New research from the University of Pennsylvania shows that people share stories online primarily if they ingite emotions that arouse the nervous system. According to FastCompany’s Kit Eaton, the study has big implications for those trying to get a message shared on a social network. READ MORE
In the age of Facebook and Twitter, the old-fashioned business card lives on. But there’s nothing out-dated about the next-generation of business cards, most of which are smart phone or Web applications or hardware-software combos that people can use to swap contact information and social network profiles. Here’s a look at some of the newest: Poken It looks like a toy, but the miniature character with the oversized hand hides a USB drive that stores a name, address, phone number, social networking accounts and other traditional business card information in an encrypted personal ID number. Meet another Poken user and swap information by pressing the infrared sensors embedded in the hands together to give each other a “high four.” Plug the USB drive into a computer and it brings up a Web browser and downloads any new contact data into the user’s account on the Poken website. CEO Stephane Doutriaux created the device while finishing MBA school in Switzerland in 2008. Since then he’s raised $2 million, moved the company’s headquarters to Silicon Valley, signed up distributors in 25 countries and struggled to keep up with orders from places like Germany and The Netherlands that have gone gaga over the tiger, geisha, panda, alien and 20-odd other Poken characters. In the United States, Poken was completely out of stock in late May, forcing fans like Kelly Guimont, a Portland, Ore., tech support specialist and avowed lover of all things digital, to wait until sometime in June for new shipments to arrive. “I want a Poken so bad I don’t even know what to do with myself,” Guimont says. “They are so the cutest things ever.” They may be cute, but they serve a real purpose and unlike some smart phone-based business card apps, Pokens don’t need a constant 3G connection to work, Doutriaux says. On the horizon: a Poken convention badge. DropCard To set itself apart from other digital business-card apps, DropCard is retooling itself to appeal to salespeople and other hardcore business types — think of it as the LinkedIn of business-card apps. According to company founder Tal Raviv, once the revamped service goes live later this month, members can log onto the DropCard website to see which parts of their profile information new contacts clicked on, data they can use to do follow up phone calls or e-mails. “We decided to sell not the technology, but the benefits,” says Raviv, who started the company in 2008 with backing from a Philadelphia incubator while an undergraduate engineering student at University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated in May. When the new DropCard comes online, three tiers of service will be available: a free, basic level for sending five DropCards a month; a $5 level for up to 25 cards, and a $10 level for unlimited service. Rather than handle marketing and sales itself, DropCard is pairing up with small businesses like print shops to act as resellers. “It adds value to the (print) business cards they provide,” Raviv says. Bump Until she can get her hands on a Poken, Guimont is making due with Bump, a free application on iTunes that lets two iPhone users tap or “bump” their respective mobile phone screens together to swap contact information. Other software developers have used iPhone’s application development platform to create similar business card-like programs, including SnapDat and beamME. EverNote While not specifically a business card substitute, this software application for noting things you find on the Web or taking pictures of them with your mobile phone can act like one. EverNote uses optical character recognition to parse text from an image and store it so it can be retrieved at a later date. Portland tech enthusiast Guimont uses EverNote instead of Bump to swap contact information with people she meets who don’t use an iPhone. “With EverNote on the iPhone I pick up a business card, take a picture and put it back. I can’t remember the last time I picked up and kept a business card,” she says. CardScan The 16-year-old company, now part of Newell-Rubbermaid, helped invent the business card reader business. Since then, CardScan’s product line has grown to encompass a variety of scanners and software applications for individuals and small businesses. One of the newest: a Mac package that includes a scanner and contact management software that debuted last fall. Other business-card applications: twtBizCard – Transmits contact information via Twitter by adding the “#twtbizcard” hashtag to a standard Twitter @reply. Contxt – Transmits social network profiles and contact information via smart phones. iPhone business card apps – A list of additional business-card apps on Mashable, the social media blog.
There are now 1.3 million people worldwide who have made a business out of selling on eBay, claiming eBay as their primary or secondary source of income, according to AC Nielson International, the New York-based market research firm. So as entrepreneurs consider launching a business on eBay, their first concern should be to figure out how to avoid getting lost in the crowd. eBay has been going strong since the online auction site was founded in 1995. That means others in the global online marketplace have already had 10 years to figure out how to make a business out of selling on eBay. “It’s definitely a challenge to start an eBay business right now,” says Sucharita Mulpuru, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, of Cambridge, Mass., “because you are coming late to the game.” The key, says Elizabeth Gaudio, senior executive counsel at the National Federation of Independent Business, is “research, research, research.” One way to do that, she adds, is to just start selling. There are several ways to sell on eBay. Once you register your business with the site and open a seller’s account, you may want to try some of the following methods. List an item for auction. Adam Galinsky, a professor of economics at The Kellogg School at the University of Pennsylvania, makes a case for setting your opening bid on the low end. Galinsky’s research shows that it entices more people to enter the auction. “Once they’re in,” he says, “they’re trapped and emotionally invested into checking back and escalating their commitment.” Set a fixed price. The “buy it now” feature on eBay can be used as the sole method of pricing, or as an added option to an auction. Not everyone wants to keep checking back over a period of days to compete over the sale of a pair of socks. Open an eBay Store. You can sell in the auction format or fixed price method. Either way, having your own storefront will help you brand yourself with customers, and hopefully make them repeat customers. Some of the benefits of opening an eBay Store include that you can showcase your listings in a customizable Web format, boost sales with marketing tools and list for longer durations through your store inventory. The store costs $15.95 per month for a basic store, and $49.95 per month to be a featured store. eBay Express. This is relatively new. It’s a special area of eBay’s site that functions more like a traditional ecommerce site, without the auction format. Sellers have to meet certain criteria, like a high positive customer feedback score, before they can participate. It’s like selling on eBay.com but the exception is that payments are made at the point of purchase so sellers don’t have unpaid items while waiting for bidders to forward payments. There is no additional charge to sell on eBay Express for established sellers. Given that eBay has been around for 10 years, there have already been studies about what sells and how to increase sales. In addition, the folks who have been successful running businesses on eBay have honed the art of making a profit this way and have some good advice. Here are some dos and don’ts to consider when setting up a business on eBay: Dos: Do include gallery pictures. These are the pictures that pop up by the listing in search results. For 35 cents, it’s money well spent because studies show that buyers are more likely to bid on purchases they can see. As for the other listing enhancements — everything from featuring your listing at the top of a search request to promotion boxes — they all come with a fee. “In most instances, they don’t improve your sales,” says Michael Miller, author of Making a Living with Your eBay Business. Do experiment. So says John Morgan, a professor of economics at the Haas Business School at University of California at Berkeley, who researches online auctioning. “Try selling your products in different categories,” Morgan says. “Alter the closing time and date for your auctions. Track what happens. You will see patterns emerge and can learn a lot from that.” Do treat it like a business. The most important piece of advice comes from Miller, who says that it’s important to remember that eBay isn’t just another weekend activity. “If you’re going to run a business on eBay, then treat it like a business — not a hobby,” he says. Don’ts: Don’t buy too much inventory. You can avoid this by using a drop shipper, which is a wholesaler that will ship and manage orders directly from their warehouse, even handling returns. Don’t play the trends. The eBay market is too volatile and changes too quickly. Those “Elmo TMX” dolls may be a hot item right now, but you don’t want to have to rework your business plan the day after Christmas. It’s better to find a line of products that work for you and stick with them. The experts at setting up businesses on eBay say that if you take the right steps and avoid the pitfalls, you’re business is not likely to get lost in that crowd of 1.3 million people who now make a living off of eBay.
Rarely has a technology had a greater effect on the spread of the global marketplace than the emergence of the Internet. Many businesses have adapted their marketing and distribution strategies to accommodate a world of commerce that is spelled with three W’s. But doing business in other countries is not always as seamless as the click of a mouse might make it appear. The speed at which the Internet develops can vary from country to country, and this has serious implications for the way in which a company manages its e-commerce approach. Mauro F. Guillé n of the Wharton School and Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and Sandra L. Suá rez of Temple University’s Department of Political Science explore the economic and structural factors that affect the growth of the Internet in different countries in their paper “Developing the Internet: Entrepreneurship and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective.” The professors analyze data on public policy as well as the conditions for entrepreneurship in 142 countries, and then take a more in-depth look at these components in Singapore, Ireland, Spain, and Argentina. “The paper essentially argues that the Internet has not diffused throughout the world in a random way, but rather that there are systematic patterns to its spread,” explains Guillé n. “We found that those systematic patterns don’t have to do with privatization or competition in the telecommunications sector, but they do have to do with entrepreneurship and with how democratic a country is. The better the conditions for entrepreneurship and the more democratic freedoms exist, the faster the Internet develops.” Guillé n and Suá rez start with the numbers. According to their research, the percentage of the population that regularly uses the Internet ranges from more than 50% in Scandinavia to less than 1% in many underdeveloped African, Central American, and South Asian countries. The number of computers linked to the Internet is also uneven, ranging from more than one for every 10 people to less than one for every 10,000. Through detailed analysis of four countries, ranging from Singapore as the most successfully wired, to Ireland, Spain and finally Argentina, where the Internet is the least developed, Guillé n and Suá rez’s paper, in part, confirms conventional wisdom. “We found that the richer the country, the greater the accessibility of the Internet,” explains Guillé n. “And the more developed the telecommunications infrastructure, the more developed the Internet.” But the authors’ conclusions regarding public policy are more surprising. Most people would likely argue that the more competitive the telecommunications environment, the lower the prices would be, leading to more widespread Internet use. but Guillé n and Suá rez discover that’s not necessarily true. The four countries studied differ in terms of the nature of public policy towards telecommunications and the Internet. Ireland and Argentina, for example, are liberal and procompetition, while Singapore and Spain have been more interventionist. Even so, Argentina is the least Internet-savvy and Singapore is the most. Internet development in Singapore, states the paper, has been very fast even though the government has implemented less-than-ideal policies. “For example, state intervention in the forms of regulation and content censorship has had detrimental effects on Internet use.” Argentina, on the other hand, has full privatization and government deregulation. But while the systematic patterns of public policy don’t always matter in the development of the Internet, Guillé n and Suá rez discover that conditions for entrepreneurship, such as the ability to raise capital and whether or not the environment is risk-free, do have a consistent effect. The country comparisons reveal that Singapore and Ireland have strong conditions for entrepreneurs, even though, especially in the case of Singapore, the state has assumed the role of leading entrepreneur. Meanwhile, the conditions for entrepreneurship in Spain and Argentina are weak. Telecom firms and other large domestic firms and business groups play a prominent role there. Guillé n and Suá rez conclude, “Internet development benefits from institutional and legal conditions favoring entrepreneurship.” Adds Guillé n: “I think this confirms conventional wisdom, but it’s still useful because nobody has demonstrated this before for a large number of countries.” Guillé n and Suá rez argue that the statistical and comparative analyses reported in their paper indicate that Internet development is “a complex phenomenon shaped not only by public policy and conditions for entrepreneurship but also by specific contingencies in each country.” More research is needed, they say, to document and interpret how the Internet has developed in different countries. Guillé n says he is already moving ahead with further research on Internet development and related issues. To start with, he is building a better database of information on the 142 countries over several years as a way to capture change in their circumstances. “I’m also looking at how specific companies go about selling their products in other countries,” Guillé n explains. “I want to understand how Internet markets develop in different parts of the world and then see how companies should react in order to be profitable.” All materials copyright © 2000 of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
