Short Online Review #D

HyeRi Jung/ Professor Monje/ CMN 622/ March 30, 2008/ Short Online Review #5

d. A critical analysis of a new media company – look into the listing of new media companies that have started in thelast15 years and provide a short study of its rise or demise.  

I’m a frequent visitor of NET-A-PORTER. Even though I don’t buy anything, I like just browsing and reading its site. NET-A-PORTER is the world’s premier luxury fashion e-tailer. NET-A-PORTER, presented in the style of a fashion magazine, offers unprecedented access to the world’s cutting edge fashion designers that fill the pages of the leading international fashion publications delivered to worldwide customers’ door by worldwide express delivery. Launched in June 2000, NET-A-PORTER sells current season clothing, shoes, bags, and accessories, expertly selected by its editors for the fashion consumer worldwide. The fashion on the site represents the best looks from the trendiest labels from London, Paris, Milan, New York and Los Angeles. The line-up includes Miu Miu, Chloé, Jimmy Choo, Bottega Veneta, Fendi and Marc Jacobs and many more. NET-A-PORTER’s unique website combines the visual and authoritative impact of a magazine with the shopping simplicity of a catalogue. The virtual pages feature slick and original fashion content, photographs and features showcasing the latest collections all of which are available for purchase on the site. Contributors include trend forecasters, opinion makers, and journalists formerly from high fashion magazines like Vogue, Tatler, Elle, and W. NET-A-PORTER simultaneously educates and inspires fashion lovers on the latest fashion trends and enables them to buy real fashions. Luxury packaging replaces the luxury shop experience and customer care focuses on exceeding expectations. NET-A-PORTER is the first, the most popular, famous, and luxury fashion website to target a global market, understanding that the same brands are in demand internationally. To meet this demand, NET-A-PORTER offers customers a seamless, international shipping formula that allows deliveries to be made with taxes and duties pre-paid, expediting their valuable packages through international customs. So no matter where we live in the world, NET-A-PORTER is our local fashion shop. With the combination of NET-A-PORTER’s unique traits – the authoritative fashion editorial, a highly aesthetic and easy to use website, access to the world’s hardest to find international labels, customer care that exceeds expectations, and a sophisticated international shipping system – NET-A-PORTER leads the online fashion pack as the world’s most successful luxury global boutique and e-commerce destination. Company Background: In the summer of 2000, as many online retailers were closing up shop, London-based “net-a-porter.com” launched a site selling current season, full-priced high fashion. Founded by one of the leading magazine fashion editors, the company carved out a unique niche by connecting high-end customers with products that were often hard to find, including attire featured in runway shows and on the pages of top fashion magazines. Over the last six years, NET-A-PORTER (a play on the French phrase meaning “ready-to-wear”) has become a major destination site for discerning fashion aficionados around the world and has doubled its revenues every year to more than $ 40 million in 2005. Goals and Challenges: “our founder saw the site as a place to write about amazing fashions and make them available for purchase,” according to Martin Bartle, Heard of Marketing at NET-A-PORTER. “We sell over 120 of the world’s leading designers and ship to more than 90 countries around the world.” As a global business, NET-A-PORTER needed a powerful tool to create, send and track its online promotions. Unfortunately, the proprietary system that the company had developed simply wasn’t able to keep up with the volume of customers or with the complexity of the company’s online campaigns. Bartle says that the company had three types of emails that were sent to customers. “The first was a generic weekly e-mail to our entire customer base, which was effectively a magazine letting them know what was available. We also sent updates highlighting particular designers. Anyone who had bought from that designer before or had signed up for updates from that designer would get those. The third set of emails was comprised of product updates that were sent to customers who had requested information on certain items. “What happened over time was that our most loyal customers were getting an ever-increasing amount of email from us, and a single individual might get nine or ten emails a week. We wanted to reduce that to one. It’s a fairly simple-sounding problem, but it is quite a challenge to make that a reality when there are hundreds of thousands of customers and hundreds of products being introduced each week.”  The Solution: the company turned to Lyris ListManager to streamline its outbound email marketing. “A fairly simple problem required a very complex solution,” Bartle says. “Most of the competitors to Lyris that offer similar levels of functionality are ASP solutions, and we wanted an installed solution so that we could have full control and the flexibility to adapt it ourselves. We are a unique business, and we didn’t want a generic solution – we wanted something that we could modify to meet the specific needs of the company. NET-A-PORTER does a lot of online advertising, and we recently launched an affiliate program, but email is the largest driver of sales for us of any sales channel we have. Being able to manage the data and ensure that our customers are getting the right information is absolutely critical for us.” Because NET-A-PORTER specializes in the latest designs, it is important for the company to be “up-to-the-minute” in its communications with its loyal customers. After all, if Charlize Theron wears a Dior gown at a Sunday-night awards show, fashion aficionados want to know how to order the item immediately. In order to speed up communications with its user base, the company uses Lyris ListManager to notify customers immediately when new products become available, giving them first call on must-have items.  Results and Future Plans: according to Bartle, the switch is already paying dividends. “We have a fairly blanket uplift that we have seen as a result of using Lyris ListManager. The click-through rates have gone up after combining our email channels, which was the most significant thing for us in terms of solving the problem that we had. Clearly Lyris was head and shoulders above most of the competitors in terms of solving the specific problem that we had. “But actually, it’s many of the other functions that Lyris offered that also helped us make the choice. In looking at the closed-loop marketing that we were able to do with a system like Lyris, we have much more under our control than we would with an ASP solution. That’s what drove us to Lyris and helped usmake our final choice. It has also allowed us to tie emails to triggered events; for example, ‘x-number of days after you’ve made a purchase you will receive this email,’ or ‘three weeks after someone first registers, he or she gets that email.’ We need this kind of flexibility and Lyris has made it possible.” 

Additional Information: Lyris Technologies, founded in 1994, provides advanced software and services for email marketing and email delivery. Lyris’ solutions are available as software or as hosted applications and are used by more than 5,000 customers worldwide, from Fortune 500 corporations to fast-growing startups.

Works Cited: “Net-A-Porter.com: How An Online Fashion Retailer Used Lyris ListManager To Consolidate Its Online Promotions.” 29 March, 2008. <http://www.lyris.com/resources/casestudies/casestudy_net-a-porter.pdf>.

You can visit NET-A-PORTER at www.net-a-porter.com

my favorite designer’s official website

www.viviennewestwood.com

I think she is brilliant. But nobody seems to know her here in the States.

what is telematics?

(CNN) — In South Korea, telematics is big business. If it sounds like a buzzword to advertise the latest purveyor of high-tech must-have gadgets, its etymology is no less firmly rooted: “tele” means remote; “matics” means information. Cruising right alongside wireless broadband and DMB (Digital Media Broadcast) cell phones, telematics refers more specifically to automobiles receiving remote information from commercial service providers. These services could include Global Positioning System (GPS), on-demand entertainment, Internet and Web access, or weather and traffic conditions.

       

All taxis in Seoul are already equipped with a telematic GPS navigation device.

Among the corporate sponsors of telematics research and development are Samsung, LG Electronics, Hyundai and     

General Motors, who all have speech-interfaced applications targeting consumer products launching in early 2008.

Among the top academic contenders of this highly competitive field of R&D is one of South Korea’s top three elite

institutions of higher education, Korea University.

Within Korea University, the School of Electrical Engineering’s Intelligent Signal Processing Lab (ISPL), headed by Professor Ko Hanseok, specializes in both image and speech processing. Applications of image processing include such popular consumer features as light balancing and face recognition, now standard on most digital cameras, which can also be associated with voice recognition. Current research in audio processing includes noise suppression and continuous speech recognition, which can be applied as much to cell phones as to voice-controlled telematic devices in vehicles.

But while South Korea may live up to its reputation as being the “world’s most wired country,” Professor Ko points out that on a global scale, the relatively tiny nation is uncomfortably wedged between China and Japan. On the one hand, China overshadows the manufacturing industry as the “world’s fastest-growing economy;” on the other, Japan dominates the collective image of the “world’s most high-tech nation.”

So, faithful to Korea University’s forward-thinking slogan “Global pride,” Professor Ko keeps his research lab’s projects closely aligned with what he calls the “impact factor.” R&D value is measured in industry impact, which depends on market analysis and consumer trends. After all, the majority of his students studying and working at the highly reputed university are sponsored by the corporate partners that will apply their research to real-world products.

In yet another example of South Korea’s converged efforts toward collective success, telematics has united the gadget-makers with the engineering academics, as the industry driven by consumers in cars.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/12/20/skorea.telematics/index.html#cnnSTCText

Online Review #E

HyeRi Jung/CMN622/Professor Monje/March 15, 2008/Short Online Reveiw #4

e. A topic of your choosing related to new mediacontent, forms, or technologies: Impact of digital media on audiences: Its impact on decline of reading in America.

The decline of American literature correlates with the invention of modern technology and digital media; radio, television, and computers dominate the American culture. Who doesn’t own at least one television in their house? Televisions in the classrooms are considered as a necessary tool in public schools. Most American houses have at least one computer. Classrooms without computers are considered as obsolete. Then where does that leave the written word? To our libraries? Before the great boom of digital media, reading was considered a highly regarded form of entertainment in America; bookshelves lined the walls of our homes and families prided themselves with collections of leather bound books. There were no televisions or Internet connections to make. Reading was a favorite pastime enjoyed by everyone before the advent of booming digital media. The world of modern digital media has killed American’s creative writing because there are too many distractions. The majority of Americans needs constant action from the electronic world to stay focused and to be kept in touch with friends and families. Literacy has taken a backseat to reality television shows such as “Survivor” and the “Net Top Model.” The best seller books become an academy award winning movies and modern authors lack the inspiration of great American authors such as Twain, Faulkner, and Steinbeck. Success is defined as the number one best seller, not by the quality of the work. America can no longer take active and engaged literacy for granted. As more Americans lose this capability, they become less informed, active, and independent minded. These are not the characteristics that a free, innovative, or productive society like the United States can afford to lose. As a matter of fact, the number of Americans reading literature is vastly declining. And the status of the Great American Novel is in great sake. Although American has a short period of history compared to Europe and Asia, it has always had a rich culture and literature. However, recently, the quality of American literature has been on the decline. Then what could have caused this disaster? According to the articles I found throughout my research, there are several substantial reasons to back up. Probably the vast choices of other forms of entertainment could be the biggest reasons. Today, media audiences have television, movies, video games, and the Internet to be entertained, and they don’t want to actually sit down and read a novel at the end of the fast pace life-style-day. In addition, the emerging of popular fiction and the tough world of publishing are other reasons that have caused the tragedy of American literature of early 21^st century. The results of highly interacting with intelligent society and culture lie in the kind of civic and historical knowledge that comes with literary reading. Unlike the passive activities of watching TV and DVDs or surfing the Web, reading is actually a highly active enterprise; reading requires sustained and focused attention as well as active use of memory and imagination. Literary reading also enhances and enlarges our humility by helping us imagine and understand lives quite different from our own. Literary reading is in dramatic decline with fewer than half of American adults now reading literature, according to a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) survey released today (Davis). Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America reports drops in all groups studied, with the steepest rate of decline – 28 percent – occurring in the youngest age groups. The study also documents an overall decline of 10 percentage points in literary readers from 1982 to 2002, representing a loss of 20 million potential readers. The rate of decline is increasing and, according to the survey, has nearly tripled in the last decade. The findings were announced in 2004 by National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Chairman Dana Gioia during a news conference at the New York Public Library. Reading is the foremost and the core important influence of human being. The decline of American literature correlates with the invention of modern technology and booming of digital media; radio, television, and computers that dominate today’s American culture. What could have caused this disaster? The vast choices of other forms of entertainment could be the most crucial causes. With the emergence and boom of digital media in 21t century, media audiences are constantly entertained by television, video games, the Internet, and movies. Although digital media, with no doubt, have helped global economy successful and our life to be extremely easier to live compared to our older generations, digital media are also the biggest reason and impact of the decline of reading in America simultaneously. However, I believe in hope. I believe in hope that there would be a possibly solution to all of these problems; a solution that consists all forms of digital media and still foster media audiences be entertained and enjoyed by reading books. In the end, it is our generations who are in charge of betterment the tragedy of American literature we have seen during the past decades. 

Muse- can’t take my eyes off you

I love this song of Muse.

I love you baby~

and if it’s quite all right

I need you baby.