Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Online retail awards - finalists

OK, it's often the business, rather than the sexy end of digital, but it's where the ROI rubber hits the pixel road... and these guys are being recognised as getting it pretty right. Worth checking some of these out

Thanks Alf, courtesy of http://www.onlineretailer.net/

1. Best Pure-Play Online Retailer

This category is open to new and established pure-play online retailers without a physical store, who demonstrate best practice in merchandising, service, functionality and customer experience. Judging will be based not on overall size but on efficiency, ingenuity, dedication to customer experience and return on investment.

SHORTLISTED NOMINEES

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2. Best Multichannel Retailer

Multichannel is open to retailers demonstrating best practice in integrating traditional retail with online retail in an innovative, effective way to grow the overall retail business. Judging will be based not on overall size but on efficiency, ingenuity, dedication to customer experience and return on investment.

SHORTLISTED NOMINEES

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3. Best New Online Retailer

This award is for the best new start-up (launched post Jan 1, 2009), be it pure-play or multichannel, who demonstrates a sound, innovative and effective business strategy and a growing customer base.

SHORTLISTED NOMINEES

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4. Best Use of Technology

For the online retailer who best utilises available technologies or proprietary systems that deliver improved efficiencies for the business, better customer experiences and valuable analytical data to continually improve.

SHORTLISTED NOMINEES

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5. Most Innovative Online Retailer

We're looking for the most imaginative initiatives in the online retail space, whether that be in site design, usability, customer experience, service, fulfillment or any other area of the retail discipline. What we're looking for is something original, exciting and practical. Must be able to prove demonstrably how innovation has led to tangible, positive results.

SHORTLISTED NOMINEES

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6. Best Online Retail Marketing Initiative

An award for the best online retail marketing initiative, via a single channel or an integrated campaign, such as email, mobile, social media, search, offline, live events or a combination of many. Must be able to show a link between the marketing initiative and increased traffic and sales.

SHORTLISTED NOMINEES

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7. Best Customer Experience

Site usability, product and content, efficiency of delivery, customer service and marketing are among the factors that will be taken into consideration when judging the customer experience award, with contenders requiring high scores in all areas.

SHORTLISTED NOMINEES

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8. Emerging Star

This is for the fast-thinking, entrepreneurial innovator (either individual or company) whose new ideas, approaches and strategies have had an impact on the industry in the last 12 months and will help influence the future of online retailing.

SHORTLISTED NOMINEES

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9. Best Site Design

This award is for the best overall site design from an aesthetic, usability and technology perspective.

SHORTLISTED NOMINEES
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Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Around the World in 80 Days goes QR

Ha... love this so much. It's just so damn quirky, clunky, mixed up and obvious that it gives some real 'ye olde world' charm to digital. Even down to the awesome 'snuggiee-esque' infomercial. I'm ordering one right now. Thanks Mr McCrudden

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Friday, May 28, 2010

6 Smell Sensors That Are Changing the Internet of Things

Ok... been slack at sharing again, but here goes with some new verve!

Found this fascinating post on ReadWriteWeb a while back about Smell Sensors and there future role in the internet of things. The mind boggles.

Got any great ideas on what we could do marketing wise with say a smell-capable RFID? Maybe a Lynx campaign in their somewhere?

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Written by Deane Rimerman / May 19, 2010 3:00 PM / 4 Comments
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smell_sensors.jpgSensors that smell help save lives everyday. From cars that won't start because court-ordered breathalyzers smell alcohol in the operator's blood stream, to bomb-sniffing machines at the airport, to complex medical tests that analyze your breath - we are designing machines that smell to make the world a safer place.

Smell sensors are essential to the future of the Internet of Things. From RFID stickers capable of smelling food through the package and updating the food's status to the Web, to our next phone being a "smell phone", engineers are finding innovative ways to help protect our families from being exposed to toxic hazards.

  1. Breathalyzers

    2. Sensors that measure blood alcohol content by smelling your breath have been around since 1938 when a professor named Rolla Harger invented the Drunkometer. His success in marketing the device was due in part to his work with the National Safety Council to legislate alcohol limits - as well as legitimize his sensor data as evidence in a court of law. Today, the innovation that's occurring with these sensors is the dramatic decline in cost. So next time you want to know if you're legal to drive after you drink, you can just blow into a Mini-Key chain Breathalyser, a device that will set you back less than $10.

  2. Smell Sensors In Medicine

    3. In Israel, Russell Berrie of the Nanotechnology Institute at Technion developed a sensor that can verify lung cancer by smelling a patient's breath. The sensor searches 42 different lung cancer biomarkers, and is built out of nine cross-reactive chemiresistors. These resistors are built out of gold nanoparticles, each with different organic functionalities. A similar sensor from the same institute can be used to detect kidney disease sooner than traditional urine tests can. The research for that particular sensor system is titled Sniffing Chronic Renal Failure in Rat Model by an Array of Random Networks of Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes.

  3. Smell Phones

    4. Michael Sailor, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at U.C. San Diego is working with startup Rhevision to develop a smelling device that will attach to your cell phone. The system is based on a camera that takes a picture of porous silicon. Each of these microscopic pores are individually shaped, or tuned, to change color when a specific chemical is encountered. Thanks to the current megapixel resolution of today's phone cameras you can take a single picture of these pores, or sensors, and load it to the Web where it can be analyzed in real time. One application would be that these smell phones could rapidly map out chemical spills and other exposure threats.

  4. RFID That Smells

    5. General Electric is currently testing RFID-configured smell sensors. These small stickers can not only detect the presence of hazardous waste, they can also detect and report food spoilage. One example is a milk carton with an RFID sticker attached to the outside. The sticker periodically smells the milk through the packaging, and as soon as the milk goes bad the RFID sends a wireless alert.

  5. Bomb Smelling Sensors

    6. Ion Mobility Spectrometry machines are currently the most common bomb-smelling sensors in U.S. airports. Austrian manufacturer Ionicon Analytik was recently featured in Scientific America because of its new Ionicon Analytik's Proton-Transfer-Reaction Mass Spectrometry (PTR-MS) machine. This machine is about the size of a refrigerator and is so sensitive that it can distinguish between molecules that are nearly identical. The device works by creating "protonated" water vapor, which is essentially water vapor with extra protons. Many organic compounds, including explosives, have an affinity to grab those extra protons and in turn become positive themselves.The positive ions produced can be extracted and analyzed to reveal their chemical composition.

  6. Non-Destructive Carbon Dating

    7. Traditional carbon dating methods required that a small piece of the object must be destroyed through burning. The carbon is then measured for age based on degeneration of the radioactive isotope Carbon 14. Yet with many artifacts the destruction of even small portions of it is sometimes prohibitive. A new non-destructive method allows the object to be placed a container that is filled with an electrically charged plasma gas similar to the plasma found in a high-definition TV. The plasma gently oxidizes the artifact, which will release trace amounts of carbon dioxide that can then be used for Carbon14-decay analysis.

These six ways are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what's currently being developed. For example, perspective search service GlobalSpec lists thousands of companies designing gas and chemical sensors. How many of these sensors will one day generate data for the Web? If you have a sense of scenarios that will make this happen, please post your comments below.

Image by Patrick J. Lynch, medical illustrator
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Some great thinking on using search and content to DOMINATE

Thanks @Ben_Phillips

Converse Domaination from Ross Martin on Vimeo.

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Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Personal cities

And to follow on from that, a great concept post from my favourite guys at PSFK:

Intelligent Cities: The Personal City

May 10, 2010

Intelligent cities PSFK.png

The development of systems that allow city wide exchange of data and the reaction to that data is important to study. The impact of what is sometimes called the sentient city is not just at a city level but it also impacts communities, neighborhoods and families.

Intelligent Cities can create personal, helpful, efficient and communal cities. In four articles on PSFK, I’m going to describe each of these four aspects and the manifestations occurring today that point to a better urban future.

ARE YOU Sexier.png

We are broadcasting information about us more than ever before and we can interpret this data to help us understand our quantified selves.

Devices collecting personal data about our lives give individuals deep levels of insight on their habits and behaviors. These systems are often passive, gathering data in the background from day-to-day activities. Over time, this information gives people the tools and motivation for people to improve their lives.

Manifestations Of The Personal City

Check In & Share

Intelligent cities helpful city foursquare.png

The popular Foursquare service provides a simple example of how people appear to be more willing to provide their personal information. Foursquare is a combination city guide and social game that encourages people to explore their cities while broadcasting information about their location. Users are motivated to share this personal data as part of a competition with their social circle, receiving points each time they check in at locations such as restaurants and bars.

Passive mobile apps monitor sleep habits over time

Intelligent cities helpful city sleeping apps.png

Mobile applications like Owl and Sleep cycle track a user’s sleep habits passively during each night. By monitoring a user’s movements, snoring levels, and other ambient data from the environment, these services collect a comprehensive database of information that helps to better understand one’s behavior.

Shared Traffic Info

Intelligent cities helpful city withing waze.png

Waze is a free mobile application that enables drivers to build and use real-time road maps, alerts on traffic and accidents, and data. Drivers can actively report and update other users with what’s happening on the road including accident alerts, police traps, weather hazards, cheap gas offers and more.

Connected body scale wirelessly sends weight data to the web

Intelligent cities helpful city withing.png

The Withings Connected Body Scale measures a user’s weight, fat mass, and lean mass, and sends that data wirelessly to a personal profile online. The device syncs with Google Health to build a long-term picture of the user’s health information.

Future Developments

How could the Personal City enhance our lives? Here is some of the suggestions we received at a recent presentation with Asian/Pacific region bloggers:

1. A weight monitoring system tells you what to eat

2. In-depth data allows for better matchmaking service

3. Find likeminded people to sit together when you travel

4. Monitor energy consumption

5. Understand the relationship between food types and your weight gain

There are plenty of other ways the Personal City can evolve. Leave your suggestions in the comments box.

Next Steps

PSFK has prepared a unique presentation on Intelligent Cities. If you would like to invite our staff to present it to your team and discuss possible opportunities for your company to explore, contact PSFK’s Jeff Weiner – jeff.weiner@psfk.com
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Facebook Poised to Take 
Geo-Networking Mainstream

Wow... been so lazy/busy that i've not posted anything for ages .Anyway going to to try get back into things with this from Adage:

Geo-location and making the real world interactive have long been personal favourite topics of mine, and with this little move from facebook it seems like it's all about to kick off big time. Which while i'm happy about that, i'm kinda pissed (but not surprised) that facebook is making a play here... do they really have to be EVERYTHING on the web?! I'm kinda fond of my geo-location stuff being on nice, not-evil, foursquare

Social Site Announces Location-Based Functionality, Marketers Eager to Leverage 'Check-Ins' Look for Scale

by Michael Learmonth and Emily Bryson York
Published: May 10, 2010

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- This could -- finally -- be the year of mobile marketing. But not exactly in the ways first predicted.

The combination of location and social networking -- once confined to tiny players like Foursquare, Gowalla, MyTown, Whrrl, Loopt and others -- is about to get massive scale in the form of Facebook, which as of last month had 450 million users and is adding a million new users each day.

MAC ATTACK: Facebook is building a location-based functionality that lets users 'check in' at restaurants and share menus with friends.
MAC ATTACK: Facebook is building a location-based functionality that lets users 'check in' at restaurants and share menus with friends.
Facebook is expected to launch location-based functionality as soon as May, according to an exec with knowledge of Facebook's plans. Marketers will be allowed in soon after.

Related Stories

Facebook to Add Location This Month, Integrate Brands Later
Marketers Line Up to Try New Updates That Allow Users to Share Their Whereabouts
Last week Ad Age reported that McDonald's is building a location-based functionality with Facebook that will allow users to "check-in" at restaurants and share menu items with friends. That campaign is expected to be rolled out some time after the consumer launch, when Facebook integrates brands into the system.

The social impact of including a physical location in a virtual sharing app is immense; so is the marketing application as brands are then able to turn their physical locations into media channels connected to real people across Facebook's social graph.

"People talk about location-based advertising, but location removes the need for advertising," said Seth Goldstein, co-founder of SocialMedia.com. "If you know where the consumer is, and that she is physically touching your brand, then you do not need to rely upon traditional mass-media channels to reach her."

Mr. Goldstein sees marketers adding location as a key part of the value exchange with consumers. A store could, for example, offer free Wi-Fi to patrons who share their location to their friends.

McDonald's declined to comment on its Facebook plans, but one can imagine it could allow users who "check-in" the ability to share an offer or promo, as well as their location, with their social connections.

Jumping on bandwagon
Brands quickly recognized the power of location-aware social networks, and Pepsi, Dunkin' Donuts, Starbucks, Bravo, Warner Bros. and others jumped on the bandwagon and did deals with Foursquare.

But location-based marketing is very much in an experimental phase, mostly because the medium is tiny. Foursquare just signed up its millionth user, for example; MyTown has 2 million; Loopt has 3.5 million; and Gowalla still under a million. For a marketer that needs to reach hundreds of millions daily, geolocation social apps just can't provide the scale yet.

"Today no one can do location-based social marketing at scale other than potentially Facebook, should they release something," said Mike Lazerow, CEO of Buddy Media.

But with the proliferation of smartphones and location-aware networks -- including Facebook -- lots of marketers are betting that the sharing of physical location is about to become as natural and ubiquitous as a status update. Indeed, where you are could become the most valuable part of social networking. See a friend is having a coffee down the street? Why not join him?

Budgets devoted to this kind of marketing are tiny, just like social media budgets were a few years ago. But unlike some other recent social phenomenon -- take Twitter, or even Facebook itself -- it didn't take marketers long at all to figure out that the marketing potential is immense.

"We're always looking for the next big thing that isn't just a passing fad, but a viable wave in consumer behavior," said Chris Fuller, emerging media director at Pizza Hut. "Geolocation services appear to be just that." Pizza Hut built a Facebook ordering platform in 2008.

But the greatest opportunity for geolocation apps could be for local businesses, for which scale is less important than reaching the right people to generate foot traffic. "This will be the biggest thing to happen to local businesses since paid search," said Ian Schafer, CEO of DeepFocus, which just launched specialty practice GEOFocus. "It enables people to move in flocks or herds; you create waves of people."

Boon to local businesses
Some local businesses are catering to their Foursquare "mayors" with offers and special services. The Scholastic Store in New York is offering visitors 10% off any purchase, just for checking in while visiting.

Facebook, incidentally, has a self-serve ad platform created for small advertisers, the types most likely to benefit from location-based services.

Still, some wonder if this could be too much. Facebook is a platform that allows people to share their lives, and it makes sense that location would become part of that. But each feature Facebook adds -- such as its recent Open Graph function, which brings its social graph to third-party sites -- brings pushback from users, mostly in the form of privacy concerns.

"Being fully connected and available 24/7 to all your peeps and tweets may not be as healthy as it seems," said Scott Bedbury, CEO of BrandStream. "Not being available, being off the grid and being fully present in whatever moment you're in, and with whoever is with you, is my measure of 'engagement.'"


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Monday, May 3, 2010

John Lewis captures the hearts of Britain

Created by UK agency Adam & Eve for department store John Lewis, the retailer says that the ad – which features a reworking of Billy Joel’s Always A Woman To Me soundtracking a woman’s life story – has resulted in an astonishing 39.7% leap in sales.



It’s certainly capturing the public’s imagination in the UK. Several mainstream British papers have written about it, and I think it’s the first time my parents have ever emailed me about an ad. As The Observer puts it:

“All over Britain, women are kneeling in front of their tellies, heads low, shoulders shaking, tears and mucus dripping from their reddened faces like rain from a suburban gutter.”

I can’t think of another ad, which has such a positive response from the mainstream press so quickly:

* John Lewis ‘Spend it before you die’ ad puts sales up 40% – Observer
* Genius of John Lewis’s everywoman ad wins female vote – Guardian
* She’s ad us all in tears – The Sun
* John Lewis advert prompts iTunes release of Billy Joel cover – Telegraph
* John Lewis’ £6m advert becomes a YouTube hit - Metro
* The £6m ad that’s got Britain talking – and sobbing – Daily Mail

Mind you, at a reported $10m, it had better shift some units.

And as John Lewis isn’t in Australia, if I was Myer or David Jones, I’d be looking at the possibilities of licencing it for this market before my rival does.

Thanks to Tim Burrowes Mumbrella
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