How Retailers Lure Us to Spend Billions on Things We Never Wanted

How you shop is studied closer than you’d ever imagine.

Just as many shoppers are trying to stick to a budget, retailers are actually studying ways to get them to spend more.

“There is a whole science behind it,” Nick Jones of advertising agency Leo Burnett. “We look at everything from how people shop, the store patterns they follow through the store and where their eyes go.”

This new shopper marketing is a $35 billion dollar business that’s doubled in the last five years, according to Jones.

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Waste Biomass to Paper – a billion dollar industry

There is an emerging, large market opening up for those converting waste biomass into paper.

According to market research firm, Euromonitor, the global paper and paperboard market in 2010 was estimated to be worth US$320.3 billion.

It is expected to grow a further 21.8 per cent by 2015 to US$390.1 billion. The price of paper, paper products and pulp has been trending upwards since 2009.

Conventional industrial brown paper is made from a mix of 20 per cent softwood pulp and 80 per cent old corrugating cartons, which is a fairly costly way of making it.

On the other hand, raw empty fruit bunches (EFB) generated from the palm oil industry costs much less, representing a three-fold cost savings and profit for manufacturers who substitute EFB pulp for softwood-corrugating carton pulp.

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Cisco’s I-Prize Contest – The Next Billion Dollar Idea is Here. Uncover it

Spigit CEO and Co-Founder Paul Pluschkell takes a look at Cisco’s I-Prize Contest and explores the history of billion dollar companies and how the pace of innovation has accelerated dramatically, in large part, due to the free flow of information. Discover how in the 21st century, growth, economic value and competitive differentiation will be derived from a company’s ability to tap their employees and customers skills, creativity and knowledge to fundamentally alter the economics of their market through innovation.

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How VCs Identify Billion-Dollar Successes

In 2011, we’ve seen a variety of billion-dollar-plus companies go public.  Examples include LinkedIn, Pandora, HomeAway  and Groupon.

So what were the factors that made these companies successful?  To get some insight on this, I had a chance to interview Tarang Shah, a former venture capitalist.  His new book, called Venture Capitalists at Work, came out this week.

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