The International Consumer Electronics Show may be a long ways off, but buzz has already begun online regarding CES 2013. This year CES will be held in at the Las Vegas Convention Center starting January 8^th through the 11^th. An expected 155,000 people are set to attend the 2013 event.…

The UK Information Commissioner's Office has drafted an upcoming law which requires that cookies be opt-in for websites. You can read more information here.

There is quite a bit of confusion about what this means exactly. The schedule of implementation was delayed already once and many think that even if it does go into…

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…

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

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Bar La Grassa, a popular eatery in Minneapolis, recently drew the ire of a celebrity Twitterer (Bob Harper of "The Biggest Loser" fame), and faced the consequences. Basically, through an intermediary at American Express, Harper was looking to nab at the last minute a table for five at Bar La Grassa; unfortunately for him, it was a Saturday night, and the place was…