Archive for the ‘Business’ Category
My husband works as an endorser in a multi-national company. He needs to promote their products all over the world. During his informative months on the company products, he is hard up, as he has to communicate with foreign countries in their respective languages. I helped him to look for a company for online translation. After finding one company with reliable and dependable name in the business, translation in any language has never been hard to us. My husband is very confident every time a new product is for endorsement.
The company’s translators are very accurate and expert in the related field. Being their client for years, we are assured that the company is always available at all times in the most needed time. If you are looking for free translation, look for a company that guarantees satisfaction and handle the most up to date and fluent speaking translators in the major language that you need. Trust Translia, an innovative translation service platform. Its unique collaborative translation technologies enables hundreds and even thousands of translators to work together for delivering translations in a manner better and quicker than ever before. There are no minimum word count or minimum charge limit. That means clients can translate as many as million words or as less as one word or a sentence, saying a name, brand, business card. For more information, visit their site now…
Nowadays, many business owners use the online world in their business to do some online trading. It is true that due to the technology and with the help of the internet having a transaction such as shopping for big bag, tablier de cuisine or accessoires de golf, applying for loan and are more easily done. You could also found information about everything whenever they are in need of.
There are significant perils for business in the new economy. Some companies that have delayed embracing the new media are already showing signs of falling behind. As Alliance collaborator Araldo Menegon says, When we look back at the end of the centuiy, companies will have fallen into two categories: those that did and those who did not.” But the dark
side extends beyond the business imperatives for change. When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he thought he. Was creating a tool to help deaf people and that’s how he wanted to be remembered. Thomas Edison thought the main use for the phonograph would be as a dictation machine. Johannes Gutenberg had no idea what the impact of his invention would be on society, but movable-type printing Iii the fifteenth century meant that hooks became more widely available. Knowledge was no longer the privilege of a very few. Gutenberg changed culture, science, power, economic structures, and the very fabric of society.
The early pioneers in the automotive business were equally uuaware of the revolutiou they were unleashing. The car was a liberator that provided mobility to the masses and helped to create wealth and jobs, but there was a terrible downside, too: cities cloaked in smog, the alienation of suburbia, carnage on the highways, sprawling metropolitan areas, and streets choked by traffic. In the words of Joni Mitchell’s lament, “They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.” At the same time, the automotive sector became the dominant force in the U.S. economy for the most part of the twentieth centuiy, employing one worker in six.
At this point, it is unclear how the new media will affect the way society does business, works, learns, and lives. Yes, the I-Way is already evolving to provide the infrastructure for a digital economy. In the digital frontier of this new economy, however, old social norms, laws, regulations, institutions, education, and customs are proving to be inadequate and inappropriate. There appear to be more questions than answers regarding what is to come and how business and societies can successfully manage the transition.
There is widespread concern that life in the settlements of the new digital frontier and in the vast society to follow may not be entirely pleasant. 25 Fear lurks everywhere that technology will bring unemployment, numbing of the mind, and invasion of privacy.
Are we to become captive of the new technologies? Will a new technology imperative or market-driven determinism confound our ability to guide these new tools in responsible directions? Can we devise useful investment criteria, organizational structures, marketplace rules, and government policies to ensure that technology serves people?26
Revolution is usually the midwife of a new age. Violence, war, and social upheaval are all part of the transition from an old economy to a new one. How will the transition to the Age of Networked Intelligence be achieved? So far in the 1990s, the world has seen far too much violence. Nor has suffering remained outside the realm of the developed world. The 1995 bombing in Oklahoma serves as a fearsome reminder that not all is right.
There are far-reaching management and social issues as we make the shift:
• Change will cause dislocations. Employment in agriculture went from 90% of the population at the turn of the century to 3% of the population today. Today, the worker displaced when the foundry Nashville closes can’t get a job in the Northern Telecom plant where the average plant worker has the equivalent of a community college degree. The fact that we’re entering a new economy is of little consolation to that displaced worker and his or her family. How will we manage the transition to new types of work and a new knowledge base for the economy?
The I-Way has the chilling potential to destroy privacy in an unprecedented and irrevocable manner. Most of us believe we have the right to decide what personal information we divulge, to whom, and for what purpose. We accept that we must give government and corporations some details about our lives to qualify for services, loans, and so on. But such information should be used only for the purpose for which it was obtained and not sold to someone else. And if the demand for information seems unreasonable, we can always say “no.” Left unchecked, the I-Way could render such thinking irrelevant. As human communica tion,s, business transactions, working, learning, and playing increasingly come onto the Net unimaginable quantities and types of information become digitized and networked. How can we safeguard privacy in an economy that is digital?
• Recent trends show a severe bipolarization of wealth in which the top 20% of households_those worth $180,000 or more—have 80% of the country’s wealth. This skewing of income and wealth is happening faster in the United States—the leading new economy country_than anywhere else and faster than ever before. Surely this is undesirable, but is this trend reversible? An ill-conceived information highway and transition to the digital economy could foster a two-tiered society, creating a major gulf between information haves and have-nots_those who can communicate with the world and those who can’t. As information technology becomes more important for economic success and social wellbeing, the possibility of “information apartheid” becomes increasingly real. Is there an emerging “revolt of the elites” who wi]l use the new infrastructure to further cocoon themselves children in private schools, paying for their own social services, surrounded by high perimeter fences, identifying closer with friends and business associates in cyberspace, losing any sense of responsibility to others in their physical communities or country? (In 1995, the hottest real estate category was “secure communities” surrounded by walls and security systems and accessible only through guarded gates. However, the Oklahoma bomblug indicates that the perimeters will have to be expanded.)
As John Landry, chief technology officer for Lotus, told me: “I’m not talking about incremental change here. I’m talking about a set of technologies that will be as significant in impact as assembly-line technology was to mass production, and as mass-media technology was to mass marketing. But this intenetworking technology will replace many advantages of mass production and mass marketing by allowing for mass customization creating, in some industries, custom goods better, faster, and cheaper than mass-produced goods and providing the framework for addressing individuals with custom marketing and messages and individualized customer service.”
The history of government regulation in the United States can be divided into four phases. The first phase was the antimonopoly period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During this era, major laws such as the Sherman Antitrust Act, Clayton Act, and Federal Trade Commission Act were passed.to maintain a competitive environment by reducing the trend toward increasing concentration of industry power in the hands of a small number of competitors. Laws enacted more than 100 years ago still impact business in the 21st century.
The recent Microsoft case is a good example of antitrust legislation at work. The U.S. Justice Department accused the software powerhouse of predatory practices designed to crush competition. By bundling its own Internet Explorer Browser with its Windows operating system (that
runs 90 percent of the world’s personal computers), Microsoft grabbed significant market share from rival Netscape. It also bullied firms as large as America Online to drop Netscape Navigator in favor of the Microsoft browser. Microsoft countered that its bundling decisions were simply efforts to offer customer satisfaction through added value. But as a recent joke reported, “In the U.S. government’s fight with Bill Gates, I’m for the federal government. I always like to root for the little guy.”1’
The second phase, aimed at protecting competitors, emerged during the Depression Era of the 1930s, when independent merchants felt the need for legal protection against competition from larger chain stores. Among the federal legislation enacted during this period was the Robinson-Patman Act. The third regulatory phase focused on consumer protection. Although the objective of consumer protection underlies most laws—with good examples including the Sherman Act, FTC Act, and Federal Food and Drug Act—many of the major consumer-oriented laws have been enacted during the past 40 years. The fourth phase, industry deregulation, began in the late I970s and has continued to the present. During this phase, government has sought to increase competition in such industries as telecommunications, utilities, transportation, and financial services by discontinuing many regulations and permitting firms to expand their service offerings to new markets.
The newest regulatory frontier is cyberspace. The Federal Trade Commission (FEC) is investigating ways to police the Internet and online services. The immediate goal is to protect consumers who buy goods and services online from fraud and deceptive advertising. Although the federal government has been slow to regulate am—junk e-mail—many states have enacted legislation and many more have introduced bills to protect consumers. Lawmakers in California, Washington, and Virginia have made it a criminal offense to send spam with false or misleading headlines, enforcing penalties ranging from fines to incarceration. But as one anti-spam activist has pointed out, “The Internet is global and laws in any one jurisdiction are not going to stop it.
The FEC and state regulators search out fraudulent schemes, like own-your-own business scams and sales promotions that, at first glance, appear to be casual chat rooms. Meta-tags are the newest shell game in town. When creating a site, a firm inserts the name of bigger competitors in a code called “meta-tags” that is read by search engines but remains invisible to casual viewers. When consumers look for a big company, they are taken to a roadside stop owned by the little company, as well. In 1999, California courts banned the use of meta-tags to lure traffic to a site because the practice breeds confusion among consumers)3 Now that the Internet is an established medium, laws to control fraud and misrepresentation in cyberspace are inevitable. Privacy and child protection issues may present the most difficult enforcement challenge of the Internet. With the passage of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, Congress took the first step in regulating what children are exposed to on the Internet. The primary focus is a set of rules regarding how and when marketers need to get parental permission before obtaining marketing research information from children over the XMeb)4 Many Internet marketing decision makers are taking proactive steps to protect the consumer. For example, IBM’s Web sites post a clear privacy policy; America Online promises never to disclose information about members to outside companies; and Microsoft is developing technology that lets people automatically skip sites that do not meet their privacy standards) lists and briefly describes the major federal laws affecting marketing. Legislation affecting specific marketing practices, such as product development, packaging, labeling, product warranties, and franchise agreements. Marketers must also monitor state and local laws that affect their industries. Many states, for instance, allow hard liquor to be sold only in liquor stores; such laws limit the distribution of low alcohol cocktails made with rum, vodka, whiskey, and bourbon. California’s stringent regulations for automobile emissions require special pollution control equipment on cars sold in the state.
Firms must spend money to create time, place, and ownership utilities. Numerous attempts have been made to measure marketing costs in relation to overall product costs, and most estimates have ranged between 40 and 60 percent of total costs. On the average, one-half of the costs involved in a product, such as a Subway sandwich, an ounce of Safari perfume, a pair of Red Line jeans, or even a European vacation, can be traced directly to marketing. These costs are not associated with fabrics, raw materials and other ingredients, baking, sewing, or any of the other production functions necessary for creatingformutility.What,then,does the consumer receive in return for this 50 percent marketing cost? What functions does marketing perform? Marketing is responsible for the performance of eight universal functions: buying, selling, transporting, storing, standardizing and grading, financing, risk taking, and securing marketing information. Some functions are performed by manufacturers, others by retailers, and still others by marketing intermediaries called wholesalers.
Buying and selling, the first two functions, represent exchange functions. Buying is important to marketing on several levels. Marketers must determine how and why consumers buy certain goods and services. To be successful, they must seek to understand consumer behavior. In addition, retailers and other intermediaries must seek out products that will appeal to their customers. Since they generate time, place, and ownership utilities through these purchases, they must anticipate consumer preferences for purchases to be made several months later. Selling is the second half of the exchange process. It involves advertising, personal selling, and sales promotion in an attempt to match the firm’s goods and services to consumer needs.
Transporting and storing are physical distribution functions. Transporting involves the physical movement of goods from the seller to the purchaser. Storing involves warehousing goods until they are needed for sale. Manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers all typically perform these functions.
The final four marketing functions—standardizing and grading, financing, risk taking, and securing marketing information—are often called facilitating functions because they assist the marketer in performing the exchange and physical distribution functions. Quality and quantity control standards and grades, frequently set by federal or state governments, reduce the need for purchasers to inspect each item. Specific tire sizes, for example, permit buyers to request needed sizes and to expect uniform sizes.
Financing is another marketing function because buyers often need access to funds in order to finance inventories prior to sales. Manufacturers often provide financing for their wholesale and retail customers. Some types of wholesalers perform similar functions for their retail customers. Finally, retailers frequently permit their customers to buy on credit.
The seventh function, risk taking, is part of most ventures. Manufacturers create goods and services based on research and their belief that consumers need them. Wholesalers and retailers acquire inventory based on similar expectations of future consumer demand. Entrepreneurial risk takers accommodate these uncertainties about future consumer behavior when they market goods and services.
The final marketing function involves securing marketing information. Marketers gather information to meet the need for decision-oriented input about customers—who they are, what they buy, where they buy, and how they buy. By collecting and analyzing marketing information, marketers also seek to understand why consumers purchase some goods and services and reject others.