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.

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.

By Milissa Tarquini Director, User Interface Design and Information Architecture at AOL

We are all well aware that web design is not an easy task. There are many variables to consider, some of them technical, some of them human. The technical considerations of designing for the web can (and do) change quite regularly, but the human variables change at a slower rate. Sometimes the human variables change at such a slow rate that we have a hard time believing that it happens.

This is happening right now in web design. There is an astonishing amount of disbelief that the users of web pages have learned to scroll and that they do so regularly. Holding on to this disbelief – this myth that users won’t scroll to see anything below the fold – is doing everyone a great disservice, most of all our users.
First, a definition: The word “fold” means a great many things, even within the discipline of design. The most common use of the term “fold” is perhaps used in reference to newspaper layout. Because of the physical dimensions of the printed page of a broadsheet newspaper, it is folded. The first page of a newspaper is where the “big” stories of the issue are because it is the best possible placement. Readers have to flip the paper over (or unfold it) to see what else is in the issue, therefore there is a chance that someone will miss it. In web design, the term “fold” means the line beyond which a user must scroll to see more contents of a page (if it exists) after the page displays within their browser. It is also referred to as a “scroll-line.”
Screen performance data and new research indicate that users will scroll to find information and items below the fold. There are established design best practices to ensure that users recognize when a fold exists and that content extends below it¹. Yet during requirements gathering for design projects designers are inundated with requests to cram as much information above the fold as possible, which complicates the information design. Why does the myth continue, when we have documented evidence that the fold really doesn’t matter in certain contexts?

Once upon a time, page-level vertical scrolling was not permitted on AOL. Articles, lists and other content that would have to scroll were presented in scrolling text fields or list boxes, which our users easily used. Our pages, which used proprietary technology, were designed to fit inside a client application, and the strictest of guidelines ensured that the application desktop itself did not scroll. The content pages floated in the center of the application interface and were too far removed from the scrollbar location for users to notice if a scrollbar appeared. Even if the page appeared to be cut off, as current best practices dictate, it proved to be such an unusual experience to our users that they assumed that the application was “broken.” We had to instill incredible discipline in all areas of the organization that produced these pages – content creation, design and development – to make sure our content fit on these little pages.

AOL client application with desktop scrollbar activated

As AOL moved away from our proprietary screen technology to an open web experience, we enjoyed the luxury of designing longer (and wider) pages. Remaining sensitive to the issues of scrolling from our history, we developed and employed practices for designing around folds:

• We chose as target screen resolutions those used by the majority of our users.
• We identified where the fold would fall in different browsers, and noted the range of pixels that would be in the fold “zone.”
• We made sure that images and text appeared “broken” or cut off at the fold for the majority of our users (based on common screen resolutions and browsers).
• We kept the overall page height to no more than 3 screens.

But even given our new larger page sizes, we were still presented with long lists of items to be placed above the fold – lists impossible to accommodate. There were just too many things for the limited amount of vertical space.

For example, for advertising to be considered valuable and saleable, a certain percentage of it must appear above the 1024×768 fold. Branding must be above the fold. Navigation must be above the fold – or at least the beginning of the list of navigational choices. (If the list is well organized and displayed appropriately, scanning the list should help bring users down the page.) Big content (the primary content of the site) should begin above the fold. Some marketing folks believe that the actual number of data points and links above the fold is a strategic differentiator critical to business success. Considering the limited vertical real estate available and the desire for multiple ad units and functionality described above, an open design becomes impossible.

And why? Because people think users don’t scroll. Jakob Nielsen wrote about the growing acceptance and understanding of scrolling in 1997², yet 10 years later we are still hearing that users don’t scroll.

Research debunking this myth is starting to pop up, and a great example of this is the report available on ClickTale.com³. In it, the researchers used their proprietary tracking software to measure the activity of 120,000 pages. Their research gives data on the vertical height of the page and the point to which a user scrolls. In the study, they found that 76% of users scrolled and that a good portion of them scrolled all the way to the bottom, despite the height of the screen. Even the longest of web pages were scrolled to the bottom. One thing the study does not capture is how much time is spent at the bottom of the page, so the argument can be made that users might just scan it and not pay much attention to any content placed there.

This is where things get interesting.

I took a look at performance data for some AOL sites and found that items at the bottom of pages are being widely used. Perhaps the best example of this is the popular celebrity gossip website TMZ.com. The most clicked on item on the TMZhomepage is the link at the very bottom of the page that takes users to the next page. Note that the TMZ homepage is often over 15000 pixels long – which supports the ClickTale research that scrolling behavior is independent of screen height. Users are so engaged in the content of this site that they are following it down the page until they get to the “next page” link.

Maybe it’s not fair to use a celebrity gossip site as an example. After all, we’re not all designing around such tantalizing guilty-pleasure content as the downfall of beautiful people. So, let’s look at some drier content.
For example, take AOL News Daily Pulse. You’ll notice the poll at the bottom of the page – the vote counts are well over 300,000 each. This means that not only did folks scroll over 2000 pixels to the bottom of the page, they actually took the time to answer a poll while they were there. Hundreds of thousands of people taking a poll at the bottom of a page can easily be called a success.

But, you may argue, these pages are both in blog format. Perhaps blogs encourage scrolling more than other types of pages. I’m not convinced, since blog format is of the “newest content on top” variety, but it may be true. However, looking at pages that are not in blog format, we see the same trend. On the AOL Money & Financehomepage, users find and use the modules for recent quotes and their personalized portfolios even when these modules are placed well beneath the 1024×768 fold.

Another example within AOL Money & Finance is a photo gallery entitled Top Tax Tips. Despite the fact that the gallery is almost 2500 pixels down the page, this gallery generates between 200,000 and 400,000 page views depending on promotion of the Taxes page.

It is clear that where a given item falls in relation to the fold is becoming less important. Users are scrolling to see what they want, and finding it. The key is the content – if it is compelling, users will follow where it leads.

When does the fold matter?

The most basic rule of thumb is that for every site the user should be able to understand what your site is about by the information presented to them above the fold. If they have to scroll to even discover what the site is, its success is unlikely.

Functionality that is essential to business strategy should remain (or at least begin) above the fold. For example, if your business success is dependent on users finding a particular thing (movie theaters, for example) then the widget to allow that action should certainly be above the fold.

Screen height and folds matter for applications, especially rapid-fire applications where users input variables and change the display of information. The input and output should be in very close proximity. Getting stock quotes is an example: a user may want to get four or five quotes in sequence, so it is imperative that the input field and the basic quote information display remain above the fold for each symbol entered. Imagine the frustration at having to scroll to find the input field for each quote you wanted.

Where IS the fold?

Here is perhaps the biggest problem of all. The design method of cutting-off images or text only works if you know where the fold is. There is a lot of information out there about how dispersed the location of fold line actually is. Again, a very clear picture of this problem is shown on ClickTale. In the same study of page scrolling, fold locations of viewed screens were captured, based on screen resolution and browser used. It’s a sad, sad thing, but the single highest concentration of fold location (at around 600 pixels) for users accounted for less than 10% of the distribution. This pixel-height corresponds with a screen resolution of 1024×768. Browser applications take away varying amounts of vertical real estate for their interfaces (toolbars, address fields, etc). Each browser has a slightly different size, so not all visitors running a resolution of 1024×768 will have a fold that appears in the same spot. In the ClickTale study, the three highest fold locations were 570, 590 and 600 pixels—apparently from different browsers running on 1024×768 screens. But the overall distribution of fold locations for the entire study was so varied that even these three sizes together only account for less than 26% of visits. What does all this mean? If you pick one pixel location on which to base the location of the fold when designing your screens, the best-case scenario is that you’ll get the fold line exactly right for only 10% of your visitors.

So what do we do now?

Stop worrying about the fold. Don’t throw your best practices out the window, but stop cramming stuff above a certain pixel point. You’re not helping anyone. Open up your designs and give your users some visual breathing room. If your content is compelling enough your users will read it to the end.

Advertisers currently want their ads above the fold, and it will be a while before that tide turns. But it’s very clear that the rest of the page can be just as valuable – perhaps more valuable – to contextual advertising. Personally, I’d want my ad to be right at the bottom of the TMZpage, forget the top.

The biggest lesson to be learned here is that if you use visual cues (such as cut-off images and text) and compelling content, users will scroll to see all of it. The next great frontier in web page design has to be bottom of the page. You’ve done your job and the user scrolled all the way to the bottom of the page because they were so engaged with your content. Now what? Is a footer really all we can offer them? If we know we’ve got them there, why not give them something to do next? Something contextual, a natural next step in your site, or something with which to interact (such as a poll) would be welcome and, most importantly, used.

Click here for full article on boxesandarrows.com May 2011 Issue

One of the principles of new media and marketing is a strategy called “Launch and learn.”  This method is used to quickly launch products, websites and marketing campaigns to establish brand loyalty and customer communication before the product or website has actually reached perfection. Launching campaigns and websites sooner rather than later allows for consumer response to show you what works, and what doesn’t.  Setting up metrics such as open rates, conversion rates and analytics allows you to inexpensively launch several initiatives at the same time using different vehicles to reach end users.   After analyzing the results you can then allocate monies and resources to what works the best. If you are involved in e-commerce, the numbers will always tell the truth.

Another basic tenet of strategic marketing and planning is transparency.  When promoting products or services, it is absolutely imperative to clearly articulate what it is you are offering.  We believe in advertising as a tool to provide the information necessary for consumers to make intelligent choices.  People want the facts and the research behind a product before making purchases, whereas 5-10 years ago a spectacular image of a product or the promise of a feeling the product or service might provide, was enough to sell it.  Promoting marketing integrity from the start provides a strong foundation by building customer loyalty and satisfaction and also helps the “launch and learn” technique  distinguish between product and delivery feedback and a lack of solid information provided to the consumer.  When testing initiatives, the less variables involved the better.

Its okay to make mistakes, and every new business should be prepared to make them.  By setting up metrics you can launch initiatives and analytics to see what works, and what doesn’t.  The key is to make the fewest mistakes possible in terms of time and money. Because each product will take a different marketing approach, there is no way to know exactly what will work best without first testing the waters. Steer clear of any marketing firm that claims to have a successful marketing approach upfront for your product or service, because this may end up costing you more than just money in the long run. If you would like to learn more, please contact Kompani Group at (786) 594-0435 for a free consultation.

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