Sometimes, it feels as if we just can’t stop thinking about the financial crisis. Every macro event is the next “Lehman moment;” every retreat in stocks marks the early innings of the next crash.
Other times, it’s as if we’ve all forgotten that the financial meltdown ever happened. Quicken Loans’ 2016 Super Bowl ad falls into the latter category.
Posted in Tools and Information
Tagged Buying Mortgages on Your Phone, Quicken Loans, Super Bowl Ad
Adweek: You’ve launched a branded content studio that targets black consumers. What is different about marketing to this demographic?
Samuels: In an ideal world, the story will come out of culture that will be relevant for more than just people who are of African-American ethnicity.
Stories that are coming out of black content and lifestyle are hot right now. If you look at things like Unsung, Empire and Blackish, you can see that those stories are very popular. Black culture has always been hot, but now it has a platform that maybe we haven’t seen in the past. Content is not just relevant for black people—it’s relevant for mainstream culture.
Posted in Tools and Information
Tagged Black Consumers, Black culture, Detavio Samuels
v.20 n. 4 – Released January 28, 2016
Posted in News and Views
Tagged L. A economics, L.A Business, L.A. County, L.A. news
If you’ve ever tried to sell a used car you know it’s a process. You either haggle low-ball offers at the dealership or wade through Craigslist emails with the hope that a possible buyer actually shows up, wants your car and has cash.
Startups such as Beepi and Carvana attempt to take the pain out of the process by cutting out the dealer and helping you list online. Ebay motors originally started with this same idea, but dealers now utilize the service quite heavily.
If you spent any time on Twitter Friday, you probably heard about a new app called Peach.
Created by Vine cofounder Dom Hofmann, the app is “a fun, simple way to keep up with friends and be yourself,” that everyone is now obsessed with because it’s Friday, and we needed this.
The app is a sort of a mix between Twitter and Slack. After you create an account and a handle and add some friends, you view a stream of updates from the people you’re connected with. From the home screen updates look a bit like tweets or status updates, though tapping into a friend’s post reveals much more.
You see, the app is centered around something its creators call “magic words” — trigger words that allow you to add a GIF, doodle, location and other content to your stream. Typing “here,” for example, adds your current location while “draw,” lets you add a quick doodle.
Research has found that the skills and traits found in people with a successful military employment track record make for particularly good civilian employees. A compilation of studies assembled by the Institute for Veterans and Military Families at Syracuse University suggest that veterans generally:
Are entrepreneurial. They have a high need for achievement, are comfortable with autonomy and uncertainty, and make effective decisions in dynamic environments.
Assume high levels of trust. Often a military career gives rise to a strong propensity to trust coworkers as well as a tendency to exhibit confidence in the organizational leadership.
Are adept at transferring their skills across contexts and tasks. Research has attributed this to the fact that military teaching strategies include contingency and scenario-based training.
World’s largest retailer Walmart is joining forces with the three biggest bottled water suppliers in the U.S. to provide enough water to last 10,000 public schoolkids in Flint, Mich. the remainder of the calendar year.
In partnership with Pepsi , Coca-Cola KO and Nestle , the big-box giant will deliver 6.5 million bottles of water, or 176 truckloads a day, to the crisis-stricken city, where all children under the age of 6 were exposed to toxic, lead-tainted water that may cause life-long damage.
Posted in News and Views
Tagged Coca Cola, Flint, lead-tainted water, Michigan, Pepsi Co, WalMart
IN THE NOT-SO-DISTANT future, your personal tech will behave like the sun. It will rise and shine brightly in the morning, and set and dim its lights as the day winds down. In a recent preview for iOS 9.3, Apple teased a new feature called Night Shift that does exactly this, automatically altering the color of your screen display to make it orange-colored in the evening. Last month, Amazon released a similar feature, called Blue Shade, in an OS update for its Kindle Fire reading tablets. The new feature lets nighttime users dim the amount of blue light that comes off the Fire’s screen, in favor of a mellow, amber glow.
Posted in News and Views
Tagged Amazon, amber glow, Apple, blue light, blue shade, Kindle Fire, Night Shift, screen colors
Tesla shares are getting clobbered: they’re down almost 20% this year after dropping another 3% Tuesday to $191. That’s a far cry from their 2014 peak of nearly $300.
The latest dip is being chalked up to a research note from JP Morgan’s Ryan Brinkman, in which his team reduced its expectations for Tesla’s fourth-quarter earnings. (Compared with the rest of Wall Street JP Morgan is relatively bearish on Tesla: Brinkman’s target price is $180)
2. Nobody With A Job Can Help You Become An Entrepreneur
If you spend two seconds thinking about that statement, the truth of it becomes evident. Unfortunately, if you want to become an entrepreneur, the most visible sources of help are the least helpful.
It doesn’t matter how much information you have about how businesses are launched, the missing element is the courage to actually take risks. The entrepreneur, while reducing risk, must embrace it to make their goal a reality. If you need a steady paycheck, you are not an entrepreneur. So why would you get direction from someone who does?
Posted in Op-ED, Peter Mehit
Dispatches From The Front 