The share of adults in the United States who own tablet computers nearly doubled over the holiday selling season, according to a new survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
Ownership of tablet computers increased from 10% to 19% between mid-December and early January. The same surge in growth applied to e-book readers, which also jumped from 10% to 19% over the same time period.
The number of Americans owning at least one of these digital reading devices jumped from 18% in December to 29% in January.
The Pew Center says the findings are striking “because they come after a period from mid-2011 into the autumn in which there was not much change in the ownership of tablets and e-book readers. However, as the holiday gift-giving season approached, the marketplace for both devices dramatically shifted.”
Pew attributes some of that adoption to the introduction of relatively cheaper versions of Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes and Noble’s Nook Tablet. In the e-book reader world some versions of the Kindle and Nook and other readers fell below $100.
The results come from ongoing surveys by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project aimed at tracking growth in the ownership of both devices. A pre-holiday survey was conducted among 2,986 people age 16 and older between November 16 and December 21, 2011 and has a margin of error of +/- two percentage points.
The post-holiday data come from the combined results of two surveys – one conducted January 5-8 among 1,000 adults age 18 and older and another conducted January 12-15 of 1,008 adults. The combined surveys have a margin of error of +/- 2.4 percentage points.
Want to see books similar to the ones you’re reading? Head over to Yasiv, a site that uses Amazon data to create a flowchart of recommendations. Created by Andrei Kashcha, the site serves up a web of book covers that, when clicked, lead to information about those titles. There’s also a box on the left that lists the volumes by title.
Kashcha describes Yasiv as “a visual recommendation service that helps people to choose the right product from Amazon’s catalog.” In addition to books Yasiv can web other products carried by Amazon including video games, music and movies, although a search for broad clothing categories such as skirts and pants yields only a single image. Good for Grand Theft Auto. Not so good for Vera Bradley.
Yasiv recommendation web for 'House of Silk' by Anthony Horowitz
Tom Brokaw referred to the men and women who fought for the United States in World War II as the greatest generation. In 1943 a Nazi propaganda periodical used the term Iron Curtain. Tea Party members often refer to journalists the media elite, a term coined by S. Robert Lichter and two other researchers in a 1980 study and subsequent book by that name. Former Vice President Spiro Agnew launched a salvo from White House speechwriter William Safire when he called the media “nattering nabobs of negativism.”
Then there’s the 1984 TV ad campaign for Wendy’s with Clara Peller yelling “Where’s the beef?” a refrain that might ring true in today’s politicized climate.
Not all pithy expressions involve cheap shots at journalists and competitors. Many encapsulate the issues like a good joke. The phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words” is attributed to Frederick R. Barnard, who published a piece in the early part of the 20th century on the effectiveness of graphics in advertising. The term senior citizen first appeared as a euphemism for older people during a 1938 American political campaign.
Richard Nixon referred to citizens who weren’t protesting against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War the silent majority. Plato said necessity is the mother of invention, a phrase that must have appealed equally to Nixon and Frank Zappa, although for different reasons.
Contemporary authors are doing an equally good job in characterizing trends. People who follow us on social networks are called peeps. People who follow us on Twitter are Tweeps. Microbloggers live in the Twitterverse.
PIMCO Bond fund manager Bill Gross has called the post-2007 mortgage debt environment of high volatility and low returns the New Normal. Writing for hospital administrators at H&HN Daily Bill Santamour called the wave of retiring baby boomers who will need healthcare the Silver Stampede. And there’s the term baby boomer itself, a term coined by Landon Jones in his book Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation.
Reaction to the release Friday of U.S. GDP numbers varied depending on which side of the pond you’re from.
The headline on the Financial Times website read “US Growth Accelerates to 2.8%.” German’s Der Spiegel wrote “U.S. economy is growing strongly again.” It’s another story in the United States. Bloomberg said “U.S. economy grows 2.8%, less than forecast” and the Wall Street Journal added an element of doubt with “U.S. Economy Expands 2.8%, but Questions Persist.”
Do they ever. After an earlier relief rally the Dow, Nasdaq and S&P spent the rest of the week retracing their gains. This despite the Federal Reserve’s promise to keep interest rates near zero through the end of 2014, a clear signal that if you want to make money, you’ll have to shift the portfolio from cash to equities.
Of course everything is relative. In Europe the financial news of late doesn’t have traders dancing in the street. On Friday Fitch joined the Greek chorus of naysayers when it downgraded the credit of five Euro-zone countries including Italy and Spain. Europeans know they’re in financial trouble and may see the United States as a beacon of growth. Reflecting the sentiment of investors, American media apparently don’t agree. While U.S. housing and employment numbers seem to be improving they’re moving upward at a glacial pace.
So is the glass half empty or half full? Depends on where you stand.
As a kid Jay Paull loved advertising so much he tore ads from publications. Over the years he’s collected quite a few. To share that vast treasure trove of nostalgia he has created Vintage Print Advertisements, a website for a collection that dates to a time before his time—the mid-1800s through the early 1900s.
The site features an ad of the day, a search function and a list of categories from art to travel. They include the usual suspects like patent medicines and corsets and a few for practical but unusual items like Heap’s Patent Earth Closet, a private toilet and water closet for invalids promoted in 1892.
The ads are part of a privately owned collection and are not for sale.
Detroit Jewel Gas Range 1899
As Paull writes on the website, “Whether you are a historian, an academic, in the advertising industry, a student, or have general interest about a specific aspect of Americana such as food and beverage products, furniture and home products, transportation, clothing styles, music, magazines and newspapers, jewelry, travel, photography, or medicinal products, you will find the site’s rich content of importance.”
More than half of America’s biggest PR firms say revenue and headcounts rose last year over 2010.
According to the Council of Public Relations Firms, which represents more than 100 of America’s leading public relations agencies, 70 percent of firms report that final 2011 revenues will be higher than in 2010. Only 13 percent anticipate lower revenues. Growth is coming from the consumer product, healthcare and energy sectors.
More than a third of those firms anticipate higher budgets in 2012. Some 60 percent report increased headcounts at the end of 2011. About three-quarters of firms expect an increase in social media services while more than a third expect growth in business-to-business, corporate communications and issues management.
The council notes one other trend for 2012: 57 percent of its agencies foresee partnering with outside firms to expand their capabilities.
What do you get when you cross Facebook with Flickr? Pinterest, the hot new social networking site that lets users collect and share photos across the Internet.
Mashable, the source of all things digital, describes Pinterest as a “digital pinboard,” a place where users can connect to others through shared tastes and the images that fascinate them. Users create category-based boards and then pin images to them. They can populate those boards by finding media online or uploading their own artwork. The boards are visible to all users, who can repin images on their own boards, “like” those images and follow other users.
So what does an image-based social site look like? Let’s take a look at my boards. I started by collecting images in some of the preset categories such as “Favorite Places & Spaces.” After that I created a few categories like “Design” and populated them with Pinterest user images I thought were worth sharing. Finally, as a bruising cold spell swept across the Northeast, I uploaded a few original photos I’d taken last winter after a snowstorm. (I’m trying to go beyond the share-the-misery idea and find something positive about a foot or more of snow.)
A few hours after the photo went live Cassandra Gouws from Pretoria, South Africa repinned it for one of her collections labeled “Travel.” I’m returning the favor and following that board and one more called “Amazing Photography.”
What impact Pinterest will have on the social and business community is anyone’s guess. Mashable only started covering it last October. And at this point participation is by invitation only. But as of late last year some 30,000 people had downloaded the Pinterest app from iTunes. And Mashable has written a primer on its use.
Participating takes more work than Tweeting and yields a smaller audience than Facebook but the site may appeal to people who prefer visuals to text. And since one of the default categories involves favorite products, Pinterest is positioning itself for companies in the fashion and design industries.
As part of its 12 trends for 2012 Trendwatching.com has published a list of tech products that enable the monitoring, tracking and sharing of an individual’s health information. It’s called DIY health and it’s going to be big this year.
With the aid of a smartphone users can monitor and potentially diagnose issues with complete privacy, without visiting a healthcare provider. The irony is that the software will allow users to share that information with friends, family and physicians — and possibly device-makers and mobile-phone carriers.
What technology gives, technology takes away.
The gadgets include a wristband that tracks a user’s moving, eating and sleeping patterns; a cuff that plugs into an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch and takes the user’s blood pressure; and a trio of apps from Ford that allow in-car monitoring of chronic conditions such as diabetes and hay fever.
In case you think DIY health monitoring is a passing fad, Trendwatching says Apple’s App Store now offers 9,000 mobile health apps, a number that is expected to rise to 13,000 by the middle of the year.
In the past week I’ve read half a dozen articles on major financial websites urging yield-starved investors to switch from bonds to dividend payers. The pitch? That you can get a higher yield with less risk with dividend-paying stocks than you can with bonds, whose yields are depressed as flight-to-safety investors bid up their prices.
The numbers seem to support that view. The yield on a 3-month Treasury is 0.01 percent. The 10-year yields 1.87 percent, the 30-year a mere 2.85 percent. Savings accounts earn 1 percent at best. At the Vanguard Group, which keeps fees low with a religious fervor, the prime money market fund carries an SEC yield of 0.02 percent. That makes the dividend yield on the S&P 500, now 2.1 percent according to Fortune, look like a windfall.
That’s a great deal, unless you want to preserve your principle, or you’ve forgotten the collapse of both the tech and housing markets. The chance of losing money in a savings or money market account is slim. The chance of losing a significant chunk of your stock fund is much greater. Just look at the performance of the markets in 2011. Writing in USA Today John Waggoner says that the S&P 500 index has lost 1.4 percent this year. It gets worse for the average diversified U.S. stock mutual fund, down 5.9 percent to date, according to Lipper.
Not so for the dividend payers. In 2011 the 100 stocks in the S&P 500 with the highest dividend yields are up an average of 3.7 percent before their dividend payouts are calculated, according to Birinyi Associates (as quoted in the Wall Street Journal). There are two problems with using that analysis to power your portfolio. You can harvest those profits only if you constantly screen for those stocks, a job better left to the professionals. And the numbers disguise higher expenses for managed funds. The average mutual fund charges about 1.3 percent a year. Savings accounts charge nothing.
That so-called stock-market bonus—you can book capital gains as well as dividends—makes for a tantalizing but specious argument. Stocks and stock funds will lose money. Savings won’t. Neither will individual bonds held to maturity. If keeping pace with inflation is an issue, TIPS held to maturity should answer the call.
Comparing stable assets to variable ones does investors a disservice. Financial writers and advisors should compare similar assets and decide which ones offer the best yield in that class. Anything else, as Ecclesiastes wrote, is a striving after wind. Or the latest end-of-the-year investment guide.
BtoB firms plan to follow their BtoC cousins and spend more on social marketing over the next three years, according to a white paper by the American Association of Advertising Agencies.
The study quotes Forrester in predicting that by 2014, BtoB spending in social media will reach $54 million, up from the $11 million spent in 2010. BtoB magazine’s survey, “Emerging Trends in BtoB Social Marketing: Insights from the Field,” found that 93% of B2B marketers are involved to some degree in social media. And in BtoB’s “2011 Outlook” survey, 62.6% of marketers reported plans to increase their spending in social media channels this year.
“Although B2C and B2B companies use social media differently, many of its functions, such as monitoring competition, gaining customer feedback and building brand awareness really do apply to the marketing goals of both types of companies,” the 4As wrote.
“Of particular importance to BtoB marketers is determining if their social media efforts are paying off.” Marketers are tracking leads by looking at click-through rates and number of downloads, among other metrics–although fewer than half measure their efforts, according to a survey by BtoB magazine.
The number of Americans owning at least one of these digital reading devices jumped from 18% in December to 29% in January.
