Online shoppers in the United States will spend $327 billion in 2016, up 45% from $226 billion this year and 62% from $202 billion in 2011, according to a projection released today by Forrester Research Inc. In 2016, e-retail will account for 9% of total retail sales, up from 7% in both 2012 and 2011, according to the report, “U.S. Online Retail Forecast, 2011 to 2016,”by Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru. That represents a compound annual growth rate of 10.1% over the five-year forecast period.

Forrester says it derives its estimates by analyzing trends in the monthly retail sales figures released by the U.S. Census Department; the Forrester estimates do not include sales of cars and trucks, gasoline, groceries and restaurant meals.

The report says that much of the growth in U.S. e-commerce sales comes from online retailers improving their web sites and services. “This is particularly true of categories such as apparel and jewelry, which have integrated rich selling tools such as zoom, color swatching, and configurators, as well as office supply stores, which have broader payment options (e.g., small business purchase orders online) and subscription plans for their buyers,” Mulpuru writes.

The steady growth in the number of web shoppers also is helping to boost e-commerce sales. Forrester says that 192 million U.S. consumers will shop online in 2016, up 15% from 167 million in 2012. But the bigger factor in driving e-commerce growth is that each shopper will spend more on average, the report says. U.S. consumers in 2016 will each spend an average of $1,738 online, up 44% from $1,207 in 2012.

Many consumers will prefer the web to bricks-and-mortar retailers in large part because of online deals, the report says—70% of holiday shoppers last year said they made purchases online rather than in stores because online retailers offered better deals.
Other factors contributing to the growth of e-commerce include:
• Aggressive merchandising and discounting from flash sale and daily deal retailers.
• More online loyalty programs, including shipping clubs such as Amazon Prime that offer free two-day shipping for a $79 annual fee. Forrester says that 12% of online shoppers belonged to such programs in 2011, up from 9% in 2010. Of those consumers who belonged to such a program last year, 61% said they bought from the retailer that operated the program.

• The increasing popularity of smartphones and tablet computers among consumers, which leads them to spend more time online, including for shopping. “The tablet shopping experience also likely encourages shoppers to purchase more products in an impulse fashion,” Mulpuru writes.

The Trademark Application

Once your comprehensive trademark search has been completed and shows that your proposed mark is available for use and registration, we begin by preparing the U.S. trademark application form. The application includes contact details for your company, a graphic illustration of the mark, a description of the goods and services for which your business wishes to obtain trademark registration, and proof of use of the mark, or a declaration that your company intends to use the trademark in the near future.

Once the application is completed and signed, we file the application with the USPTO and pay the applicable filing fees for the application.

At The Trademark Office

Once filed, your trademark application is assigned to an Examiner for formal review within 2-3 months. The trademark office examines the application to make sure that it complies with the administrative requirements or formalities (i.e., whether the application fee has been paid and the application form meets the minimum filing requirements).

The trademark Examiner also conducts a substantive review where he or she examines the application to verify whether it complies with all the substantive requirements (e.g., whether the trademark is in conflict with an existing mark in the relevant class(es), whether the description of goods or services is too broad or vague, whether the application specimen properly shows the trademark in use). If the application meets the basic and substantive review requirements, the Examiner will allow the application to be published for public notice.

Publication and Opposition

Once the application passes the Examiner’s review, the trademark is published in the USPTO journal for a period of 30 days for third parties to oppose its registration. During the publication period, any party (whether they own a registered trademark or not) may oppose the application on the grounds of their own prior use of the mark, a likelihood of confusion with their trademark, or any other basis. If an opposition is filed, the registration process is effectively paused pending the outcome of the opposition proceedings.

Registration

If the USPTO finds that there are no grounds for refusal and the application is not opposed, the trademark will be registered, and a registration certificate is issued which is generally valid for 10 years. The entire process, from application to registration takes between 8-12 months, but you establish your priority in line, so to speak, by filing your application with the USPTO as early as possible.

Renewal

While your trademark registration is good for 10 years, it may be renewed indefinitely by paying the required renewal fees. This usually occurs in the 6th year of your registration. However, your registration may be canceled if the trademark is not used for a certain period of time or if another party files a petition to cancel your mark based on non-use.

• Write it all down. Put everything on one list. Determine which tasks are easy and which are more difficult.
• Do some easy things. Spend 15 minutes doing the easy tasks. Focus on speed: make the quick phone calls, shoot off the brief emails. Cross as many tasks off the list as you can.
• Turn to a bigger task. Turn off your phone, close all the open windows on your computer, and focus on one of the more challenging tasks. Do this for 35 minutes without distraction.
• Take a break. After 35 minutes, take a 10-minute break. Then return to step two.

1. Video Attracts New, Relevant Search Traffic
No conversation about ebusiness is complete without discussing search engine optimization (SEO). An ebusiness cannot gain on a competitor until consumers know it exists and can easily find it through organic search. Today, ebusinesses that utilize video assets are at an advantage, since Google is structuring its search engine results to reward sites that include video. According to Forrester, any given video in an index of searchable keywords has a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page.

To better promote their video investments and derive the greatest SEO rewards, ebusinesses are making videos more accessible to visitors, scaling videos to reach long-tail keywords, and automating video production in order to have video available as soon as new products are introduced.

2. Video Assets Can be Easily Syndicated
Online video is usually channel agnostic. By syndicating video properties to multiple sites — includingYouTube, the second largest search engine today — ebusinesses extend their reach to innumerable eyeballs. In addition to traditional channels, online video plays equally well via mobile networks, TV, and in-store screens. It is a cost-effective way to maintain brand consistency and strengthen consumer awareness.

3. Videos Encourage Sharing
Videos are far more likely to be passed and shared than text-based pages. Additionally, a video thumbnail on a social media platform — Facebook, for example — grabs more attention than static text and often results in more comments, more “Likes,” and more traffic to the brand’s website. When you like or share a video link, a thumbnail appears on your wall and is also seen by your friends.

According to a study from YouBrand, pictures and video within Facebook get engaged with and clicked more often than just text and questions.

4. Video Engages Site Visitors
Video provides a familiar user interface for site visitors. When videos are properly produced, they captivate the user. Instead of the need to navigate, scroll and click to access information, the video is a one-stop shop for information. It takes less energy than the hassle of reading and the user is engaged until he or she is ready to follow an embedded call-to-action. Today’s automated video production platforms easily enable this flow, in many cases directing visual and auditory calls-to-action that guide the viewer to a shopping cart.

5. Video’s “Halo Effect” Drives Conversions
Video can give customers an in-depth view of a product or a demonstration that quells any hesitancy they might have about purchasing online. The peace of mind the customer gains from the video seeps into the way he or she feels about the brand and website overall, building trust and credibility. This is essential to gaining market share, especially for businesses that sell products with a lot of competition.

6. Video Increases Customer Loyalty
Video newsletters are more likely to attract consumer attention. By some estimates, the open rate for a video newsletter is two to three times higher than for a text-based newsletter. While many brands compete for consumer attention with the latter, those who employ the former stand out from the crowd. These video communications can be personalized for each recipient with individualized greetings, references to previously purchased items, or offers based on shopping history, geography and segmentation.

7. Video Creates Online Personalization
By improving and tailoring the customer experience, online retailers in every sector have increased customer loyalty, conversion rates and average order price. The quality of online personalization continues to rise and in many cases can rival or outperform the “live” shopping experience. This is a key factor in gaining market share, since consumers increasingly shop online but still express a desire for the personal touch and the social aspects of in-person browsing.

When prospects go to a store, they get recommendations and help from in-store staff who point them to relevant products. Video delivers this experience online, with far less variability and chance. With new technologies that offer personalized video created on-the-fly, ebusinesses can bridge the gap between live and virtual experiences.

8. Video Production Costs Are Falling, ROI Is Rising
Online video clearly has an impact on competitive advantage. But is it feasible for most ebusinesses? Thanks to today’s automated video production technology, the answer is “yes.”

Two decades ago, the market struggled to replace the labor-intensive process of website management. Today we hardly think about the steps required to update or add web content: Images and text are now template-based, database-driven and easy to manipulate.

Video production is experiencing a similar change. While many website owners once fought the limitations of manually produced videos — including slow production times and prohibitive costs — today’s solutions tend to be automated, cost effective and high quality. With relatively little human intervention, online video production can increase a business’s competitive advantage while creating a better shopping experience for the user.

By  Yaniv Axen
Mashables.com June 2011

Call (786) 594-0435 to contact Kompani Group and learn how we can help your business succeed.

But, what if there were a way to reduce that failure rate by cracking the formula of startup success? No easy feat to map the double helix of startups, but entrepreneurs are risk-takers by nature, so four of these risk-loving international entrepreneurs came together to found the Startup Genome Report, a report that is part of a larger project that dives into the very anatomy of what makes Silicon Valley startups successful — or not.

The entrepreneurs who founded the Startup Genome report (Bjoern Herrmann, Max Marmer, Fadi Bishara, Aleksandra Markova), have also created a business accelerator called Blackbox, which will be leveraging the data they have collected (and will collect) from their ambitious R&D enterprise.

The Startup Genome Report, as it is today, is a 67 page analysis on data collected from 650+ web startups.The entrepreneurs recruited both UC Berkeley and Stanford faculty members, like Steve Blank, the Sandbox Network team, the Startup Bootcamp team, and the Pollenizer team, to help coauthor and contribute to the study.

The goal of the report is to lay the foundation for a new framework for assessing startups more effectively by measuring the thresholds and milestones of development that Internet startups move through.Blackbox, which was co-founded by techVenture and other organizations that have a track record of working with 100+ startups, including 15 exits (such as Bebo, Tapulous & Lala), hopes to use the Startup Genome Report as a cipher to help crack the innovation code, and give fledgling entrepreneurs and startups from around the world access to the characteristics and qualities that make Silicon Valley companies successful.

Here are 14 of the most interesting trends identified by the Startup Genome Report, some of which are intuitive and some of which may come as a surprise. Among them? Investors may be less help than they think. Take a look:

1. Founders that learn are more successful: Startups that have helpful mentors, track metrics effectively, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x better user growth.
2. Startups that pivot once or twice times raise 2.5x more money, have 3.6x better user growth, and are 52% less likely to scale prematurely than startups that pivot more than 2 times or not at all.
3. Many investors invest 2-3x more capital than necessary in startups that haven’t reached problem solution fit yet. They also over-invest in solo founders and founding teams without technical cofounders despite indicators that show that these teams have a much lower probability of success.
4. Investors who provide hands-on help have little or no effect on the company’s operational performance. But the right mentors significantly influence a company’s performance and ability to raise money. (However, this does not mean that investors don’t have a significant effect on valuations and M&A)
5. Solo founders take 3.6x longer to reach scale stage compared to a founding team of 2 and they are 2.3x less likely to pivot.
6. Business-heavy founding teams are 6.2x more likely to successfully scale with sales driven startups than with product centric startups.
7. Technical-heavy founding teams are 3.3x more likely to successfully scale with product-centric startups with no network effects than with product-centric startups that have network effects.
8. Balanced teams with one technical founder and one business founder raise 30% more money, have 2.9x more user growth and are 19% less likely to scale prematurely than technical or business-heavy founding teams.
9. Most successful founders are driven by impact rather than experience or money.
10. Founders overestimate the value of IP before product market fit by 255%.
11. Startups need 2-3 times longer to validate their market than most founders expect.This underestimation creates the pressure to scale prematurely.
12. Startups that haven’t raised money over-estimate their market size by 100x and often misinterpret their market as new.
13. Premature scaling is the most common reason for startups to perform worse. They tend to lose the battle early on by getting ahead of themselves.
14. B2C vs. B2B is not a meaningful segmentation of Internet startups anymore because the Internet has changed the rules of business. We found 4 different major groups of startups that all have very different behavior regarding customer acquisition, time, product, market and team.

By Rip Empson for Techcrunch.com 
Click here for the full article

Call (786) 594-0435 to contact Kompani Group and learn how we can help your business succeed.

A brand is a perception.  The company owns the physical brand, but the value of that brand is what it means to the consumer.  Take Mercedes Benz whose single word they chose for us to identify their cars with is “prestige,” or Volvos identifying word “safety.”  With enough repetition, these words are meant to conjure up images of their products in our minds.

This works with politics too.  Hillary Clinton launched her campaign by focusing on “experience,” while Obama focused on the word “change,” a word that matched the mood of the majority of the American public desperately wanting change after 2 terms of Republican rule. Word ownership is more powerful when it is a verb.

Verbs are action words that people can replace your company name or product with.   Think of millions of people “Xeroxing,” instead of copying, and have you noticed how you no longer “search” for information on the Internet, you “Google” it?  Facebook was never going to become a successful verb, so they cleverly created the “Like” button.

In “The 22 immutable laws of Branding,” Al and Laura Ries tell us that to differentiate your business, you should create a new category and then own it in the mind of the customer.   Don’t let  the market throw you in a heap with everyone else, and instead define a category and stand out above your competition.

There is a game played around the table at dinner parties, where each person is asked to identify a single word that best describes who they are, heart and soul.  This word must be truthful and all-encompassing and create an image for the other people at the table to identify the person with.  If you attempt to create a false image of yourself, or one that is unidentifiable, you risk being laughed at and napkins tossed at you from across the table.

This is the same as word ownership in business.  How do you want people to react and feel when they hear or see your company’s name or product?  What is a truthful and accurate image you would like to portray? Remember, if you are successful then this could be a word you live with in your business for a long time, so make it count.

Call (786) 594-0435 to contact Kompani Group and learn how we can help your business succeed.

April 27th, 2011

ROAD AMERICA ANNOUNCES SUCCESSFUL LAUNCH OF LOCATEME® UPGRADE TO ROADSIDE ASSISTANCE TECHNOLOGY

MIAMI – APRIL 21, 2011   In an exclusive partnership with researchers at AT&T, Miami, Florida-based Road America has developed, tested and now successfully launched a GPS technology solution for pinpointing breakdown locations in seconds.  This development dramatically improves the speed, accuracy and efficiency of locating the customer’s disabled vehicle through the very same telecommunications device they are using to contact the Road America 24-hour Response Centers.

With this enhancement, Road America is able to pinpoint the customer’s precise coordinates to ensure that their service providers on scene arrive at the vehicle’s exact location –even if the customer doesn’t know where they are.  They are able to respond to emergency assistance calls with much greater reliability and speed – which means ensuring the customer’s safety and increasing their satisfaction with the service.

The IT Department at Road America has been on a mission to solve this problem for many years, because it’s always been the weakest link in the emergency roadside process.  The mapping engines on which the industry relied previously were not server based and depended on data that was only intermittently updated by the software companies. It was an expensive and time-consuming procedure and one that had the potential to be perceived poorly by the customer. The Telematics devices found on some newer model cars were not widely available and didn’t operate smoothly across all platforms. Road America’s strategists knew the technology could be developed; government emergency crews used something like it, based on triangulation, but this development was specifically not available to private companies.

After months of discussions, working with AT&T and with TechnoCom as the aggregator, the team finally came up with an elegant solution. It would be hosted in-house, minimizing the cost of the service, loading geo-codes for all the service provider locations and displaying tie-back destinations in real time for the client to select.  Road America designed its own locking mechanism on top of the other data base locks so that sensitive customer information is never displayed without the customer’s prior permission.

What has this done to the roadside assistance process?  With the new Road America LocateMe® technology, at least two minutes can be trimmed from the average call length for this situation, the time it takes to identify the customer, ascertain the location of their vehicle, and confirm the dispatch service. From the perspective of a stranded driver, this means reduced waiting times and a quicker return to safety.  For Road America and its client companies, it can also mean reduced processing costs and increased customer satisfaction with the program offerings.

Road America’s initial results have been more than encouraging.  LocateMe® has been successfully launched as a cross-carrier platform and, after six  months of testing, the company is consistently achieving a 98% success rate in using the technology to immediately, accurately pinpoint the location of a distress call, whether it’s from a landline or a wireless device.

In the process of developing LocateMe®, the Road America team recognized the possibilities this technology offers for the company’s future development. They will be moving to use it to manage the service provider network’s vehicles – which kind of specialized equipment does each truck carry, and where are they currently located.  And the move after that will be to fully digital dispatch, communicating directly with the trucks in the field.

Click here to view the Article on the Road America website

SIMONE’S STORY:

Simone I. Smith is all of those women by her own admission, she’s also a woman of strength, integrity and style…traits which she relied upon to keep herself grounded as she traveled along her journey. With the launch of her signature jewelry collection – Simone I. Smith – she is poised to transform her life-long affection for accessories into a thriving enterprise, one pair of dangling earrings at a time.

Back in the 80′s, when hip-hop was just finding its footing, Smith was coming into her own as well. Raised under the watchful eyes of her grandparents, the Queens, New York native grew up during an era when asymmetrical bobs and acid-washed denim were all the rage.  It was also a time when every girl on her block was wearing big, chunky earrings. In fact, Smith still has the first pair of gold ‘doorknockers’ she received as a gift when she was a teenager. “I was 17 years old when we met and I’ll always remember the day that he bought me those earrings,” she says of her husband, entertainment icon and fellow entrepreneur, LL Cool J.  These days, the self-proclaimed “accessory queen” confesses that her choice of earrings usually dictates the rest of her outfit.  Blessed with an out-of-the-box fashion sensibility she has mastered the delicate art of blending high-end pieces with classic, everyday looks. “I’m definitely a ‘hoop’ girl,” says Smith, who even admits to donning one of her favorite, wiry pairs to the gym. “I’ve also been known to wear funky hoops on the red carpet, with a to-the-floor gown.” Not surprisingly, she insists that the Simone I. Smith customer embodies the same level of confidence.

“She’s every woman, of every age and race,” Smith notes of her target customer “she’s fashionable, career-minded and comfortable with who she is, she knows how to accessorize and can rock a fly pair of earrings, with ease. She’s also unafraid to defy tradition.”  Simply stated, Smith’s intent on inspiring women to not only tap into their own personal style but also, to be bold and open to switching things up a bit, too.  Along with fine jewelry, she plans to expand the Simone I. Smith collection into a full lifestyle brand.

During the decade since she launched her first, successful venture, Ms. Got Rocks – a custom-made line of beaded Bandanas – Smith, the proud mother of four, focused her attention on caring for her family, full-time. In 2004, she endured a life-altering diagnosis of stage III Chondorosarcoma, which required an invasive surgery, followed by two years of rehab and recovery.  Through it all, she held her head up high and was rarely seen without her sparkly ballet flats or color-coordinated crutches, but the experience surely tested and renewed her faith.  It also sparked her desire to give back.  As such, she will donate a portion of sales from select pieces of the jewelry line to charities committed to the ongoing fight against cancer, in all of its forms. “Cancer affects so many people and so many families,” she says. “I knew I wanted to do something to help.”

So, what keeps Smith inspired? Her faith in God first & her family, “my husband and children definitely keep me feeling inspired and motivated,” she says. “We are a family who believes in working hard and pursuing our dreams, so I’m excited about making my brand a reality along with cultivating my philanthropic efforts; my mission for Simone I. Smith is to create a quality, fashion-forward product and represent for all of my sisters around the world who love accessories as much as I do.”

Click Here to Visit Simone I. Smith’s Website