Take Credit, Not Loans

If you are nurturing entrepreneurial dreams of starting something of your own and looking for finance, chances are that commercial loans will not come easy and aggressive credit card companies will be able to pin you down with their sky high 30% interest rates. Business Week reports that credit card companies see small businesses as a very fertile growth market and new entrepreneurs find credit cards the easy (albeit expensive) way out because of the lack of documents, no proof of capital investments etc. Close to 12% of the 6 billion credit-card offers mailed each year promotes small business credit cards, says Mercator Advisory, amounting to 720 million offers. And though people realize how much they are losing to extravagant interest rates, there is little they can do once the loan in incurred. Watch this slideshow that shows credit cards with the most market share targeted at small business owners.

Evolution Of Mobile Payments

A lot has been said about mobile payments taking over from traditional payment modes. An extension to existing alternative payment models, two years back, PayPal launched PayPal Mobile making it easier than ever for PayPal users to text money to friends and to pay for stuff that they buy, without any additional charges. A similar service called TextPayMe also became popular among people who needed to send many for various reasons, even simple reasons like splitting their lunch bills. So what next? Blogger Jim Salters, in a recent post talks, among other things, about the fact that mobile banking is catching up much faster than mobile payments.

Young And Free Alberta

We’ve heard about Alberta hosting one of the world’s biggest malls in Edmonton, but now the western Canadian province has something else to boast of. The Common Wealth Credit Union of Canada has launched a Young and Free account across the province aimed at 17 to 25-year olds. The account has most of the features of a regular bank account and comes to young individuals (a lot of who are students) with advice and guidance. Each year, a spokesperson is selected who blogs and shoots videos that teach and simplify the account’s functions. An interesting video that we caught was the current spokesperson Larissa, explaining the difference between credit unions and banks. The Young and Free Alberta site is also linked in with Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and most other sites that the young guys use, ensuring that they’re seen at all the right places. The site also has an interesting section where users can list any freebies that are available to Alberta’s under-25 crowd. Complete with polls and e-updates, the site makes an interesting place for users to come and hang around, therefore resulting in them opening Young and Free accounts.

Architecture Wakes Up With Living Skins

Architects Peter Cook (cofounder of Archigram) and Colin Fournier with Spacelab.UK have developed a bulbous, creature-like building to house an art museum, Kunsthaus Graz for the city of Graz. Cook and Fournier’s competition entry had envisioned a membranous exterior that allowed occasional glimpses of action within: “signs, announcements, short sequences of film or images,” but with funds and time rapidly diminishing, this looked likely to remain a vision. Elsewhere Columbia University architecture graduates Soo-in Yang and David Benjamin, whose firm is called The Living, have developed a prototype wall that “breathes.” Read more on the Adobe Design Centre blog.

Wagamama’s Geo Targeted Ad Campaign

In what’s perhaps a first, UK’s Asian Restaurant Chan Wagamama is debuting a get-targetted advertising campaign. In partnership with mapping site Multimap customers who search for locations on the map site will see a branded message appear when any of the searched location is close to a Wagamama outlet, highlighted here in red

Your Very Own Focus Group

Springwise blog reports of a German innovation that lets people to turn for an honest appraisal of how they look.Upload a few pictures to checkyourimage.com and have impartial strangers evaluate their appearance, solving dilemmas like: “My wife says I look boring, I think I look professional and modern.” “My boss says I come across as cool and distant. I think I look reliable and friendly.” “Does my long, red hair look good on me, or would I look better with a short, blond cut?” The website points out that just as brands routinely use focus groups to test a product’s image and appeal, anyone can benefit from an honest appraisal by a crowd of strangers. More on Springwise.

New Media President. How Barack Obama Is Using Social Media To Win The White House.

It’s 3.30 am on Saturday morning, the 23rd August 2008, and millions of mobile phones across America were woken up with a TXT message from Obama campaign . Joe Biden has been chosen as running mate. For those who don’t know the background, weeks ago the Democratic nominee has promised supporters that they would be first to know who the Vice Presidential candidate. For this any interested person could register their mobile number on the campaign site.

In an anti-news-cycle strategy, designed to give the bloggers, emailers, MySpacers and FaceBookers time to get the drop on all the C-suite media companies – CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, etc.

The strategy doesn’t end there. When the Democratic convention kicks off on Monday, 25th August 2008, in Denver it will be a transforming moment in the annals of American media and technology, the moment when the new kids on the block eclipse – or at least grab equal footing – with the so-called establishment.

Call it the Obamedia Frenzy. In Denver, the hordes of media from newspaper, magazine and cable and broadcast news outlets will be competing for stories with scores of bloggers and so-called citizen journalists kitted out by digital juggernauts Google, MySpace and YouTube.

There will also be writers from two influential online news sites that did not exist four years ago, The Huffington Post and Politico – not to mention unconventional outlets like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, a nightly comedy programme that has become one of the nation’s most trusted news sources.

At a time when many so-called mainstream news organisations in the US are grappling with shrinking newsrooms, shuttered news bureaus and identity crises, the disruptors and interlopers will be in plain view. Google, which owns the website blogger.com as well as YouTube, has set up an 8,000 sq ft facility called The Big Tent next to the arena where most of the convention is being held.
Inside, for only $100, journalists and bloggers get free food, beer and wi-fi for four days, and has a kiosk set up for uploading videos to YouTube. Sounds neat? Sure. And let us not forget that nearly half of all video watched online in the US is seen via Google, and its market capitalisation, at $152billion, is greater than CBS, Time Warner, Walt Disney, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Viacom combined.

MySpace, which was a year-old start-up at the time of the previous convention, claims that about one in four Americans are registered users. It plans a series of events surrounding the convention, some of which will be held at MySpace Cafés where people can go online to update their sites.
Having recently built up a political “channel” on MySpace called Impact, the social network also held a contest with MSNBC to select a “citizen journalist” elected to cover the event and post to their sites. In his video entry, the winner, a 23-year-old from Michigan, joked: “I don’t know, maybe I’ll interview the janitor at the convention.”

Kidding aside, like MTV before it, MySpace (which, like this newspaper, is owned by News Corp) is determined to show that it is a potent societal as well as cultural force – Obama has almost 454,000 “friends” on MySpace, only 30,000 or so fewer than the band Coldplay, and a whole lot more than John McCain’s nearly 64,000.

Lee Brenner, MySpace’s 31-year-old producer of political programming and a former producer at CNN, said that the role of social networks and blogs during the election race is different from more traditional outlets because it is about getting users to participate. “We’re trying to democratise democracy,” he told the Times London. “We’re not trying to just give information.”

Read more in The London Times here . The New York Times talks of how the campaign is changing the face of mobile marketing. An older story in The Guardian is here . Also of interest, Stage design as propaganda tool on Adverlab.

Bank Apps On The Phone

Bank of America proved once again why they are such a savvy and innovative marketer by being the only financial instution to have a native app at the time of the launch of the iPhone APP store. At the time of the launch the new Finance category in the App Store had 23 entries. Most of them are small utilities for calculating tips or splitting the dinner check. Only two recognizable brands are available, PayPal and Bank of America, which by design or omission, is listed not with its name but as simply “mobile banking.” Read more on Net Banker.

Living The Oprah Life

In Chicago, 35-year-old actress Robyn Okrant (Lo) has started a blog called LivingOprah.com, recording her year-long efforts to live as Oprah would have her live. She watches the program, tracks what products Oprah says she “must” buy, she reads the magazines, makes the recipes, buys the Favorite Things, as recommended by Oprah Winfrey. The experiment, started on the first of January, has been expensive this year. By January 18, Lo was seeing evidence that Oprah’s advice at times conflicted with her own non-billionaire lifestyle. And by Early July, Lo estimates that she’s spent 440 hours and $1,600 so far following Oprah’s advice. When her rent increased, she and her husband moved to a cheaper apartment rather than threaten the project. Read more on her blog, and in Chicago Reader.

Banking. Rejigs On The Way?

The Economist talks of an impending round of M&As poised to hit the banking and financial sector. Rumours fly about the blockbuster deals that may soon be done. Lehman Brothers, a Wall Street bank that is desperately fighting to restore confidence in its prospects, is at the centre of many of them. Barclays, Deutsche Bank, HSBC and Royal Bank of Canada are among the names to have been bandied about as predators in recent weeks. UBS, which has been hit by massive write-downs on mortgage-backed securities, is also the subject of whispers—with Barclays, Deutsche and HSBC again to the fore. Bright-eyed bankers peddle ideas for other combinations. How about Lehman’s Wall Street clout and Standard Chartered’s emerging-markets network? Or HSBC and Merrill Lynch?. Read more in The Economist.