Home › View all posts by Krikor › Page 13

Author: Krikor

Live Life Light

By Posted on Posted in Life, Motivational No Comments

“I want to be rich.”
This is a statement every single human being said once in his life, if not loudly, then with himself. Everybody wants to be rich, the poor wants to be rich and the rich wants to be even richer.

Some people are born rich and some people become rich because of hard work, of luck and sometimes a combination of both (hard work + luck) and few times because of illegal work.

But no matter how someone gets rich, they suddenly start thinking they are or became more intelligent and wiser and start seeing things from a different perspective and much better than someone standing next to them and looking from the same angle, which unfortunately most of the time is incorrect.

I don’t know why, but suddenly the whole world looks so simple for them, they start asking for problems because they think they have the solutions for everything. They allow themselves being philosophic and throwing life theories to the right and to the left and whenever they are present in a room, they believe they are the most clever person in that room. Even sometimes they convince themselves they are from a different mankind than the regular and average people.

For those who are born rich, I am sure if we take everything from them and ask them to start from scratch without any resources, sadly most of them won’t make it, even to 1% of what they have when they were born rich.

For those who became rich, no matter how hey did it, please don’t forget that few days back, you were still one of those average class people.

Many of friends who read my blog will feel concerned, I have friends who were born rich and friends who became rich, please don’t take personal.

And as a friend said to me back 12 years ago, “nobody believes me because I am not rich”.

—

By Posted on Posted in Uncategorized No Comments

L’appel de l’ange

Dans leur téléphone, il y avait toute leur vie…

New York. Aéroport Kennedy. Dans la salle d embarquement bondée, un homme et une femme se télescopent. Dispute anodine, et chacun reprend sa route.

Madeline et Jonathan ne s étaient jamais rencontrés, ils n auraient jamais dû se revoir. Mais en ramassant leurs affaires, ils ont échangé leurs téléphones portables. Lorsqu ils s aperçoivent de leur méprise, ils sont séparés par 10 000 kilomètres : elle est fleuriste à Paris, il tient un restaurant à San Francisco.
Cédant à la curiosité, chacun explore le contenu du téléphone de l autre. Une double indiscrétion et une révélation : leurs vies sont liées par un secret qu ils pensaient enterré à jamais…
Amazon.com Link

18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done

18 MINUTES clearly shows how busy people can cut through all the daily clutter and distractions and find a way to focus on those key items which are truly the top priorities in our lives.

Bregman works from the premise that the best way to combat constant and distracting interruptions is to create productive distractions of one’s own. Based upon a series of short bite-sized chapters, his approach allows us to safely navigate through the constant chatter of emails, text messages, phone calls, and endless meetings that prevent us from focusing our time on those things that are truly important to us.
Amazon.com Link

The Zappos Experience: 5 Principles to Inspire, Engage, and WOW

ZAPPOS. The name has come to stand for a new standard of customer service, an amazing online shopping experience, a great place to work, and the most impressive transformational business success story of our time. Simply put, Zappos is revolutionizing business and changing lives.

The Zappos Experience takes you through—and beyond—the playful, offbeat company culture Zappos has become famous for. Michelli reveals what occurs behind the scenes at Zappos, showing how employees at all levels operate on a day-today basis while providing the “big picture” leadership methods that have earned the company $1 billion in annual gross sales during the last ten years—with almost no advertising.
Amazon.com Link

By Posted on Posted in Marketing, Retail No Comments

During recession times, retailers always keep searching for new ways to keep the clients to come back to their stores. Some of the new trends in pulling traffic to the stores and enabling them to expand into new categories with attractive margins are:

1. Site and Store Integration
Retailers will continue to feature high-rotation products in-store, but they will also increasingly offer additional SKUs online, without taking on the additional cost and risk of stocking products in-store.

2. Automated Retail
As the online categories continues to grow, retailers will deploy more self-service technology that enables shoppers to select, buy, and check-out.

3. Prepared and Ready-to-Heat Food
The goal is to drive trips and increase average basket sizes, prepared food in particular, whether it be ready-to-eat or ready-to-heat. Consumers like the idea of shifting the meal preparation from the shopper to the retailer.

4. Instructional/Educational Space
Retailers are trying to help their shoppers learn and get the most value from the products they buy.
By offering in-store classes, retailers can attract a shopper base to spend more time in-store while building brand loyalty.

5. Interactive Space
The Apple stores style and approach. Laying products out in a more attractive environment and let shoppers trial them.

6. Retailtainment
Another way to get shoppers in the store is offering entertaining shopping experience. This is something that retailers like Disney know very well. Creating a destination that’s entertaining to visit will remain a key strategy.

7. Services
Brick-and-mortar stores need to master one of two things in order to win–being low price or being differentiated. One way to differentiate is to offer a unique set of services in-store. The right services will drive incremental trips, increase loyalty, and higher annual spend.

8. Showroom
E-commerce and price comparison apps are turning some retailers into showrooms. Some retailers will embrace this and convert their space or open new formats to take advantage of it.
These showrooms will have little or no inventory and will offer options for ordering and delivering to home and the store.

9. Social Space
Providing social space in the store will become more popular. By having places for people to just hang out–bars, restaurants, coffee shops–retailers can get shoppers to spend more time in their stores.

10. Store-Within-a-Store
Renting space to trip-driving brands within big box stores is likely to become extremely popular over the next few years. Look for retailers to take a highly rotational/seasonal approach with these mini-stores and focus on showcasing innovation.

Source: http://retailnetgroup.com/

By Posted on Posted in Apps, Mobile, Social Networking No Comments

If both a couple owns an iPhone and/or an Android based phone and are in love, then Between is the app they need to have on their mobile smartphone.

Between is a mobile service that provides a secret place for lovers to communicate and keep their precious moments.

The Korean entrepreneurs behind Between had a charming idea: Let couples create one-on-one social networks for purely private sharing.

With the app, two people can connect with each another to share private photos and secret messages. The private “chat” function includes support for emoticons, so you can dress up your sweet nothings with as many smiley faces, winks, and hearts as your sweetie can stand. In the future, the network could support coupons or other offers, enabling marketers to reach the desireable demographic of young, happy couples in search of romantic experiences and adventures.

Source

By Posted on Posted in Brands, Innovation, Startups No Comments

Gillette, the world leader in system shaving blades, will have to face some competition from a new startup called Dollar Shave Club. The startup seeks to provide consumers with $1 razors shipped to their homes (plus $2 for shipping and handling) only in the USA.

Like most good ideas, The Dollar Shave Club started with two guys who were pissed off about something and decided to do something about it… So… they teamed up with one of the world’s leading blade manufacturers and created signature 2, 4, and 6 blade razors. They’ve got everything you need in a shave: stainless steel blades, lubrication bars, and pivoting heads.

Dollar Shave Club is aptly named: You pay a dollar and you get a month’s supply of twin-blade razors shipped to you. That’s right. $1. A few more dollars and you get a few more blades. The top of the line is the “executive” where you get a month’s supply of six blade razors for $9 a month.

According to Michael Dubin, CEO and founder of Dollar Shave Club, the vast majority of that is going to marketing, as companies like Gillette and Schick work hard to hang onto marketshare in a massive industry, paying athletes and actors exorbitant endorsement contracts. Dollar Shave Club is stripping all that out.

By Posted on Posted in Uncategorized No Comments

This morning, I stopped at a traffic light in Beirut, and while taking a look at my right, i just spotted the shoe of this stranger sitting in the back of a truck with its opened doors, and without any second thought, I picked up my phone to shoot a photo without looking at the face of the man wearing it.

The following seconds, felt like ages, I had a million of thoughts inside my head, who is this guy? how old is he, what does he work, why is he sitting at the back of this truck, where is he from, where is he going, why is he wearing this old, very old shoe, how are his feet taking the cold weather, the rain, is he married, does he have kids and mainly why life is so unfair?

We have everything and we are not happy.

We wear the latest brand name fashion clothes, we buy the most comfortable shoes, we pay the monthly salary of this guy for a pair we like, we live in the luxury and warmth of our homes, we eat whatever we feel like, we drive our cars to work, we have our smartphones, our laptops, our tablets, we are connected 24/24 to the internet, we know whatever is going on the other side of the planet from the comfort of our beds while lying on a very soft mattress, we spent hours under the hot water, buy a different hair shampoo than our body shower gel, use a well known fragrance brand to mark our entrance to the office, and… and… and…, and an endless number of luxurious things we do in our lives AND sometimes we wake up and we are not happy with what we have.

I kept wondering during those long seconds, why this man cannot have what we possess, part of it or all of it, is not he human enough to enjoy things we do enjoy in our everyday life?

And then, the truck moved on the green light, while getting away, I moved my head up to look at him, he was wearing a wonderful smile on his face with a cigarette in his hand, a smile that said million of things back, maybe he was telling me he was so happy having that shoe and thanking God he was not barefooted! I guess he was in his mid-50s.

Unfortunately the truck moved left and I was going to the right and lost him, after few minutes, I wished the truck was branded so i can know where to find this guy again and buy him a decent pair of shoes.

And one more time, thank you God for everything I have!