marketing

A new report by Research and Markets says Russians are snapping up cars at a proportionately faster rate than much of the rest of the world.

The report predicts that sales of new passenger cars will increase more than 20 percent a year in the coming years. The sale of spare parts is expected to grow nearly 15 percent annually.

According to a separate 2006 report by political commentator Alexander Yurov, more than 1.5 million cars are sold in Russia every year. Yurov estimates the figure will be closer to 2 million cars by 2008.

The Research and Markets … Read more

Hal Steger and Alberto Onetti - both of mobile open-source leader Funambol - discuss open-source marketing in the Enterprise Open Source Journal. Well worth a read, especially for those who persist in believing that open source succeeds in the absence of good marketing. In fact, real commercial success in open source comes as a direct result of savvy marketing. They write:

The sooner an open source company comes to grip with the reality that it needs to practice standard marketing techniques such as segmentation, target marketing, and direct marketing, the better it will be.… Read more

I accidentally stumbled across this article by my colleague, Ian Howells (Chief Marketing Officer, Alfresco), on marketing strategies for open-source companies. Ian is a smart guy, and this article is quite good.

Ian's background is in the marketing of proprietary software (SeeBeyond and Documentum, primarily), but he's learned a great deal in his past two years with Alfresco. I particularly like his idea on the need for open-source companies to build new markets or extend old markets, rather than cannibalize old markets:

A simplistic view of open source strategy is to target a big, greedy, lazy incumbent enterprise software vendor and offer a lower-priced alternative.… Read more

The Solar Turbine Group is trying to bring refrigeration to emerging nations by harnessing the power of the sun.

The organization, which consists largely of MIT alumni, has devised a solar thermal generator that can be brought to market for $12,000 or less. A typical system can generate 600 watts of electricity or 20 kilowatts of energy for heating and cooling, according to Sam White, director for STG. The same system can also produce both at the same time, albeit less of each.

Like other solar thermal systems, STG uses mirrors. Mirrors concentrate heat from the sun onto a … Read more

The New York Times' Randall Stross thinks Apple missed a market share opportunity with Microsoft's missteps.

And he's hell-bent on proving it!

The biggest problem here is that Stross largely relies on one source for Mac market share, a source that conveniently places it at its lowest possible threshold, 3 percent. There are plenty of other sources you could use that will give you other results, and this piece comes across as a conclusion in search of the evidence.

That forlorn number looks even worse compared with Apple's peak worldwide share of 14 percent in 1984, the … Read more

Silverlight may be Microsoft's new media platform, but with its latest video game campaign, it's not showing it with a new marketing site that runs using Adobe's Flash. It's part of a massive campaign to get people to buy the third game in the Halo series, but even if you're not a video game fanatic, or familiar with it, the site is really worth taking for a spin. It revolves (literally) around a massive diorama of some intense futuristic battle. You're given control to roam back and forth using your mouse and arrow keys, … Read more

Market research firm eMarketer recently published a study about U.S. consumer spending on music since 1980. Most commenters have seized on the fact that the study shows a higher percentage of people are buying music today than ever, but that those users are spending much less, probably due to the rise of single-song downloads. (eMarketer calls these "MP3 downloads"--in fact, the #1 source of legal downloads, iTunes, offers them in the AAC format, and many other sites offer downloads in the Windows Media Audio format.)

But I also noticed that music spending per capita rose dramatically … Read more

A group of kids from one of our local elementary schools has formed a "mini-laptop club." They don't use electronic machines. Instead, these first-, second- and third-graders draw their own laptops on construction paper and pretend to e-mail each other. They dedicate a surprising amount of time to this activity. I once had a chance to examine one of their "keyboards." I was fascinated to learn which Internet functions had sunk into the minds of these kids, who are just getting their first exposure to computers from watching their parents work, and from using kid-friendly sites. Follow the page jump to see one of their designs.… Read more

At the Office 2.0 conference, I met Paul Pluschkell, the CEO of Spigit. Spigit is a marketplace for ideas, reminiscent of a prediction market. But it's not quite one, since prices are set by an algorithm that takes more into account than just market demand. "It looks really complicated," I told Pluschkell. He told me that if I gave the site 5 minutes of concentration, it'd be crystal clear.

I gave it more time than that, and found the site very interesting. It's not what I would call clear, though.

The main site is … Read more