Personalising online prices

Businesses are offered software that spots which customers will pay more

Users of price-customisation software have so far been reluctant to peep at potential customers’ social-media pages, for fear that this would provoke a privacy backlash. But the operators at the call centres [24]7 runs for its clients are beginning to scan Twitter for gen on the shoppers they are talking to—and sometimes, says Mr Vijayaraghavan, their tweets give useful hints about whether a discount is needed to clinch the sale.

How marketers can take advantage of consumers’ innumeracy

The psychology of discounting - something doesn't add up

Consumers often struggle to realise, for example, that a 50% increase in quantity is the same as a 33% discount in price. They overwhelmingly assume the former is better value. In an experiment, the researchers sold 73% more hand lotion when it was offered in a bonus pack than when it carried an equivalent discount (even after all other effects, such as a desire to stockpile, were controlled for)

Davos on the river Neva

Russia’s version of the World Economic Forum highlights its ambivalence about capitalism

'Mr Putin delivered a vigorous speech about making Russia more business-friendly. But under his rule state-backed behemoths have strengthened their grip. And later that day Mr Putin made a point of keeping the bosses of four Western energy companies waiting to see him in a dark, chairless foyer for three hours. Mr Putin needs to recognise that delivering on his promises to create a more business-friendly environment, not least by simplifying regulations, tackling corruption and privatising some state giants, is in his own interests as well as the country’s. The cost of continued ambivalence will be political instability as well as economic stagnation'

Fighting for the next billion shoppers

The eternal battle between Procter & Gamble and Unilever is intensifying in the developing world

'Whereas both firms have innovation centres around the world, P&G’s Cincinnati focus may have made it less effective than Unilever at “distributed innovation”. Consumers in Britain, continental Europe and Turkey have embraced Knorr Stock Pot, a bouillon jelly developed for Chinese consumers, who disliked existing packaged soup. Likewise, Clear, an anti-dandruff shampoo designed for China, where hair is thick, black and infrequently washed, is now being rolled out in America'

Breaking up News Corp - Murdoch does the splits

Investors like the idea of hiving off the group’s newspaper arm

'The fastest-growing parts of the company are its television and cable businesses. News Corp was shrewd in understanding the market for conservative political TV in America: the core audience of Fox News creates a stable cashflow. The company has also made wise investments in sports broadcasting, which viewers still prefer to watch live (making it more attractive to advertisers). BSkyB owns the lion’s share of Britain’s football rights, Fox has American football, and its cable network hosts NASCAR races. The company is expanding its holdings in Australia and Latin America, and is considering a new national sports network in America to rival ESPN'

Wearable Computing - The Eyes Have It

Google advances its plan to bring smart glasses to the masses

'...Google will have to meet several challenges. One is to refine their design so that wearers don’t look like nerds from a laboratory. Another is to assuage inevitable concerns around privacy that the glasses will raise. The firm will also need to reassure people their eyeballs won’t be blitzed with advertising, which is Google’s preferred way to mint money. Mr Brin stresses the aim is to make a profit on the glasses themselves, whose mass-market price will be well below the $1,500 developers are paying for a pair. That should make them worth a close look'

The world's shifting centre of gravity

How the world's economic centre of gravity has shifted

How the Internet Works - Mapping the Tubes

Contrary to expectations, the internet has a heart of cable and steel

Google launches Nexus 7 tablet

Salman Chaudhry, analyst at the research firm Context, said: "Overall, we shouldn't expect this particular tablet to take on the iPad despite Google's efforts to differentiate it. Lessons haven't been learnt from previous tablet failures. The seven-inch tablets – RIM Playbook, HTC Flyer – have been by and large unsuccessful, and are only really suitable for content consumption." He added: "Against this backdrop, strategy needs to be more aligned towards the Kindle Fire's purely 'content-consumption' orientated device. However, if Google is looking to take a bite out of Amazon's share, it will find that it's competing against a much more well-developed entertainment-orientated platform with huge, well-organised catalogues of books and media content."

Urban Research: The Laws of the City

Back in the 1940s, George Zipf, an American researcher, noted that a city’s population is inversely proportional to its rank in a country. His law holds that the largest city is always about twice as big as the second largest, three times as big as the third largest, and so on. Other regularities have emerged since. Big cities decentralise as they grow, creating more jobs outside the centre. Urban population density in all industrialised countries declines slowly as you move away from the centre. (Moscow, exceptionally, is the other way round.)

Coca-Cola: still the real thing?

Coke is now the market leader in almost every country in the world, but rivals jostle with it across its markets. Pepsi outsells it in parts of Canada, the Caribbean, the Middle East and in Pakistan, whose cricket team is sponsored by Pepsi. Other rivals around the world are called things like Zam Zam Cola, Parsi Cola, Mecca Cola, Big Cola and the Indian Thums Up. On Madeira in the eastern Atlantic, a Fanta variant called Laranjada outsells it, and the Scots used to drink more Irn-Bru. Barr's lost its lead there in 2005, but throughout my childhood I lived in a dissident soda market.

Business Lessons from Sport - FT.com

Watching the world’s best tennis players at Wimbledon over the next fortnight can help us make better decisions

Accounting for time - How Americans Spend their Days

Television accounts for the largest share of Americans’ leisure time. People over 25 years old who have not obtained a high school diploma spend two thirds more time watching the box than those who hold a bachelor’s degree. They also spend four times as much time thinking and relaxing, while those academic high achievers prefer to play on their computers.

Top 10 Russian Web Startups

Online advertising spending in Russia, valued at more than $1.4 billion last year, is expected to increase by 40 percent in 2012. One of the hottest market trends is the fact that a new generation of Russians book, travel and shop online as well as use smartphones and tablets. The strong educational background of Russian engineers and interest from international venture capital investors in Russia are the major drivers behind the internet startup scene growth in the country

TV, Film Industry Wants Social Networks to Be Liable for Content

"In January, a St. Petersburg court ordered Russia's most popular social network, VKontakte, to pay 210,000 rubles ($6,300) to Gala Records for playing and sharing some of its copyrighted songs"

Lucy Kellaway on the importance of Luck - FT.com

"I can chuck out half of my business books. Farewell Jack Welch. Farewell Sir Terry Leahy. Goodbye Lord Browne and Sir Richard Branson. I won’t miss you. I can’t think of a single thing I learnt from all you megastars, except a bit of shockingly poor counsel from Steve Jobs. One of his most trusty principles was “don’t settle” – possibly the worst tip ever. Just now I popped out for an egg sandwich, only to find that the shop had run out so I settled for ham and cheese instead. As a result, I didn’t starve and the sandwich turned out to be rather tasty"

You may need to register (it's free) to view the full article

Jonathan Margolis on the Ordissimo - FT.com

http://www.howtospendit.com/#!/articles/7548-technopolis-tv-ordissimo

Large friendly icons & an intuitive operating system make this laptop something of a French fancy for the FT's technology correspondent

A Letter from Ukraine - Simon Kuper in the FT

In this country with its terrible history, somehow a degree of political civility has emerged

Rumours of a bid by Microsoft for a social network

This month it was reported that Microsoft had agreed to buy one of these upstarts, Yammer, which is less than four years old but boasts more than 5m users in companies, for $1.2 billion. Neither side is commenting on the report.

Wizard confronts mouse

Theme parks are drawing in ever bigger crowds in Asia, but American brands still dominate the market

New film studio seeks foreign experience, local market

The goal isn't money, but knowledge it could glean from foreign directors and apply to its own film production, Glavkino chief and co-owner Ilya Bachurin said. "The experience that Western partners could bring us would be a valuable and desirable thing for us," Bachurin, a former editor-in-chief of MTV Russia, said in a recent interview. "We are ready … to give unprecedented discounts — to put it simply, to charge less than they do in East Europe."

Tourism Struggles With Russia's Identity Crisis

The fact that tourists can't decide which souvenir best represents the place they visited shows the weakness of the local brand, said Sergei Mitrofanov, general director of Brandflight Moscow, which rebranded Tbilisi and Batumi and is currently working on a post-New Year image for Veliky Ustyug, the officially approved home of Grandfather Frost. It is not only the foreigners who are baffled by Russian symbolism. Natives themselves know little about their motherland, Mitrofanov said.

P&G admits errors and slows expansion - FT

Mr McDonald said its priority was its 40 core businesses, each one defined as a product line in a certain country, such as Tide detergent in the US, Pampers nappies in the UK and Olay skin cream in China. “The top 40 focus is an important step toward achieving more balanced growth across developed and developing markets,” he said. The list includes 13 businesses in the US, six in China and others in Russia and Brazil. 

You may need to register (it's free) to view the article 

Outlet Malls Springing Up in Moscow

The first phase of Outlet Village Belaya Dacha will open in July 2012 and is already 95 percent leased out. Levi’s, Calvin Klein Jeans, Nike and Lacoste are among the brands that have taken the space. Vnukovo Outlet Village is expected to open in August and Fashion House Outlet Center in November

Microsoft's New Tablet: Surfacing or Drowning...?

Producing its own tablet may be a smart strategic move for Microsoft

Survival of the Fattest

If the whole world had the same proportion of overweight and obese people as America, its biomass would rise by 20%

Advertisers rush to master fresh set of skills

... in the past few years, a new generation of technologies has come along to disrupt once again the way advertisers operate. Led by Facebook and Twitter, and joined by behemoths such as Google and a bevy of start-ups, these Silicon Valley misfits have muscled into the ad business and upended traditional assumptions about how companies should allocate marketing budgets

You may need to register (it's free) to view the article

European advertising spending off target - FT

However, other global markets are still rising fast, with media spending in Indonesia set to overtake India this year, to enter the world’s top 10 ad markets by 2014. Brazil is also expected to surpass the UK as the fifth largest in the next two years 

You may need to register (it's free) to view the article 

Lucy Kellaway in the FT on Sir Martin Sorrell's skin

After the rumpus over Sir Martin Sorrell’s ginormous pay packet, I find myself admiring the man more than I did before. It’s not that I think he deserves his £6.7m pay packet; obviously, he doesn’t. Instead, what I admire about the media magnate is his skin. His largest organ turns out to be most unusually thin.

You may have to register (it's free) to view the article 

Top 10 Russian Internet Entrepreneurs...

So, who are the trailblazers in the new web frontier to watch? Yankov Sadchikov, Russian startup blogger at Quintura.com, has identified the hottest Russian entrepreneurs right now

The Museum of Failed Products

In the product-design business, the storehouse – operated by a company called GfK Custom Research North America – has acquired a nickname: the Museum of Failed Products

Tom Cruise's career - Mission: Unadventurous

ONE of the very few pleasures afforded by Adam Shankman's dull new musical, "Rock of Ages", is seeing Tom Cruise swanning around in leather trousers and not much else, playing a dazed, bourbon-swilling amalgam of Jim Morrison and Axl Rose

Kiev’s Euro 2012 chief shrugs off stress - Simon Kuper in the FT

While he was preparing Ukraine to co-host Euro 2012, Borys Kolesnikov had a heart attack. No wonder, because Ukraine’s vice-premier and minister in charge of the football tournament had a stressful job.

You may need to register (it's free) to view the article

Simon Kuper in the FT : The App of Life

Technologies are transforming city life in countless ways: everything from finding a date to finding a bus in an instant

Zen and the art of carmaking

Japanese firms are known for craftsmanship. But they need showmanship, too

Mobile Marketing : Square deal

After many false starts, QR codes are finally taking off

Is there money in digital radio?

FRANK SINATRA knew he was getting a raw deal. He could sing but he was not much of a songwriter, so he never saw a cent when most of his 300 or so singles were played on American radio

The Top 10 Russian Internet Brands Out to Conquer the World

In Russia, it's not Google, but Yandex you tap up for a search query. Mail.ru outstrips Yahoo!, Amazon is trounced by OZON, and Vkontakte outperforms Facebook. Russian versions of global brands are outstripping the market leaders, thanks to targeted local market knowledge, massive internet growth and a reticence of "Western" brands to target the territory.

Good football does not colour Ukraine pretty

It is ever more glaringly obvious that Mr Yanukovych's system is making a tiny minority extremely rich whilst the rest of the country struggles to get by. Even a day-tripping football fan would notice

Apple and Facebook take aim at Google

Apple has struck a new alliance with Facebook to integrate the social network into its iPhone, iPad and Mac operating system at the same time as it introduces a range of new MacBook computers.

You may need to register (it's free) to view the article

Digital drag forecast on media growth

Consumers’ reluctance to pay as much for digital media as they do for physical products, such as news, books and music, will drag on the global media and entertainment industry’s growth over the next five years, according to a new industry forecast.

You may need to register (it's free) to view the article 

Twitter turns to TV ads to drive traffic

Twitter took another step from social networking towards being a more traditional media platform on Sunday, as TV advertisements directed Nascar fans to an editorially “curated” page of hand-picked tweets. 

You may need to register (it's free) to view the article 

Advertisers embrace augmented reality

Brand advertisers have begun to use augmented reality (AR) technology to help differentiate their products from the competition and engage consumers with hidden digital content.

You may need to register (it's free) to view the article 

People in ties sometimes tell lies

A social psychologist looks at why people lie and cheat and what it means for business

Jonathan Margolis on Samsung's very smart phone

The Samsung mobile device thats made the guys in Cupertino nervous

Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP on his pay packet

'Mea culpa – I act like the owner I am'

The Olympians - Simon Kuper in the FT

FT Weekend Magazine interviews 24 living legends from every Olympic Games since 1928

The BBC on Pornography: The decline of an industry

Where porn goes, other media follow - click here for the full story

The Magazine Industry: non-news is good news

The threat of the internet has forced magazines to get smarter

The Wealth of Nations

Now in its second year, the index uses 24 variables across 11 sectors to create a measure of welfare for 34 of its member countries, plus Brazil and Russia. The Economist has grouped these 11 sectors into four broader categories. America excels most in money and jobs, Switzerland in health and education

Newspapers in the South: The barkless dog

Papers in New Orleans and across Alabama cease daily publication

The Future of Gambling

“LAS VEGAS,” said Frank Sinatra, “is the only place I know where money really talks—it says, ‘Goodbye.’”

Simon Kuper in the FT - The Family Holiday "Challenge"

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/d23921cc-aaaf-11e1-9331-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1wiMRCjdf

Simon Kuper in the FT - The Poshing of English Football

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/9ad81bf6-a551-11e1-9a94-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1wiMRCjdf

Name in the clouds - Christopher Caldwell on Facebook’s data

"Facebook is less a revolution in technology than a revolution in property rights"

You may need to register (it's free) to view the article

LVMH: The Empire of Desire

What the world’s biggest luxury group will do next

Inflated football in the Economist

Wage Bills at Top Football Clubs