Case:

Pandora is the Internet’s most successful subscription radio service. In May 2014, Pandora had 77 million registered users. Pandora accounts for over 9 percent of total U.S. radio listening hours. The music is delivered to users from a cloud server, and is not stored on user devices.

It’s easy to see why Pandora is so popular. Users are able to hear only the music they like. Each user selects a genre of music based on a favorite musician or vocalist, and a computer algorithm puts together a “personal radio station” that plays the music of the selected artist plus closely related music by different artists. The algorithm uses more than 450 factors to classify songs, such as the tempo and number of vocalists. These classifications, in conjunction with other signals from users, help Pandora’s algorithms select the next song to play.

People love Pandora, but the question is whether this popularity can be translated into profits. How can Pandora compete with other online music subscription services and online stations that have been making music available for free, sometimes without advertising? “Free” illegally downloaded music has also been a significant factor, as has been iTunes, charging 99 cents per song with no ad support. At the time of Pandora’s founding (2005), iTunes was already a roaring success.

Pandora’s first model was to give away 10 hours of free music and then ask subscribers to pay $36 per month for a year once they used up their 10 free hours. Result: 100,000 people listened to their 10 hours for free and then refused to pay for the annual service. Facing financial collapse, in November 2005 Pandora introduced an ad-supported option. In 2006, Pandora added a “Buy” button to each song being played and struck deals with Amazon, iTunes, and other online retail sites. Pandora now gets an affiliate fee for directing listeners to sites where users can buy the music. In 2008, Pandora added an iPhone app to allow users to sign up from their smartphones and listen all day if they wanted. Today, 70 percent of Pandora’s advertising revenue comes from mobile.

In late 2009 the company launched Pandora One, a premium service that offered no advertising, higher quality streaming music, a desktop app, and fewer usage limits. The service costs $4.99 per month. A very small percentage of Pandora listeners have opted to pay for music subscriptions, with the vast majority opting for the free service with ads. In fiscal 2013 Pandora’s total revenue was $427.1 million, of which $375.2 million (88 percent) came from advertising.

Pandora has been touted as a leading example of the “freemium” revenue model, in which a business gives away some services for free and relies on a small percentage of customers to pay for premium versions of the same service. If a market is very large, getting just 1 percent of that market to pay could be very lucrative— under certain circumstances. Although freemium is an efficient way of amassing a large group of potential customers, companies, including Pandora, have found that it is challenging to convert people enjoying the free service into customers willing to pay. A freemium model works best when a business incurs very low marginal cost, approaching zero, for each free user of its services, when a business can be supported by the percentage of customers willing to pay, and when there are other revenues like advertising fees that can make up for shortfalls in subscriber revenues.

In Pandora’s case, it appears that revenues will continue to come overwhelmingly from advertising, and management is not worried. For the past few years, management has considered ads as having much more revenue-generating potential than paid subscriptions and is not pushing the ad-free service. By continually refining its algorithms, Pandora is able to increase user listening hours substantially. The more time people spend with Pandora, the more opportunities there are for Pandora to deliver ads and generate ad revenue. The average Pandora user listens to 19 hours of music per month.

Pandora is now intensively mining the data collected about its users for clues about the kinds of ads most likely to engage them. Pandora collects data about listener preferences from direct feedback such as likes and dislikes (indicated by thumbs up or down on the Pandora site) and “skip this song” requests, as well as data about which device people are using to listen to Pandora music, such as mobile phones or desktop computers. Pandora uses these inputs to select songs people will want to stick around for, and listen to. Pandora has honed its algorithms so they can analyze billions more signals from users generated over billions of listening minutes per month.

As impressive as these numbers are, Pandora (along with other streaming subscription services) is still struggling to show a profit. There are infrastructure costs and royalties to pay for content from the music labels. Pandora’s royalty rates are less flexible than those of its competitor Spotify, which signed individual song royalty agreements with each record label. Pandora could be paying even higher rates when its current royalty contracts expire in 2015. About 61 percent of Pandora’s revenue is currently allocated to paying royalties. Advertising can only be leveraged so far, because users who opt for free ad-supported services generally do not tolerate heavy ad loads.

CASE QUESTION:

What e-commerce revenue models are Pandora using? How does Pandora generate money with the revenue models? Explain your answer?

Ansoff’s product-market growth matrix is a framework that focus on increasing sales more than decreasing costs. It is very popular in business field.

Pick a product of your choice (not from the textbook) and use the Ansoff product-market growth matrix to design strategies for market penetration, product development, market development, and diversification for the said product.

The title of this episode in The Office is “Shareholder Meeting, which should give you some idea of why we’re watching it this week. In this episode, Michael, Dwight, Andy, and Oscar travel (via limo!) to a Dunder Mifflin shareholders meeting in New York City. Meanwhile, Jim and the rest of the crew remain in Scranton. Hijinx ensue. Based on the information given in the episode, does it seem like the Dunder Mifflin directors or officers could be held personally liable for their mismanagement of the corporation?

2. Do you have an academic or career-oriented goal? a. Explain your goal and explain why this goal is important to you. Be specific, and describe it in light of your overall goals as a university student. b. Self-assess your own goal. Is this goal realistic? Why or why not?

and How is your progress towards that goal? When the semester is over, do you think you will meet your goal or miss your goal? Or, will you meet it in part and miss it in part?

Do Media Influence Society?

Write a proposal to a company to implement blockchain technology for the company. Why would you implement that and get them to accept your proposal. (Atleast 6 pages). Technical writing

Discuss in detail the preservation of materials, causes of deterioration of materials in a warehouse and explain how the following common materials are preserved (show the sketches where required)
o   Paints
o   Rubber and Rubber Products
o   Fragile items

*the mejor is WAREHOUSE MANGEMENT*

This assignment will require you to do some outside research. Research the events surrounding the work stoppage (strike) which happened during the summer of 2014 at Market Basket - a grocery store chain in NE. Your research should involve an exploration of the events from a Human Resource perspective.

For the assignment you will write a 2-3 page double spaced paper (12 font) plus title and reference page. (for example: minimum 5 pages - title page 3 pages of content and reference page).  

For the content of the paper choose at least three Human Resource elements that were found in your research. Explain how they impacted the 2014 events and what significance they had. In the end, summarize your thoughts (again from an HR perspective) about the events.

What type of incentives can a company offer to its employees? And how do these effect employee recruiting and retention efforts? Do you think these incentives create a more skilled workforce? Why or why not?

Describe how organizations use surveys and market pay to set employees' pay and incentives.

This assignment will require you to do outside research. Research a company that you feel provided the best benefits - do NOT use GOOGLE as your example as we have talked about this in class already. This is similar to your last project. In your 1-2 page double spaced paper identify the company and explain in your own words the benefits they provide. In your opinion why are these benefits important to the employee, company, and its customers? Do you feel that all companies should provide the same type of benefits? Why or why not? Do you think that companies should only provide the government mandated benefits? Why or why not? Do you think benefits have increase, decreased or stayed the same over the past 20 years? Explain your answer.

From the power of six sigma by subir chowdhury

1. What company and division did Joe (the main character) work for?

2. Who is Larry Hogan? What company and division did Larry work for? How does Joe know Larry?

3. Who is Cathy Baker? What did she do that really benefited the company she worked for?
4. Larry said, “The real power of Six Sigma is simple because it combines _________ _________ with _________ _________.

5. According to Larry, what are the two ways to win a football game? What analogy does he make with football and a business?*
6. Larry said, “Six Sigma is a management ______________ focused on _______________ _____________, _______________, and _______________.” “It establishes a measurable status to achieve and embodies a _________________ _________-__________ ____________ to increase ______________ _______________ and dramatically enhance the ______________ _____________.”
7. What is DPMO? How many occur at 3 sigma? At 3.8 sigma, what amount of output is correct?
8. What was Larry’s point when Joe estimated that a burger restaurant on average “screwed up” a dozen hamburgers a day?
9. What are the two most common misconceptions about Six Sigma (according to Larry)?
10. Why does Larry say that focusing on customer retention is at least as important as attracting new customers?

11. Who determines what to do to make customers happier and increase profits?

12. Define each key role in Six Sigma (those with an “^*” should have a substantially greater explanation to clearly convey the role and duties.)
    1. Executive Leadership
    2. Executive Champion
    3. Deployment Champion
    4. Project Champion
    5. Master Black Belt^*
    6. Black Belt^*
    7. Green Belt^*

13. Who are the only people who work full-time on a Six Sigma project?
14. How many projects per year might each Black Belt complete? How much money can be saved doing this?
15. How many weeks of training for a black belt? Is it all at once? What happens during the period of time the black belt is under training that makes the preparation successful?
16. Based upon Larry and Joe’s discussion, define and describe the DEFINE phase of the Six Sigma process. Which of the problems should a business pick to work on?
17. Based upon Larry and Joe’s discussion, define and describe the MEASURE phase of the Six Sigma process. Why is it so important?
18. How does Larry say to measure “capability”? What is CTQ?
19. Based upon Larry and Joe’s discussion, define and describe the ANALYZE phase of the Six Sigma process. What are the two big questions to answer?
20. Based upon Larry and Joe’s discussion, define and describe the IMPROVE phase of the Six Sigma process.
21. Based upon Larry and Joe’s discussion, define and describe the CONTROL phase of the Six Sigma process.
22. Finish Larry’s sentence “Once the plan’s in place, it’s the Master Black Belt’s job to make sure the team _______________________________, ____________________________, and __________________________________.”

23. What was a major quality problem with the pizzas according to the customers? What was the measurement they did to understand the significance of this problem?
24. What about the process caused this problem? (There were multiple things.)
25. Why did management approve the major change suggested by Larry? What about the Six Sigma method was important to obtaining approval?
26. Besides eliminating defective pizzas, what positive benefit did American Pizza receive?

27. What was the next big problem for American Pizza to deal with?
28. How did the customer’s definition of this problem differ from what American Pizza’s definition? What was the measureable difference?
29. What did they do to improve this? How could they afford to spend that amount of money on doing those things?

Describe one other project undertaken by Larry for American Pizza

A large electronics manufacturing firm makes HD televisions for export around the world. The firm is fairly new. This industry is extremely price competitive; building a solid market share quickly is the only path to survival. The company makes a limited number of models so that manufacturing can be standardized. This also keeps quality high, which is a must. All employees work at the main factory, except for a handful of sales teams who have small offices in key cities around the world. Not much changes in the company from month-to-month, except that sales volume is steadily increasing. When designing their organization structure, what choices will support the goals and culture of this organization? Select the five choices that apply.