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I was stumped to see the average minutes each country uses consuming media (TV, PC, Smartphone & Tablet). My guess would have surely been USA in the top 5, along with all European countries. I was wrong.

Indonesia, Philippines, China and Vietnam are in the top 5, with Brazil being the only non-Asian country coming in at 4th. With Indonesia and Philippines using up 540 & 531 minutes per day respectively. That’s a whopping 9 hours a day in front of a screen.

What’s more surprising to me is the leader in the number of minutes in front of a smartphone with an average of 193 minutes (That’s more than 3 hours per day!), no it’s not your sister in the USA with unlimited everything talking to her BFF; It’s actually Nigeria. Yes Nigeria with the rich prince that wants you to send your bank information.

When it comes to being in front of a Tablet screen, Philippines, Indonesia & Thailand lead the pack with 115, 111 & 95 minutes daily.

Of course, the USA has to lead in Desktop or laptop PC use right? Not in this case, China, Vietnam and Russia top this list at 161, 160 & 158 respectively. That’s a 3-way tie for me.

So where does the USA fall in all this? It must lead in something? We are the leaders in the world in everything right? Well apparently we don’t lead but come very close to leading in watching Television screens, a relative tie to our big brother the UK.

What puzzled me the most though is which country had the least number of minutes in front of a screen. Can you guess without looking at the chart? Take a minute, here’s the list of countries:

USA, Germany, China, Indonesia, Thailand, Russia, Philippines, Vietnam, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, India, Poland, South Korea, UK, Canada, Slovakia, Hungary, Italy, Japan, France, Czech Republic, Argentina, Brazil, Kenya, Poland, Mexico, Turkey, Canada, Spain, Australia, South Africa, Columbia & Nigeria.

Well, did you think? Which one came to mind? Let’s just say it’s the country that is my favorite place to visit. Somewhere I’ve been more times than any other place in the world, as a tourist. It is a place where an empire ruled the world for millennia and shaped the world. An area that had one of the oldest civilizations, yet as a country, it’s younger than the USA. Yes, Italy, as a nation is younger than the USA. We became a nation by declaring our independence on July 4th, 1776 (recognized in 1783), and Italy became unified in 1861 (March 17 to be exact), and became a republic in 1946.

Well, enough history lesson, I was still amazed at how it has the least number of minutes in front of a screen. I thought about it, I think they enjoy their surroundings, nature, food, antiquities etc so much that they spend a lot more time outside then they do in front of a TV or computer screen. About the smartphone and Tablets, well I don’t know. Maybe it’s their culture, the price of the devices, the unemployment

Another thing I noticed, in the list of the countries they didn’t survey Ukraine, Portugal, Sweden, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Venezuela, and specially Greece & Iceland. I would be curious to see how the relationship between the current state of finance in a country, and it’s prior state of finance plays a role. as an example:

Greece and Iceland are in dire straits, but they used to be much better off before. This is the same with Italy. It’s on the same path if nothing changes. But when it comes to countries using the most number of minutes in front of screens, they’re countries that have not had great economies to start with.

Is that the reason? Is it because they have less access to TV screens? I don’t think so, because except Vietnam, most other underprivileged countries have a higher number of TV minutes than Italy. Maybe it’s because the people in those countries rely more on other virtual places, or lives or experiences by being in front of screens that lead to a different dimension like the web, or movies, or communicating with people in other areas, etc? Is there a correlation? I look forward to reading more about this.

The study was done by Milward Brown AdReaction, 2014. They surveyed by asking respondents “Roughly how long did you spend yesterday watching Television, using a laptop or PC to access the Internet, spend time on a smartphone or tablet?” And the survey population or at least the respondents were 16-44 across 30 countries, who had access to TV and a smartphone and/or tablet. The population of the 30 countries surveyed in the study collectively represent ~70% of the world population.

Original location for the histogram: http://images.bwbx.io/cms/2014-05-28/viewing-by-country1.png

Before a salty lake dries up, it becomes more and more saline (Salty), then it dries up and becomes a Dry Salt Lake Bed. It’s the same way with industries that the Internet is effecting. They get reduced from many players, to a few large players, that start fighting dirty,  to then a non-existent or just a non-significant industry.

Some examples of industries that have been effected are the Stockbrokers, travel agents, mail (Post office, although just one, it’s fighting against itself), the encyclopaedia industry, translation, newspapers, and now books. This is just a few, there are a lot more that are not very obvious or are  subsections of each of the above that are effected also, let’s take the newspapers:

– Help wanted ads were predominantly the domain of the newspapers, as recent as just 15 years ago. Now, almost no one buys a paper to look for a job.

– The Classified ads is another, When was the last time you looked for computer parts, a guitar, a bicycle, or parts for a bicycle, in a newspaper’s classified section? I can safely say, I haven’t done that for more than 10 years.

– The Car dealership ads. This segment in the newspaper has been hit very hard, not only by the Internet by dealers with their own websites and other sites like CarsDirect.com and cars.com, but the direct mail industry also like the circulars that come directly to your house without any cost to you.

– The stock reports of the Wall Street Journal, a newspaper itself. Who waits for the stock prices on when the Wall Street Journal comes out? We used to use that when I was in High School, to do mock investing and forecasting etc. (Wow, am I that old?)

The thorn on the side of the newspapers has been mainly Craigslist, which almost singlehandedly killed the classified section of the newspapers.

10 years ago, if you were to ask me how many ways are there to go about generating electricity, I would have told you many many ways, maybe 10-15 different methods. But after doing research for solar panels for my house back in 2010, I realized that there are really just 3-ways of generating electricity, Turbine, Fuel Cells, and PhotoVoltaic, (There are other methods that are insignificant and non-relevant on a large scale at this time).

You see, generating electricity can be done in a Non-Sustainable, like coal, hydro, etc. Semi-Sustainable, like wind, geo-thermal, fuel cells and Sustainable, like Solar PhotoVoltaic, methods. Turbine has been used the most and for a long time. Most methods use a turbine but use different ways to turn that turbine. Here are some descriptions:

1- Turbine – Hydro, Wind, Geo-Thermal, Solar-Thermal, Nuclear, Coal etc. are all the same way of generating electricity, just use a different fuel to do so. Basically you turn a turbine, and generate electricity from the resulting work that’s being done. The only difference is the fuel used to do it. Let’s take a look:

• Hydro – Flowing water is used to turn the turbine (Dams, Rivers, Waterfalls etc.) The fuel is water.
• Wind – Wind comes across and turns a turbine which generates the electricity. The fuel is wind.
• Nuclear – Superheat water, generate steam, turn the turbine and generate electricity. Fuel is Uranium.
• Coal – Heat water, generate steam, turn a turbine, generate electricity. Fuel is coal (Dirtiest method to generate electricity)
• Geo-Thermal – Heat of the Earth used again to turn a turbine and generate electricity. Fuel, heat from underground (Earth’s core)
• Solar-Thermal – Mirrors direct the Sun’s rays to a tower, that heats the water, to generate steam and turn a turbine to generate electricity. (Some attempts have been successful like heating salt stored underground and using the residual heat at night to whirl turbines etc.) Fuel, Sun’s rays and water.

2- Fuel Cells – Reactions between different chemicals produce electricity. This is similar to how a battery works, so on a mass scale it is very scarce, but Bloom Energy is generating electricity using this method. They have, what are called “Energy Servers” which generate electricity by using chemical reactions.

3- Solar with PhotoVoltaic – So the other, completely different way of generating electricity, which doesn’t require work (Machine work) and doesn’t require turning a turbine to generate electricity is Solar Energy, specifically PhotoVoltaic method of generating electricity from the Sun.

PhotoVoltaic cells generate electricity by having 2 polymers/chemicals in such a way that when the sun’s rays hit the area and stimulate the electron in one of the chemicals, it jumps from one level to another giving off energy. It’s a simplistic explanation but it’s sufficient to show that this method is completely different than the turbine method.

So now you know too. Almost all methods of generating electricity that we know of, are really split from the same log. They just use a different fuel to do the same thing. PhotoVoltaic is significantly different and still in its infancy. We have to support it, and make sure research continues and gets to a point where the efficiency is more than 50% (Currently 12-18%) to make it indispensable. Current leaders with prototypes:  Semprius (41% efficiency in Lab, 33.9% verified)

Fuel Cell and Photvoltaic are very related, they are similar processed in that there is a chemical reaction and/or electron stripping that is producing the energy.

I love this field!

If you are generating content for your product or service, unless it is for the betterment of knowledge for mankind, you need to be able to convert. If you are not converting the leads you are generating fodder for cars. While fodder might be important for animals, it is useless for cars. Stop wasting your time and resources.

Most marketers tell you you need 3 things for content to be effective, It needs to be Findable, Sharable (Worthy of sharing), and Convertible, and by that I don’t mean the car type convertible, I mean Able to Be Converted.

So start with that feature in mind. There is no “Build it and they’ll come”, Twitter has been battling this for years. We all know how indispensable it is now (It took a long time to be understood), some people still don’t. So te entire world is using it, and that same entire world has changed because of it. But the company still doesn’t know how it is going to monetize this shift in paradigm (Sorry Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Dick Costolo who still toils with the task of finding a way to monetize content).

So when you start with Convertibility in mind, you might find that the idea for the product or service, although great in and of itself, might not be feasible to make. That’s if you want it to convert, and generate revenue or something else that leads to generating revenue, like creating leads etc.

Most of us have watched Shark Tank, where the investors start by hearing about the idea, then move quickly into, “How do you sell it?”, “How many have you already sold?”, Will it make money easily?”, etc. If you keep that in mind, then you will have a better chance of success as 9 out of 10 businesses fail within a year.

So once you have figured out how to monetize, or make money, or generate revenue, etc. etc. Then you move to the next stage which is share-ability. You need to make sure there is a message or WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) so it can grow like a virus, being shared and passed on from user to user. Then your last step is to make it Findable.

At the last stage, You will can craft the message like the website, the brochure, flyer, billboards, complementary blogs, radio commercials etc to make it Findable. This is how you maximize your chances of success (Notice, I’m not saying succeed, because if you don’t innovate, adapt, change, and actually deliver, all this is for nothing). Good luck.

It’s very hard for anyone to take criticism. Whether it’s in the professional world, or the personal one. Also the tone sets the line between Criticism and Insult. you should never criticize something that cannot be changed, like the way someone looks or sounds etc. It’s hurtful and may cause undesirable consequences. That said, let’s talk about business and how to sell crap.

Sometimes companies don’t put things in their product or service descriptions, but the customer/client reads between the lines. So companies that are smart, will take the feedback from their customers and change the message, or better yet, change their offering to match the customer/clients’ expectations, even better yet, in addition to the latter, they add value by giving a little something above and beyond the expectations of the customer.

When I taught marketing at Cal Poly University, I would use examples, one of the examples was “Cracker Jack”. Of course Cracker jack had a little hidden gem inside and that was expected, so it really became a part of the product, some people bought it for the little toy, and threw away the actual box with the snack.

Customers expected this little gem, they knew it wasn’t worth $100, but imagine if every nth box had a real gem, like a real Gold ring. What would this do to the sales of Cracker Jack? Of course cereal boxes followed this model, also Publisher Clearing house etc.

Then along came Woot! A daily deals site that set the standard for hidden gems. They sold the unwanted and unsold inventory of companies for a good price, but every so often they put odds and ends in a bag and sold it for $1 and called it “Bag of Crap”. The limit was 3 of them, and the shipping was the same, $5 whether you bought one, two or three.

People started buying this “Bag of Crap” (BOC). The shipping cost $5 and the bag $1, for a total of $6 for one bag, $7 for 2 and $8 for 3. So it doesn’t take a genius to figure out, that it makes much better sense to buy 3 than it does 1, right? (Some people still buy 1 till today). Needless to say, when this BOC comes online, the servers crash, and within 1 minute, they have sold more than 5,000 Bags of Crap, or in proper English Bag-Of- Craps (I love it!).

When they first started the BOC program, they truly had junk and people didn’t expect much because they were telling you, “Hey, you’re getting a bag of Crap, so don’t expect anything”. But the tipping point was when every so often they put an Xbox or Large LCD TV, or something that’s worth a lot, but like I said, in most cases you got crap that didn’t sell on its own. So if they had 10,000 BOCs, they would have sold all of them, maybe even 20,000 or?

I like the fact that somebody at Woot was connected to the customers enough to see that there was a potential for a made up product like that. This person was interested in making it better in the future for the customer and of course, ultimately for the company.

A lot of companies get defensive and just blurt back at customers. Customers have nothing more to lose, but merchants do. The customer takes his/her money elsewhere but piles a whole lot of negative feedback online about the company and how they don’t care about the customer etc. If you’re a company with customer facing employees, send them to anger management training.

No one likes being told that their “Stuff” is not right or not valuable. Successful companies ask and find out what they can do to make it better, and get free and very valuable advice from the customer or client, which is the Holy Grail of marketing and commerce in general. I would rather hear honest feedback from a consumer that didn’t buy than a rosy comment from a buying customer, or worse yet, a great comment from a prospect that never even bought, and probably would not buy.

That’s why you MUST take the time to respond fully to customers and make sure to get their feedback. Also be ready to tweak your product or offering to satisfy the majority. In my classes I used to teach what I was taught when taking marketing courses, “You’re not the customer! The customer is the customer and the customer is not you!” always remember this.

You want the customer to fall in love with your company, put in things that were not included in your description and say, “I know we didn’t tell you about this, but you are such a valued customer that we included this too”. It doesn’t need to be much. A Mousepad would do fine for a software company. A list of sources to lookup if you are selling information, a small card with a mortgage calculating table if you’re a Real Estate agent, a card with useful conversion charts if you’re selling spices or food products online, etc etc. —– and take the chance to have them brag about you to their friends?

If you are a company that does this, you have earned my respect. Great job!

-D

*Disclosure: Woot was the original daily deals site (for me at least), they were acquired by Amazon
Mousepad.com is a company I have interest in. It sells custom printed mousepads and has some off the shelf pre-printed mousepads too that I found to be useful giveaways. PrismPlug is another company I have interest in. Prism Plugs are small removable covers that let you cover and uncover your webcam so you can make sure you have some privacy from hackers and other people that are not authorized to view through your webcam.

I taught Marketing courses as an adjunct faculty and guest lecturer from 2000-2003 at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona.

We don’t think twice before downloading and installing apps on our mobile phones. We go through screens of text pertaining to Terms of Use and Privacy statements without even reading a sentence. It is common practice to Just “Accept” at the bottom, to just be able to use the free app.

Well this is no different that someone doing anything for drugs. They will sell their brother’s iPad, watch or whatever for cheap just to get some. Actually it’s different because they are giving away rights that are much more expensive, and in some instances, IRREVERSIBLE.

Lately I’ve been noticing that most apps are telling me they will use such things as the  camera and the microphone on the device, “Without Permission”, the location of your phone, even the amount the phone is used and who you called and how long you called. When asked, the developers say, if they don’t get that permission, then every time you are going to use the camera it is going to need permissions (Between clicks),  or not having the right location will not give you the right location on the map and your navigation will be a problem. Or when your phone is lost or Stolen you won’t know where it is, etc.

This is Bull Shit with a capital B&S. Why would a Health app, that tracks my steps or distance and food and maybe heart rate,  if I have a monitor, need to use my camera and microphone and record without my knowledge or permission? This doesn’t make sense to me, and lately I’ve been a lot more careful with some applications that want to update and change these terms that I could have agreed to by default, as in apps that came pre-installed on the phone.

Is there a sinister plan? Is this information that will be used by the insurance companies to spy on the users? It is perfect to find out how much exercise you are or aren’t doing. What kind of foods are you eating. Where you are going (in the case of the location of your phone)

I like to have my location accessible by my phone because I always think, what if I was in an accident off of a mountain road or something, I would like my family or the search and rescue to be able to track my phone and find me, but not the retailer that wants to give me a coupon because I am passing by the store, or the health insurance company because I am going to too many parties or night clubs, etc, etc.

I think you get the picture. I would be careful before accepting these terms blindly and letting whoever it is have access to that data. BE CAREFUL! It might even be too late.