A recent survey by Harris Interactive showed that online coupon use has increased dramatically among an unexpected demographic. Oddly enough, according to the survey, it’s well-to-do families with household incomes over $100,000 who are using more coupons. Four out of 10 people from families within this income bracket say that use online coupons – nearly twice the number of respondents with an annual income of $35,000 or less.

They make use of sites like Coupons.com, which offers free coupons that can be printed out or used with a savings card, Foursquare, which offers specials to users who frequent a certain location, or Groupon.com, which lets users take advantage of group discounts of up to 90% on local products or services.

The users of these services are well-to-do and tech-savvy, and live in urban areas. It’s not just a matter of discounts for them. Groupon.com encourages users to go to places they’ve never been to before in order to take advantage of the excellent discounts. Foursquare provides an entire mobile online community where people can find out where their friends have been, and what they think about a particular place.

It makes sense that these products cater to the well-appointed who have the gadgets and services needed to best take advantage of them. Gowalla, for example, uses a Google Map-like application and works best if you’re constantly online while on the go.

“The holy grail is, ‘how can we make e-commerce social?’” says Andrew Mason, CEO of Groupon.com. “Usually, [a coupon] is a pretty solitary, one-to-one experience. But we’re helping consumers discover things.”

Services such as these constitute a new age in how we experience commercial settings. If social media sites help to foster social interaction among users, then services like these can help to push economic activity, as users are encouraged to try out new products and services offered by small, little-known, local businesses.

Crowdsourcing is a portmanteau of the words crowd and outsourcing. When crowdsourcing, companies take tasks that are usually assigned to a department or a single employee within their business, or a contractor, and offers them to entire communities.

Crowdsourcing offers many advantages to advertisers. They get to see proposals from a diverse group of people, instead of just one. IamaSource opens its doors to freelance designers and writers from around the world. And, instead of paying for each proposal, advertisers only have to pay for the one that they like, at a price that is set when the call for proposal is made. Much like a design contest, the designer with the “best” design gets paid.

The danger for advertisers is that there is no guarantee that they’ll meet strict marketing deadlines. No one can be held liable for not finishing the work, or not coming up with a good enough idea.

IamaSource aims to support the advertising industry and even inspire creativity in it. By creating an alternative to traditional advertising, they’re raising the bar for creative executions.

On the other hand, the designers and writers who participate in crowdsourcing have to take care not to be exploited. For every designer that wins one of the contests posted by IamaSource, there can be dozens and potentially hundreds of designers and writers that do legitimate work and end up not getting paid one cent for their efforts.

View a previously written post by Mouli Cohen about Innovation.

The term ‘contagion’ is accurate in the context of investment because it frequently leads to irrational or impudent behavior. Contagion prevents ‘healthy’ evaluations of investment opportunities, and gets in the way of sound judgment in decision making.

Contagion leads to the classic blunders associated with following the crowd – buying into the market when prices are high, and fleeing in panic when the prices drop. Contrarian behavior, generally the safest way to make money, is completely undermined by emotional contagion.

Emotional contagion is common because people tend to imitate those who seem to be successful. Envy and greed attract others into the same activities. The problem is that by the time contagion sets in when it comes to ordinary people investing, it is usually too late in the cycle to make money. Prices and the risks of a crash are too high at that stage.

So how do we overcome this contagion? The key is emotional neutrality – only invest for coldly rational reasons, and never because other people are buying and making money at the moment. Heated emotions, euphoria, and excitement are the enemy of prudent and profitable investing. Make sure you don’t get carried away with the crowd. In fact, it is almost always best to do just the opposite. When the crowd is cheering and buying, look to sell; when it is moaning, groaning, panicking and selling, it is generally time to make your move.

View a previously written post by Mouli Cohen about emotional investing

Hu visited scientific research bases, industrial parks, and workshops of enterprises during the four day tour, investigating the mode of economic growth and work to promote sound economic and social development.

During his visit to the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, Ltd., Hu said that the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee had made a strategic decision to develop large passenger aircraft. He expressed hopes that the community stick to independent innovation and succeed at an early date.

At the Spreadtrum Communication, Inc., a high-tech company founded by returned overseas students, Hu said independent innovation is the lifeline of a company. He parted with these words to the company staff: “I hope you make further breakthroughs in core technologies, so as to boost China’s communication industry.”

At the end of the inspection tour, Hu heard the work report by the CPC Shanghai municipal committee and the Shanghai government. He said he greatly appreciated the work done in Shanghai in recent years. He called on the cadres and people in Shanghai to stage a “successful, brilliant, and memorable” World Expo.

Hu said China should take the international financial crisis as an opportunity to restructure the industry and enhance independent innovation, so as to shift the pattern of economic growth. He also urged to promote energy conservation, emission reduction and eco-protection, as well as to improve people’s livelihood, so that the shift of the economic growth pattern could benefit the general public.

I applaud President Jintao for promoting independent innovation and making breakthroughs in core technologies. Such breakthroughs are sure to provide strong support for the transformation of the mode of economic growth in China and elsewhere.

View a previously written post by Mouli Cohen about international markets

Niche targeting simply means to focus marketing efforts on a group of end users that are using a particular product or service. Many companies attempt to target specific niches, but most just apply their regular sales and marketing procedures towards particular industries. This is not niche marketing. If you are going to niche market effectively, it is essential to implement a whole new business process toward the newfound target group.

Choosing which niche to focus on is the most important part of this overall strategy. The more specialized you are in targeting a niche the better. A good place to start is by shifting your focus to niches that are cutting costs for end users.

The real key to achieving an extraordinary level of success within a niche is to build better relationships with those who specialize in your target niche. When you are strategically targeting a niche, the standard procedure of recruiting goes out the window. By building a database and marketing campaign around your niche, you are in a unique position to offer those you do business with a tremendous amount of value. Share the prospect group, and now both you and the vendor are focusing on the same customers, and you are both offering services that compliment each other. By sharing the marketing efforts and referring each other business, you will amplify your own sales efforts with your new partners.

View a previously written post by Mouli Cohen about marketing

This is puzzling news, given the popularity of such applications and seemingly overnight growth of a modern day cottage industry around this array of gadgets. Hardware has the ability to create excitement in the short term, but the constant stream of applications with novel and useful implications is what truly builds a loyal following.

Wired explains how this decision differs from the larger mobile tech landscape,  ”Apple’s App Store allows anyone to submit iPhone and iPod Touch apps, although Apple exerts stringent (and often capricious) control over which apps make it to the public. Google’s Android Market is completely open to any developers who wish to offer apps for it. Research in Motion, Verizon, Nokia and Palm have also all opened mobile app stores to compete with Apple’s.”

I can’t help but think that this is an acknowledgment on the part of Microsoft that they weren’t able to compete in the app space with the likes of Apple “so why bother” kind of attitude that is no way to build consumer confidence. I for one, am certainly not buying this particular stance, and as a result, probably not the Zune HD either.

Seth Godin refers to this situation as a “surplus of attention,” a reversal of the previous trend that saw marketers buying up ad space wherever they could and at premium prices because there was only so much that people were looking at and it typically translated into increased profits for everyone.

Now we’re looking at a situation where there’s so much real estate that the options of where to try and capture an audience are almost too vast. Advertisers don’t know how to handle so many choices to leverage this situation and therefore are missing out on our collective time spent online. Godin sees the solution as “hyperlocal, hyperspecialized, hyperrelevant,” as the direction we need to be heading.

And while this trend, is more geared towards marketers, I see parallels within the business world, particularly when looking at new tech start-ups because this is the landscape that they will be navigating. Understanding the demands of the your potential customer in any environment, but especially online will have a huge impact on the success of your offering, whether product or service.

[image via katielips]

Without incentive from outside forces, the American public tends to buy whatever it likes, regardless of the logic and potential impacts, and that usually means big. Apparently, the main obstacle is the belief that small cars are unsafe and as we’ve seen time and again, changing perception is often a lengthy process.

I must admit, this is a rather worrisome trend and once that I hope automakers can reverse with a concerted effort to reverse this fear with marketing that touts the benefits of these vehicles and reframes the discussion – think cost-savings and and maneuverability for starters.

Features that can add value beyond a car’s relative size or lack thereof, certainly won’t hurt their case either and would go along way towards bolstering the auto industry as a whole. Considering that they have been viewed as decidedly out of step with consumer desire, particularly in recent years, this would be a huge boon indeed. And it appears they’re making strides with the addition of “connected” systems for entertainment, navigation and calling, but beyond greater functionality, this also adds price. And it’s hard to say if consumers will be willing to pay a lot of money for a lot less car.

[image via rick]

As Fast Company reports, the industry will “most probably see Office productivity apps being included on cellphones made by Nokia, which is the world’s largest maker of cellphones, albeit not necessarily the world’s hottest-selling smartphone maker.” RIM currently holds that distinction.

Microsoft plans to implement its new Mobile Office software in new Nokia smartphones, a move reminiscent of the particulars within the fine print of the Yahoo! agreement. Under that contract, Microsoft’s new Bing search engine would power all Yahoo searches, in exchange for Yahoo! keeping 88% of the ad revenue generated on those searches.

This announcement sheds further light on Microsoft’s new strategy in the technology market. Rather than trying to compete head-to-head with the leader in each specific technology sector, the company is attempting to leverage its software within the framework of already established brands. Arguably a blueprint for survival, given Microsoft’s well publicized losses during the recession.

The partnership could also be viewed as a preemptive strike on Google’s expansion into new sectors. According to the Financial Times, “Google’s Android operating system for smartphones is gaining ground, and giving the US technology company the chance to put its web-based software on handsets.” This would loom large on Microsoft’s bottom line.

RIM’s success in the smartphone market has been “partly because the Canadian handset maker’s Blackberry devices have user-friendly e-mail.” But with Microsoft’s Mobile Office platform, Nokia phones – which now operate with Symbian operating systems – will be able to perform word processing and spreadsheet functions. This fact alone should make the combination an appealing option within corporate space.

Smartphones are the fastest growing section of the mobile phone market, and have proved to be resilient in the face of economic trouble. In fact, smartphones are “the one part of the mobile phone market that continues to grow in the recession. Mobile phone sales fell 6.1 per cent in the three months to June 30, to 286.1m units, according to figures released on Wednesday by Gartner, the research firm. But smartphone sales increased 27 per cent to 41m units.”

Only time will tell how Microsoft’s new partnering strategy works to combat Google’s rapid rise to the top of the technology heap, but it’s not unlikely that there will be more partnerships in the future. It will be interesting to see if these recent developments impact Google’s long term plans or if the juggernaut will simply stay on course.

[image via Tjeerd]

Long thought of as being behind in the trend towards smaller, cheaper, and more fuel-efficient vehicles, G.M. is throwing much of its lot in behind the Volt. According to Market Watch, “the Volt will be able to travel up to 40 miles on electricity from a single charge, based on testing of pre-production prototypes, and extend its overall range to 300 miles or more using a flex fuel-powered engine-generator.” This triple digit range has so far been the model’s biggest selling point, and has been used to validate the relatively high initial price tag of $40,000. But with the government now owning around 60% of the company, it is likely that some sort of government rebate or incentive could be included once production begins.

Aside from the superior gas milage, “the Volt could also give GM a much-needed makeover in terms of its reputation for lagging behind the push toward ‘green’ technology.” As noted in the New York Times, the Volt will get around 230 miles a gallon in city driving. That rating, “based on methodology drafted by the Environmental Protection Agency, would make the Volt the most fuel-efficient vehicle on the road, although other manufacturers have not revealed the gas mileage for their electric models.”

The story of G.M. is certainly not over yet, but many in the industry are skeptical as to how much market share the company can regain. Furthermore, with companies like Ford, Toyota, Nissan, and others introducing more advanced electric vehicles to the market, the Volt may not have a low enough price point to make a much-needed dent in the Prius’ domination of the market.

[image via cliff1066]