Shopping Tips Archives
Some Holiday Shopping Tips for You Guys.
We've been told by several fellas that live with their gals that the only time they can come by our Showroom to look at Diamonds and Engagement Rings is during their work day. Their 45 minute lunch break is not enought time for this kind of momentous purchase and they would take a sick day but their Boss is savvy and has heard all of the "excuses".
What to do?
Well, here are some suggested "excuses" you can try out that are quite novel and that I'm sure your Boss has not heard:
1. "I was sprayed by a skunk."
2. "I tripped over my dog and was knocked unconscious."
3. "My bus broke down and was held up by robbers."
4. "I was arrested by the cops in a case of mistaken identity."
5. "I forgot to come back to work after lunch."
6. "I couldn't find my shoes".
Personally, I would go with #1. Guaranteed your Boss will keep his distance from you for a couple of days!
YO! Shopping Procrastinators! What You Gonna Do?
Last-minute gift shoppers may be a boon for jewelers, as jewelry is one of the top five gift choices for those who shop later in the holiday season for gifts, as well as for those seeking stocking stuffers.
If it's the holiday-season 11th hour, then more than 20 percent of shoppers are desperately seeking gift cards, according the latest Shopping in America 2005 survey. The study finds that by the Thanksgiving weekend, the average consumer still had more than 64 percent of their holiday shopping left to do, according to the poll of more than 2,300 shoppers from across the country conducted by research firm August Partners for The Macerich Co.
The average consumer will give about three gift cards this holiday season, the survey finds, citing the cards as the top choice of last-minute gift shoppers. Other popular last-minute gifts include: CDs, DVDs or books, selected by 19.2 percent of those polled; perfume, for 14.6 percent; jewelry for 10.1 percent; and gift baskets for 8.8 percent. Jewelry also made it onto respondents' top-five list of stocking stuffers, with 14.2 percent making sure baubles were among the small gift items included.
Many shoppers indicated they'll be waiting until closer to Christmas to do their shopping, with 30 percent saying they believe they can get better deals at that time, a prediction borne out by retailers as Christmas nears.
"About 30 percent of shoppers surveyed think they can get better deals closer to Christmas, which will likely be the case, as deep retailer discounts are expected to continue throughout the holiday season," said Garry Butcher, vice president of marketing and consumer research for The Macerich Company, in a release from the group.
Factors driving last-minute gift purchases, according to the survey, include: convenience, for 23 percent of those polled; price, for 20.5 percent; advertising, for 7.5 percent; and panic, for 4.8 percent. While a third of last-minute shoppers said they'll likely spend the same amount as they otherwise would have, more than a fifth (22 percent) said their late gift-buying ways would require them to spend more than originally planned.
Tiffany To Open Two New Diamond & Jewelry Stores In China.
Luxury retailer Tiffany & Co., plans to open two new stores in China during 2006. One store will open at Beijing's Oriental Plaza, and a second store at Shanghai's Plaza 66. Beijing is scheduled to open in May, and Shanghai could open towards the end of the year, the company reports.
"The Oriental Plaza in Beijing and Plaza 66 in Shanghai are ideal environments for a Tiffany store," said Darren Chen, group vice president at Tiffany & Co. "These convenient locations expand our presence both in Beijing and Shanghai, cities of growing importance as global business centers and as destinations for both domestic and overseas tourists."
Once the new stores open, Tiffany will have a total of two stores in each of those prominent cities. Tiffany currently has a boutique in Beijing's Peninsula Palace Hotel, which opened in 2001, and a boutique in the City Plaza shopping complex in Shanghai, which opened in 2004.
How do say "Bling-Bling" in Chinese?
"Bring-Bring"!
Diamond Identification Method for Consumers: Bring Napkins
The Financial Times of London reports on a novel way to identify Diamonds from fakes:
It is said that Alexander the Great found a valley full of both diamonds and poisonous snakes. No one could work out how to retrieve the jewels until Alexander had the idea of throwing down raw meat, to which the diamonds attached. When eagles flew down for the meat, Alexander's men just had to follow them to their nests.
It sounds like fantasy but diamonds are attracted to fat, and the story reminded people how to tell real diamonds from fakes. De Beers still practise Alexander's trick in their South Africa mines today: They use "grease tables" and only the valuable stones stick.
Today, most engagement rings are diamond but after the war, people wanted holidays, cars or colorful gems to celebrate a future marriage.
In 1947 a New York copywriter, given the task of finding a slogan for her client's product, stayed late in the office. "I put my head down and said: 'Please God, send me a line.'" Then she scribbled: "A Diamond is Forever" and the rest is History.
Don't Scrap Your Estate Jewelry...Sell It.
People have been calling us lately and asking us for advice on what to do with some of their inherited jewelry and/or estate jewelry pieces that they just cannot wear (for whatever reason).
I have seen an unfortunate practice by some jewelers who tell these unsuspecting people that their jewelry is only worth the "scrap metal" or "melt down" price of the precious metal. The price they usually offer these people is often well below the "penny weight" for just the precious metal content alone..and is certainly less than what these items are really worth.
Therefore, I just wanna give you all a heads up here.
Many of you no doubt have some gaudy looking gold jewelry that may have been passed down to you from a grandmother or great grandmother. You being the trendy cosmopolitan women with impeccable taste in diamonds and jewelry wouldn't be caught dead in some of these outdated pieces.
However, keep in mind that the asthetic look of the jewelry pieces themselves are NOT reflective of their quality and value. Many of these heirloom jewelry pieces are quite substantial, are rare, and worth alot of money.
While some jewelry items are only worth their weight in gold, or platinum, most fine jewelry has an intrinsic value far in excess of its scrapping value, especially if it includes diamonds or gemstones.
So while the easy thing for many people to do is to just walk into a local jeweler with all of your Grandma's jewelry, throw it on the counter at wait for the guy to offer you next to nothing for the "scrap value" of the merchandise...and you sit there thinking..well, some money is better than no money....and I'm certainly not wearing this stuff...
You need to realize that in most of these cases your ignorance is being exploited, your indifference taken advantage of, and your just plain old getting rooked.
If you could use the extra cash that the sale of this jewelry will afford, do yourself a favor and invest a bit of your time in doing some proper research. With a bit of effort you will find that many of these jewelry pieces you have buried in the drawer are quite valuable and worth a significant amount of money to the right buyer.
Buying Loose Diamonds, Engagement Rings, Wedding Bands, & Wedding Rings: Trust and Verify.
Marshall Loeb of Market Watch quotes our friend and colleague, Jay Mednikow with advice to consumers on how to safely shop for loose diamonds, engagement rings, wedding rings and bands, both in jewlery stores and through internet websites. It is advice we agree with 100% and worth following.
Few purchases are more mystifying for first-time buyers than fine jewelry. There's more information out there than ever - from jewelers' Web sites and online forums to nearly ubiquitous grading reports from independent labs. But buying expensive gems and precious metals is still largely a matter of trust between you and the jeweler.
First, educate yourself on the basics. For diamonds, that means the four Cs: cut, color, clarity and carat weight. For gold, platinum and silver, it means purity.
You can find helpful information on these fundamentals from the Federal Trade Commission ( FTC) and the Better Business Bureau (BBB). The Gemological Institute of America, the most prominent diamond grading agency, provides tutorials on buying diamonds and colored gems at (GIA Education).
"It's less of a blind purchase than it used to be," says Jay Mednikow, president of 115-year-old Mednikow Jewelers in Memphis and Atlanta. "But a jeweler who knows what he's doing can take advantage of you if he wants to."
Thus, there is still no substitute for a reliable dealer with an established reputation. Many jewelers are GIA-certified gemologists and display their credentials prominently.
For diamonds, Mednikow recommends buying only those with grading certificates from GIA, the American Gem Society or another independent laboratory. If a jeweler says he can offer you an uncertified diamond at a discount, tell him you'll pay to have it analyzed since the cost should be only $50 to $300 depending on the size of the stone. Read warranty and return policies carefully and make sure all guarantees are written on your sales receipt - it's your legal contract.
You may have a hard time distinguishing between slight variations in color and clarity, but still trust your own eyes.
Mednikow recommends holding diamonds with a pair of tweezers over your finger or against a white background and under lights of different types and varying brightness. With shapes other than round-cut, which has standard specifications, and with colored gems, you will have to rely much more on the jeweler's expertise.
If you are buying a colored stone such as a ruby, sapphire or diamond, ask if it has been "treated" to enhance the color. Some processes are routine, like heating for sapphires and rubies and oiling for emeralds, but others are temporary or undesirable.
Up to half the gold jewelry sold in the U.S. bears a false karat rating, says Mednikow. Choosing a reliable merchant is your only insurance, although national retailers like Zales and Sears are diligent about the purity of their gold.
Guess Where You Can Buy Diamonds & Jewelry? You Won't Believe It!
Idex Research today reports that Specialty jewelers who lament that they are losing sales to discounters, department stores, and many other retail categories are correct. Just-released information from the U.S. Department of Commerce reveals that for every specialty jeweler in the U.S., there are three other merchants – whose primary business is not jewelry – who are also selling diamonds, precious metals, and other goods that have traditionally been the domain of specialty jewelers.
There are just over 128,000 retailers in the U.S. who sell jewelry in their stores, according to the latest Business Census data from the U.S. Department of Commerce. Roughly 28,000 of those stores, or about 22 percent of all jewelry retail outlets, are specialty jewelers; the others represent a wide variety of retail categories including department stores, general merchandise stores, warehouse clubs, apparel retailers, non-store retailers, and a number of other specialty retailers. The graph below illustrates the mix of specialty jewelers to total retailers of jewelry in the U.S.
Stores Selling Jewelry by Category
Percent of Total of 128,000 Stores
Source: Dept. of Commerce
Because jewelry is such an attractive industry – gross margins are healthy and the long term characteristics of demand are positive – there are many merchants who are trying to sell jewelry.
Further, as a result of few barriers to entry, retailing attracts a large number of merchants who will try to sell anything to make a profit.
The bad news for specialty jewelers is that they are losing market share to those merchants whose business is not primarily selling jewelry. Over the past decade, specialty jewelers’ market share in the U.S. has dropped from about 50 percent to just over 47 percent, as the graph below illustrates.
There may be some surprises among the list of retailers who are gaining – and those who are losing – market share in the jewelry category. As expected, non-store retailers have among the strongest growth of any retail category. Stores that retail sporting goods, hobby supplies, books, and music (a single category, according to the Department of Commerce) have also posted strong jewelry sales gain, though this category generated an aggregate of just over $100 million in sales. That was just enough to be included on the Idex list, which analyzes only retail categories with $100 million or more in annual jewelry sales.
A graph of those retail categories that are gaining market share and those which are losing market share is shown below. These are all of the retail categories which report that they have $100 million or more of jewelry sales annually.
U.S. Specialty Jewelers’ Market Share
Source: Dept. of Commerce
Who Is Taking Jewelry Market Share?
Sales Growth over Past Ten Years by Retail Category
In addition to the list of logical purveyors of jewelry, there are a number of surprises on this list of jewelry outlets. For example, the Commerce Department’s Business Census, lists 117 stores which primarily sell beer and wine that also sell jewelry. You can gas up your car at 178 gasoline stations that also sell jewelry. In addition, there are about 385 convenience stores (such as 7-Eleven) which sell jewelry; 1,210 book stores sell jewelry; and, 37 pet stores also sell jewelry. In the prior Business Census (1997) about 85 automobile dealers also sold jewelry; by 2002, however, those car dealers apparently had stopped selling gemstones and watches.
Here’s an exhaustive list of all merchants who sell jewelry, but whose primary product line is not jewelry.
* Furniture & furnishings stores
* Consumer electronics stores
* Appliance stores
* Home centers, including building materials, lawn & garden supplies, nurseries, farm supply and hardware stores
* Grocery stores, supermarkets, convenience stores
* Fruit, vegetable, confectionery, and nut stores
* Beer, wine, and liquor stores
* Cosmetics, beauty supplies, and perfume stores
* Optical goods stores
* Gasoline stations
* Clothing stores, including men’s wear, women’s wear, children and family clothing, shoe stores, and infants’ stores
* Luggage and leather goods stores
* Sporting goods, hobby, and musical instrument stores
* Sewing, needlework, and piece goods shops
* Book stores, news dealers, college book shops
* Music stores
* Department stores
* Warehouse clubs
* Variety stores
* Florists
* Office supply, stationery, and gift shops
* Used merchandise stores (pawn shops are included in this category)
* Pet stores, art dealers, tobacco stores
* Electronic shopping and mail-order retailers
* Vending machine operators and direct selling, including in-home sales
Diamond Cleaning: Use Efferdent and Smile!
Saw this humorous posting today on Bridal Blog
Here's her story:
I keep meaning to stop in at a jeweler to have it professionally cleaned, but my mother-in-law to be (MILTB) told me this ridiculous slash terrifying story where she swears a friend of a friend of her cousin Phyllis did just such a thing and had her ring replaced with a fake. I realize that the chances of this story being true are infinitesimal, but I’ve yet to stop in and have it done, so clearly there is a tiny part of me that truly believes Phyllis’s friend’s friend. My MILTB went on to say that the BEST and ONLY means one should be using to clean a ring like mine is Efferdent—as in denture cleaner Efferdent.
So, today I did it. I walked into Duane Reade with purpose and conviction, found a box of denture cleaner and bought it. I was so excited to come home and try it out, I could barely contain myself. I heated up some water in a small teacup, dropped in the efferdent tablet, plopped in my ring and stood there watching the water fizzing for five long minutes. Even my dog looked up at me as if to say “you’ve officially crossed the line.”
When I couldn’t handle the suspense for one second longer, I fished my ring out of the icky blue solution, rinsed it off and Bing. Bam. Boom. Seriously, WOW. I may have been temporarily blinded. Dammit all if my ring didn’t look just as sparkly and shiny as the day I got it.
Now I just wonder if an Ultrasonic Jewelry Cleaner can have the same cleaning results for dentures?
Smile!
Diamond Hunting: You Can Do It.
Want to prospect for your own diamonds? Pamela Selbert tells you how to do it!
Finding Your Diamond In The Rough: Here's How!
David Yurman Jewelry: Evolution of a Jewelry Designer.
The Orlando Sentinel has an interesting feature on David Yurman today.
David Yurman jewelry is like your favorite blue jeans -- only much more expensive. The jewelry is "comfortable," says Yurman, 63, who recently visited his new boutique, which rubs shoulders with Cartier and Tiffany in Orlando's Mall at Millenia.
The jewelry is also versatile, he says. "You can wear it anywhere, day to evening." Just like blue jeans.
It wasn't always that way with jewelry. Before the 1980s, when Yurman's now-iconic cable bracelets became the most coveted, and copied, arm candy in the United States, there were two kinds of jewelry: Costume for everyday wear, and fine jewelry for special occasions.
The relaxed elegance of Yurman's designs bridged the divide. The jewelry is classic but with a modern twist that gives it go-anywhere elan.
Fashioned from gold and silver, many pieces also feature coral and turquoise, a sparkling array of gemstones and Yurman's current favorite, South Seas pearls. Signature motifs include a squared "cushion" shape, a hook-and-eye closure and the widely recognized twisting "cable" pattern.
The designs are "a combination of art, fine jewelry and fashion," says Yurman, who wears several of his creations: A ring, a bracelet and a square-faced watch.
Dressed all in black, his thick white hair swept straight back, his chin fashionably stubbled, he looks every inch the artist from Tribeca, the New York neighborhood where he and his artist wife, Sylvia, live and work.
Before designing jewelry, Yurman was a sculptor, hanging out with prominent Beat artists of the 1960s; writer Norman Mailer, painter Franz Kline, sculptor Ron Boise.
"I did these funny little silver angels," he says.
It was one of those angels, fashioned into a belt buckle, that sparked his career as a jewelry designer.
The buckle was a gift to Sybil, his girlfriend at the time. She wore it to an art opening, where it caught the eye of the gallery owner. He asked if it was for sale. Yurman said no, but Sybil said yes -- and within weeks they found themselves in the jewelry business.
Ever since, they've had good-luck angels perched on their shoulders. Their collections are in more than 450 stores around the world, and David Yurman is one of the best-known luxury brands on the planet.
Gwyneth Paltrow and Barbra Streisand wear the jewelry; Steven Spielberg and Kevin Spacey the watches; hip-hop moguls Jay-Z and Damon Dash the men's designs. Their ad campaigns have featured models Amber Valetta and Kate Moss, and the company's newest "face" is Naomi Watts -- who recently flashed Yurman earrings of rose quartz and diamonds at the Oscars.
Orlando real estate agent Virginia Morales, 49, collects Yurman bracelets. "I wear three, four at a time," she says. "My husband always knows what to give me for my birthday, anything David Yurman."
Since founding their company in 1980, the Yurmans have worked as a team.
"I have the vision; I design the collections," explains Yurman. "My wife does the styling and merchandising."
Their son, Evan, is part of their ever-expanding creative team. And let's not forget the lawyers.
The couple's designs, which range from about $300 for a simple bracelet to more than $7,000 for a multistrand couture necklace, are among the most copied in the world. Yurman is not flattered by imitators and spends $1 million a year protecting his brand.
"Copying is stealing," he says. People who wear copies are deceptive. "And that's not cool."
Worse, he says, they are supporting counterfeiters who may pay no taxes, have ties to illegal operations or use child labor.
As his company grows, Yurman finds himself more in the role of executive than artist.
"It's less like playing an instrument, more like being the leader of the band," he says. "I'm about ready to do more art work."
But that is not likely to happen anytime soon. First, he plans to introduce a line of Yurman eyewear and a Yurman fragrance, followed by Yurman handbags and luggage.
No wonder he believes in angels.
Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend, NOT Moissanite.
Shares of jewelry maker and sole source of moissanite Charles & Colvard Ltd., fell on March 27, a day after the company forecasted lower quarterly sales due to substantially lower orders from K&G Creations.
Shares dipped $1.73, or 12.8 percent, to $11.75. The stock price is down 27 percent so far this year, adjusted for stock splits.
In a company statement on March 26, Charles & Colvard said sales for first quarter fiscal year 2006 are expected to be between $7.5 million and $8.4 million, which is 25 percent to 33 percent lower than a year ago. The company expects K&G's orders to slip due to lower orders from the 2005 merger of its customers, Federated Department Stores and May Department Stores Co.
Charles & Colvard’s board authorized the repurchase of up to one million common shares. Company shares have traded between $8.63 and $26.29 over the past year.
Loose Baguette Diamond: What Is It & What To Look For.
A straight baguette is a relatively small, elongated diamond that usually is rectangular in shape. The cut is characterized by square corners with rows of step-cut or steplike facets parallel to the table. Baguettes do not conform to the Federal Trade Commission's" 17 -facet" requirement for diamonds.
Straight Baguette.
The name of the cut must proceed the word diamond. Baguettes today are most often employed as side stones, although they also can be the main shape in full-band rings or fashion rings. When used as side stones they serve to camouflage the shoulders of the center stone, masking it £rom the girdle to the culet. Baguettes can also be lined up to produce a continuous flow of diamonds on a ring, bracelet, brooch (i.e. circlet) or necklace.
Baguettes are usually channel-set, but sometimes prong set. Less-expensive baguettes are often channel-set into bracelets. Measured in millimeters more often than weight because their size must be precise for their function, typical sizes for today's side baguettes are from 1.5 mm to 3 mm in length. For larger, more important pieces, designers and retailers may order straight baguettes of 2.7 mm to 4.7 mm, for example.
The word "baguette" is a French word for a long, narrow loaf of bread. This shape, beginning in costume jewelry, is a fashion outgrowth of the 1920s to mid-1930s. During that time, interest in functionalism in architecture and the Bauhaus movement influenced the applied arts and dominated contemporary design. In the Art Deco period, many stones were cut in strict, geometrical shapes, typified by the calibre technique or elongated baguette. In contemporary times, jewelry houses like Bulgari have sustained their use and passion for the baguette. Nicola Bulgari once exclaimed, "We flirt with the baguette." The yield for a baguette from the diamond rough is 38 to 42 percent.
Baguettes are extraordinarily clear. If baguettes are to be used as side stones or as other matched pairs, they must be of similar quality, color and clarity to one another, and to the stone they are enhancing. The step-cut appearance is unforgiving and does not allow for little imperfections in the diamonds. Stay with VS clarity and higher. SI clarity must be examined to insure that the imperfection(s) are not eye-visible. A small chip is much more obvious on a baguette than on a heavily faceted diamond.
Lose Your Engagement Ring, Diamond Ring, Wedding band? Try This Internet Lost & Found Website!
The Associated Press today reports an item of interest: There is now an Internet Website where you can post your lost Engagement Ring, Diamond Ring and Wedding Band.
Maureen Silliman felt her empty pocket and gulped: Her new $300 iPod must have bounced out as she ran to catch a train.
While she sobbed, her boyfriend suggested a message on the lost-and-found section of Craigslist, an online bazaar of classified ads.
"No," the 24-year-old Silliman said. "Nobody would ever turn in an iPod."
Her boyfriend posted the message anyway. Within 24 hours, Silliman's iPod was back.
In an increasingly cynical world, there are still places where people try to do the right thing. Everyday on Internet message boards, honest folks post notes about valuables they found: cash, bank cards, diamond bracelets, engagement rings, wedding bands, digital cameras, and even a cockatoo valued at $1,200.
In turn, when there is no place left to look for something missing, the desperate sometimes take the longest of longshots and look online themselves.
Occasionally, it works for both sides. People such as Silliman get back their iPod, still loaded with Radio Head and Broken Social Scene.
The impulse to be honest doesn't surprise Lawrence M. Hinman, the director of The Values Institute at the University of San Diego.
"I think we perceive ourselves as being much worse than we actually are," Hinman said. "There are people who live lives of quiet honesty."
Take Monique Peddle, 48, in Hollywood, Fla., who posted a note online when she found a diamond studded gold bracelet that she could have just as easily slipped quietly in her pocket.. Or Blake Facente, 30, who also turned to Craigslist when he discovered a Dell Inspiron laptop leaning against his building in San Francisco.
The same for Agnes Satoorian, 27, who climbed into a cab in Boston last month and found a pricey digital camera that another rider had left behind.
"I know that pain," said Satoorian, who had recently lost her own camera loaded with sentimental pictures. "I decided I would try to make it right for someone."
Craig Newmark, the namesake and founder of Craigslist, said that the company added the lost-and-found message board in March 2003 after they noticed a proliferation of people looking for things that they were missing.
"The culture of trust is key, and the fact is that we work really hard at that," said Newmark, 53, who now has Web sites in 190 cities that boast more than 10 million users a month.
That means everyday there are new lost-and-found posts. Like the drawer in a school secretary's office where missing scarves wait to be claimed, the message boards accumulate a disparate collection of goods.
Some are outlandish.
The three teeth -- including a molar with a filing that needed replacing -- pick up in downtown Honolulu. The $100 bill found on a sidewalk on the Las Vegas strip. The man in Copenhagen who lost his ex-wife. Or the New Yorker who misplaced her clean-shaven cowboy and implored: "If found please send him to Queens."
In the lost column in Dublin, Ireland, a post under the heading, "$1 Million US reward," has a link to the FBI's Ten Most Wanted poster for Boston fugitive mobster James "Whitey" Bulger.
"I just want him caught," said the post's author, reached through e-mail, who declined to elaborate or give his name.
Other posts are authentic, and even touching.
The 39-year-old woman in Frankfurt, Germany, looking for her birth mother (Bridgitte Siglinde Stolba). The Homestead, Fla., mother searching for a lost dog named Sparky that detects her 17-year-old epileptic son's seizures and barks for help. The 1-carat diamond engagement ring that slipped off a woman's finger in the hills outside Berkeley, Calif.
Success of the Lost and Found is difficult to measure. Craigslist does not track its sites, and the free posting are only valid for 30 days.
But as stories about triumphs like Silliman's iPod circulate, more people keep playing the odds.
Last Fourth of July, scuba diver Stephen Klink found a solid platinum men's wedding band buried in sand beneath 30 feet of water off Cape Cod. Klink, 36, recently posted a note on the Boston-area Craigslist.
"It's a long shot, but I figured it's worth a try," Klink said from his home in Hillsdale, N.J. "Some married guy somewhere is getting whopped on because he lost his wedding ring."
"Diamonds Are For Ever", But Are Diamond Mines?
Cramer's Mining Weekly reports that the slogan "Diamonds may be forever", but the same cannot be said of diamond-mines.
While De Beers Consolidated Mines (DBCM), the largest producer of diamonds in South Africa, produced a record 15,2-millioncarats last year, it estimates that it will produce just over 14-million carats this year.
Part and parcel of new DBCM MD David Noko’s strategy is to sweat the company’s existing assets, and bring new, additional production on line.
“I do not think that we can grow production from our existing operations – we just can’t.
“Our installed capacity is fixed, and we need capital to improve it,” Noko, who was appointed as DBCM MD on February 7, tells Mining Weekly in an exclusive interview.
And, gaining approval for brownfield projects that do not meet the hurdle rates of the company’s principals is out of the question.
“There would be no point in injecting capital into declining mines like The Oaks, as a return would not be realised, but, by exception, all opportunities are being explored, the major ones being brownfields, but some being greenfields through finding partners that have large resources,” Noko says.
Hence, besides organic growth projects, DBCM’s growth strategy is levered on partnerships with smaller diamond-mining companies.
“If we partner with smaller companies, they will benefit from our knowledge, while we will benefit from the resources that they have acquired,” Noko says.
DBCM has many partnerships in Kimberley, where it has large tailings dumps that require advanced technology to turn the low grades of diamonds that they contain to proper account.
The company is also continuing to research the opportunities of working with junior miners and, in Kimberley, already 25% of revenue emerges from joint ventures with junior miners through contracts.
Diamond & Jewlery at Retail: How Much Money Is Involved?
The US jewelry retail industry generates annual revenues of about $44 billion from 28,000 specialty, department, and discount stores. Specialty retailers hold about 50 percent of the market. Wal-Mart is the biggest jewelry retailer in the country, followed by Zale, the biggest specialty jeweler with over 2,000 stores and kiosks. The industry is highly fragmented: the top 10 jewelry chains hold less than 25 percent of the market. Other large specialty retailers are Tiffany and Sterling, the US branch of British jeweler Signet Group.
Jewelry sales depend partly on consumer income. Small jewelers can effectively compete with large chains because price isn't the main factor determining retail sales. Profitability depends on the volume of sales because sales costs are high and fixed. Because gross margins are very high, often 50 percent, mass merchants like Wal-Mart have taken market share by controlling costs and cutting prices.
Jewelry is often classified as bridal merchandise (engagement, bridal and anniversary rings - about 35 percent of the market); fashion jewelry (rings, bracelets, earrings, pins, gold chains); and watches, silver flatware, and other giftware. Diamond jewelry and loose diamonds account for the largest share of total jewelry store sales (46 percent); gold jewelry for 11 percent; colored gemstone jewelry (rubies, sapphires, emeralds, etc.) 9 percent; and watches 4 percent.
Rolex Watches Set Sales Records.
Watch auctioneer Antiquorum saw enthusiastic response to Rolexes in the first half of its "Mondani Collection of Rolex Wristwatches" sale in Geneva on Saturday.
Phase one of the two-part auction—whose second section will conclude in Geneva May 13—netted $3.676 million for Antiquorum including buyer's premium, according to a company release issued Sunday. All 152 lots were sold at 200 percent of their estimated value, with intense bidding from European and Asian buyers.
Ten lots fetched world-record prices. The sale's top lot, selling for a world-record price of $286,211 including buyer's premium, was Rolex's "Oyster Chronograph Antimagnetic" made in 1941. The rare stainless-steel watch, also dubbed the "Medical Chronograph" or "Stainless Steel Monoblocco" boasts a black dial, round button chronograph, register and pulsometer. The next-highest sale was $242,787 for Rolex's "Oyster Perpetual, Officially Certified Chronometer." Made in 1953, the gentleman's watch has a stainless steel "Jubilee" bracelet and features a triple date and moon phases.
In a separate sale on Sunday, "Important Collectors' Wristwatches, Pocket Watches and Clocks," Antiquorum made nearly $9.3 million from the sale of 88 percent of available lots, which fetched 100 percent by value. In its release, the auction house cited the "Mondani effect" on bidding, which catapulted the sale's Rolex lots to fetch value beyond their estimates.
This helped boost Rolex's "Milgauss Brown Dial Rolex" and "Oyster Perpetual" to world-record sales of $153,959 and $93,300, respectively. Top lot at the sale was Patek Philippe's "World Time" watch made in 1953, featuring a map of North America on its cloisonné enamel dial, which fetched $1.745 million.
$1.745 million!
Another sale record was for the Hamilton "Railway Special" pocket watch made in the 1940's. The piece sold for $64,050, the highest price ever paid for an American-made watch at auction.
The Railway Special: $64,050!
Do You Know How To Buy Your Diamond Engagement Ring?
NOT as this couple unfortunately found out. Be A Smart Diamond Shopper
We totally agree. Here are our recommendations for your safe diamond engagement and wedding ring shopping:
1. Work with a reputable Jeweler; be it Brick & Mortar (B&M) or Internet. Check with your local BBB and the Jewelers Vigilance Committe (www.jvclegal.org)
2. Know what you're buying. Make sure your diamond has a lab grading report. The two most stringent, accurate, and consistent diamond grading labs are the GIA (Gemological Institute of America) and the AGS (Americn Gemological Society). Insist on them.
3. If you're more comfortable shopping with a B&M Jeweler, look at as many diamonds as you can and away from the diamond counter's high intensity halogen lights which tend to make even the ugliest darkest diamonds look D-Flawless.
4. If you're shopping with an Internet Diamond vendor, make sure that they can examine the diamond for you to determine if there are any red flags you need to know about which would dissuade you from buying the stone.
A great number of Internet Vendors sell of Virtual Diamond (VD) databases and never see the diamond you're buying. The diamond is drop-shipped directly to you from the manufacturer. We covered this topic in more detail here: Cyberspace Diamonds
5. Ask the Internet Vendor to supply you with as much information as possible, including photo's.
6. Be clear and understand the Vendor's Policies: Payment, Returns, Upgrades, etc. and any timelines or deadlines that might accompany these Policies.
7. Ask about and receive any paperwork that comes with the diamond.
8. Stay away from in-house Appraisals. Such Appaisals are inflated, will cost you undue high insurance Premiums, and is a practice that is frowned upon and not sanctioned by the reputable National Association Of Jewelry Appraisers (NAJA). Best is to get an evaluation and Appraisal from an Independent Appraiser that does not work for a Jewlery store and does not sell their own diamonds and jewelry. Contact NAJA for a llisting and location of such Appraisers.
Shop Smart. This is a big purchase not only in terms of money but also in terms of emotional significance.
Good Luck!
Hey Guys: Can Diamonds Buy Women Love? Guess Again.
Diamonds are a Girls Best Friend. Right?! Well, fellas, not according to a survey just released by True, an on-line relationship service. They found (surprisingly?) that women value Love and a long-term committment-relationship more than diamonds and jewelry.
Read the results of their survey here: Love Or Diamonds?
Iran Affecting Diamond & Jewelry Prices.
Commodities prices roared to new peaks on Tuesday as fund buying restarted, triggered by fears over the nuclear stand-off in Iran and the impact of surging economic growth in China, investors said.
The oil market hit a new record peak, taking key industrial metals prices with it and propelling precious metals to their highest since the early 1980s.
"The fundamental factors are the intensifying of the political situation in the Mideast Gulf and the Chinese GDP figures, which got everyone back to thinking China is eating up global natural resources," a fund manager said.
China's economy is on course for growth of at least nine percent this year signalling accelerating imports of energy and raw materials.
Fears about Iran's row with the West over the country's nuclear program sparked oil's latest rise.
IPE Brent crude set a fresh high of $72.20 per barrel before falling to $72.03 at 0847 GMT.
Brent has rallied from below $60 in December, buoyed by a fresh flow of fund investment amid mounting concern over Iran and the possibility of U.S. military action against the world's fourth largest oil producer.
"If we look forward it's continued economic growth and a potentially disastrous situation in the Mideast Gulf," the fund source said.
Most commodity indexes, which between them have attracted around $80 billion of speculative investment into the markets, are weighted heavily towards oil.
Fasten Your seatbelts!
Web Analytics Vendor warns a fifth of pay-per-click activity may be Fraudulent.
ClickTracks Analytics has introduced updated software for detecting click fraud, saying that an average of 20 percent of a company’s pay-per-click adverting budget can be traced to fraudulent activity.
The problem stems from individuals or companies trying to increase pay-per-click online ad traffic through illegitimate means. By driving up traffic on ads that show up next to search results, they would get more revenue from the advertiser.
In some cases, the fraud involves using software robots to do the extra clicking, or hiring people to click repeatedly on the ads.
The Santa Cruz, California-based company’s products, ClickTracks Professional and ClickTracks JDC, compare different statistics from the ads and highlight variances that show evidence of suspicious activity. The technology works with the Google, Yahoo, and MSN search engines.
The software highlights statistics such as the number of clicks that come from a certain country, the number of sessions with no referrer site for the click, and the number of different IP addresses.
‘An automated bot flies right underneath the wire.’ says Michael Stebbins, of Clicktracks.
Joe Tedd, operations manager at the New York City-based diamond e-tailer DiamondHarmony.com, has been testing the products on his site. “Since we began using it, which was at the start of the holiday shopping season for ’05, it helped us identify up to $10,000 in fraudulent clicks,” he said. “The tool paid off for us in the time we began beta testing.”
DiamondHarmony spends close to $30,000 per month on online advertising. Mr. Tedd said that without a click fraud tool, his company would not have noticed suspicious activity until much later this year.
At first, he had difficulty confronting the search engine where the suspicious activity originated. The company wouldn’t believe him until he produced detailed reports that prompted the search engine to acknowledge there was a technical glitch and give DiamondHarmony a refund.
While the technical glitch by itself accounted for a proportion of the extra clicks on his company’s ads, Mr. Tedd believes some fraudulent activity also occurred that exploited the technical glitch.
“We debugged something for them that they had never encountered before, and they realized the issue was something on their side,” he said.
Michael Stebbins, vice president of marketing at ClickTracks, said there are click farms run from India and China that drive up click traffic, and sophisticated software robots that can be difficult for many web advertisers to detect. “An automated bot flies right underneath the wire,” he said.
ClickTracks’ 7,000 customers include major companies like Coca-Cola, Intuit, NASA, Nokia, Nordstrom, Pfizer, and Volkswagen.
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is big revenue for Google, Yahoo, and MSN and getting more expensive all the time.
Indeed, BlueNile, a leading diamond e-tailer partly ascribed their lower 4th Quarter 2005 earnings results to significantly increased PPC advertising costs.
Diamond Shoppers: A Lab Grading Report Makes a BIG Difference.
Diamond shoppers will be out in force with the upcoming Mother's Day, Graduations, and June anniversarys.
Buying a diamond wth an accurate lab report is crucial. Stay away from labs that are not well known.
Discussion going on right now over at Diamondtalk.com on reliability of diamond lab grading reports. Discussion is here:
Diamond Reports
Our view is that the most reliable Diamond grading labs today are the GIA and the AGS. Stick with them and know that you're getting an accurately graded diamond.
Remember to Wear Your Diamond Engagement Ring When You Go Shopping Or You Could Wind Up In Jail!
From this morning's London Times:
There are many reasons why Mr Science Notebook doesn’t wear a wedding ring. Chiefly, when he tried one on, he thought it “felt funny”. He doesn’t really do bling.
I shall now have to warn him against hanging around Canadian supermarkets. For, in such places, social psychologists lurk unseen, noting the presence or absence of such jewellery among unwitting shoppers. From behind the frozen peas the psychologists have observed that people who don’t wear wedding rings are more neglectful of their charges than those wearing wedding bands.
The findings, by Andrew Harrell and colleagues at the University of Alberta, were presented at a conference this month and in a news release sensationally entitled: “Absence of wedding ring connected to parental neglect”. I can’t better the description of this utterly weird experiment, so I reprint it here . . . “862 caretaker-children combinations were furtively observed in 14 supermarkets in Edmonton. Caretaker neglect was measured according to how often the caretakers or their charges, estimated to be between one and seven years old, wandered out of sight or were more than 10ft away from each other — too far to prevent most accidents.” Leaving a kid in a trolley while dashing to a neighbouring aisle was a no-no, for example.
On average, 14 per cent of caretakers — with or without rings — lost sight of their charges at least once. But young, attractive adults without rings were particularly lax. Among women in this category, 19 per cent failed the vigilance test. Among the men, it was 25 per cent.
Dr Harrell’s conclusion? The lack of commitment to marriage, signified by unadorned fingers, extends to a laissez faire attitude to the kids. Harrell implies that these customers might have been shopping for more than just Shreddies, and might have been distracted by “an interest in establishing social, sexual or emotional ties outside of marriage . . .” And you thought that chap dithering by your trolley had just lost his way to the beer aisle!
Am I alone in finding this an excessive leap of imagination? Have you tried keeping a boisterous six-year-old within 10ft of you? Might the neglectful caretakers not have been parents? Dr Harrell’s team was not permitted to speak to shoppers, so we don’t know. That wasn’t the only methodological drawback. “A few children spotted us and would ask their parents ‘Why are those people following us?’,” Dr Harrell says. “Their carer would usually ignore them.”
If one wanted to do a serious study on whether unmarried parents are more neglectful of their children than married ones, why the supermarket espionage? After all, in the pantheon of perilous environments, the home reigns supreme. According to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, children regularly burn, scald or poison themselves, start fires or fall down stairs or out of windows. They are treated in A&E departments, or by GPs, both of whom have access to family records.
Dr Harrell holds his hands up: “You’re right. We had to make do with the limitations of this study but we hope to look at such things in future.” Meanwhile, he stands by the unpopular thesis that unwed couples are probably more lax than marrieds: “Sometimes the truth hurts, and if it’s predictive of injury and death, then we have to say it.”
Hey, Harrell! Why don't you turn around, bend over, and see if you're hat's on straight. You'd be better off and so would we if you drove a Taxi.
The Internet 10 Years From Now. Diamond Engagement Ring Brought Right To Your Hand?
The following article appeared in the April 10, 2006 issue of Red Herring. Showing you the entire article because we deem it important and the harbinger of trends and innovations to come that will significantly impact our lives.The possibilities are limited only by our imagination. Think of a robotic arm coming out of your computer screen and offering you a choice of diamond engagement rings, wedding rings, and wedding bands to try on!
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Fast-forward 10 years, a decade out from the final deconstruction of the old order marked by headlines about France’s Alcatel sweeping up its last remnant, Lucent Technologies, AT&T’s old equipment division.
The year is 2016. You’ve just come out of surgery and are being pushed down the hospital corridor on a gurney toward the recovery room. The nurses know you are on the way because a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag on your plastic patient identification bracelet automatically generated an alert to the nursing station.
The doctor doing rounds checks the Internet to monitor your vital signs. As always, the implants in your body are beaming real-time information about your brain waves and blood pressure to a protected web site 24/7. Your daughter, who is on a different continent, is already whispering words of encouragement into your ear—thanks to an embedded speech processor equipped with 802.11 wireless technology, TCP/IP communications protocol, and specialized software that allows sound from the Internet to flow directly into your cochlea. Using your VOIP-enabled mobile telephone, you tell her not to worry.
“One expects there to be much more organic connection between people and technology,” says Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf, who is widely known as one of the “fathers” of the Internet for his role in co-designing the TCP/IP protocol and the Internet’s architecture.
Crossing the Line
If Mr. Cerf and about two dozen other pundits Red Herring interviewed about the future of the Internet are right, in 10 years’ time the barriers between our bodies and the Internet will blur as will those between the real world and virtual reality.
Automakers, for instance, might conceivably post their parts catalogs in the virtual world of Second Life, a pixilated 3D online blend of MySpace, eBay, and renaissance fair crossed with a Star Trek convention. Second Life participants—who own the rights to whatever intellectual property they create online—will make money both by using the catalog to design their own cars in cyberspace and by selling their online designs back to the manufacturers, says Danish economist and tech entrepreneur Nikolaj Nyholm.
Today’s devices will disappear. Electronics will instead be embedded in our environment, woven into our clothing, and written directly to our retinas from eyeglasses and contact lenses, predicts inventor, entrepreneur, author, and futurist Ray Kurzweil. “Devices will no longer be spokes on the Internet—they will be the nodes themselves,” he says.
We will know exactly when our children will be dropped off because the school bus will be connected to the Internet, says Internet doyenne Esther Dyson. Our cars might one day arrange for repairs at dealerships before we realize there’s a problem.
Everything from the family fridge to the office coffee pot—as well as heating, cooling, and security systems—will be managed through the Internet, possibly using souped-up mobile phones doubling as universal remote controls, says Google’s Mr. Cerf. By 2016, he predicts the online population of 1 billion will treble, and a huge portion will be mobile. And by then, the Internet will become so pervasive that connecting to it will no longer be a conscious act.
Bandwidth access of 100 megabits per second or more will become the norm. “It is probably a safe bet that everyone will be able to have a full-motion, high-definition real-time link to anyone,” says Bram Cohen, creator of the popular peer-to-peer program BitTorrent. Once that happens, “the concept of who is online and who is offline will melt away,” says Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo’s director of media and desktop search.
In sum, the Internet “will just become like plumbing, which you won’t notice unless it backs up,” says Brewster Kahle, inventor of the Wide Area Information Server, the Internet’s first publishing system, and co-founder of the Internet Archive, the largest publicly accessible, privately funded digital archive in the world.
While the technical underpinnings of the Internet are likely to undergo drastic change, the nature of those changes will be wrought by policy decisions made by governments with a heightened interest in overseeing the Internet. When a network is this critical to just about everything, it’s reasonable to expect that governments will seek tighter control of what remains today a decentralized and somewhat anarchic system. The trick will be to preserve the creativity that spawns innovation—and profit—in this more vital and inevitably more regulated Internet.
No matter what, people will continue to make money from Internet innovation in a variety of ways.
Targeted advertising will continue to be an important revenue generator, as will intellectual property distribution, predicts Mr. Cerf. Tools for content production will evolve to allow for widespread and uniform tagging of content, significantly improving our ability to use sensor data, financial information, medical data, text, imagery, video, and audio. And the semantic web being promoted by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee will help us better match computer understanding with human understanding of the world around us, though it will likely be far from perfect.
People will be able to talk to the Internet when searching for information or interacting with various devices—and it will respond, though not necessarily in English, which will cease to be the dominant language on the web, says John Patrick, a founding member of the World Wide Web consortium and former vice president of Internet technology at IBM.
As so-called sensor networks evolve, there will be vastly more machines than people online. As it is, there are almost 10 billion embedded micro-controllers shipped every year. “This is the next networking frontier—following inexorably down from desktops, laptops, and palmtops, including cell phones,” says Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com. This is what will make up much of the machine-to-machine traffic, he says.
RFID tags will be in wider use. So will geo-location services, which can be used to locate friends, places, and events of interest. Better real-time language translations will be available, at least for text translations.
Mash-ups won’t be limited to web sites—we’ll see the introduction of “mashed” real-time web applications. The Internet will further revolutionize publishing, film, and television. “You will suddenly have a few hundred thousand producers out to kill each other, competing on the Internet,” predicts Charles Zhang, founder and CEO of Beijing-based portal Sohu.com. “You will have instant rankings of the most popular videos,” adds Mr. Zhang, who reckons China will lead the way in this new form.
Independent management consultant and author John Hagel III sees opportunities in network infrastructure management and customer relationship businesses that put together individualized bundles of products and services and act as trusted advisors.
Search will remain big. Big players will continue to dominate online, says Paul Saffo, director of the Palo Alto, California-based Institute of the Future. “The lesson is, if you want to become big you do so by empowering and enabling lots and lots of small players.” The same way that Google, Amazon, and eBay did, he adds.
So just how big will Internet business be? “My whole thesis is that information technologies are growing exponentially. Things that we can measure like price performance, capacity, and bandwidth are doubling every year so that’s actually a factor of a thousand in 10 years,” says Mr. Kurzweil. “So if the Internet is already very influential—if there is already a trillion dollars of e-commerce, already a very democratizing technology, then multiplying its size and scope by a factor of a thousand will be a very significant change.”
A Clean Slate
But this assumes that the current Internet, which was never designed to be a critical part of an economy’s infrastructure, will be able to sustain a tripling of the number of people connected and the addition of billions—perhaps even hundreds of billions—of devices.
Concerns about how to prepare for such a future took center stage at a March 8 meeting of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris. The meeting drew researchers, telecom executives, academics, government officials, and economists from the United States, Europe, and Asia.
“The Internet is at a turning point and the changes are big enough in nature to warrant the high-level attention of policy makers,” says conference organizer Andrew Wyckoff, head of the OECD’s information, computers, and communications policy division.
Indeed, willful service disruptions, viruses, and the web’s fragility and lack of robustness have all become issues of enormous importance as the Internet becomes central to the global economy and people’s lives. Even spam has graduated from irritant to serious threat.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Senior Research Scientist Dave Clark, who has been actively influencing the development of the Internet since the 1970s, believes the Internet needs a total overhaul, not just more patches.
Mr. Cerf wonders about that himself. “Plainly the Internet continues to play an extraordinary role in the daily life of its billion users, so in a sense it cannot be considered hopelessly broken,” he says. “But it is arguable that it can be significantly improved.”
Growing Up
The Internet did not really become a mass-market communications tool until after 1983, when the U.S. government’s original ARPANET—short for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network—changed communications protocols and hooked up with a computer network linking academic computer science departments nationwide, helping usher in the web we know today. It was built on the telephone network and satellite and radio systems of the day, and adapted amazingly well to new technology. But “a new version of the Internet is certainly imaginable,” says Mr. Cerf.
Those who argue that the current Internet does not need fixing “tend to be people who sell a lot of antivirus software,” says John Wroclawski, director of the computer network division at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute.
Mr. Wroclawski, working with a team of graduate students as well as some of the Internet’s pioneers, is trying to rethink the Internet from scratch. The idea is to keep an open mind to what works, including preserving the best of what we have today. To that end, they are participating in the Global Environment for Networking Innovations (GENI), a new National Science Foundation project to build an advanced test-bed network for piloting new protocols and applications on the Internet.
A second NSF initiative, the Future Internet Design (FIND), is one of many projects aimed at generating new approaches that can be tested over GENI’s advanced test-bed network.
“We don’t presently have a roadmap of where we are trying to go with the Internet,” says MIT’s Mr. Clark. Instead of worrying about backward compatibility and migration issues, the focus has shifted to “where we would like to be in 10 to 15 years,” he explains. “If the story is compelling enough, people will figure out how to get there.”
There are different schools of thought about GENI’s ultimate impact on the Internet’s technical underpinnings. Some, like Nick McKeown, a Stanford University professor involved in three different “clean slate” initiatives, believe that after testing new technologies over the GENI platform, a consensus will emerge on one approach and entrepreneurs will innovate around that—and commercialize their products with the help of venture capitalists.
Others think entrepreneurs will end up commercializing different approaches addressing different problems. In this scenario, specific applications will have their own dedicated networks that will coexist indefinitely running over GENI, which, as a platform, will become the new Internet.
However, “The biggest challenge to efforts such as GENI will be confronting the reality that there will be no technical solutions to the top problems of the Internet that do not also solve the underlying issues of economics, ownership, and trust,” says K.C. Claffy, founder and director of the Cooperative Association of Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at the University of California, San Diego’s Supercomputer Center.
In short, it will be difficult to choose a technology direction without becoming embroiled in policy decisions that impact business models.
The future direction of the Internet could end up being one in which the telecom carriers apply their own business model to the Net—one that CAIDA senior analyst for economics and policy Tom Vest calls “telcotopia”—which would basically mean a return to the public switched telephone network (PSTN), where no network service is possible outside of an explicit partnership with the regional or national PSTN owner. In another scenario, the Internet could become a government-run utility, whereby network control ceases to be a strategic business advantage. Finally, the “let a hundred flowers bloom” approach could be adopted, in which many different infrastructure control arrangements and business models compete and coexist.
The outcome of that debate is likely to determine the technology path of the Internet. The telcos, for example, are unhappy with just being the pipes because they can’t earn their traditional profit margins. “Society has decided IP is like water—this has strong implications for a [telecom] industry structuring itself to sell wine,” says CAIDA’s Ms. Claffy.
So, telcos are pushing to start putting functions in the core of the network because they believe they can make a lot more money with services than they can just providing access.
To date, the network’s core has been dumb—meaning its only job is to blindly carry data from one user to another. All the innovation—think Mr. Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web or Niklas Zennström and Skype—happened at the edges. But there are several proposals, all likely to be tested on GENI, that would move some of the innovation to the Internet’s core.
One idea is to replace today’s routers, the boxes that direct Internet traffic, with much simpler dynamic circuit switches, which would allow the introduction of new optical technology, says Mr. McKeown, director of a new Stanford Clean Slate program, which will use outside donations to seed small projects that could end up changing the Internet’s architecture in 10 to 15 years.
The upside of this approach could make service providers’ networks more efficient, lower their costs, and make the model more sustainable. The downside, as USC’s Mr. Wroclawski sees it, is that “any move to change the current overall Internet structure might be tremendously threatening to innovation in the future.”
When it comes to telcos, it is competition, not just innovation, that their detractors see at risk. Unlike in Europe and some parts of Asia, the U.S. has restricted competition in broadband access to the consumer—the portion of the network referred to as the last mile, or the local loop. The policy virtually guarantees insufficient capacity and artificially high prices, says Bill Woodcock, director of Packet Clearing House, a San Francisco-based nonprofit research institute that analyzes Internet traffic, routing economics, and global network development.
To make matters worse, some U.S. local exchange carriers in recent months began lobbying for a different model in which any traffic generated by any network endpoint—such as Google—has to compensate the carrier for the use of its broadband facilities. “This is an attempt to return to a 19th century model of telecommunication with complex inter-carrier termination and compensation mechanisms,” says Mr. Cerf.
If telecom carriers want to provide value-added services in addition to broadband access, they should be free to do so, he says. But, he and others argue, they should not be free to interfere with the provision of broadband services by others.
Telcos are dependent on companies like Yahoo and Google to provide content that telecom customers want. Some folks, Mr. Woodcock being one, see them using protection-racket tactics to corner business, offering to degrade the service quality of competitors for the right price—helping Google against Yahoo (or the other way around, as the case may be) or Skype, Vonage, and others, he says.
“In my opinion, legal protections are needed to preserve both consumer choice in the use of the Internet and to ensure continued innovation of new services without having to obtain permission or negotiate commercial arrangements with the access providers,” Mr. Cerf says.
In fact, some believe that Google now has more than enough cash and heft to provoke a power shift, even though it lacks the Washington, D.C., connections and savvy of telco lobbyists.
New technology solutions could also act in favor of companies like Google and Yahoo. Canadian researchers are already testing a system in which the user owns, rather than leases, the last mile of connectivity. The user then connects to a neighborhood co-location point, where he will be free to interconnect with a phone company—or use an alternative provider such as a Google or a Yahoo.
Engineers have already tested the system successfully. Trials with consumers could start as early as this summer, says Bill St. Arnaud, senior director of advanced networks at CANARIE, a Canadian industry and government consortium that is developing next-generation Internet technologies.
Mr. St. Arnaud argues that, just as governments do not define where you can buy your computer or how much memory it can have, users should be able to configure their own network, decide how much bandwidth they want, and choose from a menu of providers.
Mr. Arnaud believes that CANARIE’s approach can make money, and possibly end the practice of governments propping up phone companies at the expense of consumers. “While the business case for the carriers may be disappearing, a host of new business and investment opportunities is being created with far greater economic wealth creation,” Mr. Arnaud writes in his blog. “Our biggest concern is that governments will be distracted by the complaints of the old industry such as carriers and penalize the new economy industries of the Internet.
Nearly everyone interviewed by Red Herring for this article predicts that government involvement in Internet issues will continue for the next 10 years, as will the debate over such involvement. The Chinese government’s attempt to limit searches on Google is only the beginning.
Indeed, the U.S. government’s claim that it does not control the Internet Committee for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) proved hollow when the U.S. Department of Commerce recently told ICANN to delay the allocation of the .xxx and .cat domain names, asserts Packet Clearing House’s Mr. Woodcock.
The White House’s move gave “a lot of unexpected leverage at a particularly dangerous time” to a Chinese government attempt, through the United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union (ITU), to place control of critical internet resources like IP addresses in the hands of national governments, says Mr. Woodcock. If national governments directly oversee available Internet protocol addresses, they can control and therefore limit the entry of all new Internet service providers.
America’s perceived control of the Internet is likely to change, but not for the reasons people think, says Israeli tech entrepreneur and investor Yossi Vardi. He predicts that many U.S. corporations will continue to lobby Washington to tighten their grip on the food chain—including pieces like music, movies, software, and telecoms—and the natural result of that will see the center of Internet gravity shift to countries where the grass roots is more powerful and operates more freely.
Others, such as Ms. Dyson, founding chairperson of ICANN, hope that ICANN will retain the authority it has today but will continue to be seen as illegitimate, which is “a desirable state of affairs,” she says, “because it means it can do very little.”
The moment any Internet governing body is seen as legitimate and gains power, governments will use it only to further censorship and other nefarious aims, she argues. It would be better, she says, if ICANN stays in place, and everyone watches it like a hawk.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill on Democracy, a free Internet is the worst form of Internet, with the exception of all the others.
Canada Drops Jewelry Excise Tax!
The Canadian Government today abolished it's jewelry excise tax.
Canada's conservative majority in government dropped a number of excise taxes on May 2 to create "a more competitive business tax system," said Jim Flaherty, the country's finance minister.
Along with the tax changes, Canada's jewelry excise tax was eliminated. In June 2005, Parliament voted to abolish the jewelry excise tax over a period of 5 years.
"Jewelry is available at all price levels and is purchased by a wide range of Canadian households," the budget report read. "Repeal of the Excise Tax will recognize this and ensure that the Canadian jewelry industry is able to compete on a fair and equitable basis with other retail and manufacturing businesses in Canada. It will also serve to reduce the compliance burden on the jewelry industry, a particular benefit to small businesses.”
The Canadian Jewellers Association (CJA) briefed the industry on the news. Morris Robinson, chair for the group's government relations committee, said, “We are delighted that the conservative government has ended the inequity and confusion inherent in the Excise Tax in the content of minister Flaherty’s budget.
According to a statement by CJA, the "vote of confidence to our industry is the result of many group and individual efforts, specifically to the Prime Minister [Stephen Harper] for honoring his campaign promise to our sector."
Are you listening U.S. Congress? Get rid of these consumption taxes!!
Beethoven Diamond On Your Finger!
LifeGem, an American company that allows people to immortalize their loved ones, whether family or pets, in memorial diamonds, is to create three diamonds using the carbon from Ludwig van Beethoven's hair.
The diamonds, which are being made to showcase the company’s newest technology, will go on display at museums and opera houses worldwide and then be auctioned off. Proceeds from the auction will go towards creating LifeGem diamonds for underprivileged and military families.
Each Beethoven LifeGem will be a certified, high quality diamond between .5 and 1 carat in size. The Beethoven LifeGem process will be completed around the end of this year.
The Beethoven locks of hair are provided exclusively by John Reznikoff who holds the Guinness World Record for the largest and most valuable collection of celebrity hair. Reznikoff’s collection also includes such figures as Napoleon, Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.
We blogged about this company last year, HERE: Diamonds From Ashes
Just answer me this Batman: If I get me to wear one of these Beethoven diamonds, will I be the next guaranteed winner of American Idol?
Luxury Spending Up in 2005
In 2005 the typical luxury consumer spent $52,588 buying luxuries, up 3.8 percent over the average amount spent in 2004 of $50,640, according to Unity Marketing.
Aggregate results from 25 leading global luxury marketers show an average revenue growth of 10.9 percent for the year 2005.. Growth for 2004 was higher at 14.5 percent. Overall the luxury market in the United States reached $1 trillion in 2005 (up 12 percent from 2004,) a figure that includes jewelry.
In 2005 the dominant trend in the luxury market was a shift in spending more – significantly more – on experiential luxuries; in other words, the things people do rather than material goods one has or one owns. The typical luxury consumer spent $22,746 on experiences in 2005, that is nearly double what they spent in 2004. Luxury consumers also spent nearly 20 percent more buying luxury automobiles, a highly experiential luxury good.
While spending on experiences and automobiles went up, luxury consumers spent less overall on home luxuries, down 4.6 percent to $19,990. Spending on personal luxuries like luxury apparel, fashion accessories, jewelry and watches, wine and spirits, pet luxuries and pens and desk accessories, rose 5.6 percent to $10,007 in 2005. A moderating factor in the growth of personal luxuries is that the super-affluent households (incomes $150,000 and above) didn’t hold up their high 2004 spending levels, while spending on personal luxuries among the near-affluent ($75,000 to $99,999) and the affluent ($100,000 to $149,999) increased at a significant rate.
Take My Diamond Engagement Ring, PLEASE!
What do divorced gals or women over a relationship do with their diamond engagement rings?
Here are some ideas: Take My Diamond Wedding Ring, Please!!
Diamonds On Your Teeth
Girls are showing Diamonds everywhere, including their teeth!
Diamonds In Your Mouth
"Dazzling Smile" now takes on a new meaning!
Another Useless Study.
Retailers are more likely to see brisk business on rainy days, or days where temperatures are either frigid or boiling, a new study finds.
Shoppers are more likely to spend more time and money during their shopping excursions during days with extreme weather conditions, a new survey from the Mystery Shopping Providers Association says.
More than 64 percent of shoppers said they would stay longer in a store on extreme weather days, be it hot, cold or rainy, and consequently, more than 46 percent will spend more money than they would during a typical shopping trip, according to the survey of more than 1,000 mystery shoppers.
Mystery shoppers who said their shopping experiences were impacted by the weather noted they were nearly five times more likely to take personal shopping trips on warm and sunny days compared to cold or rainy days. In addition, more than 30 percent said they were more likely to spend the most money on a single shopping trip during warm weather compared to only 12.5 percent who said they would spend more money during cold weather.
The shoppers also reported that sales associates were twice as likely to offer complementary products to their purchase on warm or sunny days. The last is an important finding, as nearly 85 percent of shoppers surveyed said the mood and helpfulness of the sales associate impacts how much money they are willing to spend in the store.
The survey was conducted by the Mystery Shopping Providers Association, the world's largest trade association dedicated to the use of mystery shopping.
Whatever happened to Common Sense? I guess if there was more of it around, many academics would be looking for another line of work.
Survey Highlighlights Importance of Diamond and Jewelry Branding
Diamond and diamond jewelry brands continue to see increased awareness among consumers, according to a survey of 2,571 members of the Jewelry Consumer Opinion Council (JCOC) conducted from May 31 to June 12.
A media release from JCOC stated the leader of the branding pack is the Zale Diamond. It remains the strongest diamond brand since the survey was last conducted in October 2004. It is followed closely by Hearts On Fire, Radiant and the Leo Diamond. While consumers say a brand name is still the least important factor in driving the diamond purchase, they acknowledge that brands are gaining importance.
Among the changes since the 2004 survey: Hearts On Fire has gained recognition in the past two years; consumers are naming more diamond brands, such as Lucida and the Princess Plus; more respondents are saying they own a branded diamond, while a smaller percentage are citing a lack of awareness for not owning one; a larger percentage of respondents say they own branded diamond jewelry such as Vera Wang, Scott Kay and Escada; and consumers say they are slightly more willing to pay higher prices for branded diamond jewelry versus two years ago.
"It's extremely difficult to establish specific brand awareness with consumers," said Elizabeth Chatelain, president of MVI Marketing Ltd., founder of JCOC, in the release. "Although consumers are more willing to pay premium prices for branded products, making a jewelry line 'stand out' is not getting any easier. With the saturation of brands in the market, a name and logo is not enough to catch consumer attention. Each brand must develop a niche, a unique selling proposition, or a product attribute demanded by consumers."
While consumers were willing to pay more for a brand, they were also deterred from purchasing branded designer jewelry because of high prices, Chatelain said.
"The key to successful product branding is to design and deliver a unique product the consumer needs and prefers to other products available," she said. "Manufacturers and retailers can help consumers come to understand what exactly branded diamonds and diamond jewelry are, and that the consumer has increased flexibility in choosing."
Weddings getting less Conservative.
As young couples look to put their personal stamp on their big moment.
More here:
What Diamond Buyers Want.
A new Retail Trends report just released by G.A. Wright Marketing says retailers can remain competitive by focusing on "value-added" strategies, such as loyalty programs that reward customers.
According to Gary Wright, CEO and Founder of G.A. Wright Marketing, Price is not the most important decision influencer for retail purchases.
In Retail Trends 2006, Wright suggests creating loyalty programs that reward customers for repeat business and referrals and that they create emotionally relevant marketing messages, and interesting experiences that make it exciting for customers to do business.
Ethnic Jewelry: Can It Grab Market Share?
A recent study conducted by the Jewelry Consumer Opinion Council (JCOC) reveals significant consumer awareness of ethnic-inspired jewelry.
Sixty-five percent of the study's 2,930 respondents said they would be open to purchasing quality ethnic jewelry if they knew more about the styles available and their histories.
More than one-third of respondents said fashion is a critical purchasing driver of ethnic-inspired jewelry. Nearly a third said they like to mark a trip with jewelry from the place visited, while 14 percent said they display their own ethnic pride by wearing jewelry representative of their culture.
Sixty-nine percent of respondents said they are concerned that the gems they buy are mined in an ethical way, and 63 percent said they are willing to pay more for a piece of quality ethnic jewelry depending on its origin. A majority of the respondents said they have spent up to $200 on a piece of ethnic jewelry, with nearly a quarter spending $200 to $5,000. Local craftsmen are the most popular source for consumers buying ethnic jewelry, followed by jewelry chain stores, local independent jewelers and art fairs.
Wedding Insurance: Do You Really Need It?
Having an insurance to cover your home or car is a no-brainer and in almost all States mandatory.
Specialty insurance is a growing segment of the insurance market, says Jeanne Salvatore, spokeswoman for the Insurance Information Institute, a New York-based industry group.
"There are only so many cars and homes out there to insure," Salvatore says. And insurance products have to keep up with a changing world. For example:
How about insurance to cover your costs if your wedding gets canceled?
So what happens if you spend a boatload of money on your big day and you have to postpone because of something like a flood or a hurricane or because the bride or groom or one of their parents is hospitalized?
Maybe you lose your deposits. Maybe you have to reschedule at great expense. Not to worry: Wedding insurance can help.
Such policies will cover expenses if you have to reschedule your wedding for a "covered reason," such as Mother Nature, illness or military deployment.
If the bride or groom simply gets cold feet, though, forget it.
The policies cover expenses like forfeited deposits and travel expenses. If a rowdy dancer or drunken guest runs into your gift table at the reception and causes it to collapse and break some of your gifts, the damage is covered. If your wedding photos don't turn out, the insurance will pay to reconvene your wedding party to take replacement photos. If the best man loses the wedding rings, it's covered. And if a wedding postponement or cancellation causes the bride or groom to need professional counseling, the insurance will pay for the sessions.
Mother-In-Law clause is NOT included in the Policy.
One policy, WedSafe insurance through Robertson Taylor Insurance Brokers Ltd. of London, costs $185 for about $15,000 coverage, and $405 for about $75,000 coverage.
Good Idea!
Buying Your Diamond Engagement Ring On The Internet: Future Trends.
E-commerce is booming, with all sorts of products being bought and sold, especially Diamonds, Diamond Engagement Rings, and Wedding Rings. We recently made note of this trend here:
Diamond E-Commerce
Asia is the next E-Commerce frontier. No doubt there are still many consumers out there that are skeptical if this trend will continue and/or are just flat-out more comfortable shopping for their Jewelry at their neighborhood Jewelers. Well, for you skeptics and non-believers, a peek into the future might just change your mind.
At the Red Herring Asia 2006 conference Wednesday in Hong Kong, Safa Rashtchy decided to travel to 2026—10 years further than other analysts dare to look.
A managing director of Piper Jaffray who analyzes the Internet, Mr. Rashtchy said more than half the world’s Internet users would be in Asia by 2026: 1.3 billion out of a total of 2.5 billion.
Despite the large number, the penetration rate would be only 30 percent, leaving huge scope for growth.
Companies in this space would do well to address the Asian markets. In China, for instance, 39 percent of Internet users are in the age group of 18 to 24. Another 25 percent are between 31 and 50 years old, while 18 percent are in the 25 to 30 age group.
Shantanu Bhagwat, business development partner for Asia at Amadeus Capital Partners, said India’s online community is growing, though not as fast as its population of mobile phone users.
Indian cell phone users download ringtones worth about $100 million a year—and these downloads are not necessarily from high-end users.
Mr. Bhagwat expects online and mobile commerce in India to increase substantially in the next few years.
“About 67 percent of India’s GDP is made up of consumer spending, second only to the U.S., which is over 70 percent,” he said. “I expect a big chunk of spending will move to online platforms—on the Internet or on mobile phones.”
China’s homegrown Internet properties compete with well-established ones from the U.S., and consolidation is starting to happen.
Local companies in India still have to get numbers, but there’s a huge revival of interest in the online space. Venture capitalists, both local and those from Sand Hill Road, are investing in online companies, hoping for large monetization as online communities grow.
MakeMyTrip.com, an eVentures-funded online airline and hotel booking company that began catering to local travel in India in September 2005, is getting huge traffic these days.
CEO Deep Kalra believes India’s web commerce of about $500 million is just the tip of the iceberg. “There are endless opportunities,” he said.
Diamond TV Is Here.
Do you have some extra cash lying around and it's burning a hole in your pocket?
Try this.
An Italian design company called Keymat Industrie has brought bling into the home by introducing the $130,000 Yalos Diamond TV, which features a diamond studded white gold frame, holding at least 20 carats of the precious gems in its own "grill." Available in 26, 32, 37, 40 and 46 inch sizes, I doubt whether the fact that the screen maxes out at 1080i will concern potential customers like Jay-Z and Master P all that much.
A few years down the road when this technology becomes obsolete, just pull the diamonds and look for some other faddy doo-dad.
Only 108 Shopping Days to Christmas!
Looking for a Unique Diamond Gift for Her? How about this Diamond Bra?
Hearts On Fire has created a dazzling diamond bra to celebrate the 10-year-anniversary of the Victoria's Secret "Fantasy Bras," which have a combined value that surpasses $96 million in diamonds, jewels and precious metals.
Inspired by the Victoria's Secret "Very Sexy" collection, the balconet-style bra includes more than 2,000 diamonds and weighs 800 carats. The centerpiece is a 10-carat Hearts On Fire diamond brooch with a Victorian floral motif, meant to embody "the romance, glamour and sophistication that is Victoria's Secret."
Karolina Kurkova
Karolina Kurkova, a Victoria's Secret "angel," models this year's bra, which will be featured in the 2006 Victoria's Secret "Christmas Dreams and Fantasies" catalog, coming out this month. This is the second time Kurkova has had the honor of modeling one of the diamond bras, having donned the "Star of Victoria" in 2002.
The 2,000 Hearts On Fire diamonds that make up the Diamond Fantasy Bra required over 20,000 hours of labor to cut and polish, the company said. It took another 300 man-hours to design and create the bra.
"Trust but Verify", were the sage words of advice by our late President, Ronald Reagan. I'd like to get up close and examine those diamonds with my 10X loupe.
Waiting for Him to Buy You that Diamond?
I know for some of you wonderful Ladies, Godot will sooner show up!
So it is with interest that we note that 68 percent of those surveyed in a new Jewelry Consumer Opinion Council (JCOC) study said they've bought diamonds for themselves.
The study of 3,553 JCOC panelists took place between Oct. 27 and Nov. 1, with 83 percent of respondents saying they own diamond jewelry. Self-purchase topped bridal, holiday and birthday gifts, which were the next highest in rank, according to respondents.
As the holidays approach, the survey found that 16 percent intend to buy diamond jewelry, with well over half citing it as a self-purchase. More than a third said they were undecided, with the potential to buy diamonds either as gifts or for themselves. With a significant amount of consumers willing to self-purchase, the most popular price range for diamond jewelry other than bridal is between $300 and $2,500. Right-hand rings are the most favored style, followed by stud earrings.