The CEO Game

A new pub in Manhattan now offers, beers that their prices are set by the visitor’s demand, much like trading in the stock exchange. The owners admits that it’s all about the gimmick, but they hope that people will come.

How much does a pint cost? Well apparently is up to the market forces: a new pub in Manhattan offers a menu in which prices of the dishes and drinks will rise or fall according to the demand in the pub.

The Beer Exchange.

The prices will depend on the visitor’s demand, and they will change in a 25 cents jumps. For example a price of  a single glass of whisky could start at 10 bucks or 4 bucks , depending on the demand,  so popular drinks will be more expensive while less popular drinks will be much cheaper.

The owners admit that the stock theme is just a marketing gimmick, but they hope that the low prices, of some of the drinks and dishes, will attract the clients.

Ailon.

The CEO Game.

The major international banks Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan and UBS are charged in fraud. The banks are being charged in miss leading Milan’s city hall in investments it made using those banks. Those investments caused a loss of over 870 million Euros.

Ailon.

The CEO Game.

The video content site continue to entertain millions of visitors from around the world – But Google are far less than pleased: The site simply isn’t making enough money.

YouTube only exists for 5 years, but it seems like it was part of our live since ever. It’s hard to recall what we did before YouTube , when we had the rush to hear some old song or entertain ourselves for few minutes.

Turned 5 years old

Not only , we the consumers, are having hard time to remember how was life before YouTube, the life of Cinema and Television corporations had also  changed. Only that they look back in sorrow. Since YouTube’s breakthrough they had lost most control on the habits of the consumers.

Since the site was first open for the public it had few ups and downs, the most important one was it being bought by Google in 2007 in a deal worth 1.65 milliard dollars. Although YouTube has a financial and marketing support of Google, It been marked as one of the worlds’ most popular sites, and the fact that every minute visitor are uploading 20 hours of video, YouTube is still hardly pays for itself. With costs of over 365 million dollars a year for bandwidth and advertising revenues hardly reaching the 500 million dollar mark. Google has beating itself for over two years about how to produce more revenues that will maximize YouTube’s potential.

YouTube’s main problem is the difficulty to  attach advertisements to 98% of videos it got. Google had made a major step in the last weeks when they added the automatic caption service which will aid in this subject.

Ailon.

The CEO Game.

Google, YouTube’s parent company has announced on its blog that automatic captions will start rolling out across the site. The world’s largest video hosting service will begin automatically add subtitles to videos using Google’s voice recognition program. Thus YouTube, will become far more accessible to speakers of different languages, the hearing impaired and additionally YouTube will make one giant leap towards search engine dominance.

Youtube - Now With Captions

YouTube announced on November 2009, on launching a new automatic caption service. The service was good but limited, it offered English captions but those were found only on 13 of YouTube’s streaming channels. These include National Geographic, Columbia, as well as most Google and YouTube channels. But, from this day and on, all users will be able to use Google’s speech recognition technology, in order to create subtitles for their content.

Google already admitted that the new technology is not perfect, nevertheless it still provides a better solution than manually captioning the content. In a demonstration held the phrase “sim card” became “salmon” in text, but Google also promises that the technology “will continue to improve with time”.

Automatic captioning, will allow the hearing impaired to enjoy video content over the web, without any need for additional help or program. In addition, the service will allow watching content with no need for speakers, that might intrude the surrounding environment. The automatic captioning service, is currently supporting only English soundtracks, but Google says that making it international is its top priority and it is only a matter of time before they will achieve that.

Still, that does not mean you won’t be able to enjoy the clips in your own language. The English subtitles could be translated with one button click to any of the 50 languages supported by Google’s translation service.

How will it work? Upon uploading a video to the site, the user would be able to create an automatic caption of the clip’s soundtrack and then fix it manually, if there is a need. The user then, would be able to download the subtitles file to the personal computer in a SUB or SRT file format. Users who already uploaded content, are expected to find a new button for requesting captions for their existing content. According to Google, processing each video could take some time. Hence, Google promises to add more servers if users will experience a slow service.

One of the big challenges of the video medium is whether it can be made accessible to everyone, and now Google is raising the standard and doing just that. In the web 2.0 age, where “content is king”, Google- the web’s searching giant, will become even bigger by “writing down” and indexing every video we have got.

Omer Shachnai

The CEO Game.

Milestone for iTunes: 10 billion songs sold in less than seven years.

Apple had launched the iTunes Music Store for the first time in the US in April of 2003. By the end of that year, Apple had sold more than 25 million songs. Three years later, on February 2006, business was still a booming and sales reached one billion. Now, seven years since iTunes’ debut, another achievement was reached: 10 billion songs sold. Amazingly and even more, if you recall that it was only a while ago Apple was celebrating crossing the five billion songs sold barrier. On February 24, 2010, just a couple of days ago, Apple’s song download counter hit the mark, something it has been counting down to for the last two weeks.

iTunes

The tenth billion song was sold on February 24, as aforementioned, which happens to be Steve Jobs, Apple’s well famous CEO’s birthday. The 10 billionth song, “Guess Things Happen That Way” by Johnny Cash, was downloaded by Louie Sulcer of Woodstock, Georgia. As the winner on Apple’s 10 Billion Songs Countdown contest, Louie will receive a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card, which can buy some 7000 of the hottest songs, or 14,500-20,000 songs on sale. Simply, Plenty. The card can also be used to buy iPhone apps from the app store.

The iTunes online music store is considered one of the “saviors” of the music industry: it revolutionized the entire industry and the way we consume music. Moreover, it has been the first online store which reached such widespread sales and thus, made all label companies shift their activities to the Internet. The sales increased rapidly and constantly and on the last quarter, Apple made a hefty profit of 520$ million from songs sold.

“This has been the birth of legal downloading,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said, when it was first launched in 2003. “We are going to fight illegal downloading by competing with it. We aren’t going to sue it. We’re not going to ignore it. We’re going to compete with it. With iTunes you are supporting artists. You’re not stealing. It’s good karma”. Clearly, it is good karma. Especially for Apple which has used the store to become America’s number one music vendor in a short time.

To celebrate the milestone, Apple published the all-time bestsellers in the store’s history. Leading in the top of the list, is the song, “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas, that also take the third place with “Boom Boom Pow”. Between them, in the second place you can find “Poker Face” by the provocative Lady Gaga. In the fourth place, “I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz and in the fifth place “Viva la Vida” by the British band of Coldplay.

But, It isn’t Apple’s only milestone lately. Just a month ago, the app store (Apple’s online application store) passed three billion downloads, a huge feat, particularly when you consider that the app store is younger than iTunes.

In conclusion, that’s billions in revenue that iTunes has generated for the entire music industry, but also billions that Apple has done for itself and while competitors came up, none even reached Apple’s dominance. Well “Guess Things Happen That Way” indeed.

Omer Shachnai

The CEO Game.

Two more banks in the US were closed during the last weekend, increasing the number of banks that were closed since the beginning of the year to 22.

Carson River Community Bank from Nevada held 51.5 million dollars in assets and 50 million dollars in deposits, while Rainier Pacific Bank from Washington held 717.8 million dollars in assets and 446.2 million dollars in deposits. The closing of River bank will cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund 7.9 million dollar, while closing Rainier bank will cost 95.2 million dollar to the fund.

Rainier Pacific Bank.

According to estimations  by fund officials, closing bank rate is expected to overcome in the coming months. The “problematic” banks list of the insurance fund in the fourth quarter climbed to 702 from 552 in the previous quarter, although the industry recorded a small profit.

The banks earned 914 million dollars in the fourth quarter, compared to the loss of 37.8 billion dollars during the same period last year, which is considered the climax of the crisis. Still, nearly one in three banks has reported a loss last quarter.

During the year of 2009- 140 banks were closed, the highest number since 1992. These closers have cost the Deposit Insurance Fund more than 30 billion dollars. In comparison, during 2008- 25 banks were closed, while during 2007 only 3 banks were closed. The Deposit Insurance Fund estimates that the cost of closing the banks will climb to 100 billion dollars during the next four years.

Lucy.

The CEO Game.