Filed under: Products and services, Consumer experience, Apple Inc (AAPL), Marketing and advertising

It is still over a week and a half until Coldplay’s fourth album, Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends, is scheduled for release, but the album leaked on the internet through a torrent Wednesday. The band’s first album in just over three years has already proved itself popular with a highly downloaded single and has become the highest pre-sale album ever in Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iTunes Store, according to NME.

Prefix magazine speculates that the album’s leak has raised serious issues for the band’s label, privately-held EMI. Prefix reports that the albums second single, title track “Viva la Vida” has seen 510,000 downloads already, not as impressive as the two million its predecessor “Violet Hill” moved. The magazine also speculates that the leak will make it “unlikely that the album will be the rousing success that EMI had hoped.” This just seems to disregard the consumer base and the band’s large fanbase.

Arguably, the 510,000 downloads of “Viva la Vida” should be interpreted as that many presale downloads for the album, since the single and album pre-order are bundled together in iTunes. If that’s the case, first week sales will be an impressive, rousing success. Coldplay and EMI have taken the next logical, and predictable, step to combat the on the internet leak. NME reports that starting tonight the album will be available for streaming from the band’s MySpace page.

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Filed under: Products and services, Consumer experience, Apple Inc (AAPL), Marketing and advertising

It is still over a week and a half until Coldplay’s fourth album, Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends, is scheduled for release, but the album leaked online through a torrent Wednesday. The band’s first album in just over three years has already proved itself popular with a highly downloaded single and has become the highest pre-sale album ever in Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iTunes Store, according to NME.

Prefix magazine speculates that the album’s leak has raised serious issues for the band’s label, privately-held EMI. Prefix reports that the albums second single, title track “Viva la Vida” has seen 510,000 downloads already, not as impressive as the two million its predecessor “Violet Hill” moved. The magazine also speculates that the leak will make it “unlikely that the album will be the rousing success that EMI had hoped.” This just seems to disregard the consumer base and the band’s massive fanbase.

Arguably, the 510,000 downloads of “Viva la Vida” should be interpreted as that many presale downloads for the album, since the single and album pre-order are bundled together in iTunes. If that’s the case, first week sales will be an impressive, rousing success. Coldplay and EMI have taken the next logical, and predictable, step to combat the on the internet leak. NME reports that starting tonight the album will be available for streaming from the band’s MySpace page.

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Filed under: Wal-Mart (WMT), Marketing and advertising

When it comes to Wal-Mart’s (NYSE: WMT) impact, I’m ambivalent. In some ways it’s good, in some ways it’s bad and, on balance, it’s hard to state. I think that’s the most rational position to hold on something as complex as this company.

Well aware that its increasing size has brought increased controversy, Wal-Mart has launched a number of initiatives designed to convince you that it’s really, really good for the world. While a lot of it brings up valid points, a lot of it is propaganda that would make Lenin proud.

Take this one for example. If you go to http://www.savemoneylivebetter.com/, a site run by Wal-Mart, there’s a tiny counter at the bottom that “represents the amount of money Wal-Mart has saved American families since January 1st, 2008.” As I write this, it’s at a tiny over $123 billion, but it adds another million every 30 seconds or so.

How Wal-Mart is saving American families $2 million per minute at 4:00 AM ET is a tiny bit beyond me but hey, this is advertising. Back in March, I wrote about Wal-Mart’s claim it saves the average family $2500 per year: “the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus is set to release its finding that the claim is misleading, promoting a statistic “for which the advertiser provided no support and, in fact, conceded that there was none.”

On the SaveMoney site, Wal-Mart provides the name of a study it clams supports the statistic, but provides no link to its contents or methodology. I wonder what the Council of Better Business Bureaus would have to state about that.

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Filed under: Blogging, Productivity

If you love writing, but hate the grunt work of blogging - like inserting relevant links, tags, and images, Zemanta might be for you. It’s available as an add-on for Firefox or Internet Explorer, and a plug-in for Wordpress or Movable Type, and it automatically adds some useful stuff to your blog posts in progress on most of the major blogging platforms. It recommends links and applies them to the relevant words in your post with one click, and it also provides tags and a gallery of Creative-Commons-licensed Flickr pics you can drop in.

Zemanta currently supports Wordpress, Movable Type, LiveJournal, TypePad and Blogger, so the majority of blogs should be able to make use of it. It might be too blunt an instrument if you’ve got a really specific linking scheme going on at your blog, but for a post like this one, it came in handy: it automatically linked the word Zemanta to zemanta.com. Hey, we were going to do that by hand anyway. More importantly, it also grabs links to stories from places like CNN, the New York Times, and Technorati.

[via WebWare]

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Filed under: Business, Utilities, Office, Productivity, Web services, Beta, web 2.0

The first thing you’ll probably notice about the new web-based presentation creator, 280Slides, is that it looks an awful lot like Apple’s Keynote. As great as Keynote is, 280Slides has a few advantages: it’s free and it’s web-based. It’s got all the features you would expect from good presentation software: you can present in full-screen mode straight from the web, download your slides, or share your presentation to SlideShare. Vimeo and Youtube integration let you add video to the mix, too.

We have the ability to already see 280slides saving numerous butts at conferences. Equipment failure? No massive deal, just borrow a personal (any platform will do!) and pull your stuff from the web. Presentations were a good candidate for the next desktop function to hop aboard the “cloud computing” bandwagon and go web-based, and the folks at 280 North have pulled it off with style and functionality. Frankly, we’re a tiny relieved that we’ll never again have to ask, “Hey, does this machine have PowerPoint?”

[via Daring Fireball]

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Filed under: Press releases, Products and services, Consumer experience, Starbucks (SBUX), Marketing and advertising

Former Beatle and recently divorced Paul McCartney is reportedly planning to host a virtual dinner to raise funds for Adopt-A-Minefield, promising donors and fans who pledge $25 a new, unreleased track entitled “Lifelong Passion (Sail Away).” Those who register with McCartney’s official website, www.paulmccartney.com, and donate will also receive “some special vegetarian recipes from celebrity chef Jamie Oliver.”

It was this time a year ago that McCartney released the debut album for Starbucks’ (NASDAQ: SBUX) music label Hear Music. Also his first album upon leaving EMI after 45 years, Memory Nearly Full debuted at #3 in Billboard and sold 161,000 copies in its first week. McCartney’s website reported earlier this year that the album had sold over 1,000,000 duplicates. Last month, McCartney also gave a copy of the album away with the Mail on Sunday in the UK.

Although that album and the new track promised for donations are likely not related, McCartney has enjoyed a very profitable and successful year. Pledging such strong support for the charity is also not surprising from McCartney, and indicates another step forward for the rock icon into the digitally-based music market. In a statement announcing the virtual dinner, McCartney said, “It should be a priority to clear arable land of landmines so that communities can once again use their land to grow their own food. Some music, some fantastic recipes from Jamie and hopefully, with your help, we’ll be able to raise the much needed funds for the cause.”

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