Whatever You Do, Don't Buy an Airline Ticket On...



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Shoppers looking for the cheapest airfare can learn something from stand-up comedians: It's all about timing.

Ticket prices are highest on weekends, on average, according to online travel agencies, fare trackers and airline pricing executives.

When's the best time to buy? Travel experts have long said Tuesday is when sales are most often in place, which is true. An analysis of domestic fares shows that Wednesday also has good—and occasionally better—ticket prices.

Though prices fluctuate frequently and the ups and downs of airline prices can frustrate and anger consumers, airline pricing actually does follow a cycle during the week. Many sales, in which some seats are discounted by 15% to 25% typically, are launched Monday night. That was true again this week when AirTran Airways launched a sale to all its destinations. Competitors typically match the lower prices Tuesday morning. By Thursday or Friday, many sales have already expired.

Two weeks ago, a Chicago-Atlanta round-trip ticket for April travel dates cost $209 on Tuesday and Wednesday on American and Delta, but then $301 for the next four days. When Tuesday rolled around last week, the fare dropped to $219 at both airlines for the April 8-15 itinerary. By Friday it was up to $307 at both American and Delta. Come Tuesday this week, the fare was down to $229.

Airlines don't manage their inventory as actively on weekends, so if cheap seats sell on some flights, prices automatically jump higher. Fare analysts may decide later to offer more seats at cheaper prices, but not until they come back to work on Monday, according to airline pricing executives.

Rick Seaney, chief executive of FareCompare.com, studied three years worth of airline prices and concluded that 3 p.m. Eastern time Tuesday was the best time to buy. "That's when the maximum number of cheapest seats are in the marketplace," he said.

Airlines say weekends are their slowest bookings days, and ticket-sellers say they are the most expensive. Orbitz.com said its average ticket sold on Saturday was $791 last year, based on all domestic and international air tickets it sold. That was 7% higher than Friday's average price.

Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz, the three big online ticket-sellers, all say their busiest day for bookings is Tuesday and the slowest day is Saturday. Expedia says Saturdays have about half the volume of Tuesdays.

These days, the Internet makes ticket-buying available any time, and announcements of sales can be zapped to potential buyers electronically. Nonetheless, the pattern still remains in place.

But the dynamic may change. Some airlines say that social-media outlets, such as Twitter and Facebook, are beginning to disrupt the cycle. Some airlines are sending sales out directly to customers at all hours, making pricing far less predictable each day. Or carriers may tweet an hour-long sale. As a result, airlines can match competitors more nimbly, sneak sales under the radar of competitors and send deeply discounted offers anytime to customers who sign up for fare alerts.

So far, social-media sales still account for a small number of seats actually sold, but give it time.

"The tools we have make it a lot more dynamic," said Brad Hawkins, a spokesman for Southwest Airlines.

Source:

Scott McCartnery, "Whatever You Do, Don't Buy an Airline Ticket On...," The Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2011

The Internet Is Running Out Of Space...Kind Of

On February 2 around 4 a.m., the Internet will run out of its current version of IP addresses. At least that’s what one Internet Service Provider is predicting based on a rate of about one million addresses every four hours.

Hurricane Electric has launched Twitter and Facebook accounts that count down to what it has termed the “IPcalypse.”

Every device that is connected to the Internet gets a unique code called an IP address (it looks like this). The current system, IPv4, only supports about 4 billion individual IPv4 addresses.

As PC World‘s Chris Head explained in a blog post yesterday, some of these addresses are reusable. The problem, however, is that their one-time use counterparts will eventually lead to the complete depletion of IP addresses.

Fortunately, some smart folks foresaw this problem long before we did and invented IPv6, a system that invokes both letters and digits to handle 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses (shall we just call it “a zillion?”).

Hurricane Electric’s doomsday campaign encourages other Internet service providers to transition to that system. Fortunately, the Internet Society‘s Wiki assures us that IPv4 and IPv6 can coexist during the transition despite being largely incompatible. Software and hardware developers are working on transition mechanisms, and most operating systems install support for IPv6 by default.

Since many of us still have some canned food and bottled water stacked up in our basement from the Y2K era, we should be OK either way.

Source:

Sarah Kessler, "The Internet Is Running Out of Space...Kind Of," Mashable, January 23, 2011

Photographer Takes Pictures Of Pictures

If a Picture's Worth a Thousand Words, How About a Picture of a Picture?

Barry Newman shot Mustafah Abdulaziz shooting

Tom Powel shooting Ms. Minter's picture.

 

Marilyn Minter takes pictures. Then she paints pictures of the pictures she has taken. When she's finished, she hires Tom Powel to take pictures of her pictures of her pictures.

His pictures go into books and catalogs to catch the eye of buyers willing to pay $100,000 or more for a painting by Ms. Minter. For his pictures of her pictures, Mr. Powel earns $2,000 a day.

"I don't know how Tom does it, but he's the best I've seen," Ms. Minter said in her SoHo loft one day. "If you took a sloppy picture of one of my pictures, it'd look like...a photograph."

She was leaning over a table, brush in hand, varnishing her latest creation: "Sludge," a painting of a Photoshopped photo of a glossy shoe overlaid with dribbles of translucent goop.

"Dog hair," said Ms. Minter, picking something off the surface. Then she straightened up and said, "I'm done."

Her painting glared in the track lights. Standing to one side, Mr. Powel said quietly, "Varnish. My nemesis."

His job now was to kill the glare and capture the gloss.

Mr. Powel, 54 years old, began doing this kind of work in 1985. Digital cameras and computer software have since become tools of manipulation, but Mr. Powel seeks absolute fidelity.

He resists the urge to make his pictures look better than the pictures he takes pictures of. He's a star in an occupation that stands out for self-effacement.

The occupation doesn't exactly have a name. "Copy photographer" works well enough, or maybe "archivist." Photojournalist Mustafah Abdulaziz, who came along for this newspaper to photograph Mr. Powel taking pictures of Ms. Minter's picture, said, "I didn't know this was a job."

While news photographers have lost business to Flickr's amateur crowd, photographers of pictures are in big demand.

Collectors today often don't get to stand in front of an artwork before they buy it, especially if they live in China. They see a picture of the artwork first—and it had better be a good one.

"A lot of our clients experience pictures only through the illustrations in our catalogs," says Conor Jordan, who runs the Impressionist auctions at Christie's in New York. For him, pictures of pictures are "of pivotal importance in the art market."

Contemplative retreats like the Metropolitan Museum of Art are hangouts now for the Flickr crowd. Fanny Martin, a French tourist, was there recently, photographing a 2003 painting of the Cotton Club in Harlem.

She had been to Harlem herself. "I'm taking a picture of a picture of my memory," she said. Down in the museum shop, the postcard choice was sparse. "Why buy postcards of art when you can take a picture of it with your telephone?" said a clerk.

One postcard the museum sells is a Rembrandt self-portrait. In it, Rembrandt looks tan and his backdrop yellowish. But up in the gallery, he looks sallow and his backdrop greenish. The postcard is way off. Without holding it up to the original, you might never know.

Someone buying a million-dollar picture wouldn't appreciate a surprise like that. In the world of picture photography, there's one place where such surprises never happen: a gray, windowless Midtown Manhattan room containing the late Richard Avedon's old Saltzman enlarger, fitted with a $30,000 camera that makes 600-megabyte files.

That's where Chris Nesbit works. At the Avedon Foundation, he photographs the photographer's own prints. A while ago, he was painstakingly photographing one of Norman Mailer. "This job is the height of self-restraint," Mr. Nesbit said.

But it pays: His photos of 65 Avedon photos went into the catalog for a Christie's auction in Paris last November. The photos (not the photos of the photos) sold for $7.5 million.

Ms. Minter's loft isn't a gray room: It has prints on walls, paint cans on shelves, pipes above, boards below. Mr. Powel works on location. For him, the task is to take a picture of one picture while blotting out the slightest glimmer of anything else.

"OK, let's do it," he told two helpers after Ms. Minter, who is 62, had hung her shoe painting on a white wall. Mr. Powel's crew set up lights while he took prints off walls and hid paint cans. He positioned a camera between the lights and connected it to a laptop.

As he stood behind the camera, Mr. Powel took off his glasses, and eyeballed the painting for what seemed like a long time. "This is what I wanted to see," he said. And then he pushed the plunger on the shutter cable.

The entire procedure took several hours. Fortunately, Mr. Abdulaziz was there to take pictures of Mr. Powel taking his picture of Ms. Minter's picture. In a story of a thousand words, his pictures will surely be worth it.

Source:
Barry Newman, "A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words, But How About a Picture of a Picture?" The Wall Street Journal, January 14, 2011

A Makeover for a Starbucks Mermaid

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Source: Felipe Torres, http://twitpic.com/3ncktp

Logomania has been in the air since the chief executive of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, announced another redesign of the Starbucks logo last week.

In March, on its 40th anniversary, the Starbucks name will be entirely removed from its logo, leaving only a stylized illustration of the green mermaid, which Mr. Schultz calls “the siren.” The decision set off a wave of criticism from designers, much like the Gap logo fiasco last year. Gap unveiled a new logo so bland that the company was bombarded with complaints and scrapped it.

Why does such a small change create such alarm?

Fear of change may have something to do with it. Trademarks and logos are so integrally linked to our daily lives that any tinkering with the familiar is suspect — and to be avoided.

And altering the symbolic public face of a corporation is often accompanied both by unreasonable expectations of success and by superstitious resistance.

Paul Rand, a graphic designer who designed the I.B.M., ABC, Cummins Engine and Westinghouse logos, which have been in use for decades, said logos and trademarks were like good-luck charms or rabbits’ feet. In his book “Design, Form and Chaos” (Yale University Press, 1993), he writes, “There are as many reasons for designing a new logo, or updating an old one, as there are opinions.”

He added, “The belief that a new or updated design will, like a talisman, magically turn around any business is not uncommon.”

A redesigned logo may imply a new or improved product, but, as Rand said, “this boost is temporary unless the company lives up to these dreams.”

So when Mr. Schultz introduced the new logo in an online video, he did something chief executives don’t usually do: He explained the symbolic relevance of the change, hoping that his own confidence in the new format would persuade critics.

The new mermaid mark “embraces and respects our heritage,” Mr. Schultz said. But “the world has changed and Starbucks has changed.”

By allowing the siren to “come out of the circle,” he said, the company is thinking “beyond coffee.” He used sincere brand-speak, the jargon commonly used by designers selling their designs to executives like Mr. Schultz.

“If in the business of communications, ‘image is king,’ the essence of this image, the logo, is the jewel in its crown,” Paul Rand argued.

This means that not only is the logo valuable, it also should be crystalline and recognizable. The lone Starbucks siren is familiar, but is it good design? The new minimalist form is crisper, but without the circle of type, the mermaid appears naked.

Is it hubris to believe that a slick version of the mermaid, in green, can sell coffee? The rock star known as Prince replaced his name with a symbol. Maybe Starbucks is the rock star of coffees.

Source:
Steven Heller, "A Makeover for a Starbucks Mermaid," The New York Times, January 8, 2011

Can Social Media Take Down Your Business?

Could one or two employees take down your business with a funny but nasty YouTube video, or a disparaging Facebook post? Absolutely!

A 2009 YouTube video made by two rogue Domino’s employees left a bad taste in the mouth of over 1 million viewers who watched it.

While Domino’s executives initially hoped the controversy would die down, the perpetual mushroom effect of Twitter tweets reminded potential customers, “When you think about Domino’s think nose snot.” The hammering of bad publicity forced the company to close the store at which the employees worked. The fired employees face federal food-tampering charges.

But what’s important here is not the amount of chatter, but the emotion, intensity and negativity associated with a brand in a crisis. Words like “disgusting,” and “snot” hounded Dominos. The word “Motrin” also found its way into the conversation, echoing the controversial Motrin Moms commercial that went negatively viral.

Can employees do this without consequences? That depends on your HR policy, its enforceability and whether the employees break other laws.

But, every employee’s rights to privacy complicate this matter, as does the fact that the National Labor Relations Act protects even non-union employees.

As recently as 2008, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued an advice memorandum upholding the social media policy of Sears Holdings that prohibited the “disparagement of company’s or competitors’ products, services, executive leadership, employees, strategy and business prospects.”

After 2008, however, the composition of the NLRB changed dramatically, and a recent complaint issued by an NLRB regional director might portend a shift in how the agency views social media policies. 

Setting Precedent
In what labor officials and lawyers view as a ground-breaking case involving workers and social media, the National Labor Relations Board on November 2010 accused a company of illegally firing an employee after she criticized her supervisor on her Facebook page. Click here for the NLRB News Release link.  

The yet-to-be resolved case involves an ambulance service, American Medical Response of Connecticut, who fired an emergency medical technician, accusing her, among other things, of violating a policy that bars employees from depicting the company “in any way” on Facebook or other social media sites in which they post pictures of themselves.

The NLRB is suing the company, alleging that the company illegally terminated the employee, and that the company “maintained and enforced an overly broad blogging and Internet posting policy.”

The NLRB argues that the company's rule was overly broad and inappropriately limited an employees' right to discuss working conditions among themselves, according to The New York Times. "This is fairly straightforward case under the National Labor Relations Act -- whether it takes place on Facebook or at the water cooler, it was employees talking jointly about working conditions, in this case about their supervisor, and they have a right to do that," said NLRB general counsel Lafe Solomon.

“Such provisions constitute interference with employees in the exercise of the right to engage in protected concerted activity,” the NLRB found.

Companies have reason to enforce policies aimed at protecting their image and brand. Although Facebook is often seen as a more casual forum for personal discussions, social media may well be the new "water cooler" for employer conversation.

A hearing before an NLRB administrative law judge is scheduled for Jan. 25, 2011.

Sidebar:
Interestingly, the National Labor Relations Board has an very active Facebook presence. It can be found at: http://www.facebook.com/NLRBpage

Update:
NLRB Settles Complaint as "Concerted Activity"
On February 7, 2011 - the day before the scheduled NLRB hearing, the NLRB announced that it had settled the Complaint with the employer. Importantly, under the settlement, the employer agreed to revise its Internet posting policy, which the NLRB had alleged was overly broad and improperly restricted employees from discussing their wages, hours and working conditions with co-workers and others while not at work.

While this settlement was reached at the "Complaint" stage and did not established NLRB precedent, the Complaint itself is clearly an indication of how the NLRB views employees' use of social media

Related News...

In First, NLRB Goes After Thomson Reuters Over Twitter

Labor Board plans to file complaint about employee disciplined for Tweet

- Lucia Moses , Adweek (April 6, 2011)

In an apparent first, Thomson Reuters could face federal penalties for allegedly disciplining an employee over his use of Twitter, according to the Newspaper Guild of New York.

The Guild, which represents more than 420 Thomson Reuters employees, announced Wednesday that the National Labor Relations Board planned to issue a complaint, the equivalent of formal charges, against the company. According to the Guild, the employee in question was a union activist who was responding to a management solicitation for opinions about the company. The employee tweeted that the company should “deal honestly with Guild members.” Thomson Reuters hasn’t replied to a request for comment.

The Guild said the NLRB would also charge Thomson Reuters with illegally cutting employee pay in the amount of $2.4 million a year; and with imposing rules that illegally bar the union from bargaining over wages.

The NLRB complaint would lead to a trial before an administrative law judge unless both parties settle, according to the Guild.

Sources:
1. Steven Greenhouse, "Worker Rights Extend To Facebook, Labor Board Says," New York Times, December 20, 2010
2. Laura Strachan, "NLRB: Facebook Complaints Are Protected Speech," Findlaw.com, November 10, 2010
3. Lynne Curry, "Social Media Can Turn A Prank Into A Crisis," Anchorage Daily News, December 19,2010
4. Melissa Bell, "Facebook Job Whining Is Protected Speech, Say Labor Board," Washington Post, November 9, 2010
5. National Labor Relations Board, "Compaint alleges Connecticut company illegally fired employee over Facebook comments," November 2, 2010
6. National Labor Relations Board, "Settlement reached in case involving discharge for Facebook comments," February 8, 2010
7. Lucia Moses, "In First, NLRB Goes After Thomson Reuters Over Twitter," Adweek, April 6, 2011