Shivamkar blogged about the ability to use YouTube as a record label and “Broadcast Yourself” (The YouTube Slogan). he writes that it has become much easier for aspiring artists in this day and age to become successful as “the middle man is gone”.

In my business plan project for Comm, my group and I decided to do the business plan of a record company. The one thing we really noticed was the extreme competitiveness of this industry. Thinking about it now, YouTube would be a great way to get your name out there. It wont work for everyone, but it has turned out some of the biggest stars today, such as Justin Bieber and Lana Del Ray.

The increasing power YouTube receives is incredible. They have been able to turn many people into celebrities, or home videos into videos being played in everyone’s home. YouTube started as a way to share videos between a group of friends and has turned into a “Star Finder
Service”

Mykhalo Boreshevski wrote about the idea of virtual goods earning profits for certain companies such as Google or even Facebook. But he asked a question at the end regarding physical goods and the use of them with Facebook. Mykhalo argues that they may need to do this to protect the company. In my opinion Facebook has grown to such a powerful company and this is just another way to attract more and more people and satisfy the customer.

I believe this because Facebook is literally trying to be a part of every social exchange there is, birthdays, anniversaries, even just normal talking. All of these things can now be done with out face to face confrontation. Clearly people are moving away from this idea so now they can do something else without meeting anyone. It will also satisfy their clientele who has moved away from home. It makes sending gifts much easier than going out, buying something, and then shipping it to friends and family across the world.

So in Conclusion Facebook is merely trying to make everything much more accessible and easier to the growing number of lazy people around the world. As sad as it sounds I think it will be a success.

Here is a link to his article: https://blogs.ubc.ca/mykhayloborushevskyy/2012/10/29/children-of-virtual-millenium/

Famous lines have been ingrained into movie watchers and videophiles minds since the beginning. For example Bruce Willis’ “Yippee ki yay!”, Darth Vader’s “No I’m your father” or James bonds “shaken not stirred”. However this is all about to change, for James Bond anyways. The new Bond flick, “Skyfall” will begin to shake things up with a new catch phrase from the British spy.

Product placement in movies is becoming more relevant in movies however is still being fairly suttle and at times unnoticeable. But the European lager company is going against this. James Bond will no longer ask for the famous vodka martini “shaken not stirred” but a Heineken beer instead. This is all due to a huge deal made by the beer company just so the movie could even happen. The film company MGM had been struggling to make this movie, hence the two year hold off for filming. This struggle was specific to cash. This deal consisted of £28 million for the product placement in the film.

This is important to see the importance of marketing. Marketers have been able to find a situation to showcase their product across the world with high paid actors and actresses, even if it costs a fortune to do so. In this particular deal they saw the potential to not only reach out to all the world with talent, but also to say there beer is the one drank by the promiscuous spy, James Bond.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2206593/James-Bond-swaps-Vodka-Martini-pint-Heineken-controversial-product-placement-deal-new-film.html

During one of our classes last week we focused our views towards marketing. In this class we watched some advertisements from soda company Pepsi. Pepsi, unlike Coca-Cola, needs an advantage so they create ads that are against coca-colay. One ad in particular shows a young boy buying two cokes from a vending machine, merely to stand on them so he can buy a Pepsi.

This has become a similar scene with the two smartphone heavy weights, the Galaxy S3 by Samsung and the iPhone 5 by Apple. Samsung has struck first with their new minute and a half ad that shows people waiting in line for the iPhone 5, while people all around them have an S3 and are using some of there many features available to show that Apple is no longer the only powerhouse.

This ad created by Samsung might be one of the funniest attack ads I have ever seen. But most of all I believe this ad has persuaded me to choose a Samsung over the new iPhone. I have an iPhone 4 right now, but through watching this I would rather be one of the people with a Samsung Galaxy S3 than a slightly upgraded iPhone 5.

The ad by Samsung: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf5-Prx19ZM

In 2008 the world suffered a major economic crash due to poor business practices and unethical decisions. One of the key components of this major market crash was the unethical practice of securities fraud. Securities fraud is “A type of serious white-collar crime in which a person or company, such as a stockbroker, brokerage firm, corporation or investment bank, misrepresents information that investors use to make decisions … The types of misrepresentation involved in this crime include providing false information, withholding key information, offering bad advice, and offering or acting on inside information.” This is what major investment banks like, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs were taking part in. They were selling subprime mortgages to people and betting against them and the collapse of the subprime mortgage bubble in the mid 2000’s. I find this extremely unethical for the fact that they are selling something to someone one minute and next they are betting against the failure of it. The example my teacher always gave was, a car salesman selling a car and cutting the brake lines. Then taking out an insurance policy against it for they know it is going to crash. They were betting against something they knew was going to fail and that is extremely unethical.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/may/20/wall-street-role-financial-crisis