Äänekoski was gorgeous. George and I commented over breakfast this AM that life travels at a quiet, relaxed pace in Finland. It’s an interesting contrast to the hustle and bustle in Los Angeles.

We toured the company’s production facility (the anti-static jackets are very sharp looking!) and interviewed three employees. It was interesting to hear different perspectives about the company, from operations to financing, production to purchasing. I think these insights will be useful as we prepare for our research, recommendations, and presentation.

The weather has been very accommodating. I understand that this has been the warmest summer on record since 1942.

I’m hoping that we’ll have a chance to see a bit of Helsinki before we leave. Thankfully we’ve done most of our GAP-related work in the morning, so with luck we’ll be able to take a bus into downtown and walk around a little bit.

On the road to Jyväskylä, Finland

about further research, and gaining a deeper understanding of the company’s history, strengths, weaknesses, and objectives. It’s all well and good to talk about the theoretical in class or strategize over HBS cases. It is another matter entirely to sit across the conference room table from seasoned executives who have retained our team of five students to provide them with insights as to where to take their business next. I think the biggest feeling that I get from this is: “this is real and this matters very much to the company we are working for.” There’s no Part B to this case, no epilogue to tell us whether we got the levers right or wrong. We’ll present our findings to the executives in slightly less than four months, and while we’ll be backed up by dozens of hours of primary research, there’s no answer key for our work. Ultimately, that’s what makes this so exciting.

Moose crossing

We’re spending the night in Jyväskylä, Finland, about 300km north of Helsinki and about 46km south of Äänekoski where we’ll spend the day speaking with our company’s manufacturing and production team. Tomorrow evening, we’ll head south to Vantaa again to meet with the company’s board of directors and investors. Finally, we’ll spend Thursday in and around Vantaa speaking with two of the firm’s major customers.

This is shaping up to be a lot of work. Our industry isn’t exactly transparent, so it’s taking a lot of digging to understand where these products can be used, let alone get a sense of the total available market in any particular market or geographic area. Despite these challenges, we’ve got a good team dynamic, a good advisor, and a great host company.

Over the last several months at UCLA Anderson I’ve taken a significant interest in the program’s study-abroad offerings. I applied to four study-abroad programs expecting to be selected only for one or two given their popularity. It was quite a surprise to learn one by one that I was could participate in each!

Sunset in Helsinki, ~21:30

Of course, the invitations were just the beginning. All told, I could expect a week’s travel for GAP primary research, plus about aweek for each of the study programs. Asking my manager for more than five weeks off through the end of the year felt like quite a tall order. I am incredibly grateful to my managers and employer for giving me the opportunity to take such extended travel and study breaks.

And so it begins. I return to Los Angeles this Friday evening, only to hop on a plane to Seoul for a “Doing Business in South Korea” course at Seoul National University. Two weeks later, I’ll be traveling to India for “International Studies in India: Understanding Indian Financial Markets” with Professor Subrahmanyam, then off to HEC in Jouy-en-Josas, France, to study “Sustainable Investments” and “International Negotiations.” Finally, I’ll travel to South Africa in mid-December to take “International Studies in Africa: Focus on Health Economics” with Professor Victor Tabbush.

Here are the results on the effectiveness & popularity of some of the social bookmarking buttons on a couple of our websites:

Social Bookmarking Buttons that are Very Likely to Be Clicked by Readers

• Tweetmeme
• Twitter Retweet
• Facebook Sharing
• Yahoo Buzz

Click rates were 60% or more for these buttons compared to the rest of the ones we put up on the same posts & pages.

Social Bookmarking Buttons that have Moderate Likelihood of Being Clicked

• Technorati
• Digg
• StumbleUpon

Click rates were 20% or less for these buttons compared to the rest of the ones we put up on the same posts & pages.

Social Bookmarking Buttons that will Possibly Never be Clicked

• Del.icio.us
• Reddit
• Newsvine
• Plurk

Click rates were negligible (less than 2%) for these buttons compared to the rest of the ones we put up on the same posts & pages.

A few seconds after a user watches a video on IGN, the page refreshes and brings the user to the next video. This seems like a clever way of encouraging a user to keep watching one video after another. If the user walks away from their machine for a while, it will also drive up preroll advertising inventory. Clever!

OKCupid is a free dating site with some clever user interface details. Their “OKTrends” blog has an interesting social media toolbar that swings into view when a user approaches the end of the blog entry.

Intuitively this makes a lot of sense; designers often place social bookmarking links at the top of the article, but users aren’t likely to respond to the suggestion that they share an article until after they have read it. Sure—seems obvious—but even big-time sites like the NY Times get this one wrong:

I do like the NY Times “Read the next article” widget that pops up as you approach the end of an article:

So what techniques do you use to increase page views and sharing of your content?

As part of my research for school and work, I’ve made heavy use of various online survey applications.

The most common survey programs that I’ve seen are Survey Monkey ($20/mo or $200/yr) and Zoomerang ($200-600/yr). UCLA Anderson makes heavy use of Qualtrics, which is an incredibly powerful application but costs somewhere on the order of $5,000/yr for a relatively limited number of survey responses.

Enter LimeSurvey. This open-source survey application lacks the polish of the paid applications, but it is much more flexible than either Survey Monkey or Zoomerang. Better yet, there’s no set limits on the number of survey responses you can request. Finally, since it’s open-source, it’s free to use. All you’ll need is a domain name and server to host it on, which can be had for $5-$10/mo depending on your source. If you already have a website, the marginal cost of using LimeSurvey is likely close to zero.

So, while the paid survey services have their place (e.g., informal polling for a limited number of people), LimeSurvey is free and carries the weight beautifully for more complex surveying needs. It has a steeper learning curve than SurveyMonkey or Zoomering and lacks some of the most sophisticated tools available in Qualtrics, but when you want something a little more powerful without spending too much money, LimeSurvey is a very happy medium.

(By the way, comment here if you’re looking for LimeSurvey hosting and I’d be glad to help.)

This is a clever approach to parodying carbon emission permits. While I generally endorse the idea of carbon emission permits, I think the folks at Cheat Neutral have an interesting perspective that a) additionality is not guaranteed, and b) “offseting” a transgression does not necessarily make  it acceptable in the first place. Carbon offsets are “indulgences.”

I might take a slightly different perspective. My upcoming study trip to Jouy-en-Josas is going to use a lot of fuel. According to CarbonFootPrint.com, it’s going to introduce ~3.11 metric tons of CO₂ into the atmosphere, which is slightly less than the 3.72 metric tons I’d introduce driving my 2004 Toyota Prius 20,000 miles in a year (a typical usage pattern for me). My personal consumption patterns (e.g., purchase of overseas goods, non-local produce, air-conditioning in the San Fernando Valley) also contribute significantly to my carbon footprint.

I’m unlikely to stop flying because of the carbon output. Buying a carbon offset, even if it doesn’t completely reduce the amount of carbon I “introduced” into the atmosphere by taking the flight, is at least a good gesture. Changing my behavior—such as living closer to work, using public transport, or editing my consumption patterns—would more directly reduce my carbon footprint, making them more valuable than personal carbon offsets in the long term. Obviously, this requires a greater change of habits.

Personal carbon offsets will do a lot of good if they get people thinking about the negative externalities resulting from their consumption, even if their actual offset effects are slight.

Finally, there’s much more to carbon offsets than personal consumption. I am optimistic that they can be a useful tool at the macro level. In addition, a liquid carbon market would allow citizens to decrease their own consumption to buy carbon emission permits and personally “lock them away.”

For all of you App developers (Amy!), TechCrunch had a great article describing sales numbers for AppStore products. Of particular note:
Across 96 developers who responded, the average app sold 100k copies over 261 days with a median price of $0.99 at a development cost of $6.5k.
Removing the top 10% of products, the numbers drop a lot, which is a common in competitive markets. The numbers for the remaining 90%: 11k copies over 44 days. That’s a big difference. The lesson there: Go big. The smaller apps don’t get the same amount of time in the spotlight (44 days vs 261) and don’t make as much money ($11k vs $100k).
About staying in the spotlight, the author suggests providing a compacted, bunched marketing campaign when the spotlight is on your app instead of spreading the campaign out over time. Use any press to springboard your way into other press and maintain your marketing momentum.

That final bit is a good takeaway for any of you who are entrepreneurs/indie developers. Developing a good product is an important part of the business, but harnessing the powers of marketing and P/R (mostly PR for indies) is what drives the revenue that allows you to develop a version 2 and 3.

The link: http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/16/iphone-app-sales-exposed/