November 29, 2007

Keeping tabs on gift cards


The Irvine-based company hopes its online service, at www.leveragecard.com, will alleviate some of the frustrations associated with gift cards. This year, consumers will lose about $8 billion in unredeemed gift cards, according to Consumer Reports, which also found that 27% of gift card recipients have at least one unused card from last year.

Shoppers listed gift cards among their favorite presents to receive, but many acknowledged having a difficult time keeping track of their whereabouts and balances. Some had found creative ways to keep their gift cards in one place.

"I used to lose them like crazy," said Andrea McCoy, a corporate flight attendant from Los Angeles. "Now I keep them all in a Ziploc bag. It's not very sophisticated but it works."

Julie Foster, a Long Beach accountant, was so notorious among her friends for misplacing gift cards that one pal gave her a business card case for her recent birthday."When you lose several of them," she said, showing off the new leather case filled with 11 gift cards, "it adds up."

By registering a card at Leverage, users can track their gift cards online and are notified when gift card balances change. If a card is misplaced, a backup mechanism can retrieve lost card numbers.For those who buy gift cards on the site, there's a small financial reward: 3.65% in interest. Cards that are registered with but not purchased from the website earn 1%
interest.

"People might not be making $100 a year from this," Mathe said, "but it's definitely better than having dead plastic sitting in your wallet."

November 28, 2007

Facebook May Revamp Beacon

In the wake of mounting criticism, Facebook executives are discussing changes to a controversial advertising tool that publicizes users’ Web activities outside of the popular social network. Alterations to the recently introduced Beacon system could be announced as early as Nov. 29, BusinessWeek.com has learned.

Executives of the three-year-old company were in deep talks over proposed changes late into the afternoon on Nov. 28, according to a person familiar with the matter. At issue is the Beacon program, which alerts members' Facebook "friends" to purchases and other activities on third-party Web sites. A spokesperson for the company declined to discuss changes, reiterating an earlier statement: "Facebook is listening to feedback from its users and committed to evolving Beacon."

Online Company Offers Gift Card Management

Gift cards are expected to be a major component of holiday giving, with estimates putting sales at more than $100 billion in 2008. And according to Consumer Reports' survey, 62% of consumers are planning to buy gift cards this season, many of which will be bought online. Consumer Reports' survey also found that when the time came for consumers to redeem their gift card, the majority of consumers also spent their own money, with 60% spending more than the value of the card.

Leverage (www.leveragecard.com) is a way for consumers to manage an array of gift, reward and loyalty resources online. Users can perform the following tasks online with a single, free online application including purchase, track and exchange gift cards from retailers who are online; earn interest on gift card balances; enroll in and manage loyalty and rewards programs; receive targeted offers and savings from retailers based on gift card holdings, as well as self-reported demographic, psychographic, gift occasions and travel calendar information and maintain complete privacy of all personally identifiable information.


Users create an account and profile, and then register their gift cards, reward and loyalty program information. This information is securely collected from participating partners, aggregated and presented to users in a friendly and intuitive interface. Changes across all accounts are visible immediately as they occur.

Leverage also gives advertisers an opportunity to deliver relevant and timely messages to users based on self-reported, non-identifiable information. When users log in to their Leverage account, they are invited to view their offers and savings from retailers in a format that is similar to an email inbox.

The promotional messages are accompanied by a key that provides insights into each merchant's targeting rationale. Criteria include non-personally-identifiable demographic and geographic information (age, gender, and location), recent gift card transactions, loyalty program membership, or an upcoming gift occasion. This transparency provides consumers with far more control over the timing, volume and relevance of advertising.

Poking Facebook

Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg created one of the most trafficked sites on the Web and became a paper billionaire as a result. But ongoing lawsuits suggest that Facebook's origins are murkier than Zuckerberg would like to admit. Is the man many are calling Harvard’s next Bill Gates telling the truth?

November 6, 2007

Skype Goes Mobile

Bit by bit, big names in the computing world are barging into the cell-phone business. First came Apple's (AAPL ) game-changing iPhone. Next came word that Google (GOOG ) is creating its own software platform for a new breed of cell phones.

Now Skype (EBAY ), which popularized free and cheap phone calls over the Internet, is set to launch a customized cell phone developed jointly with 3 Mobile, a wireless carrier in Europe, Asia, and Australia. Code-named the "white phone," the Skype handset will be introduced by late October in Britain, Italy, Hong Kong, and Australia, and will reach 3's other five markets later, BusinessWeek has learned. There are no immediate plans to bring the device to North America, though the companies may try to license it to other carriers or sell versions straight to consumers for them to use on other networks.

A Business Best Seller in Japan

What do you get when you combine a guitar-playing eggplant with McKinsey-style reasoning? In Japan, a best-selling business book. Titled The World's Easiest Problem-Solving Class, it aims to teach consultant-style analysis to middle and high schoolers in a country where test-taking and rote memorization are second nature to kids at an early age. But since its June release the book has been snapped up by adults, rising as high as No. 2 on Amazon (AMZN) Japan, where it currently ranks No. 26 with 250,000 copies in print.

Author Kensuke Watanabe, a Japanese national who was educated in the U.S. and Japan and worked as a McKinsey & Co. consultant for nearly six years, says he wants to teach Japanese kids to "use critical thinking skills more and be more proactive in shaping the world."

Health is wealth for leaders on the 24-hour treadmill

The dirty little secret of leadership is that it is not nearly as stressful as being a subordinate. Lack of autonomy and control over your work - now, that is stressful. Boring, repetitive tasks and being excluded from the really interesting networks - this is what makes working life unpleasant and potentially damaging to health. If you don't believe me, read Sir Michael Marmot's book Status Syndrome , based on his three decades of research into the subject.

November 2, 2007

So Many Ads, So Few Clicks

Can more targeted pitches on Facebook and other sites reverse the shrinking response to online ads? In June, Luke Mitchell's student marketing service, Reach Students, ran a series of Web ads to promote an offer from a major parcel delivery service. The timing seemed perfect: just when college students decide whether to store belongings for the summer or ship them home. So did the placement--on the Facebook social network, where students hang out for hours.

Yet when the results rolled in, Mitchell was stunned: Only 0.04% of those people who got the ads on their screens bothered to click on them. He had expected at least 1% to respond. "We had just a handful of users come to the site," he says.The truth about online ads is that precious few people actually click on them. And the percentage of people who respond to common "banner ads," the ubiquitous interactive posters that run in fixed places on sites, is shrinking steadily.

The so-called click-through rate for those ads on major Web destinations such as Yahoo! (YHOO ), Microsoft (MSFT ), and AOL (TWX ) declined from 0.75% to 0.27% during 2006, according to Eyeblaster, a New York-based online ad serving and monitoring firm. It says that last March the average click rate on standard banner ads across the whole Web was 0.2%. This reflects a surge in new ads and Web pages, fueled by the rise in social networks.