Kameir

Google and Walmart are testing the idea that an enemy’s enemy could be a friend.

The two companies said Google would start offering Walmart products to people who shop on Google Express, the company’s online shopping mall. It’s the first time the world’s biggest retailer has made its products available online in the United States outside of its own web presence.

The partnership, announced on Wednesday, is a testament to the mutual threat facing both companies from Amazon.com. Amazon’s dominance in online shopping is challenging brick-and-mortar retailers like Walmart, while more people are starting web searches for products they might buy on Amazon instead of Google.

But working together does not ensure that they will be any more successful. For most consumers, Amazon remains the primary option for online shopping. No other retailer can match the size of Amazon’s inventory, the efficiency with which it moves shoppers from browsing to buying, or its many home delivery options.

Telenor Group – a Norwegian mostly government-owned multinational telecommunications company headquartered near Oslo –  is one of the world’s largest mobile telecommunications companies with operations in Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and Asia. It owns extensive broadband and TV distribution operations in four Nordic countries, and a 10-year-old research and business line for Machine-to-Machine technology. Telenor owns networks in 13 countries, and has operations in 29 countries.A product within telecommunications giant Telenor is hoping the technology behind initial coin offerings (ICOs) can help it disrupt the media business model.

Central to the Norway-based firm’s exploration of the Blockchain technology is its partnership with startup Hubii, which launched an ICO. Both companies believe the project will bring benefits by providing a way to create a decentralized, autonomous marketplace of content that can be sold across different platforms, as well as helping Telenor defend against its hacking problem.

The firms are also interested in how they could directly interact using smart contracts powered by ethereum, instead of via the pesky media companies now increasingly viewed as middlemen.

Telenor’s global partnership director, Ketil Hoigaard, described how a number of early-stage blockchain operations being conducted by his firm around the world could stand to benefit from lessons learned from the Hubii Network ICO. Hoigaard said:

“Using technologies like blockchain to deliver these services is [the] key to succeed, to be honest, because I think [blockchain is] what’s coming to all these verticals as a tool, a platform, to help deliver content to the end users in an easy way across borders.”

If you had invested $250 in Bitcoins on April 11th, 2011, you would have received 260.417 Bitcoins. As of today (August 13, 2017) these 260 coins would be worth more than $1 million. Most of the value increase stems from the quadrupling of the currency since the beginning of the year. The hike is fueled by an ever-increasing number of Initial Coin Offerings with companies (or mostly: ‘projects’) raising more than $100 million often in a matter of hours.

Even as US regulators issued strong statements as to the legality of (unregistered) ICOs, there have been no signs of the frenzy slowing down and 25 percent of the recent Bitcoin trades are still being attributed to the United States (although origins could be manipulated, and certainly are being obfuscated to some degree). Apparently most Bitcoin buys were made with Japanese Yen accounted for nearly 46 percent of global trade volume.

With most consumers still sitting on the sidelines of cryptocurrency trading, it can be expected that another high is still to come.

Marketing is math. Without a solid grasp of Return On Marketing, Customer Acquisition Costs, Customer Lifetime Value and a list of other marketing key performance indicators you should not call yourself a marketer.

The most visible example for the power of math over marketing is Google’s money-making machine: pay-per-click. Every aspect of pay-per-click is a result of a calculation including the fundamental PPPP of marketing:

• Product (including features and support!)
• Pricing (not only monetary but also time and energy!)
• Promotion (branding, PR, advertising, sales)
• Placing (geo, channels, market segments – gender, age, education etc.)

With more data becoming available at ever lower efforts and costs every day “Big Data” is on most marketers mind. As with most fashionable terms that have not yet clearly been defined by academia the term “Big Data” is being used (and abused) by marketers on a daily basis which try to put a slant on it fitting to whatever flavor of the term might be most conducive for the promotion of their own product.

Cathy O’Neil takes an interesting stands on the term is her recently released book Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. If you are interested in the social significance of how big data and mathematics are being today, you should go out and get a copy. Cathy has been blogging for quite a while at Mathbabe, which you should be following if you are in marketing.

To Cathy, Facebook is clearly the most worrisome of all the Big Data concerns in the book. The social media giant exercises an incredible amount of influence over what information people see, with this influence often being sold to the highest bidder. Together with Amazon, Google and Apple, the US economy and society have become controlled by monopolies to an unparalleled degree, monopolies that monitor most of the populations behavior (for commercial purpose). And, in the context of government surveillance measures, Edward Snowden remarked that we are now “tagged animals, the primary difference being that we paid for the tags and they are in our pockets.” A very small number of huge extremely wealthy organizations have even greater access to those tags than the government does, recording every movement, communication with others, and even every train of thought as we interact with the web.

However, I think that Cathy clearly underestimates the second order effects that Google’s money machine (originally “borrowed” from Yahoo) had on the world wide web and by extension on the world at large. Google inadvertently created an entire ecosystem that spews out misinformation a million pages at a time – charitable referred to as ‘Search Engine Optimization’. And, why Internet users might spend more time on Facebook, most will turn to Google to find ‘information’ on products, services and the world at large. Since reality does not have a marketing budget, content now often written by bots serve the Google algorithm and its commercial intent. Keep in mind: if you are not paying for it – you are the product.

So, to that extent, increasing shareholder value of one entity (Google) has become the overarching principal of information distribution. And, while capitalism is the motor of most progress unrestrained capitalism and its second and third order effects are without a doubt the main driver for the destruction of the environment we live in as well as the exploitation of most people living in it.