IFTF's Future Now

Virgin America Auctions Maiden Flight Seats on Ebay

And this, the one week I -don't- have to fly to San Francisco!

eBay View About Me for virginamerica_by_auctionwire

You will receive 2 seats on the August 8th,Inaugural flight from JFK to SFO. Richard Branson and Cold War Kids will also be on this flight with you.

Not only do you get to be part of the first flight, but you also get a one night's stay at Clift Hotel and VIP tickets to Virgin America's exclusive launch party at Ruby Skye. Ground transportation provided.

What a great marketing idea though.

Technorati Tags: mobility, tourism

Shopping Trends for 2007

Intstitute friend Anita Campbell's Small Business Trends blog has an excellent article on shopping trends.  The article describes 5 shopping trends and is well worth reading.  Trend 2 is "Men Come Into Their Own as Shoppers".  As someone with 2 teenage boys who care way too much about their clothes, this quote really hit home for me:

“The surge in men’s apparel sales came from some of the most unexpected places, such as young men buying a suit. Teens and young adult men have finally ‘discovered the suit.’ When exploring that further, NPD found that young men never owned a suit, never wore a suit and never saw their father in a suit - yet, they have migrated towards dressing up to be ‘cool.’ We are seeing a shift in the younger generation reaching their image through grooming and dressing up,” said [NPD chief industry analyst, Marshal] Cohen.

The other trends described in the article are:  shopping as a force for a better world; celebrity wannabe shopping; social shopping; and the shopper as buyer and seller. 

From Blog to Spam in Under 6 Hours

At 12:15 Pacific Standard Time today I posted an entry on this blog containing a new email alias I'm using for my OpenEx project. At 6:06 pm I received this spam at that address. Should I be surprised how fast that was, or rather how slow?

From:       geoff@puretick.com
Subject:     re: Trading more efficiently
Date:     December 14, 2006 6:06:41 PM PST
To:       openex@iftf.org

Good Evening again,

Here is day trading video on how to clean up your charting/execution computer. A few of the group members have been having problems with audio, low resources and system slow downs. This video explains how you can minimize a lot of these issues. If you'd like to check it out, please see the link below. Trading is my job, I cant have a inefficient PC causing me to miss moves.

FLASH VIDEO LINK: http://webpages.charter.net/puretick/cleanup/index.html

GN!

Have a good day trading tomorrow

*********************
Geoffrey Preston
HTML Designer/Coder/Admin
www PureTick Com  - Disciplined Traders Helping Bring You Real Returns

Quote of the day

From Geoffrey Moore's Dealing with Darwin:

Everybody gets that there must be a big idea behind Google’s googoolian market valuation, but what exactly do we think it is? Not product innovation, although arguably their original claim to fame, Google Search, was just that. Not acquisition innovation, especially if you can believe BusinessWeek’s write-up of December 5. No, the only way to decode their market cap is to say it is yet another public market attempt to value disruptive innovation....

[W]hat exactly is the disruptive innovation that Google represents? What is the big idea here? Let me propose the following: Any stream of electrons delivered over the Internet to a human being on the other end, regardless of whatever attributes it may also possess, is a form of media, and can be monetized as such.

Obviously this is true of content. The interesting thought is that it is also true of products and services.

Technorati Tags: search

Do we all need to turn off comments?

Susan Kuchinskas writes in Internetnews.com that Amazon has received a patent that "covers methods for encouraging consumers to write reviews of items they've purchased by determining the optimal times to send them e-mails or reminders." In other words, a patent on consumer reviews:

Amazon Gets Patents on Consumer Reviews

Review your local dry cleaner, pay $10 million?

User reviews are a hot new content area, being used by Google (Quote, Chart), Yahoo (Quote, Chart) and MSN to sweeten their local search results. But as of Thursday, such consumer reviews could put search providers, as well as thousands of e-commerce sites, video rental or review sites and online booksellers, in the sights of Amazon.com's (Quote, Chart) lawyers.

The online retailer of books and just about everything else was awarded three new patents, covering its purchase circles, search and consumer reviews. While Amazon.com's patent police would go after Web publishers, not consumers, the review patent could put the kibosh on the social networking components of many search services....

In one embodiment of the [customer review] patent, the system sends consumers a message inviting them to write a review in a predetermined amount of time after the purchase. It's a method widely used by online retailers, including Yahoo (Quote, Chart) Shopping. The patent also covers the method of tracking who returns to rate products by asking them to click on a unique link in an e-mail.

But the patent even covers collecting reviews by letting visitors to a Web site fill out a form.

Amazon has been-- and continues to be on-- both sides of lawsuits involving some pretty fundamental Web technologies or practices, including one-click shopping and recommendations agents.

[via Alex]

Technorati Tags: business, ecommerce, patents, law, Web 2.0

eBay and Skype, 2

My colleague Anthony Townsend recently posted about the eBay-Skype transaction,

Perhaps Ebay has a little more foresight and realizes that a little more intimacy in the transaction is what helps deals get done. I'm struggling with the broader implications - is this just another incremental improvement to Ebay or a sea change in the way we will trade online - through rich, multimedia, personal connections rather than anonymous bits of text and ratings?

If I read it rightly, he imagines-- and indeed, eBay itself is talking about-- a marriage of eBay and Skype, with the latter layered atop the former. A couple thoughts.

First, ratings aren't anonymous, and the paucity of bits may be a good thing in the current system.

Theoretically, at least, those doing the reviewing have identities and are real people (though one can game the system, just as one can game transactions in the real world). Indeed, one can argue that they've succeeded precisely because they're an example of what Malcolm Gladwell calls "thin-slicing": they only provide information on a participant's performance, and nothing else. The smooth salesman's tricks or the liar's honeyed words don't work on eBay; nor do prejudices get in the way of completing transactions or evaluating performance.

The question, it seems to me, is whether the addition of more layers of information-- and in particular, the addition of a VOIP service atop auctions, will either add to the volume/velocity of transactions, or correct whatever flaws or shortcomings exist in the current system.

I suspect that for some of us, part of the pleasure of eBay is knowing that we don't have to interact with salesmen the way we do in stores, but can still know enough to have a sense of whether we're going to get ripped off or not. Whether you can add more channels atop this system and have it still operate in the same way remains to be seen; and I think I'm skeptical that it can.

But maybe for really expensive purchases, or for things that require some hand-holding to learn to operate properly, being able to reach out and touch someone would be good. Maybe you really do need more bandwidth to make transactions above a certain size function. However, for small sellers of cheap goods, will Skype be a virtue or a curse? For people selling relatively inexpensive things that buyers can be a little nuts over-- Beanie Babies, say-- I'd imagine that it could be more trouble than it's worth.

Technorati Tags: business, internet

Early Lever Product Placement

The first film product placement occured in an 1896 silent film: Laveuses No. 60, by the Luminere Bros. Filmed in Geneva. Produced by Lavanchy-Clark, early film and advertising pioneer. It showed two Sunlight (Lever) soap boxes, prominently placed. It was also the first use of multilingual placement, one box says savon, the other seife. French and German words for soap. Newell on Product Placement. MIT Laboratory for Branding Cultures. Via TCM and George Simkowski. I saw this on TV, and have been unable to find a still image from the ad itself, if anyone has this I would appreciate a copy.

Typepad and the marketing of informality

Now that most of the summer interns have gone off to college, or otherwise returned to their regularly scheduled lives, the Institute is starting to shift into fall mode: lots of travel, a busy conference season, and lots of articles and reports going out the door.

One thing I'll probably be doing is a subtle redesign of this site. Typepad has reforged the tools blog owners use to control the design and layout of blogs, and they've also added capacity for displaying RSS feeds from other sites, podcasting support, and a couple other cool new tools.

As nice as that is, just as interesting is the way they've decided to communicate this to the Typepad community: not through a FAQ or dry technical announcement, but through a series of interviews with Typepad programmers. In each interview, the programmers talk a little about what they do, what new feature they've developed, and why they wanted it (or why it's cool). Obviously it's a lot more personal and informal than a more traditional announcement, and is probably overdetermined (as the Marxists used to, and probably do still, say) for a blogging company; but I think it works, for two reasons.

First, most of us blog as a serious hobby, or are pro-am about it, adopting an informal, person-to-person mode makes plenty of sense. Second, Typepad is one of those institutions that doesn't so much have customers-- in the sense of people who just buy and use a finished product-- as a large mass of people who are constantly pushing, remixing, and creating with their service. For such a group, interviews probably work far better than a traditional corporate release.

Technorati Tags: blogging, Typepad

Detecting Emotions for Engagement

An article on work by an MIT student to analyze phone conversations to determine the engagement of a speaker. Prosaically called the jerk-o-meter, from its use in phone dating scenarios, it analyzes a number of vocal parameters to determine engagement.  This is another example of what has been called affective computing ... using elements of emotion, knowingly or not, to interact with a system. Is it an invasion of privacy to have your 'emotions' read in this way?  Are there market research applications for these techniques to determine the strength of responses?  Similar systems exist which detect call-center emotions. Whats different here is the dependent result being tracked: engagement. We learned first about Affective Computing in the book by the same name by MIT professor Rosalind Picard.

Advertising Confessions

David Ogilvy's 1963 book: Confessions of an Advertising Man, is still worth a read. Its a short, empassioned advertisement for advertising, barely updated in 1987, still well before the web media revolution. (He also had a follow-up book: Ogilvy on Advertising, which I have not read) There is still an Ogilvy organization. He was a researcher at heart, mainly an expert about print advertising, and some of his expertise can be repositioned for online. Two quotes from the last chapter: Should Advertising be Abolished?, have always interested me: (p.154)

Advertising brings savings in is wake. On the distribution side it speeds up the turnover of stock and thus makes lower retail margins possible, without reducing the shopkeepers income. On the manufacturing side it is one of the factors that makes large scale production possible and who would deny that large scale production leads to lower costs? - Lord Heyworth, Unilever

Time and time again in our company, we have seen the start of advertising on a new type of product result in a savings that are considerably greater than the entire advertising cost .. the use of advertising clearly results in lower prices to the public. - Howard Morgens, P&G