The gaming world is more broad and diverse today than it has ever been before. Games nowadays can be played on all sorts of devices, online and offline, alone or with large groups of people, on a tabletop or... Tagged as:

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The gaming industry is fast developing, and regulatory bodies are crucial in its trajectory. There are several regulatory bodies; however, only a few are known to stand for fairness and player security. A stamp of approval from these regulators means... Tagged as:

Mobile is just about the perfect platform for turn-based RPGs, where battles tend to take place in contained, small screen-friendly environments and sessions can be as short or as long as you like.... Tagged as:

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As rigorous as the pursuit of education can be, supplementing academic efforts with fun outdoor activities can yield remarkable benefits for serious students. From enhancing physical health to improving cognitive functions, the advantages of engaging in leisure cannot be overstated.... Tagged as:

The European Union has notified Apple that it may be violating EU anti-geo-blocking regulations with practices regarding its media services, giving the company one month to respond.


The European Commission, in conjunction with the Consumer Protection Cooperation (CPC) Network, today announced that it has formally notified Apple regarding potential breaches of the EU's anti-geo-blocking rules. This follows an investigation led by national consumer authorities from Belgium, Germany, and Ireland, coordinated by the European Commission. According to the Commission, Apple's practices appear to unlawfully restrict European consumers from accessing digital content based on their country of residence.

According to the CPC Network, consumers using Apple Media Services, such as the App Store, Apple Music, and Apple TV+, encounter different interfaces and content depending on their country of registration. This regional segmentation allegedly makes it difficult, if not impossible, for users to switch between country-specific versions of Apple's services, which may be in violation of the EU's Geo-blocking Regulation enacted in 2018, designed to protect the Digital Single Market.

A significant point of concern for the EU authorities are restrictions on downloading apps. The investigation found that the ‌App Store‌ does not allow users to download apps available in other EU countries. The EU maintains that consumers should be able to access and download apps offered in other EU/EEA countries when traveling or staying temporarily in another member state.

Consumers are also only permitted to use credit or debit cards issued in the country where their Apple account was created. The Commission argues that consumers should be able to use any EU-issued payment method without facing unnecessary barriers.

Apple has been given one month to formally respond to the Commission's findings and to propose potential commitments to align its practices with EU regulations. If Apple does not adequately address the concerns raised by the CPC Network, the company may face enforcement actions. The European Commission's latest action against Apple is part of a broader push to ensure that tech giants operating within the EU comply with the bloc's regulatory frameworks.

Chris Sanders has only directed four animated features (plus a live action adaptation Call of the Wild), and the previous three (Lilo & Stitch, How to Train your Dragon and The Croods put him in four way tie for most nominations without a win in the Best Animated Feature category at the Oscars. It feels pretty certain that The Wild Robot will be the movie that finally wins him that Oscar, but we'll keep such speculation to a minimum.

Sanders's first feature, Lilo & Stitch, is probably the only truly great movie to come out of Walt Disney Animation Studios in the first decade of this century. (To be clear, you're allowed to like other movies from that decade, but most were flawed.) Anyway, the upshot of Lilo & Stitch becoming a beloved classic is that its directors, Sanders and his writing and directing partner, Dean Deblois, were driven out of Disney by John Lasseter a few years later (I don't like that guy).

Sanders and Deblois took their talents to DreamWorks Animation, where they delivered How to Train Your Dragon to the studio, often seen as one of the highlights of its output.

I've often seen Sanders cast as the "idea guy" in the Sanders/Deblois partnership, as well as being the guy who brings a lot of unique visual aspects to his projects, while Deblois is the more story-driven member of the partnership, bringing in the emotional aspects. I'm not so sure about that, especially after this movie, which features an emotional story just as potent as Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, sans Deblois. The Wild Robot also features a visual design that echoes the original illustrations of the book it's based on, by Peter Brown, showing Sanders is more than just a recognizable art style.

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"It's a brutal world for all of us, really, and some aspects of it are not comfortable for the sentimental or the squeamish. Somehow that's never dimmed my love for all animals. I celebrate their beauty, even the darker side of it." (Introduction, The Book of Deadly Animals)

"The predators far outnumbered the vegetarians."
(last words, The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators)

It's October, the "spooky" month with Halloween at the end of it; I sometimes take advantage of that to bring to light something a bit more horror themed than the usual Flayrah fare.

This year, I'd like to share the non-fiction books of Gordon Grice, which are about animals and their sometimes very tense relationship with man, because they are some of the scariest things I've ever read, and so appropriate enough under the "it's about animals and it's spooky" month to stretch the boundaries of what a furry publication can cover. Furthermore, from a personal angle, Grice spent much of his life where I'm originally from, the Oklahoma Panhandle (we share a birth town), and I occasionally like to shine a light on what would be to me local authors.

"The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators", Delacourte Press, 1998, 259 pages, Kindle $5.99, hardcover $19.32, paperback $17.10
"The Book of Deadly Animals", Penguin Books Ltd., 2010, xxvii + 383 pages, Kindle $4.99, paperback $24.00, illustrated, originally published as Deadly Kingdom

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Now for the first time in our history, we're witnessing a broad and powerful attack on the principle of equality. Daily, we are told that all people are not in fact created equal. Some were born with moral stain, others were not. Some Americans are guilty, some are innocent. Nothing can change this because it was all determined at birth. All we can do is respond accordingly. Continue reading →

Democratic politicians don't fear the mob. Notice that? Why? Because they don't need to. They control the mob. The mob operates with their permission. These are their foot soldiers. This is their militia. Continue reading →

The problem is the corruption that is absolutely pervasive in the U.S. news media. There are newsrooms all throughout New York and Washington DC, where top editors are explicitly saying they do not want this story investigated. And they're being clear that the reason that they don't want to investigate it is because they think even if there's corruption that's exposed here, in their view Trump is worse. And therefore it would be malfeasance on the part of the media to report corruption on the part of Biden when Trump is so much more corrupt. What they're really saying is they see their role as journalists not as informing the public, to let the public decide which candidate is better and which is worse. They see journalism, the function of it is to defeat Donald Trump and elect Joe Biden. Continue reading →

The CIA from the very first days of the Trump administration, even before he was inaugurated, devoted themselves to sabotaging the administration because Donald Trump questioned just a few of their pieties. And that can't be done in Washington. Whoever does that must be destroyed. And so the CIA and the Deep State operatives became heroes of the liberal left, the people who support the Democratic party. They're now in a full union with the neocons, the Bush Cheney operatives, the CIA, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street. That is the union of power along with mainstream media outlets that are fully behind the Democratic party, which is likely to at least take over one branch of government, if not all of them, with the coming election, and that is a very alarming proposition because they're authoritarian, they believe in censorship, and they believe in suppression of information that exposes them in any kind of a critical light. Continue reading →

The real threat is collusion. When journalists strike secret alliances with the very people they're supposed to be holding accountable, we are in deep trouble. Lies go unchallenged.  Democracy cannot function. And that's what we're watching right now. Continue reading →

This ruling class of administrative state, big tech, corporations: all of these people think that they can get rid of Trump and we'll go back to normal. They're wedded to a broken system that has sold out the American people. And now they're going to try to sell out the American people and the middle class especially. They're not going to fix immigration; they're not going to fix trade deals; they're not going to break up big tech; they're not going to do any of these things. Continue reading →

COVID-19 antibodies have been found in blood samples as early as September, 2019. China knew about the virus' transmission to humans months before it announced such to the world. Why has the media and our government not investigated this gross negligence, if not mass murder? Continue reading →

Darryl Cooper, AKA @MartyrMade, is a podcaster who had a Twitter thread go viral with 13k retweets and 20k likes of the first Tweet alone. This one is 36-Tweets long. It makes very cogent arguments of not only why millions of Trump supporters believe the 2020 election was stolen, but also why we are justified to believe it. Continue reading →

THE SECURITY STATE HAS EXISTED SINCE THE END OF WORLD WAR II. THEY'VE BEEN OPERATING IN SECRET AND WITH NO DEMOCRATIC ACCOUNTABILITY FOR EIGHT OR NINE DECADES NOW. DWIGHT EISENHOWER WHEN HE LEFT OFFICE WARNED THE COUNTRY ABOUT THE DANGERS THAT THEY POSE. Continue reading →

Google, Facebook and Twitter should be treated as state actors under existing legal doctrines. Using a combination of statutory inducements and regulatory threats, Congress has co-opted Silicon Valley to do through the back door what government cannot directly accomplish under the Constitution. Congress is giving Big Tech immunity and more power in exchange for it censoring whatever Congress wants censored. Continue reading →

The government is instructing social media companies what should and shouldn't be allowed to be on the internet, these are the people least competent to judge what is misinformation. Continue reading →

FBI CIA NSA are not only spying on American citizens but also are illegally unmasking their identities to journalists who support our fascist government Continue reading →

Censorship is antithetical to the scientific method because it requires free speech and open debate and skepticism Continue reading →

And so that is what I call the birth of this woke industrial complex. It is a new leviathan, a new monster, that is far more powerful than what Thomas Hobbes might have envisioned 400 years ago, and it is the biggest threat to individual liberty today. It is not big government alone. Its conservatives are reciting lines that they memorized in 1980, thinking that big government was the threat to individual liberty. Maybe it was in 1980. It's not today. It is this new hybrid of big government and big business and big government not just in the United States but big government in places like China, co-mingled with big business creating the actual threat to our liberty and our prosperity. Continue reading →

Carlson: So now we’re arming the Taliban and marooning our own citizens in Afghanistan. Who could possibly have seen that coming. Glenn Greenwald is one of the few journalists who did see it coming. He writes for Substack where all … Continue reading →

THAT'S WHAT THEY ARE USING JANUARY 6TH. IT'S DEMENTED TO COMPARE 9/11 AND JANUARY 6TH BUT IT'S SO CENTRAL TO THE AGENDA OF THE SECURITY STATE, THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY, TO ESSENTIALLY INITIATE A SURVEILLANCE REGIME, A DETENTION REGIME, AGAINST PEOPLE ON THE RIGHT WHO ARE AGAINST THE ESTABLISHMENT. AND THEY’RE ALREADY DOING IT. AND THEY PUT PEOPLE ON THE NO-FLY LIST, THE KIND OF DEFINING FEATURE OF THE FIRST WAR ON TERROR, THEY WANT TO DO NEW LEGISLATION THAT GIVES THE FBI AND THE CIA NEW POWERS, SPENDING MORE MONEY ON LAW ENFORCEMENT. THIS WAR ON TERROR IS CRUCIAL TO THEM. Continue reading →

Glenn Greenwald: "So you have huge number of journalists who believe that, they have the right to lie and even when they get caught, they don't care because they know their audience won't hold it against them." Continue reading →

TRUMP TOLD THE AMERICAN PEOPLE THERE ARE THE SECURITY STATE AGENTS WHO THINK THAT THEY RUN THE GOVERNMENT AND HE STOOD UP TO THEM AND CHALLENGED THEIR ORTHODOXIES AND PIETIES AND SHOWED AMERICANS, ESPECIALLY PEOPLE IN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY ON THE RIGHT, THAT THESE INSTITUTIONS ARE NOT NOBLE OR BENEVOLENT BUT ARE HIGHLY PERNICIOUS. THEY WANT TO INTERFERE IN OUR DOMESTIC POLITICS AND THEY OUGHT TO BE DEEPLY DISTRUSTED. Continue reading →

Видео полного выступления DREAM THEATER, которое состоялось третьего ноября на Atlas Arena, Łódź, Poland, доступно для просмотра ниже:

Act I

01. Metropolis Pt. 1: The Miracle And The Sleeper
02. Act I: Scene Two: I. Overture 1928
03. Act I: Scene Two: II. Strange Déjà Vu
04. The Mirror (with "Lie" outro)
05. Panic Attack
06. Barstool Warrior
07. Hollow Years ( demo version)
08. Constant Motion
09. As I Am

Act II

10. Night Terror
11. This Is The Life
12. Under A Glass Moon
13. Vacant
14. Stream Of Consciousness
15. Octavarium

Encore:

16. Act II: Scene Six: Home
17. Act II: Scene Eight: The Spirit Carries On
18. Pull Me Under
#Dream_Theater #DreamTheater #ClassicRock #Classic_Rock #ProgressiveMetal #Progressive_Metal
Видео: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHhgoMHu1zY

"Lakonic", новый альбом группы THYRATHEN, доступен для прослушивания ниже.
#Thyrathen
Видео: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UGwHbag13s

Lords Of Fyre, новое видео FEUERSCHWANZ & LORD OF THE LOST, доступно для просмотра ниже.
#Feuerschwanz #FolkRock #Folk_Rock #FolkMetal #Folk_Metal
Видео: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJnlT_7YWmg

Tracing the Line is a book of plotter art available for preorder now, coming out this November. Many of our featured artists are included in the book, and AxiDraw makes several appearances in the video teaser. Looks like it will be fantastic!

Bantam Tools proudly unveils its latest advancement in proven plotter technology with the launch of the new Bantam Tools NextDraw™ series of drawing and handwriting machines. Engineered for artists, innovators, and educators seeking exceptional versatility and performance, Bantam Tools now offers a trio of new models designed for drawing and handwriting. “The Evil Mad Scientist … Continue reading Introducing the Bantam Tools NextDraw™ →

I first arrived in Silicon Valley in 1977 — 45 years ago. I was 24 years old and had accepted a Stanford fellowship paying $2,575 for the academic year. My on-campus apartment rent was $175 per month and a year later I’d buy my first Palo Alto house for $57,000 (sold 21 years later for $990,000). It was an exciting time to be living and working in Silicon Valley. And it still is. We’re right now in a period of economic confusion and reflection when many of the loudest voices have little to no sense of history. Well my old brain is crammed with history and I’m here to tell you that the current situation — despite the news coverage — is no big deal. […]

Sorry I’ve been away: time flies when you are not having fun. But now I’m back. Moore’s Law, which began with a random observation by the late Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that transistor densities on silicon substrates were doubling every 18 months, has over the intervening 60+ years been both borne-out yet also changed from a lithography technical feature to an economic law. It’s getting harder to etch ever-thinner lines, so we’ve taken as a culture to emphasizing the cost part of Moore’s Law (chips drop in price by 50 percent on an area basis (dollars per acre of silicon) every 18 months). We can accomplish this economic effect through a variety of techniques including multiple cores, System-On-Chip design, and unified memory — anything to […]

Today, I saw a definition of Problem that I disliked VERY MUCH. Granted, this was in a Root Cause Analysis manual, so I expected much...

The first volume of Eden of Witches releases on Nov. 12.

This week's Top Comics to Buy for November 13 features buzzy books like Absolute Batman, G.I. Joe, and more!

Papercutz has announced Flash Gordon: The Girl from Infinity, which reimagines the iconic character, for release in 2025.

The Small-Animallike Lady is Adored by the Ice Prince is a brand new romance manga from Yen Press. This first volume takes us to a familiar setting where there's a royal arranged marriage involved, and some frozen hearts are melted along the way!

#56 Enlightenment - The Effortless Living of an Enlightened Life

The post #56 Enlightenment – The Effortless Living of an Enlightened Life appeared first on Enlightenment Podcast.

When I was an undergraduate at university many years ago, my deep enjoyment and love for the works of William Shakespeare blossomed. I had the privilege of taking a Shakespearean class and then during one summer in my undergraduate years, I was able to travel through Europe inexpensively on a bike and a Europass to see the great sites. A memory I remember most is going to Stratford-upon-Avon and watching a William Shakespeare play. I don’t know where my passion and love for his plays comes from but it has been a deep part of my life. His writings have also taught me many things.

When I was in England many years ago for the first time, I was standing in the back of the audience watching the play ‘As You Like It’ that was performed not too far from the ... Read More »

The post What Shakespeare Can Teach Us About Enlightenment: All the world’s a stage appeared first on Enlightenment Podcast.

When we wake up to who we are, something happens. We stop identifying with our egoic selves because we realize they are impermanent and only that which is permanent can be who we are.

We aren’t our bodies, we aren’t our memories, we aren’t our thoughts, we aren’t our feelings… We aren’t any of these things, so we stop identifying with them. What happens is that detachment develops. An aloofness or distancing from everything that occurs. We wake up to the fact that life is an extended dream and a relaxation is able to set in. It’s a sense of calm or a feeling that ‘all is well.’

We lose our identity with our lives, thoughts and feelings, so we witness them but we don’t engage with them. We notice them, but we don’t create stories with them. Since we don’t create ... Read More »

The post The Paradoxical World of Spiritual Enlightenment: We are nothing but we are everything appeared first on Enlightenment Podcast.

The post #59 Enlightenment – How to End the Suffering in Life appeared first on Enlightenment Podcast.

For many years, the fees charged by investment managers of mutual funds grew ever so slightly, gradually approaching 1.5%. Over the last few years, though, the growth in these management fees has stopped. In fact, it reversed. Last year the average management fee charged for actively managed mutual funds was 1.38%, or 138 basis points, where a basis point is one tenth of one percent. But that average is badly misleading. It’s misleading because it treats all funds, regardless of size, as the same. When you adjust the fees for the size of the funds, you find that the dollar-weighted average for actively managed funds is now below 100 basis points. Three things have caused this reversal in management fees: low returns in the stock market, the growth of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and a price war among the biggest players in the market.

The first two of these factors need little explanation. Over the last ten years, an investment in many bond funds out-performed an investment in diversified equity funds. These low returns have many investors focusing on the costs they incur for the management of their money. These costs include transaction fees for trading securities and management fees for the companies managing mutual funds or exchanged-traded funds. The second factor, the growth of ETFs, is somewhat less obvious, but important. ETFs have garnered a significant share of new money invested in equity funds over the last few years. Companies managing ETFs charge low fees for managing these funds because they have very low costs for shareholder servicing and some other administrative functions associated with investment management. Shrewd mutual fund managers have reduced prices in order to manage the gap in pricing they allow for their managed mutual funds compared to comparable ETFs.

These two causes of the fall in prices for investment management now have a third important factor. This third factor may turn out to be the most important of all. (See the Symptom & Implication, “The industry is seeing its first price wars” on StrategyStreet.com.) As described in other blogs (see blogs HERE and HERE), Vanguard has started, and continued, a price war in the ETF market. For example, iShare’s MSCI Emerging Market’s ETF and Vanguard’s Emerging Market’s ETF compete directly. Vanguard’s fund charges 27 basis points. The iShare’s fund charges 69 basis points. The iShare’s fund entered the market well before the Vanguard fund, and was much larger than the Vanguard fund. However, during 2010, the Vanguard ETF added $18 billion to its fund while iShare’s added about $4 billion. Price matters among peers.

The iShare’s funds are not always market share losers, however. The iShare’s Gold Trust is an ETF that competes with a larger rival, SPDR Gold Trust. Until June of last year, both of these ETFs charged 40 basis points. In June, iShares cut its management fees to 25 basis points. SPDR Gold Trust stayed pat at 40 basis points. Over the next few months, the iShare’s fund gained $875 million in new money, while the SPDR Gold Trust saw a net loss of $1.2 billion of money under management. Price matters among peers.

These management fees can even go to zero. One ETF today has no management fee, zero. It gets its revenues by lending out the securities in its portfolio. (See the Symptom & Implication, “Technology improvements bring falling prices” on StrategyStreet.com.)

Of course, as companies engage in price wars, they advertise their lower prices extensively in order to capture as much market share as possible before their competitors respond. The result: customers are becoming ever more price sensitive about the management fees they pay, simply because the management companies tell them to be more sensitive.

How long will it be until this fee warfare spreads to other smaller types of ETFs? Not very long, as long as price moves share.

After nearly four years, AT&T has lost its exclusivity on Apple’s iPhone. It has been a great run. Now AT&T faces the formidable competition of Verizon, who started offering the iPhone in February of 2011. Market shares are about to shift. Let’s look at how they might change.

Market shares among established customers shift for one of two reasons. (See Audio Tip #40: The Components of Market Share Change" on StrategyStreet.com.) First, a competitor may “win” market share by offering a benefit that more than half of the market suppliers do not offer. On the other hand, market share may shift away from a competitor if it “fails” its customer relationship and opens that relationship to other competitors. A company “fails” a customer relationship when it refuses, or is unable, to offer something that half the other competitors in the market can or will offer.

AT&T garnered much of its share gain over the last four years with a “win.” That “win” was due to its exclusive offering of the Apple iPhone. While it won business with the iPhone, it developed a reputation for problems in the quality of its services. iPhone users tended to overwhelm the AT&T network and cause interruptions and dropped phone calls. AT&T’s customer service has been suspect as well. Still, its market share has grown with the iPhone, primarily at the expense of the smaller carriers. Its market share growth due to the exclusive on the iPhone offset its “failures” in its network and customer service.

Now Verizon enters with its own version of the iPhone. Today, any customer who wants an iPhone can choose either the largest competitor in the market, Verizon, or the second largest competitor, AT&T as his or her carrier. So, Verizon can “win” market share against the smaller competitors as well. These competitors, such as Sprint, Virgin Mobile and others like them, do not offer the iPhone and are unlikely to do so soon.

Verizon should also be able to gain share at the expense of AT&T. Here’s how. iPhone-using customers who are dissatisfied with their current service with AT&T now have a viable, high quality competitor offering an equivalent service with the same phone. Some of these customers will leave AT&T because they perceive that AT&T’s services are not up to the standard of the other competitors, especially Verizon’s, and migrate to Verizon. This is a phenomenon we call “flight to quality.” This “flight to quality” is also an example of a “weak win,” where a competitor gains share only after an incumbent supplier has “failed” the customer relationship.

This “flight to quality” is unlikely to be dramatic. A company can “win” share quickly with a unique Function. On the other hand, a “flight to quality” usually brings share gains in dribs and drabs. It produces share gains slowly, over time, because of inertia in the customer relationships. This inertia allows AT&T time to get its house in order before it suffers a great deal of customer immigration. (See Video #36: Probable Priorities for Innovation in Hostile Markets on StrategyStreet.com.)

The United Autoworkers (UAW) is on a new campaign. The union plans to organize workers in hither-to non-union foreign-owned automobile plants in the United States. This campaign may or may not work, but in the long run it will prove futile unless the union can compete in the international market, against all international auto workers.

There are 575,000 autoworkers in the U.S. Nearly 20% work for foreign-owned plants. All of these plants are non-union. The foreign-owned plants were intentionally placed in right-to-work areas, many in the South.

The UAW is likely to have some difficulty succeeding with this campaign. The non-union workers already earn highly competitive wages and benefits. To date, these U.S. workers in plants owned by Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai and Honda have shown little interest in unionization.

Why would the union be so interested in this initiative? To preserve its membership. The traditional problem with unions is less the rate of wages they demand and more about the work rules they impose. These work rules reduce the productivity of the unionized plants. That has certainly been the case in the U.S. auto industry. As a result, the UAW is losing membership as UAW auto plants in the U.S. close under the onerous costs the UAW plants carry. If the union can succeed in unionizing the domestic foreign-owned auto plants to the same extent they have unionized the domestic manufacturers’ plants, they will be able to impose the same work rules and produce roughly the same productivity. The result should, in the union’s eyes, be a reduction in the rate of jobs lost in the union.

But there is a problem here. The UAW has already seen that it was unable to stop new non-union plants in the U.S. How will it stop future non-union domestic plants? O.K., let’s say they can do that. Will they also be able to stop all foreign non-union plants from becoming established and growing? Certainly not. Unless the union membership can compete on an international basis with competitive costs and productivity, this unionization effort is wasted money. If it succeeds, the U.S. loses more plants to plants located offshore. Union membership still falls.

It seems that one of the problems for unionized employees is one of definition. Union members often call their compatriots in competing companies “brothers and sisters.” These are certainly not brothers and sisters. In a marketplace they are competitors. Union employees have to be able to beat, or at least stalemate, these competitors or lose their jobs. This is true as long as the UAW can not control the entrance of other less expensive competitors, either in the U.S. or elsewhere.

The long history of the DRAM semiconductor market illustrates this. The U.S. manufacturers of DRAM semiconductors faced intense competition from the Japanese in the 1980s. The domestic industry succeeded in slowing the Japanese by using the International Trade Commission. Then arose new and equally troublesome problems. These problems were DRAM semiconductor facilities in Taiwan and Korea. Eventually, the U.S. industry evolved to the point where it had only one domestic producer of DRAM chips. Intel was one of the early competitors to get out of that market to focus its resources in the more complex, and much more profitable, domestic micro-processor business. SX4MBURBCAJQ

The figures are in for U.S. auto sales in 2010. The biggest winners in percentage growth were Hyundai, at 24%, and Ford at 20%. Toyota lost .4% and Honda grew a mediocre 7%. The Japanese struggled in 2010.

Earlier we wrote a blog about Ford’s ascendency and Toyota’s problems (see Blog HERE). Toyota is paying the price for failing its customers. Honda appears to be getting painted with the “failure” brush, though I doubt its punishment is deserved.

I am actually using the word “fail” to mean something specific here. A company fails its customers when it is unable or unwilling to do something that at least half of its competitors can, or will, do for customers. Toyota’s troubles with accelerators, floor mats, and so forth, received extensive media coverage. This coverage clearly has had a negative impact on Toyota this year.

Toyota’s struggles illustrate the win and fail dynamic. In our terms, a “win” occurs when a company is able to do something that the majority of its competitors either can not or will not do. Wins account for a good deal of market share growth in a fast-growing market, but are less important in more mature markets. In a more mature Stable market and, especially, in all Hostile markets, failure moves a significant amount of market share.

Here is what this means. The decision to change a supplier is really two decisions. The first is the decision to leave a current supplier and the second is the decision on which new supplier to take on in your relationship. In the average Stable and Hostile marketplace, more market share moves on failure than on wins. This means that before an established customer will change suppliers, its current incumbent supplier must “fail” the relationship in some way. This failure, then, opens up the customer’s relationship to competition among other potential suppliers. Whichever supplier gains this customer’s volume really did so only after the incumbent failed. We call this gain a “weak win.” The “weak win” would not have happened on a straight-up comparison of performance and price of the new supplier versus the old. The gain only happened after the incumbent clearly failed the customer and then opened the relationship to someone new.

Toyota’s failure was largely a failure of Reliability. It clearly lost share. The companies that gained this share from Toyota, Ford and Hyundai among them, enjoyed some degree of a “weak win” in the domestic automobile market. They may have “won” market share as well, but my guess is that most of their share gains from Toyota fell to them from Toyota’s “failure.”

Over the last several years, we have studied many examples of cost reduction initiatives to improve productivity and create economies of scale. In simplest terms, there are four actions that improve productivity and economies of scale. First, reduce the rate of cost you pay for an input. Second, reduce the inputs that do not produce output. Third, reduce unique activities or components in products and processes by redesigning the products and processes. Fourth, spread fixed cost activities over new product output. The cellular telephone carriers are introducing measures to reduce their costs by redesigning the product.

The wireless carriers use cellular towers to broadcast their signals. The cellular product design offers signals traveling long distances, primarily for voice and for relatively low data speeds. A cellular tower is expensive but capable of sending a signal for several miles.

This cellular technology worked well until the evolution of the smart phone. The growth of the smart phone has put very high demands on the cellular tower infrastructure because of the heavy data usage it brings to the market. Since 2010, data has taken over the majority of network traffic from voice communications. Now the carriers and, in particular, AT&T with its Apple iPhones, is having difficulty keeping up with the growth in demand.

AT&T today and, likely a few others in the future, has found a potential innovative solution, adding Wi Fi access points. These Wi Fi access points are ideal for heavy data traffic sent at high speeds over relatively short distances. Wi Fi access points transmit signals over a few hundred feet. The Wi Fi access points are smaller, easier and cheaper to install than are cellular towers. This low-cost approach appears to make sense in areas with high density of users. AT&T has placed them in New York’s Time Square and Rockefeller Center, in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina, in neighborhoods surrounding Chicago’s Wrigley Field and in San Francisco’s Embarcadero Center.

But there are some drawbacks to Wi Fi access points. Sometimes, a user has to take several steps to connect to a Wi Fi access point. Signals from the Wi Fi access points may interfere with one another, if signals come from multiple networks. Some smart phones do not have Wi Fi capability. These disadvantages have, so far, held back Verizon Wireless’s adoption of this apparently low-cost approach to providing service.

AT&T is leading this cost-saving innovation experiment. Their network strains force it to be creative and experimental. AT&T saves costs by redesigning the product itself using a less expensive technology with some shortcomings. If the AT&T experiment proves both cost effective and acceptable to cellular customers, every other wireless carrier will be forced to adopt it. And since a Wi Fi access point is largely a fixed cost, the wireless carriers with the highest density of membership within the Wi Fi area will have the lowest cost per unit. In most areas of the country that is likely to be either Verizon or AT&T. They will end up getting a unit cost advantage over their smaller competitors…if this works.

Don’t look now, but we are entering the world of F-commerce. What is that, those of you older than thirty will ask? F-commerce is selling through a Facebook page.

The trend is early yet, but likely to turn into a stampede. JC Penney and 1-800-Flowers.com both have established full E-commerce stores within their Facebook page. The stores include check-out and other features you typically find on an E-commerce web site. Facebook claims that twenty-five of the largest retail sites are already integrated with Facebook, as are seventeen of the twenty-five fastest growing retail sites.

Think of Facebook as a virtual mall. There are all kinds of people wandering around there, talking to one another. Facebook offers a nice opportunity for a company to interact with customers and allow them to bring their friends into the conversation to evaluate styles and colors and so forth. If a company integrates its storefront with the Facebook page, its Facebook “friends” will never have to leave the virtual mall in order to purchase. This is an important product innovation.

Product innovations reduce customers’ effective costs in one of three ways: add information about the product and how it is to be used, reduce the resources the customer must use with the product, or improve the customer’s experience with the product.

This innovation improves the customer’s experience with the product by increasing the customer’s sense of security in using the product. It allows the customer to get her friends’ opinions on what she is purchasing. Secondarily, the Facebook store reduces the customer’s resources used with the product by reducing the time the customer must spend in using the product. The innovation reduces the steps the customer must take to make a purchase and it places the company’s product closer to the customer’s location.

This is going to be a train to the destination of millions of customers. Every mainstream retailer has to get on board.