WELCOME TO OAT SHOES!

OAT Shoes is a brand-new initiative in shoe design combining biodegradable materials and attractive style to produce sportive shoes that not only look good, but leave no mark on the environment when you throw them out. Bury them in garden, woods or compost and nature will gobble them right up!

Read up on our progress on the blog below and be sure to contact us if you have any questions, comments, advice or remarks: we love your feedback!

Over the past few months, there has been a growing chorus of criticism — much of it anecdotal, but coming from a number of respected technology observers — about Google’s increasingly useless search results. Now the web giant has responded to these criticisms in a blog post, saying it doesn’t believe its search is getting any worse (if anything, it claims results have improved), but noting that it is going to be coming down hard on so-called “content farms” that try to game its algorithm with low-quality pages filled with keywords. And that could mean some pain for Demand Media, which is planning a closely-watched initial public offering that could launch as soon as next week.

Post and thumbnail courtesy of Flickr user Atli Haroarson

go for it google!

Excerpt from this very insightful blog post:

So by now, you've heard endlessly about the Facebook/Goldman quasi-IPO. What is its larger significance?

Consider, for a moment, a historical contrast. When Google IPO'd, it explicitly refused to play by Wall St's rules--instead, issuing equity in a relatively open Dutch auction:

"...Among other things, Google issued a firm warning to speculators hoping to make a buck by quickly flipping their shares, a hallmark of many hot technology IPOs in the past. Instead, Google hopes to place its shares in a way that avoids the typical investment banking strategy of intentional underpricing--and the volatility that frequently follows.

"Our goal is to have an efficient market price--a rational price set by informed buyers and sellers--for our shares at the IPO and afterward," the filing states. "Our goal is to achieve a relatively stable price in the days following the IPO and that buyers and sellers receive a fair price at the IPO."
To make that sharper:
"...According to its filing, Google seems willing, eager even, to start off life as a publicly traded company on the right foot, hoping to steer clear of some of the sweetheart dealmaking that characterized the last wave of go-go IPOs. Instead, Google plans an auction of its shares to raise up to $2.7 billion; a process open to all bidders."
Today, we have Facebook--not challenging Wall St's rules, but, instead, endorsing and subscribing to them. Facebook's quasi-IPO is a deal with Goldman to build an SPV through which high-net-worth investors can essentially buy blocks of Facebook equity...

read the whole thing on Bubblegeneration

There have been many anecdotes lately from business owners about how Groupon, the online coupon site for local businesses, isn't actually that good for business, but now there's some data to back it up. According to a study out of Rice University, 42 percent of businesses who participated in a Groupon deal said they would not do so again, even though the majority of those who participated said their promotion was profitable.

Further reading

• Groupon Effectiveness Study, September 28, 2010 version (PDF) (ruf.rice.edu)
• Groupon in Retrospect (posiescafe.com)

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good read

By Priya Ramesh (@newpr)

Happy New Year! I am sure you are tired of the “Top ten trends in 2011” blog posts that most of us forget anyways in less than ten days so let me take you through a different route with this one I am writing from Bangalore, the Silicon Valley capital of India where I have spent the last two weeks on vacation with family and friends. One consistent theme that I noticed during this vacation is that Facebook has redefined our social interactions. From my aunts, nephews and childhood friends to new business contacts in India, no one asked for my email or phone number anymore but definitely asked me, “Are you on Facebook?” No doubt, the Social Network has brought a paradigm shift in how we communicate and maintain relationships but the bigger message to marketers is how Facebook is rewriting the rules of advertising and search and how that affects your brand in 2011. Here’s why you should treat Facebook more seriously in 2011:

Chances of customer engagement higher on Facebook than on any other social network:  The 2010 Facebook usage report shows that over the past year its 500 million users uploaded more than 2.7 million photographs shared one million links and ‘Liked’ 7.6 million pages every 20 minutes. Take a look at what 20 minutes on Facebook looks like:

Shared links: 1,000,000 every 20 minutes
Tagged photos: 1,323,000
Event invites sent out: 1,484,000
Wall Posts: 1,587,000
Status updates: 1,851,000
Friend requests accepted: 1,972,000
Photos uploaded: 2,716,000
Comments: 10,208,000
Messages: 4,632,000
Likes: 7,657,000

Facebook moving from “atrocious” clickthrough rates to higher conversions: Analysts predict that the six-year-old company will report $2 billion in revenue in 2010 and close to twice that in 2011. The bulk of that revenue is predicted to come from selling ads.  Facebook ads are not for everyone and there is a huge gap between brands like Starbucks (17.5 million Likes) and Coca Cola (18 million Likes) that are considered benchmarks in Facebook engagement and millions of other brands that struggle to increase clickthrough rates. Having said that, Craig MacDonald, writing for Search Engine Watch, stated he estimated pay per click marketing providers are planning to spend between 10 and 20 percent of their budgets for the year on Facebook campaigns.

He explained that, while last year clickthrough rates for Facebook promotions were “atrocious” and there were virtually no conversion rates, the site is now onpar with major search engines for returns on investment. MacDonald noted the key factors that make the service appealing to marketers are that it is “huge, it’s global and it’s growing”, adding the sites performance on a dollar-for-dollar basis is the same as Google’s. 

Search and Shop on Facebook to gain momentum in 2011: BusinessWeek (http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2010/tc20101217_877527.htm) recently confirmed senior execs at the Palo Alto based social network have met in the past month with more than 20 companies, to help retailers set up shop on its pages and build tools that let Web users interact while buying. Facebook is adding e-commerce features to attract users, keep them logged-on longer and generate higher advertising sales. Companies like P&G and Delta Airlines are investing heavily on Facebook e-commerce, and this is just the start of what’s to redefine how we search and shop online.

There is a good reason why 500 million chose to join Facebook and more than half of them log-in every single day to update their status. Now as digital marketers we need to think smartly about how to get your brand mentioned in those status updates, Likes, comments and discussion threads to ensure when someone searched for you on this growing social network, you DO have a favorable wall to show off.

Good luck Facebooking (yes that’s officially a verb now) in 2011!

Image courtesy: Time magazine.

downhill

I love the save/dont save idea

what a place.

take this. but as always with a grain of salt

spannendes Projekt "off the beaten track" take a look!

This is a collective brain about urban developments. One of its core focus are intelligent, sustainable buildings, mobility systems as well as further new technologies to broaden opportunities and equity on cultural creativity.

* Contributors
* Johannes Kleske,
* Welf Kirschner,
* Axel Quack,
* Igor Schwarzmann

Foodspotting is an application that allows you to take picture of a food, say what it is, and pin it (with geolocation) to the restaurant where you got it.

Das hört sich dufte an. Vielleicht kann man noch spielerische Elemente einbringen, das würde das Ganze bestimmt noch aufpeppen. Auf jeden Fall eine App, die ich testen werde.

great vid. I especially love the "globe" conclusion and what difference it is to be a girl on chatroulette.

I could not believe what I found out yesterday, when a friend of mine became a fan of the facebook fanpage "the norwegian olympic curling team's pants". Guess how many fans this page has?! 550.000+ and counting. Unbelievable. Imagine what the web could do for your product?

Unbedingt Vollbild und FullHD. Nach 10 Sekunden war ich mir noch hundertprozentig sicher, dass es Trickaufnahmen aus dem Hamburger Miniaturwunderland sind...

fantastic!

via @ifranz

J.E.T.P.A.C.K.