Just returned from 3 days at CES 2012.  I've uploaded an album of photos I took at CES - check it out!

I was last at the Consumer Electronics Show two years ago, in 2010.  The word back then in 2010 was "3D" - everything was all about 3D TV.  Not anymore. The word in 2012 is "smart".  Everything is smart.  TVs are smart, interfaces are smart, apps are smart, health and fitness devices are smart - even…

Just joined, learning the dash board, does this blog go to everyone on the

on the Sloan University server? What are featured post vs regular blog posts?

Off to CES soon. Have walking shoes, will travel! #ces2012

I am currently developing a loyalty platform for a leading quick service restaurant chain in USA. The platform is based on a "Mobile Plus Cloud" architecture where all complex functionality is hosted on a cloud platform while the user accesses this functionality on his/her handset through web services. We are planning to market this loyalty solution to other quick service restaurant chains where all the cloud functionality remains the same and can be reused across partners. The only thing…

Effective Ecommerce

Black Friday is against my religion. Black Friday to me is like Filene's Basement Running of the Brides or the Spanish Running of the Bulls. Running amok in a sea of delirious strangers for a…

Social media is not only about social network, they are also powerful media. A recent accident happened in China showed how influential social media can be.

“A collision between two high-speed trains on July 23rd near the coastal city of Wenzhou not only killed at least 35 people but also unleashed a torrent of online criticism of the network and the railway bureaucracy, ” as was written on The Economist’s news feature “Interrogating the Party” on July 25th. What happened is that all…

One of the best things in the US is that there is no Great Firewall (GFW) here, a  censorship and surveillance project operated by China's government. Because of the GFW, we cannot visit popular social websites such as Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook.

So what if a young Chinese want to have some fun in social media? There are two ways around it. One is  we use “wall climbing” software, i.e. proxy software to log on western social media. The problems with proxy software is they…

As most people might know, Chinese government blocks Facebook although it is a very successful social media, which has been widely used in the world. However, with the rapid development of Internet and the increasing needs of connecting, “Renren (www.renren.com)”, a local Chinese “Facebook” was born.…

Footpath is testing technology that tracks the unique IDs in consumers' cell phones in order to study their "footstream" while shopping in malls. It's a very slippery slope...

SoCal Mall Tracks Shoppers

Apparently taking a page from questionable police tactics, shoppers are now pepper spraying other shoppers during Black Friday! Pepper spray at Wal-Mart

Tom and I have been nominated for the Paul D. Converse Award for our outstanding contributions to marketing scholarship.  https://uiuc.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_3xTS80D2PimXqHa

Two of our contributions were acknowledged – our JM theory paper on flow in online environments (843 ISI citations/2838 Google Scholar citations) and our Marketing Science paper testing the theory (453 ISI citations/1261 Google Scholar…

Tom and I recently presented some of our new ideas on what's in store in the post-social media world at the MSI Berkeley Conference on Marketing Communications in a Digital World.

One thing we talked about is the idea that “reality is no longer ‘real.’ We want digital to be real.…

Ross Levinsohn, Yahoo! EVP of Americas says their goal is to be the premiere digital company creating really rich premium experiences for consumers on their platform. They run 13 million different variations of their home page every day and hope they can serve the right ads in the right programming context. Time will tell if this is a big opportunity or an idea whose time has come and gone.  

#w2s. John Battle asked Sean Parker if Spotify is his chance to get napster right? Yes. Sean says it's a chance to finish what he started, creating a frictionless tier of service that enables music-sharing. It lets consumers select the music that best meets their needs and disintermediates the gatekeepers with the right product experience. Sean argued that it took the outright collapse of the music business as we know it to finally convince them to do the deals. No hints about Airtime, his…

One of the biggest events in a long time for the search marketing world began last week with the New York Times article on bad linking practices undertaken by JCPenney's search engine optimization (SEO) firm, SearchDex.

Google's penalization wasn't a big surprise to seasoned SEO veterans,…

Today there are nearly 73,000 coffee growers in Costa Rica, 45,000 of whom are members of cooperatives. Coopeldós R. L. is the second coop in this series on Costa Rican coffee cooperatives.  These coops provide a great measure of competition to the major growers in country.

There are other ways to captilize on these sources.  One is shown by the activity of a new Kirkville, Mo. coffee shop owner, who on July 1st capitalized on a "country of origen" appeal…

The Future of Search from…

You might have been one of the millions of YouTube viewers who this weekend watched the hilarious, and of course "contagious," viral video in which a fake Prince Wills and soon-to-be-Princess Kate dance to East 17's "House of Love" as part of their wedding procession. The T-Mobile video, presumably shot via a cell phone, cleverly markets the product's video sharing…

As many people have surely noticed, the big G recently updated their algorithm. This update was called the Panda or Farmer update. The intent of this algo change was to combat the recent flood of spun content to hit the web and to "punish" or penalize the content farm sites that benefit from this spun content.

For example, sites like Ezinearticles dropped in the rankings dramatically. For those who dont know that site, EZA is a site that lets article writers post their…