Not-So-Great Live Music Performances

Recently, American singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey received criticism from many people due to her live performance of “Video Games” on the famous comedy skit show “Saturday Night Live.” Personally, I don’t dislike Lana Del Rey nor fancy her but the live performance she did was indeed a flop for me. I guess that was her musical style as a singer but it was still different and quite far off from the recorded version of her song. Not to sound negative here but I just think that the best singers must sound better live or at least sound as great as their records.

Aside from Lana Del Rey, a couple of artists have not fared well during their live performances so Lana should not feel so bad… I guess? Anyway, here are some live performances that had people wanting for “stop” instead of “more”.

The famous Whitney Houston (R.I.P.) could not reach the same stellar heights of her voice during the hype of her career. In this video, the old Whitney was compared to the recent Whitney in 2010 when she sang I Will Always Love You.

Britney Spears also had her share of unstellar moments. One was her performance during the MTV Awards in 2007. She looked unprepared and awkward.

Lazada leads the e-commerce race

There are lots of great things that are happening in Lazada Philippines currently and everything is pointing towards the success direction. The recent news is that the company lately hit the one million sales mark. As we all know and as the saying goes the first million is the most difficult to achieve. That is a fact of modern human life in our capitalist culture. That might be the situation for come companies and individuals but for the company Lazada Philippines, making the first million sales was an expected result. Saying that Lazada is performing is an understatement because they are more than that. They are beyond the generated advertising hype. They dust the competition and put everything into perspective. It is a big player in the online selling game. It is mainly due to the corporate support and incubation it got from its parent company.

Online venture builder forward slash business incubator extraordinaire Rocket-Internet, a company based out of Germany that focus on business incubation and online venture building. It gathers successful online business ideas all over the e-commerce industry and replicate their strategies so that they can be released onto emerging markets that are currently a dime a dozen in in Europe and Asia. Among those emerging economies is the Philippines, which is why we have Lazada. The company runs 25 offices all over the globe (one of those 25 offices is located here in the country right there in the middle of the bustling Makati business district and provides gainful employment to over 15,000 employees on their venture companies not including the 700 people that are working direct for Rocket-Internet.  Since the company began creating and building successful online venture companies, they have created and successfully exited around 100 market leading online companies, probably more than that but I am not just so sure of the  numbers as I am only drawing from what I have been reading, estimates would probably suit our purposes in this case. Most of the portfolio ventures are located in multiple markets. The company has around 50 active venture portfolio companies that include popular names like Linio, Mizado, Zalora, Zalando and Wimdu.

Lazada also has presence in other Asian nations like Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia. In the Philippines, it is dubbed as one of the fastest growing online shopping store that offers varied product choices that are not available in average online shopping websites. This online shopping company provides relaxing online shopping experience. It offers big discounts, best deals and promos almost on a daily basis. The usual services that the company offers are free delivery for items that costs P1000 and low shipping costs for purchases below P1000. The return policy was put at 14 days instead of the regular return time frame of seven which is actually a good thing for consumers that does not have too much time to put a product to test. These attributes of Lazada makes them a very successful online shopping company and that is why it is no wonder that they lead the industry race.

Lazada Philippines Review: This kind of success did not just happen overnight

Looking for information online (where else would one look for information these days but the internet) and trying to get hold of some information about lazada.com.ph/ ‘s parent company is a task and tour of wonder.  An enlightening process and very educational, looking at the numbers that the giant internet company Rocket Internet pours in, I could not help but gawk at the truly staggering figures staring at me whether it is on a blog, a review site or on the official home page itself. What did I find about them? Based on my little research about this amazing online venture building company, I found out that Rocket Internet has been doing what they are doing right now for more than a decade which only means that they are experts and veterans in the field of internet business incubation. But that leads to another question, what is Rocket Internet ? What is that thing that they do that makes them the most relevant business entity in the internet universe (if you prefer to call it like that instead of the cliché world wide web or net) Just to give you a quick at a glance look and some kind of profound inkling about the concept that envelopes this company, I am going to drop in some essential rocket-internet knowledge so you get you daily dose of brain crunching and cerebellum flexing information.  Rocket Internet is an online start up incubator conceptualized, founded and brought to staggering and dizzying heights of success by the Samwer Brothers of Germany.

The main business model that they currently employ and that they would probably employ in the succeeding years revolves around the concept of finding out what the latest and best e-commerce ideas are (usually internet companies coming from the United States, Canada and other developed first world economies) and having that idea resurface somewhere else like in another country as an e-commerce company or online shopping business entity like Lazada Philippines. The apt term and actually the official term for that kind of process is cloning hence the Rocket-Internet nickname or moniker clone factory that was unofficially coined by people in the technology community.  That term cloning might induce images of dolly the sheep which is the first mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell (now that is some serious sounding stuff right) I know that is kind of whacked out to use that as an analogy but can’t help it because of the term cloning. Anyway, that is what the company Rocket-Internet is doing and has been doing for more than 10 years and they have been very god at it.

You want proof? Just look at the numbers that they have churned out over the years, over 100 portfolio companies created and successfully exited, 25 offices strewn across the world and almost 17000 strong manpower including those that are employed at the main headquarters in Germany.  Now you are aware that the kind of success Lazada is enjoying right now did not just happen overnight.

How Lazada enabled local-commerce to get off the ground

A lot of positive things have transpired in the local e-commerce industry, There have been a lot of things going on and all of them are primarily attributed to the online shopping company called Lazada Philippines  which is almost always a company name that is getting dropped whenever there are talks and conversations about local online shopping and the state of e-commerce. What is e-commerce by the way an why there is so much fuss about it in the business world both here and abroad. We are going through some quick definitions of e-commerce so that we get a quick inkling of what it is, how it affects us and our economy and the overall quality of our lives. A lot of research and study has been conducted by various academic institutions and private individuals about e-commerce. Among the explanations and definitions that they came up with was that e-commerce is the operations, processing and technology that takes place when business transactions or interactions are done in an automated manner through networks using information technology or the internet as the primary vehicle to make the business transactions happen. Another business organization and trade association categorizes and defines e-commerce as the creation, production, marketing, distribution, sale or exchange of goods, products and services through electronic means. E-commerce is simply the business of the future and the future is now. It has been widely hailed as one of the largest technological and business innovation to dawn in human society. It is slowly but surely capturing rising markets as it progresses and it is slowly dominating all economies including the developed ones.  Economies on developing nations that has been thought of as antiquated or unprogressive for e-commerce are now assuming it as a natural way to do business transactions. The popularity of e-commerce can be attributed to the improvement in telecommunications infrastructure and spread of internet service providers over the years that offers cheap, inexpensive connection to the internet. The fast development of of gadgets that enables internet connection easily also added to the widespread popularity of the internet resulting to consumers being   inclined to try out new things that comes with the internet revolution, among them e-commerce and online shopping. The online shopping website Lazada Philippines affected the local e-commerce economy positively and we will examine how the company did it.

-The company peddles goods and products that are categorized as hard goods. There are no services and other stuff that can’t be placed inside a box and packaged. That is why the company is classified as an online retailer which is a new thing in local e-commerce that has been steeped in the online marketplace style of shopping.

-There is no physical location or what other call shop. Everything is done online with the exception of the payment which in Lazada can be done through cash.

-Offer convenience, varied selection of goods and services as well as very competitive pricing.

The positive things that Lazada offers contributed to the increased participation of consumers in online shopping and attracts even more market segments.