How do consumers create markets? The case of the minimoto

Public release date: 15-Oct-2013
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Contact: Mary-Ann Twist
JCR@bus.wisc.edu
608-255-5582
University of Chicago Press Journals

Consumers have the power to do more than just respond to products that companies put on the market; they can actually change and develop new markets, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

"Firm-centric models of market development view consumers as relatively passive, downstream actors, whose agency and ability to affect a market are limited to decision making in a realm of choices controlled by marketing institutions," write authors Diane M. Martin and John W. Schouten (both Aalto University). "Recently consumer culture scholars have explored the power of various kinds of consumer resistance to change markets or develop new ones."

The authors studied the emergence and growth of a new market within the motorcycle industry, the minimoto. The original minimoto is a child's minibike that has been modified significantly to be ridden and raced by adults. Minimoto aficionados are passionate about the bikes, and there is currently a thriving global market for parts to modify stock minibikes from major manufacturers such as Honda, Kawasaki, and Yamaha.

The mainstream motorcycle industry has always viewed minimotos as a niche product in a shrinking segment of dirt bikes. The authors explain the emergence of the minimoto market as a process in three stages: consumer innovation, where creative consumers mobilize available objects and other resources to overcome barriers; community formation, when creative consumers engage other people in the same activities, leading to the development of products, practices, and infrastructures; and a final stage of market emergence.

"Such organic market emergence distributes the risk and the investment of market building broadly among consumers rather than concentrating it at the level of the firm," the authors write. "And it offers insight into the kinds of actors that have the power to shift markets in fundamental ways."

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Diane M. Martin and John W. Schouten. "Consumption-Driven Market Emergence." Journal of Consumer Research: February 2014. For more information, contact John Schouten or visit http://ejcr.org/.

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Public release date: 15-Oct-2013
[


| E-mail



| Share

]

Contact: Mary-Ann Twist
JCR@bus.wisc.edu
608-255-5582
University of Chicago Press Journals

Consumers have the power to do more than just respond to products that companies put on the market; they can actually change and develop new markets, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

"Firm-centric models of market development view consumers as relatively passive, downstream actors, whose agency and ability to affect a market are limited to decision making in a realm of choices controlled by marketing institutions," write authors Diane M. Martin and John W. Schouten (both Aalto University). "Recently consumer culture scholars have explored the power of various kinds of consumer resistance to change markets or develop new ones."

The authors studied the emergence and growth of a new market within the motorcycle industry, the minimoto. The original minimoto is a child's minibike that has been modified significantly to be ridden and raced by adults. Minimoto aficionados are passionate about the bikes, and there is currently a thriving global market for parts to modify stock minibikes from major manufacturers such as Honda, Kawasaki, and Yamaha.

The mainstream motorcycle industry has always viewed minimotos as a niche product in a shrinking segment of dirt bikes. The authors explain the emergence of the minimoto market as a process in three stages: consumer innovation, where creative consumers mobilize available objects and other resources to overcome barriers; community formation, when creative consumers engage other people in the same activities, leading to the development of products, practices, and infrastructures; and a final stage of market emergence.

"Such organic market emergence distributes the risk and the investment of market building broadly among consumers rather than concentrating it at the level of the firm," the authors write. "And it offers insight into the kinds of actors that have the power to shift markets in fundamental ways."

###

Diane M. Martin and John W. Schouten. "Consumption-Driven Market Emergence." Journal of Consumer Research: February 2014. For more information, contact John Schouten or visit http://ejcr.org/.

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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-10/uocp-hdc_1101513.php
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NSA collecting email and messaging contacts worldwide, Yahoo moves to encrypt webmail by default

Don't think that the NSA's bulk communication data collection is focused solely on the communications themselves. The Washington Post has published more Edward Snowden documents which reveal that the agency collects large volumes of contact lists from email and instant messaging users around the world. While the NSA gathers the information on foreign soil, its method reportedly prevents it from automatically screening out any Americans in the list. The NSA and anonymous officials argue that American laws prevent analysts from accessing data unless they believe there's a foreign target hidden with, but the strategy still has the government storing contacts for "millions" of people.

Yahoo customers are some of the most common targets of this surveillance, as the company doesn't normally encrypt webmail sessions. That's about to change, however. The internet firm tells the Post that its webmail service will default to using SSL encryption on January 8th, catching up with Facebook and Google. Yahoo isn't officially tightening its security in response to NSA activity, and using SSL won't necessarily stop interceptions when spies frequently have workarounds. However, the upcoming encryption will at least complicate any snooping -- whether or not it's part of an intelligence operation.

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/14/nsa-collecting-email-and-messaging-contacts-worldwide/?ncid=rss_truncated
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Reid, McConnell praise progress in U.S. debt limit, funding talks

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on Monday that he and his Republican counterpart, Mitch McConnell, have made strong progress toward reaching a deal to reopen the federal government and lift the U.S. debt ceiling, but there is still work ahead.

"We've made tremendous progress. We are not there yet," Reid said on the Senate floor. "We hope that with good fortune ... that perhaps tomorrow will be a bright day."

Reid and McConnell are trying to reach an agreement that would end a shutdown of many government agencies on October 1 and lift the debt limit before the U.S. Treasury exhausts the nation's remaining borrowing capacity on October 17, raising the risk of default.

"We've had a good day, we had a good day yesterday," McConnell said. "It's safe to say we've made substantial progress and we look forward to making more progress in the near future."

(Reporting By David Lawder and Richard Cowan; editing by Christopher Wilson)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/reid-mcconnell-praise-progress-u-debt-limit-funding-222927114--business.html
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One Direction’s Louis Tomlinson Got Himself A Pac-Man Tattoo

WACKA WACKA WACKA

Posted by: Trent on October 14, 2013|

One Direction member Louis Tomlinson may not have been born until years after Pac-Man ruled the video game world but that doesn’t mean he’s not a big fan of the 8-bit arcade character. Tomlinson got himself a new Pac-Man tattoo recently and started showing it off over the weekend. A bunch of eagle-eyed 1D fans noticed the tattoo on his arm and started sharing photos. Click below to have a look at Louis‘s newest tattoo acquisition.

Fans are loving Louis Tomlinson’s latest tattoo. The One Direction boy-bander has dedicated some skin art to the old school video game Pac-Man. / @About1D_ Louis’s new tattoo is pac-man! So cute! -C / @lookuptomalik @Louis_Tomlinson YOU HAVE A PAC-MAN TATTOO! HAHAHAHA I LOVE IT! / @Team_Louis_OneD I love @Louis_Tomlinson new PAC Man tattoo!

LOL! All these poser 1D fans claiming to the Pac-Man tattoo are hilarious. Kids. They just don’t really understand how cool this tattoo really is. Even tho it’s not something that I would get myself, I can appreciate the homage to the awesome early 80′s on Louis‘s arm. I can’t say that I don’t think Tomlinson may regret this tattoo some day but I can appreciate it now. Do you like Louis‘s new ink?

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Source: http://www.pinkisthenewblog.com/2013-10-14/one-directions-louis-tomlinson-got-himself-a-pac-man-tattoo
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WIRED Space Photo of the Day: Lonely Planet

Multicolor image from the Pan-STARRS1 telescope of the free-floating planet PSO J318.5-22, in the constellation of Capricornus. The planet is extremely cold and faint, about 100 billion times fainter in optical light than the planet Venus. Most of its energy is emitted at infrared wavelengths. The image is 125 arcseconds on a side.

Image: N. Metcalfe & Pan-STARRS 1 Science Consortium [high-resolution]

Caption: University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy

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Virtual Strangers: A 'Journey' With Anna

A screenshot from Journey.

thatgamecompany

A screenshot from Journey.

thatgamecompany

Not long ago, when I got a PlayStation 3, the recommendations started rolling in: play this, play that, play my favorite game.

But a bunch of people said, with a sort of excited urgency — particularly people who know me — "Play Journey."

Journey is a PS3 exclusive from a game company called, yes, Thatgamecompany. It's won a bunch of awards from a bunch of different places — its music was even nominated for a Grammy for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media, where it competed with the scores of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Adventures Of Tintin, The Artist, The Dark Knight Rises, and Hugo.

Here's how the company describes it: "Journey is an interactive parable, an anonymous online adventure to experience a person's life passage and their intersections with others." As beautiful as the game is, that is not a description that excels in the area of specificity.

The basics are these: You appear on the screen in the form of a hooded and caped figure (I'd be lying if I denied that there was something nice about appearing in the form of what looked to me like a woman), alone in the desert. There's a mountain in the distance. That's where you're going. If you follow your nose, you wind up with a scarf that flaps behind you that can be charged up to give you flight.

And you just start traveling. Those dunes, those dunes ... you can walk on the sand, but when you're going downhill, you slide like a skier, leaving a little trail, making a ffffffft noise with your feet, flapping your cape. You skim the ground, you float, you leap. You trudge up a dune and peek over, then push past and slide again, steering between rock formations, ffffffffft, ffffffft, for long stretches. It is as close to understanding what being physically graceful would feel like as a not-so-graceful person is likely to get. (I ... well, I hypothesize.)

You look tiny sometimes. You feel tiny.

thatgamecompany

A Journey screenshot.

thatgamecompany

But one thing that distinguishes Journey is that you run into other hooded figures being played by other real people. For me, this was the part of gaming I had decided would wait a long, long, long time, because I associated it with nightmarish-sounding stories about getting yelled at in a headset because you couldn't load the gun fast enough. Or getting yelled at because your name sounded like a woman, or getting yelled at for any number of other reasons, and frankly, if I wanted to get yelled at, I'd roll down the window and drive slowly in the left lane. I knew I didn't know what I was doing yet; I didn't need anybody to be mad.

But Tuesday night, once I was done with the opening chapter and made it into the next piece of the story, I headed up a dune, and I saw her — another person who looked just like me, except with a longer scarf, which I assumed meant she was much better at this than I was, since your scarf grows in length as you collect pieces.

There are some advantages to traveling together: you can charge up each other's scarves, for one thing, so you can fly. But for me, it was an advantage that she seemed to know what she was doing and where she was going, and I didn't. I was very sure — the me sitting in my living room — that she would very quickly get sick of me — the me who could barely fly. I figured she'd wander off rather than drag my sad novice self around the desert. I wouldn't have blamed her.

I immediately named her "Anna," for no particular reason, despite the fact that she could have been, in reality, a 45-year-old male banker or an 11-year-old boy. In my favorite fantasy, she's a 14-year-old nerd girl who will one day be a game designer and loved Pitch Perfect. I can imagine these things; the desert isn't the only thing that's subject to interpretation.

A Journey screenshot. (This is not me and Anna. But it was just like this!)

thatgamecompany

A Journey screenshot. (This is not me and Anna. But it was just like this!)

thatgamecompany

We could communicate only through pressing the button that makes you go, "BING!" That's all it does. "BING!" Sometimes it does it in different tones. But it's always that: "BING!" So I said, "BING!" and Anna said, "BING!" We climbed up a dune together, and before long, we were scooting through rosy pink sand, side by side.

And the strangest thing happened: I had this little swell of happiness. Now I wasn't doing everything by trial-and-mostly-error. Now we were on a trip, and even though we could only say "BING!", we had clearly decided to travel together for a bit. I still figured I'd fall behind before long, but for the moment, it felt ... a little joyful.

We found ourselves at a tower. I'm no genius scarf-wise, but I knew we wanted to get up to the top of that tower. I flew, but I couldn't get up high enough. Anna flew straight to the top. "Well," I thought, "That was fun. I'll go back to being a loner. HAVE A GOOD TRIP, ANNA!"

And then she flitted back down. She landed next to me and charged up my scarf again. She headed back up and disappeared. I flew up again. I fell. She came back to get me. Again.

This went on for a while. She probably rescued me three or four times, until I finally figured out how to get to the top. I experienced for the first time the negative part of not being able to say anything except "BING!" Because I couldn't tell her, "Thank you." I couldn't tell her, "That was really nice of you; as you can tell, I have no idea what I'm doing." We just went on.

But the real test was The Wall. We were trying to get over this wall, and I just could not figure out the right combination of things to do in the right order, and she kept flying over the wall, and I kept crashing into it and sliding down and landing with a soft puff! in the sand. I would think I was ready; I would think I was going to make it this time, and then I wouldn't, again. I felt terrible, because she kept flying over and then coming back. I would say "BING!" meaning "I'm sorry I'm sorry," but I think she just read "BING!" as "HELP!", and she kept coming back.

If there had been a button for "GO ON! SAVE YOURSELF!" I'd have pressed it, several times. I even wandered in the wrong direction briefly, trying to get her to go on without me, because I felt so bad. But then I'd see the little glow that meant that somewhere, she was BING!ing at me. And I'd go back to the wall, and she'd still be there.

We went through this again, after I'd gotten over the wall, when we encountered a sort of high structure you had to walk across that I, for some reason, kept falling off of. Just walking, I would fall off and have to fly all the way back up again.

I was really, really, really mad by this point. Why did I keep falling off? She'd come back down to get me and show me again, flying up and landing perfectly on the top. And I'd fly up and land, and then start walking, and then fall off. (I eventually realized I needed to adjust the camera angle so I could better see what constituted walking in a straight line. You live, you learn.) But at one point, I fell off, and I stood on the ground and — no fooling — had a tantrum. I went like this: "BING BING BING BING BING! BING BING BING BING BING BING BING!"

She floated back down. "BING!" She flew back up. I flew back up, and this time, I got it. Later, when we encountered something scary, she went "BING!" and I went "BING!", and I'm pretty sure they were both profanities.

We played for a while longer, but eventually, I had to quit; I knew I didn't have enough time to finish. I was hesitant to go, though, because again, limited communication meant I couldn't say, "This was so fun, but I have to leave." I could only, you know, "BING!" at her, and she'd probably just think I wanted more help. Again.

But then at almost exactly 9:00 p.m., she vanished. My theory is that she went off to watch New Girl.

This experience, this delicate little connection with strangers, is one of the things people like about this game; it's hardly revolutionary to have experienced it. But it was revolutionary to me, as a novice — it was hard to think of another situation in which I was likely to encounter such utterly blank goodwill from another person. No visual cues, no race, no age, no gender, no body to be an advantage or disadvantage, no class, no avatar, not even a screen name to separate a "marjorie316" from a "kickbuttgamer."

It was disembodied, completely decontextualized kindness and help.

So thanks, Anna. BING BING.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2013/10/09/230676658/virtual-strangers-a-journey-with-anna?ft=1&f=1052
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A domain name plays a vital position in a industry's printing with

Solar energy is quickly gaining popularity. Many people are now using it as a viable alternative energy in their homes. If you are unsure as to whether solar energy is right for you, you've come to the right place. The following article will help inform you of all the benefits solar energy has to offer.

Get quotes from several contractors before signing any solar energy installation company. Just as with any other construction product, it pays to shop around before you commit to a particular company. Check out their reviews online and their standing with the Better Business Bureau. A little research ahead of time can save you a big headache later.

If you find that you cannot afford solar panels at the moment, you should stay up to date with new products and technologies. Scientists are regularly coming up with new technologies and materials that can be used to build more efficient and affordable panels, which means solar energy should become a more efficient solution in the future.

You should find solar panel vendors located in your area and have them inspect your property to determine what kind of panels would be best for you and how many panels will be needed. There are many vendors on the Internet but working with a professional located in another state means they might not be familiar with weather conditions.

Try getting recommendations for solar energy home equipment. If you have loved ones or colleagues that have solar energy at home, ask them to provide details of their experience or any issues they've been through with their system. It's important to consider other opinions on what you should or should not do.

When using solar power, you do not have to worry about harming the environment in any way. Fossil fuels send harmful greenhouse gases off into the atmosphere, and they contribute to global warming and climate change. However, solar cells have no impact on the environment and are safe to use.

When you're planning on installing a solar energy system, you should shop around and get a few quotes. You'll be able to see how much prices vary between providers. While you shouldn't be completely swayed by price, it's crucial that you don't just go for the cheapest since cheaper components can cost you a lot more later.

Don't assume that just because a company sells and installs solar panels means they are good and trustworthy people. Shop around. Get a minimum of three quotes. Read all contracts. Check backgrounds of potential contractors. Deal with this like any other home-improvement project that you would otherwise do.

Always look for a good and qualified contractor to install your solar system. Just because you are having a new technology installed on your home, does not mean that you should look for new contractors. The type of work is very specialized and having a quality contractor with a proven track record is critical to having your system installed properly

When most people think about solar energy, they think that it has to cost a lot of money, but it doesn't. If you want to use solar energy, but you have a limited budget, you can install solar powered lights in your yard. This is a good way to save energy without spending more than you can afford.

A charge controller is a great addition to any solar array, specifically those that are working above 10 watts on a regular basis. These small devices act as "ON" and "OFF" switches to protect your batteries. They prevent overcharging from damaging your batteries and can provide more advanced charging options depending on the make and model.

Get several quotes before making a final decision about your solar panel system. There are many companies out there selling solar panels, and they all have something different to offer. By getting quotes from several of them, you can become an informed consumer and make the best buying decision for your family.

Talk to others about solar energy. Talk to your friends and family about the ways that solar energy saves them money. Talk to them about why use of solar energy is important. They may not understand what is at stake until someone they trust can give them the information they need.

If you think you might need to replace your roof in the near future, hold off on installing solar panels. Solar panels can be difficult for some roof installers to contend with, and this means a more difficult and increasingly costly roof repair bill. If you can afford to wait on the panels and replace your roof first, this is the way to go.

If you are considering installing solar panels, but you aren't sure if you can clean them regularly, think about solar tiles for the roof. Roof tiles will help you continue with your greener change, and they are easier to physically maintain.

Particularly if you plan to sell your home someday, it is important to keep in mind that a solar-powered residence is very attractive to buyers. Therefore, purchasing such a system will generally help you command a higher selling price. This is because, as time goes on, our society is becoming more and more driven to find eco-friendly solutions to everyday problems.

As was mentioned earlier in this article, solar energy is quickly becoming a popular form of alternative energy in residential homes. Hopefully, you now have a better idea of all the benefits it can provide you. Use the information you've just read to help you make the decision as to whether or not solar energy is something that could benefit you.

Source: http://beachange.org/a-domain-name-plays-a-vital-position-in-a-industrys-printing-with/

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