Hi everyone, my name is Xiaotian Huang. I am from China and came to Canada just one year ago After a semester I named myself Shael which is pronounced similar to my first part of my first name since I found that it is hard to pronounce my name at the first glance. I take this course because I fully understand the importance of marketing though I have not spent much time thinking about stepping into the field of marketing. That is probably because I have little understanding and knowledge of this aspect in commerce. However, since no business can stay in operation without marketing, it will never be bad to have some basic ideas about marketing, so I am glad that marketing is included in my STT.

I only have experience with marketing as a consumer, but based on my interest in psychology I can always tell how some ads create wants and desire to increase consumers desire to buy the products. For example, CHUNGHWA cigarettes use the image of the Tiananmen Square and the slogan of “Love my Chunghwa(the same meaning as China)” to induce the patriotic feeling of people and make itself outstanding, thus making a great selling record in China. I don’t like those marketing strategy that induce people to consume something bad, though I do understand the power of those ads. That is also why I can enjoy a lot of ads but none of them can become a favorite of mine.

Relatively, I am more interested in the marketing strategies which focus on analyzing massive amount of information and get insight from it and then use the insight to meet the requirement of people. That is a process of knowing people and guessing the public’s opinion which themselves may even not know. That is an interesting process for me.

The personal experience I want to share with the class is that I have driven across Canada from Prince Edward Island to Vancouver this summer. I have never driven this long before and along the way I see the exceptional natural beauty of Canada. I experienced different city styles ranging from the old Québec city, Montreal to Toronto, Vancouver. I went through 9 provinces in total where I see the calmness of the great prairie the craggedness of the Rockies. It is really a great experience that you went to so many places in a row.

Above is pretty much about my first blog for marketing.

Comm 299 is really a useful class where I have learnt a lot of things about myself. The most helpful thing to help me learn about myself is the strength quest test. That helped me learn clearly about my five most outstanding merits. Furthermore, the class taught us to focus on what we are good at and focus on strength. Through the lesson, I have learnt that everyone cannot avoid having his/her shortcomings but the important thing is to develop and promote our strength points. After the strength test, I have learnt that my five merits are context, individualization, learner, input and analytical. I apply this concept in my interview and receive success. Additionally, through my preparation and course of my interview, I have learnt that one must make pointed preparation and be professional in order to succeed in the interview. Also, I have learnt to face my weak points properly during the course of interview. From the preparation of the cover letter and resume, I have learnt to be patient and careful as much as possible and try my best to discover my merits from my past experiences. Because of the strict rule of grading, my friend and I spent as long time as possible to look for our mistakes in our works. That made me to learn the strength of cooperation. Overall, the course of Comm 299 really help me a lot on learning about myself better.

To me, my mother is the most bravest person who dare to try new things in her ages. From her, I have learnt the spirit that one should never be afraid of trying new things in whatever age.

My mother is now nearly 50. As a traditional Chinese woman in this age, she should have been a conservative person who has no interest in trying new things. Actually, i was once a conservative person myself too. However, my mother doesn’t appear to be an old -fashioned woman. Several years ago, she determined to move abroad to try to live in a foreign culture. She then managed to persuade us to agree with her. Giving up an existed home to move to another place in one’s middle age is discouraged in traditional Chinese culture.

After she came to Canada, she tried very hard and even was happy to learn English. To her, it is a totally new experience which she always appreciates. I knew so many Chinese of her age moving to an English-speaking country and never ever try to study English again but always keep speaking Chinese. She was still learning new things with high passion. She cannot drive in China, but she finally learnt how to drive after she moved to Canada.

Her experience and enthusiasm really represent the miret of a Chinese saying “never too old to learn”. Her attitude towards new things and new environment encourage me to try new things. Under her influence, I have learned the spirit that one should never be afraid of trying new things in whatever age and am gradually changing my conservative personality.

With the cost of insuring Spanish, Italian, Irish and even German government debt against default rising this morning, Ireland’s €85bn rescue package has not calmed the markets. One expert believes Ireland is effectively insolvent while another fears the eurozone is heading for ‘total meltdown’

 These days, market shows less confidence on euro because of the continuous sovereign debt problem in the “Mediterranean” countries. The problem can hardly be solved without addressing the structural integrity of the euro.

 The Eurozone, as a whole, doesn’t have the much pressure about the balance of the economics superficially. But looking from the inside, the unbalance of the economics and trade is relatively serious. Compared with the high trade surplus of German, some other European countries are even facing the heavy excess of import. Saying an isolated country, it can balance the situation by currency rate. However, as a whole union using an identical currency, there’s no choice for them to choose. And Euro’s rate is usually based on German, which is always having trade surplus.

 It is said that a new round of bank ‘stress tests’ is planed next year. Nonetheless, if the the structural integrity of the euro doesn’t change, problems will last.

As Apple launched the iPad half a year ago, tablet has attracted millions of customers. According to a research from Gartner, conducted by Ranjit Atwal, the sale of the tablet will take the place of that of PC by 10% by 2014. There seems to be a trend that tablet will become the fashion.

Finding such a great chance, all kinds of major IT industries have determined to have a finger in the pie. RIM, Samsung, Dell, Toshiba, Orange, Cisco, Lenovo, and Google have all made the schedule of launching their own tablets.

 Apple still own the advantage of first launching the tablet, and are making efforts to develop the support technology and application program of the iPad as well. according to the current situation, it is forecasted that the dominating position of iPad will hardly be broken until 2012.

 However, iPad is still more like the enlarged form of an iPhone and have more common design elements with communication tools. Therefore, it gives some chance to those PC makers which will certainly add more computer elements to the tablet in order to make differentiated competition.

 Thus, Apple still needs to be careful in this fierce competition.

HP’s CEO, Mark Hurd was fired in August because he was had been involved in a sexual harassment. It is the third top manager fired from HP during the last five years.

Mark Hurd was a competent CEO. After he took the office, he carried out drastic reformation and managed to merge HP with EDS in a cost of 13.9 billion. During his term of office, the stock price of HP has risen by more than twice as much as his first coming. That is to say, Mark Hurd really contributed a lot to HP.

However, the trust of the company is the base of a top manager. The sexual harassment damaged the trust of both the staff members and shareholders. Thus the expulsion seems to be a must.

Another thing we need to learn from the expulsion is that the top management of any companies should learn to respect the business ethic which is always neglected as the promotion of position and the increase of authority. The responsibility top managers assume is great, so they need to be more aware of the decision they made, even in the daily life, in order to effect the company negatively.

The 2010 Shanghai fire was a 15 November 2010 fire that destroyed a 28-story high-rise apartment building in the Chinese city of Shanghai, killing 58 people with 56 missing and more than 120 others injured.

An investigation under China’s cabinet was announced on 16 November, the day after the fire, to determine the cause of the blaze. The investigation into the fire made a preliminary conclusion that negligence by unlicensed welders on the tenth floor caused the bamboo scaffolding and attached nylon netting to catch fire, which subsequently spread to the entire structure.

As of 19 November, a total of twelve individuals were being held by officials in connection to the blaze, including four more who were detained that day. The four were representatives of Jiayi Building Decoration, a part of renovation contractor Jing’an Construction, Shanghai Jing’an Construction Supervision, and the apartment management company.

It is a signal that big cities in China need to improve their ability to deal with fire happened in skyscrapers. Additionally, it is also need to be investigated seriously about the poor quality of the construction and the why this kind of company can get the opportunity to do the program.Shanghai fire

read more：http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/15/video-of-deadly-shanghai-fire/

A war between Tencent, operator of the popular instant-messaging software QQ, and Qihoo 360, China’s biggest antivirus service provider, escalated early this month when Tencent  stopped service to QQ users whose computers are installed with 360’s software.

Tencent is always accused of plagiarizing others ideas and copy them on their own online platform, QQ, which force many small companies to collapse. 360, created by Hongyi Zhou, who had created the 3721, one of the famous rogue software, is accused of kidnapping the users and trying to push aside other companies.

Though online polls are hardly a scientific measurement of public opinion, one poll on popular Internet portal 163.com suggests Tencent may be taking a hit in this publicity battle. Of 423,000 respondents who were asked whether they would remove Tencent or Qihoo’s software, 66% voted to remove Tencent’s software, while 34% chose Qihoo 360.

Whatever the two companies have said, they have all made the unethical decisions which harm the users’ rights, thus breaking the basic morality in the business. In any case, any corporations should not harm the user, especially now the war is now affecting innocent bystanders whose computers have become the battlefield of the two big corporations.

read more:http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2010/11/05/qq-360-battle-escalates-into-war/

According to a research report in 2005, only a minority of American households feels “confident” about retirement saving adequacy, and a one-third of adults in their 50s say they have failed to develop any kind of retirement saving plan at all (Lusardi 1999, 2003; Yakoboski and Dickemper, 1997).

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/downloaddoi=10.1.1.74.1946&rep=rep1&type=pdf 

That means a lack of financial literacy which will cause avoidable loss of individuals due to the lack of common sense to finance.

As time goes by, people are attaching more importance to finance. More people start to understand that finance is close to their life. Canadians are flocking to online tools to learn more about their finances, according to a report from the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2010/10/08/con-fcac-report.html#ixzz11uBUsn2i

After an access to the financial knowledge, ordinary people are now more interesting in how to decide among safe and risky savings
opportunities and how do intermediaries assist in the savings and investment decisions, which are important to be considered in finance.

Now, there are a growing online tools which can help ordinary people to manage their financial decision, such as the website called The City, http://www.mymoney.gov/ and many others. The growing use of these  tools really helps people to manage their money.

The price in Vancouver, BC has been overvalued for a long time, and the housing market in Vancouver is overshooting itself. Ordinary citizens in BC can hardly bear it.  The high housing price exert a heavy debt on ordinary people while provide a good opportunity for those multimillionaires to spectulate and enlarge the gap of wealth.

The high price is partly brought by the rich immigrants and investors, but not all. BC’s economy which has no  no jobs, no industry inside has made the decision of itself that it needs to depend on its higher price in housing market to keep its economic growth. Also, the banks like the high price which keep their loan for ordinary people cannot afford the housing price themselves.

However,CIBC deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal said in an interview that he believes B.C. prices could drop 10% over the next year — possibly more in Metro Vancouver where prices are so much higher — before settling down.

 http://www.vancouversun.com/business/real-estate/home+prices+rise+this+year+before+falling+2011+report/3604390/story.html#ixzz11ucsTlyA

I remain my points  because I think if there is not a change in the economic structure, there can hardly be a real drop which bebefits ordinary people because real estate is the prime engine of economic growth.

http://housing-analysis.blogspot.com/