Pi-Consulting

Americans are on a mission to root out their roots. Genealogical searches are becoming more of a passion than a pastime, with the spread of genealogical websites and the wider accessibility of DNA testing. People are switching off the TV and spending hours online, piecing together ever more elaborate family trees. The most widely-used service is ancestry.com, owner of genealogy.com and myfamily.com, which goes beyond root tracing into family networking. Ancestry.com claims 800,000 subscribers, and 14 million registered users. Addicts spend hundreds of hours of their own time tracing their origins, and some even buy the services of professional genealogists, at $25 to $100 an hour. Says one: “I was consumed by finding our story”. One website chief explained the compulsion: “If you’re successful in the early stages, it’s like salted peanuts. Once you start, you won’t stop”. Sources: New York Times, Pi.

When is a cellphone not just a cellphone? When it’s an iPhone, said all those fanatics back in mid-Summer, as they waited in line to be among the first to pay $599 for one. Apple seemed to have another “gotta-have-it” product on its hands.

So, if the newly-launched iPhone was not just a cellphone, what exactly was it? And why would consumers walk past the free or subsidized phones offered by many wireless telephony companies in order to pay out nearly six hundred bucks? The technical spec described a sleek little techno-miracle that was at the same time a super-phone, a web-browser, a music player, e-mail center and image sharing platform. But none of that was really the point, somehow. “It was a lifestyle choice”, explains a report in the Washington Post, “an advertisement for oneself, …a shiny little slice of the future, a thin slab of cool”. (more…)

For fifteen years, The Nielsen Company, which measures America’s TV audiences through its eponymous ratings service, has separated out Hispanic audiences for special study. In September, they announced that the separate Hispanic ratings service is to be scrapped, and that Latino homes will henceforth be counted along with panel homes of other ethnicities. This might not seem important, but it signals the moment at which one of America’s bellwether research companies saw a great truth: that Latino audiences have grown to the point that they are “just Americans like everybody else”. 12 million homes is no longer a curious minority, it’s part of the mainstream, with vast Hispanic components already evident in the TV audiences of Los Angeles, New York City, and the Miami/Fort Lauderdale conurbation, to name but three. Nativists, please note. Source: Adweek, WARC, Pi.

“You want time off? Sure, kid, but what are you telling me for? Just go, tell me about it when you get back to work”. Some employers, including IBM and Netflix, are telling their workers they can take as much vacation time as they want, whenever, so long as they get their work done. It sounds like a dream, but many employees offered this deal are keenly aware of their ultimate accountability, and typically take less time off than they would formally be entitled to. Another result, though, is people saying “This is a great place to work”. The fact that they are trusted makes for greater commitment. A Netflix HR chief puts it this way: “When you have a workforce of fully-formed professionals, you have a connection between… the work and how long it takes to do it. So you don’t need the clock-in-clock-out mentality”. At IBM, that’s an advantage, considering that 40% of the workforce have no dedicated office, toiling at home or on-site. So who would be watching them anyway? Source: New York Times, Pi