BING KIMPO

I’d like to believe that the two recent controversial bills, SOPA and PIPA, were stopped because they were poorly written but the real reason had to do with the power of messaging and branding.

Let’s face it: bad laws are passed everyday. In 2009-2010, Congress passed 8,970 bills alone. Most of the time, things go by unnoticed. SOPA and PIPA had great intentions (even praised by their strongest opponents) to deter piracy but their problem had to do with messaging. Both bills had been making steady progress for months with bi-partisan support and hardly any opposition. However, during the last several weeks, things exploded online when major Internet companies such as Google, Wikipedia, and Facebook got involved. A lot of things were said about the bill that weren’t true…but by then, it didn’t matter. People were buying the new story: SOPA and PIPA would “break the Internet.”

This is what they did wrong from a marketing perspective:

1. They didn’t share the stories of those affected by piracy. Some of the bill’s biggest supporters, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), vouched their support but the messaging came from their executive staff. They didn’t tell the story of the thousands of workers affected by piracy: film hands, aspiring writers, the struggling artist. People launched attacks against the entertainment industry’s wealthy while ignoring the possibility that multi-billion dollar Internet companies probably have their own lobbyists influencing legislation as well. People don’t mind hating a big corporation but it’s hard to dismiss the power of a single story.
2. They Communicated in the Wrong Places. Nearly all of the messaging supporting SOPA were featured on industry sites (such as ASCAP and BMI) but that information wasn’t being shared much outside of that. On the other hand, anti-SOPA/PIPA messaging prominently featured on social media and Internet sites (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.), making it easy to spread quickly and effectively.
3. They Focused on the Wrong Message. People don’t care about industries or companies, they care about themselves. When the entertainment industry talks about lost revenue or lost jobs, eyes glaze over (they’re tired of hearing that tale). It’s why piracy continues to rise. On the other hand, hen someone hears “the Internet will break” or that they could lose their favorite social media site, they begin to listen and more importantly, want to take action.
4. The Brand Suffered but They Didn’t React. The bill supporters assumed that people would use reason and read the bills themselves (especially as they got updated throughout the process) but in reality, most people didn’t care enough to follow. They had one poor impression and it was enough. In the customer service industry, if manage negative touch-points aren’t managed, customers are lost. By then, it’s too little, too late. Many of the bill’s supporters began jumping ship simply because they didn’t want to be associated with SOPA or PIPA.

Even if the bills undergo major overhaul, I doubt they’ll get the support that they need. My recommendation would be to change the name (the brand) and begin with fresh messaging, highlighting the stories of the people who would be affected by its passage. Have independent artists reach out to their fans, show case budding directors and fashion designers. Show that it was more than the entertainment industry who had a stake. Share the a real story that people could relate to and spread.

Most of the bill sponsors involved never expected such a strong reaction since major laws are nearly ignored everyday. However, when you mess with the largest supply and delivery information services in the world, expect some sort of retaliation. In the end, it’s just business. But remember, a lot of spending, just like voting, is emotional and not necessarily rational. The story or idea that spreads and sticks is the one that wins.

——————————————————————————

Simon Tam is owner of Last Stop Booking, a full service agency that offers tour booking and music consulting services. Simon has appeared on stage at over 1,200 live events and has traveled North America presenting ideas about the music industry. Simon’s writing on music and marketing can be found at www.laststopbooking.com

Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief

‘Focus Media Sinks in Muddy Waters’ writes the Wall Street Journal, ‘Focus Media Shares Crater; Analyst Alleges Fraud‘ writes Forbes (there are many more) and there have even been regular bulletins on CNBC.

There seem to be three main allegations: -

21 November 2011 Share Tradiing

A “significant overstatement” of the number of screens in its LCD network

”Olympus-style acquisition overpayments”

Focus Media insiders selling at least USD 1.7 billion worth of stock since its 2005 IPO

On Monday at one point, shares in Focus Media Holding Limited (Nasdaq: FMCN) fell well over 60% in trading.

I know it is easy to be wise after the event but there is a reason why the Greater Fool Theory has never been proven wrong.

With keywords like ‘China’ and buzzwords ‘digital’, ‘advertising’ there were many who (literally) bought in.

However many screens they are (finally) proven to have or have not, it will be interesting to see how they count them all as the whole network is run by Sneakernet.

If we remember correctly their CFO was a speaker (via the web, not in person) at one of the Digital Signage Investor Conferences many years back (at least 4 years) and we don’t remember him coming across particularly well.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 21st, 2011 at 19:37 @859 and is filed under DailyDOOH Update. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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This 28-Year-Old Is Making Sure Credit Cards Won't Exist In The Next Few Years

Alyson Shontell, provided by

Thursday, November 10, 2011

There's a tiny 12-person startup churning out of Des Moines, Iowa that most people have never heard of.

Dwolla was founded by 28-year-old Ben Milne, and it's an innovative new way of thinking about online payments that sidesteps credit cards completely.

Milne has no finance background, yet his little operation is moving between $30 and $50 million per month, or about $350 million per year.

We interviewed Milne about how he is building a credit card killer and Square rival from the middle of the nation where VCs and press are scarce.

I'm told you're pissing off credit card companies. How are you doing that?

Ultimately we're trying to build the next Visa, not the next PayPal.  We're building a human network based on how we think the future of payments will work. The current model needs to be blown up. 

Dwolla started out of my old company.  I owned a speaker manufacturing company and we sold everything directly through a website.  I got really obsessed with interchange fees and how not to pay them.  Every time a merchant gets paid with a credit card, they have to give up a percentage.  In my case, I was losing $55,000 a year to credit card companies.  I felt like they were stealing from me -- I was getting paid and somebody was taking money out of my pocket. 

So I thought, how do I get paid through a website without paying credit card fees?  We pitched a bank, and amazingly enough they said, "We'll give it a shot."

That was three years ago, so we've been working on the project for a really long time. In December of last year we figured out how to legally do what we do.

How many transactions are you doing?

The average transaction volume for Dwolla is right around $500 dollars. We move between $30 and $50 million per month

What's your story?

I'm 28.  I started my first company, Elemental Design, when I was 18.  I dropped out of University of Iowa and built that. 

I started college because I thought that's where I was supposed to go.  I applied to one college, I got in, went, and realized it wasn't for me.  I had customers so I stopped going to class.

We grew that company from a $1200 investment to over a million in revenue in 4 years with 3 or 4 people  without outside investment.  We were doing a million and a half a year and the company was running itself; I wanted to work on another project. 

You don't have a finance background and yet you built Dwolla?

It's been helpful in some strange ways.  I think the first financial institution we went in to only listened to me for entertainment.  They let me get in and pitch the full executive team at the bank. 

I don't look like a banker, they knew I didn't have a banking background. They actually agreed to work with Dwolla after two hours of arguing with me and me scribbling on a whiteboard about how the whole thing could work. 

Had I been more typical, maybe they wouldn't have listened to me.  In that respect, I think that probably not knowing how the mechanics work is good -- we just know the way we want them to work.

What did you do for the first two years when it wasn't technically legal?

For the first two years we built out the platform. We did a sh*tload of testing and did it small scale because legally we couldn't do it nationwide.  We spent two years inside of Iowa fine-tuning Dwolla with the financial institutions, building out some of the initial models, and trying to figure out how to legally do what we do. 

How'd you find a legal loophole?

Moving money is an exceptionally regulated business.  We're in Iowa, which is sort of conservative -- I don't know if that helped us or hurt us, but long term I think it helped us.  We figured to do this legally, we had two options: We could take in a tremendous amount of money and go out and get licenses, which is how most people do it.  But we didn't have access to that kind of capital here.  The other option was to bring in really strategic investors, which is what we did. One is a financial institution, one is a financial services company. 

Our investors do credit and debit processing for banks.  So when you get a credit card from your bank, it's being issued by companies like this.  Our investors are also distributing our product to financial institutions.  So we've been building a network, and we can do it legally because of who our investors are.

We launched in December of last year and started moving $50,000 a week. Now we're hovering around $1 million a day now.  We hit that milestone in June or July. Now we've quieted things down. We had to tap the breaks because the way you handle money needs to be managed correctly.  We have some new partners on board and we're going to hit it hard in December again.  We've got some stuff coming out in December that we think should be really big.

How does Dwolla work and how is it different than PayPal?

With Dwolla, payments are made directly from your bank account.  No credit or debit cards are allowed.  And because they don't exist in the system, we don't have to bring the fees into the system. 

You can spend any amount of money and when you do that, the person on the other end doesn't have to pay 1, 2, 3 or 4%. They only pay $0.25 a transaction, which is especially helpful when it's $1,000, $2,000 or $5,000 transactions.  Obviously PayPal becomes very cost prohibitive with those larger transactions.  

The biggest difference between ideas like this and a PayPal -- and PayPal is a phenomenal idea, Square is too -- is that those are built on top of networks like Visa and Mastercard. We're building our own.

Can users only send money to Dwolla members?

No, you can send money to anyone.  Only the person sending it has to have a Dwolla account to initiate the transaction.  The person receiving it will have to sign up for an account, but we've been surprised at the conversion there.  It's worked relatively well.  We leverage social networks really heavily as contact lists, which is one thing we do really different.  You can send money with an email address or with a phone number, but the most popular way to do it is to connect to Facebook and type in a friends name. 

We think, in the long term, sending money should be as easy and effortless as finding a friend on Facebook.  That's really a behavior we try to mimic when it comes to peer to peer payments.  When someone does not have a Dwolla account, they get a wall post that says, "You've got money."  If a friend sent that to you and it was their name and their face, you would have a different emotional connection to that than an arbitrary email from hellokitten32@aol.com.  It's a totally different interaction and one that's been really helpful for us in converting users into the system.

What kind of purchases and money transfers are Dwolla being used for?

We do pretty well in B2B; 11% of our business is person to person, and the large majority is business to business, consumer to business, and business to consumer.  The platform was originally built for taking in payments through websites, and we have APIs that allow you to do that.  We haven't experienced the scale on those quite yet. 

Where we've seen a ton of transactions right now is with people paying monthly rent.  If I'm a landlord and I want to collect it, taking a credit card payment means missing out on 3% of a $1800 charge.  Dwolla is $0.25 cents. 

The average Dwolla transaction is right around $500. PayPal takes 2.9% plus $.30 a transaction. 

Why hasn't anyone side stepped the credit card companies before? 

I think a lot of it is timing and luck.  And a little bit of getting your foot in the door.  One of our investors is a $1.8 billion financial institution. That's atypical anywhere, let alone in Iowa.  Having them on board allowed us to get into a lot of rooms. 

We serve everyone from the landlord taking in one payment to the individual buying a coffee with their cellphone, to billion-dollar corporations.  Because we're so atypical and look at mobile payments differently, we got in the room with the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury who allowed us to have a conversation, not only from a corporate standpoint, but from a government monetary distribution standpoint. 

All banks are connected by one APH system.  Credit card companies utilize that same system to pay off your credit card charges.  Banks internally set along that same system to move money in their own banks.  This system in it's own right is riddled with flaws -- tons of fraud issues and waste and delays.  If you've ever had a payment take a few days to clear, its because they're waiting on that APH system. 

We want to fix that system between the banks, take out the delays and make it instant.  If we can create this ubiquitous cash layer of distribution between consumers and merchants and developers and financial institutions, that actually fixes the problem.

No one has built a payment network in 30 years -- since credit cards.  Everybody has concentrated on how we build a portal for credit cards, from digital wallets to Square.

We don't believe in credit cards.  We believe in authorization and in lower cost transfers.  Our generation actually understands that when you buy sh*t, it comes out of your bank account and you have to pay for that.

Since you're hooked up to bank accounts, users don't have to have money in a Dwolla account to make a transfer?

You can hold money inside of Dwolla but you don't have to.  We're finding a lot of consumers want to hold it there.  There is actually a positive average balance inside of Dwolla for each consumer.  We also have businesses that use Dwolla to do payroll, so they'll keep a balance in there to cover the cost.

You could have an account of $0 in Dwolla and their would be no fee?

The only fee would be if someone paid you.  We take a quarter.  We really want that quarter. It's all we want!

How do Dwolla's mobile payments work?

We built out mobile facing system; your mobile phone is just a different view of a website, so a mobile payment is just an authorization on your cell phone. 

We take the website, plop it into the cell phone, start adding proximity solutions so you can to see what Dwolla merchants are close to you, and then make it easy to pay once you go into a store that accepts our system. Dwolla uses the GPS feature and allows you to make a payment in real-time.

So you're saying if a Starbucks accepts Dwolla I'll be able to see that on a Google Map, go there and charge the coffee to my phone?

Yes, you'll just walk into the store and pay.  It's like checking in on Foursquare, you're just paying instead of checking in.

We started in one coffee shop and now we're working with 400 or 500 merchants.  Part of us scaling out is we  have to pick inflection points and then do some hiring to actively pursue those communities and integrate with them.  We'll be beginning that in December.

Do banks have to pay to be integrated with Dwolla?

No, we just give them the service and then your bank account comes with Dwolla.  There are 16 banks across the country that come with Dwolla.  We're talking to some huge financial institutions about doing the same thing. 

Banks are going to have trouble being relevant in mobile.  The fundamental issue with mobile payments is: how do you get to your cash regardless of where you bank?  No one has cracked that nut.  I truly feel like we've not only cracked that nut but we're already selling it into financial institutions.

You don't have to pay the banks anything to log in and access accounts?

Nope.  We built a web service that connect with the financial institutions and we do not have to pay them to work with them.  We're a service provider to them and we work at the same time to make their customers happy.

Who are your investors?

We've raised $1.3 million. 

You ever hear of John Deere Tractor? They have a bank, Verdian Credit Union, but essentially it's John Deere's bank, Verthian Credit Union. Verthian is one of our primary investors. The other investor is a company called The Members Booth which provides credit, debit, and security solutions to banks and credit unions.

How big is the Dwolla team?

We're about 12 people -- that's a beast of a startup in Iowa.  We were smaller last December, about 2 or 3 people, so we've had pretty good growth. Most everyone is in Des Moines. 

We've experienced strong early stage validation and have generated revenue that says "Hey, this thing can work well."  We've got this little fire and now we're trying to figure out how to pour a sh*tload of gas on it, and really make this scale out.  The beginning of that is in December and right now we're trying to ensure we have the right partners to really kick that thing off really hard.

What happens in December?

Oh, it's going to be good.

What is it?

We've got this product coming out in December that solves a whole bunch of really big problems inside of the ACH system, which all banks are connected to, and it does it in a way that's never been done before.

Are you raising capital?

We have a lot of really positive conversations going on at the moment and we're trying to figure out who the right partner to work with is.  We're fortunate that our current investors are very supportive of what we're doing.

How are you doing all this from Iowa?  It seems like this company should be on Wall Street.

Maybe.  Right now Des Moines is the right place for us to be.  In the future there's going to have to be a lot of business development outside of Des Moines and there are some things we won't be able to do from here.

If we can convince people in Iowa, who are more conservative by nature, to use Dwolla then my personal feeling is we've really got something there.  Had we been outside of Iowa, maybe we would have tried to scale things up too quickly and maybe it would have blown up in our faces.  Maybe not. 

In my own naive way, I would never build a company anywhere but Iowa so maybe I just don't know any better.  My personal feeling is, if you want to build it, where you are is just an excuse. Figure out  ahat the area has to offer you and then leverage that.  Hustle your ass off and make it work. 

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How a man should relate to a strong woman

By: Ed Tamayo
Philippine Daily Inquirer

1:19 am | Sunday, October 16th, 2011 Posted by ryanl-->

 2 share53  50

All my life I’ve dealt with strong women, starting with my late Nanay, who imposed her will over my bad-boy inclinations, and now with my 2-year-old grandniece Moshi, a mischievous beauty who can command me to play “no pass” anytime.

I write as a lifelong student of women (although I can’t vouch for the quality of my studies on the subject). And I will always be a student who continues to learn, never an expert, since there is too much to learn.

But I must say that a strong woman is one with a mind of her own, gifted with smarts and common sense. Otherwise, she would simply be stubborn and obstinate, a shrew, a termagant.

A strong woman sees life for what it is, and will deal with it on the terms she has chosen. She respects her own person and understands her worth, and looks out for herself and the people she cares about.

Oh yes, she tends to be successful, because she sets goals and works to achieve them. A strong woman will control her desires and feelings, especially if she knows that there’s a dead end ahead.

They have different personalities, strong women, from outspoken and in-your-face to quiet but steely of resolve, to permutations in between. One characteristic that I’ve noticed strong women share is the understanding that knowledge and wisdom are important tools. So they take education seriously, because it represents independence, the ability to earn their own keep, and it opens up different options in their lives.

So how does today’s man relate meaningfully with strong women? It’s a question worth asking, because more and more, the worldwide trend toward the empowerment of women is enabling them to recognize and develop their potentials, making them stronger. Gender norms, parameters and roles are ever evolving.

No rocket science

There’s no rocket science behind it, but first, a man has to understand himself, who and what he is, and be comfortable in his own skin. He needs to define his masculinity and feel secure within his own self, before he can deal with the nature of a woman.

A man insecure about himself can view a woman as a threat and competitor, and cut her down in an attempt to deal with his internal issues. And that’s exactly what a strong woman has no time for. Not uncommonly, men, when they realize the strength of a woman, can feel intimidated, or shy away, or probe her for weaknesses in order to inflict hurt on her.

It’s no wonder that strong women aren’t too trusting, because they know only too well about human frailty and betrayal. So they tend to listen to words with a grain of salt. Men need to earn their respect and trust with their actions. And in every woman, as in every man, lies the wish to be loved truly.

In my inexpert opinion, but one evolved through trial and error, good old-fashioned respect is indispensable in a positive relationship with a woman, whether personal or professional, romantic or platonic, whatever it may be.

As you would wish to be respected, then should you extend respect. Especially to a strong woman. Why? Well, because she is strong, so you don’t want to face the consequences. That, of course, is tongue-in-cheek.

I’ve never believed that men are stronger than women or vice versa, because each gender is made and wired differently. There is just no apples-to-apples comparison. That’s why we partner with and support each other. It’s the best arrangement. And if a woman is strong, why then, celebrate and rejoice in her strength.

In my heart of hearts, I believe that true beauty can never be external. Thus, every woman is beautiful, especially if she is a strong woman. Like my grandniece Moshi, who rocks and rules.

Complete stories on our Digital Edition newsstand for tablets, netbooks and mobile phones. Subscribe and get several chances to win tickets to the Black Eyed Peas concert in Manila as well as tickets to Stomp. Promo details. About to step out? Get breaking alerts on your mobile.phone. Text ON INQ BREAKING to 4467, for Globe, Smart and Sun subscribers in the Philippines.

Tags: Relationships , Strong woman