCA spec that allows DVD creators to flag sequences as unskippable: that's such an attractive nuisance, it's bound to attract every hard-sell marketer and power-tripping fool in any media company, who will eventually colonize it with so much crapola that it comes just short of destroying the possibility that anyone will voluntarily pay for the product. (Be sure to click below for the whole thing)

If you are a pirate, this is what you get (via Making Light)

Previously:

Chris Anderson: "In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits,"

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 05:54:25 GMT

In a long, thoughful and exciting piece entitled "In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits," Wired's editor-in-chief Chris Anderson describes the way that networks, 3D printers, and other technologies are reinventing business, from garage hackers to Chinese knock-off factories. Chris's most provocative thesis, a recapitulation of Bill Joy's argument: "working within a company often imposes higher transaction costs than running a project online. Why turn to the person who happens to be in the next cubicle when it's just as easy to turn to an online community member from a global marketplace of talent?"

It's fascinating to see this essentially anti-corporate position emerge from a former Economist editor who now runs a major Conde-Nast publication. It's one of the things I like best about Chris's work: he's multidimensional and willing to challenge all sorts of received wisdom.

One place he doesn't go here is what corporate giants will do in the face of this sort of "creative destruction" -- are they going to roll over and play dead, or will they fight back with the indiscriminate savagery of a cornered record executive?

Alibaba's chair, Jack Ma, calls this "C to B" -- consumer to business. It's a new avenue of trade and one ideally suited for the micro-entrepreneur of the DIY movement. "If we can encourage companies to do more small, cross-border transactions, the profits can be higher, because they are unique, non-commodity goods," Ma says. Since its founding in 1999, Alibaba has become a $12 billion company with 45 million registered users worldwide. Its $1.7 billion initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2007 was the biggest tech debut since Google. Over the past three years, Ma says, more than 1.1 million jobs have been created in China by companies doing ecommerce across Alibaba's platforms.
This trend is playing out in many countries, but it's happening fastest in China. One reason is the same cultural dynamism that led to the rise of shanzhai industries. The term shanzhai, which derives from the Chinese word for bandit, usually refers to the thriving business of making knockoffs of electronic products, or as Shanzai.com more generously puts it, "a vendor, who operates a business without observing the traditional rules or practices often resulting in innovative and unusual products or business models." But those same vendors are increasingly driving the manufacturing side of the maker revolution by being fast and flexible enough to work with micro-entrepreneurs. The rise of shanzhai business practices "suggests a new approach to economic recovery as well, one based on small companies well networked with each other," observes Tom Igoe, a core developer of the open source Arduino computing platform. "What happens when that approach hits the manufacturing world? We're about to find out."

In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits

(Photo: Leon Chew, Wired)

Previously: