Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/TRxEXheA_cw/would-you-pay-300-bucks-for-a-radio
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Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Would You Pay 300 Bucks for a Radio?
In Mayan doomsday, marketers see $$$ opportunity
2 hrs.
Where the Mayans saw the end of time, marketers see dollar signs.
As ancient doomsday predictions draw near, a number of hotels and restaurants are launching tongue-in-cheek promotions to profit from the fiery apocalypse forecasts surrounding Dec. 21, one Mayan Calendar's end date. The offers range from end-of-days themed vacation packages to restaurant menus encouraging customers to live it up one last time.?
Step one of apocalypse preparation is returning some of those holiday gifts to free up additional end-of-days capital because many hotel offers this doomsday require deep pockets (but what does money mean anyway when the world is ending?!).
For $79,000 per couple, the Rosewood Mayakoba in Riviera Maya offers "The Ultimate New Beginning" package, which includes a spiritual cleansing with a Mayan shaman priest along with a private helicopter ride to a tour of architectural sites led by an archaeologist. At the J.W. Marriott resort in Cancun, guests can visit the ancient ruins of Chichen Itza and indulge in Mayan-inspired spa treatments.
Stateside, hotels are also trying to cash in on the Mayan hype. For superstitious starting price of $666, The Keating in San Diego is selling the "End of the World" package complete with a last supper and fitness classes aimed at outrunning zombies. Christos Brooks, the Keating's standards and operations director, drew the idea for the promotion from Britney Spears's song "Till the World Ends."
"That was pretty much my anthem last year, and this year we were talking about promotion ideas for the end of the world," Brooks said. "It's always a slow time of the year for San Diego, and that's where it came about."
The package has sold well so far with 15 rooms booked, making it one of the year's most popular, Brooks said.
"The one thing that people really haven't been into is going to the gym the next day," he added. "No one's really given a reason for it, but the only thing that people have asked about is if the gym is required."
The Keating is also offering a post-doomsday special for guests.
"If you pre-pay for your room after the 21st, you get a 40 percent discount so it's kind of a gamble," he said. "You can pay for your room and if the world doesn't end, you get a great bargain. But if it does, you lose your money. Based on the booking we have seen so far the world's going to continue to go on."
For $12,021, The Curtis Hotel offered a "Party Like There's No-To-Maya" special that included rental of an entire floor of the Denver hotel along with Doomsday supplies including anti-radiation tablets, freeze-dried food and gas masks. A tattoo artist was also included if guests wanted to mark the end of the world with some fresh ink.?
Kate Thompson, the hotel's director of sales and marketing, said the package did not end up selling, but it did generate curiosity, which is often one of the main goals for an whimsical promotion like the Curtis'.
"It's a great coup to us to be able to get our name out there, and the more press we have the better it is and the more exposure we get, the better it is for us," Thompson said. "The exposure's worth just as much as actually selling that package."
The buzz surrounding the Mayan doomsday predictions allows marketers an opportunity to "piggyback" their offers on the highly publicized event, said Chekitan Dev, an associate professor of strategic marketing and brand management at Cornell's School of Hotel Administration.?
"With the media creating a lot of hype, a lot of the market preparation is already done for product and service marketers so it's then a matter of capitalizing on this media opportunity," Dev said.
Mayan-related promotions can be a positive move for brands, even luxury ones, if the offers are well thought out, offer consumers something special and target a market that is likely to respond, Dev said.
"Luxury hotels, not wanting to go for the macabre, can use this as a way to promote cultural tourism, a fast growing segment with a higher spend than average, by showcasing Mayan culture by having special attractions, speakers, events around this event," he added.
Dev cautions companies against using what he calls "soft-sell" offers, such as merely spa packages that give "the impression that they have not put a lot of thought into this."
It makes sense that marketers would use any opportunity they can to drum up business, but what makes consumer prone to bite at these playful promotions?
Jonah Berger, an assistant professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has studied why certain products get more word-of-mouth exposure than others and why online content goes viral as some Doomsday-related coverage has.?
"We've done research that shows around Halloween, when you ask people to name products, they are more likely to name orange products around that time of year," Berger said.
Similar to this Halloween association, people's decision making may be affected when Mayan culture is top of mind, he added. Even with the publicity is negative, it can help boost sales.
"Just like in this case, you might find yourself at a Mexican restaurant and don't know that why, we find that negative publicity can sometimes increase sales because that makes that product top of mind," Berger said.
To capitalize on the occasion, restaurants are also hosting events around the country. T.G.I.Friday's restaurants will have a "Last Friday" menu that packs a caloric heavy-weight punch and urges consumers to make their last meals great and "go out with a full stomach" (because diets won't matter in the apocalypse, right?!).
At Margaritas Mexican Restaurant's "End of the World" party, there will be a "if you were the last man on earth" pick-up line contest and "sitting here in limbo" limbo competition. The company has also created an app that enables users to create postcards to share with friends and detail how they will spend their last earthly moments.
"It seems like a natural fit; in difficult times, bars tend to do well," said Patrick Dowling, the restaurant chain's marketing coordinator. "It stands to reason that if the world is going to end, we're going to have a pretty good apocalypse eve."
So far, about 100 messages have been created so far and posted on Facebook, including "The end of the world is coming. Repent and drink more margaritas" and "Kevin Youkilis on the Yankees? What more proof do you need the world is ending?"
Breweries are also getting in on the action. California-based Stone Brewing Company has released an "enjoy by 12.21.12" IPA that is "brewed to not last." A leading Canadian craft brewery Unibroue invites drinkers to pledge to raise their glasses at midnight on Dec. 20 "for one last toast to the end of the world."?
For consumers, the end-of-days prediction will offer a chance to indulge even if only a very small set of celebrants believe it is the last time to spoil themselves, Berger said.
"People want to go out to dinner," he added. "They want to take fun vacations. I don't think they really think the world's going to end, but it's a good excuse to behave like it will."
And so far, efforts to drive traffic to Mexico appear to be paying off.
In the tourism district of Riviera Maya, which contains ancient Mayan ruins, Expedia's hotel bookings are up 44 percent for the dates that include Dec. 21. Meanwhile, Cancun hotel bookings have risen 7.5 percent for the period.
Outside of Mexico, Honduras and El Salvador ? two other countries with Mayan roots ? have each seen hotel bookings surge more than 50 percent.
Priceline also reported a boost in sales compared to last year. During the last three months, sales have jumped 16 percent compared to the year-ago period.
Expedia added that Americans are continuing to book tickets and vacations for well after Dec. 21 so it appears that they are in fact confident that the end of times isn't imminent. But even if the Mayans do turn out to be wrong, one thing is certain ? marketers will be ready to profit from the next dire prediction faster than you can say "The Fiscal Cliff Cookbook."
More from CNBC:
Products for the Zombie apocalypse
Tips for the apocalypse
Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/business/mayan-doomsday-marketers-see-opportunity-1C7608708
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Question for Gun-Rights Fanatics: Have You No Sense of Decency?
I?m still brooding over the Connecticut massacre. Here are some points I?d like to add to those I raised in my column on Friday:
One respondent to my previous post chided me for my inflammatory language. Yes, my response was emotional, because I literally get sick thinking about what the hard-core gun-rights folks?and their appeasers?have done to this country. Also, reason and logic aren?t exactly prevailing. Perhaps we need more emotion, outrage, like that dramatic moment in 1954 when lawyer Joseph Welch stood up to the anti-communist bully Senator Joseph McCarthy, asking, ?Have you no sense of decency?? That was the beginning of the end of McCarthyism.
I?m appalled by the recklessness and shallowness of the arguments of some opponents of gun control. Many eagerly seized on the fact that on Friday, a man in China stabbed 22 elementary school children. Should we outlaw kitchen knives? a clever commenter on my blog asked. Crappy comparison. None of the Chinese children died, according to The New York Times. All countries have deranged, violent people, but not all countries make it so easy for madmen to obtain weapons designed for mass murder.
Gun-lovers argue we need more people packing guns, not fewer. That?s almost as stupid as arguing that the world would be safer if more nations possess nuclear weapons. Two recent shootings in Florida show what can happen when armed civilians roam the streets. The first took place last February, when George Zimmerman, a self-styled neighborhood watchdog, shot to death Trayvon Martin, a teenager who lived in the neighborhood. Last month 46-year-old Michael Dunn asked four teenagers in a car to turn down their music. After a heated exchange, Dunn fired eight shots into the car, killing 17-year-old Jordan Davis. Dunn has been charged with second-degree murder, according to The New York Times. More guns will surely mean more lethal accidents, suicides, homicides and vigilante attacks.
Okay, now I?m really going to go off the rails. The potential connection between violent entertainment and real violence keeps nagging at me. I love violent flicks, like the latest James Bond and Batman blockbusters, and I?m a staunch believer in free speech. My son grew up playing first-person shooter games, and he?s a kind, considerate young man. Also, the surge in consumption of violent games over the past few decades has not been matched by a corresponding surge in gun violence. In fact, violent crime rates in the U.S. have fallen since the early 1990s. I nonetheless worry about the corrosive moral effects of violent entertainment on young people.
I?m even more worried about the potential link between our country?s hawkish actions overseas and mass shootings here in the homeland. President Barack Obama has signed off on drone attacks that often result in the killing of civilians, including children. There is a cognitive dissonance between our leaders? condemnation of school shootings here and their violent actions beyond our borders.
What I?m trying to say, I suppose, is that I see the Connecticut massacre and similar outbursts of violence as symptoms of a profound American sickness, a pathological infatuation with violence, which is also manifested in our militarism and atavistic adherence to the death penalty. All these forms of violence?whether carried out by crazed individuals or by our own government?violate basic human decency. When will we say, Enough!
Credit: chronicle.uchicago.edu
Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=14e425b6adcff95b30f4c57e3d4af650
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Monday, December 17, 2012
Egypt's ousted president slips, hits his head
CAIRO (AP) ? An Egyptian security official says ousted president Hosni Mubarak has slipped in the bathroom in the prison where is serving a life sentence, hitting his head.
The official says the ailing Mubarak, 84, was treated in Cairo's Tora prison Saturday for head injuries and a chest bruise. He says Mubarak slipped before two months ago but did not injure himself.
The report comes at a particularly tense moment in the transition that has followed Mubarak's 2011 overthrow, as millions of Egyptians vote in a highly contentious referendum on a draft constitution written by a mostly Islamist panel.
Mubarak was convicted of failing to stop killings of protesters during the uprising. There have been conflicting reports about his health.
The official spoke anonymously as he wasn't authorized to talk to reporters.
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Tuesday, December 4, 2012
News Corporation shutters The Daily tablet newspaper as of December 15th
News Corporation's The Daily was to have been a vanguard of the future, based on the past -- a tablet-focused newspaper that could get us back to paying subscriptions for our regular news fix. Not enough of us were as enthralled with the retro-future concept, however. While CEO Rupert Murdoch calls The Daily a "bold experiment," he's shutting the publication down as of December 15th following sluggish growth that didn't match long-term expectations. The move may pay off for other divisions. As part of a larger spinoff of its publishing wing headed by Robert Thomson, News Corp is moving the all-digital outlet's resources and some of its staff (including Editor-in-Chief Jesse Angelo) into the considerably more paper-bound New York Post. In some senses, it wasn't hard to see a shutdown as a possibility. While Murdoch is more than a little fond of paywalls as an alternative to free, ad-based viewing, The Daily was counting on building a paid readership completely from scratch in a web-based era -- it's hard to compete with free.
Continue reading News Corporation shutters The Daily tablet newspaper as of December 15th
Filed under: Tablets, Internet
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Dear text message: Happy 20th birthday!
It was 20 years ago today that the first text message was sent. It was Dec. 3, 1992, and Neil Papworth, an engineer working in the UK, sent the world's first short message service or SMS. It read "Merry Christmas."
But while most are entering their prime at age 20, the text message might just be past its glory years.
The History -- In More Than 160 Characters
Papworth, however, was in his prime when he hit the send button on that first text. At the age of 22, Papworth was working for a company called Semea Group Telecoms, which had been working on a mobile messaging project for Vodafone, a European cellular carrier.
"It happened that day that Vodafone wanted to try sending a message to Richard Jarvis, one of the directors there, who was at a Christmas party. So we sat at the computer and typed him a message and then sent him the message 'Merry Christmas,'" Papworth told ABC News. "For me it was just another day's testing, it didn't seem to be anything big at the time."
But, of course, it turned into something very big -- at least once some of the consumer technology caught up. On that day in 1992, Papworth didn't send the first message with his thumbs on a mobile phone. He sent it from a big computer in one of Vodafone's offices to a Orbatel 901 mobile phone, which was the size of of today's office phones, Papworth explains.
(Papworth isn't the inventor of the text message; the origins of the idea date back to 1984 when Matti Makkonen, a Finnish engineer, was working with Nokia on mobile messaging.)
At that time, you could only receive messages on phones; you couldn't actually send messages from phones until a year or so later when phones from Nokia and others had the proper capabilities.
"Years went on and people were able to start to send text messages. It took quite a few years of it to take off," Papworth said. "But by the 10th anniversary it was fairly big by then."
The Rise and Start of the Fall
And it became even bigger than that. In 2010, the International Telecommunications Union reported that 200,000 text messages were sent every minute and 6.1 trillion texts were sent worldwide. In June 2012, the CTIA mobile trade group reported that 184.3 billion text messages were sent a month in the United States -- up from 28.9 billion a month in 2007.
But in 2012, there is building evidence that text messaging is past its peak as more and more people have smartphones and use e-mail, instant messaging, iMessage, and other mobile messaging services to communicate.
In November, the New York Times reported that in the third quarter of 2012 text messaging was down. According to a report by Chetan Sharma, a mobile analyst, cell owners sent 678 text messages a month, down from 696 a month the previous quarter. It's not a huge hit, but it falls in line with other reports that text message usage is dropping.
"Texting isn't evolving, therefore it's declining," Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, told ABC News. "There are way too many alternatives like iMessage, BBM, Facebook chat and Google Chat that are cross-platform that texting is a backup now for sophisticated users. Texting is more reliable but is declining as a primary tool."
Other experts also point out that users still need to pay for text messaging, while some of the other services are free, with no cap on the number of messages.
"It comes down to cost -- carriers still charge extra for text messaging after all these years, even though it costs essentially nothing to operate. It's pure margin," Chris Ziegler, a mobile phone expert and senior editor at The Verge, told ABC News. "Alternatives like BBM, iMessage, WhatsApp, and traditional instant messaging services, like Google Talk and Microsoft Messenger, only require a data package, which any smartphone user already has anyway. A savvy subscriber can dispense of their text messaging plan altogether and rely on data alone."
Additionally, with more of those services and social networks like Twitter and Facebook, users are finding texting to lack the features of the others. Ironically, Twitter, which says 60 percent of its users access the service on mobile, was based on text messaging. Like SMS' 160-character limit, Twitter has a 140-character limit and was designed that way because of text message capabilities.
"Twitter was inspired by SMS and we continue to embrace this simple but ubiquitous technology. In fact, Twitter's 140-character limit was designed specifically to allow for any tweet to be read in its entirety whether you're using a rudimentary mobile phone, or a more sophisticated Internet enabled device," Twitter wrote on its blog back in 2010.
But while Papworth admits that texting is past its prime, he believes it will still be very relevant for years to come. While a growing part of the population owns smartphones, which allow you to instant message, email, or connect to social networks, cellphone use without those features is growing at a very fast rate in emerging markets like India or Africa.
"Those handsets can do text messaging, but not everything can use data," he said. "Yes, the data is showing that it is starting to decline, but it's not going to go away. There is a lot of use for it alongside all the data services."
Also ReadSource: http://news.yahoo.com/happy-20th-b-day-text-message-013407860--abc-news-tech.html
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Saturday, December 1, 2012
Supreme Court to Determine American Parents' Rights to Retrieve Children Wrongfully Abducted or Retained Abroad
International Family Law Attorney Michael Manely appeals to U.S. Supreme Court to determine all American parents' rights to obtain a court order for the return of children abducted or wrongfully retained abroad. Manely's client, U.S. Army Sergeant 1st Class Jeff Chafin, who served his country in Iraq and Afghanistan, turns now to his country to protect his parental rights.
Washington, D.C. (PRWEB) November 30, 2012
On December 5, 2012, The Supreme Court of the United States will hear oral argument in Chafin v. Chafin, No. 11- 1347, to determine if Federal Courts may order the return of a child abducted or wrongfully retained abroad. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, Atlanta, GA, held in Bekier v. Bekier, 248 F. 3d 1051 (11th Cir. 2001) that Federal Courts lack jurisdiction to issue such an order once the child is taken from U.S. soil.On February 6, 2012 the same court denied Sergeant 1st Class Chafin?s request to review a Federal District Court decision allowing his four year old daughter to be taken by his estranged wife to Scotland. The Eleventh Circuit Court held that even if the District Court had erred, they were powerless to issue a return order because the child was no longer in The U.S.
Other Federal Circuit Courts of Appeal disagree, citing the provisions set forth by The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction and The Federal International Child Abduction and Retention Act. The Supreme Court of The United States granted Chafin?s Petition for Writ of Certiorari to resolve the split. Chafin?s international family law attorney, Michael E. Manely, points out that rendering U.S. Courts powerless to order the return of American children would encourage abduction and retention abroad which the Hague Convention on Child Abduction is intended to prevent.
Chafin's daughter was turned over to her Scottish mother by a lower Federal District Court. Attorney Manely explains that the lower court denied his request for a stay and within two hours Chafin's daughter was taken out of the country by her mother, a woman she hadn?t seen in a year. Chafin says even though he served in Iraq and Afghanistan, he has never feared anything more than losing the opportunity to parent his daughter. He is looking to the U.S. Courts to protect his parental rights.
Shelia Manely
The Manely Firm, P.C.
678-382-1638
Email Information
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