Posts tagged e-commerce
4 tips on making it big on eBay
May 19th
Huge online traffic generated by eBay caught the eye of Henry’s decision makers back in 2000.
“We taught it would be a great channel for our hard-to-sell items and potentially an additional revenue stream,” according to Max Payne, director of marketing at Henry’s.
Nestor Arellano
The company never expected the move would become so big that it would open the 100-year-old Canadian photo supply store to a whole new group of American customers. Read the rest of this entry »
Mobile payment needs more than an iPhone Bump to get going
Mar 19th
I’d like to apologize to Darrell MacMichael of PayPal Canada for costing him all of $8 while we were filming a demo of his company’s new Send Money Version 2.0 application for the iPhone.
Send Money is an app that enables smart phone users to access their PayPal accounts with their mobile device. The new version works with the Bump app on the iPhone which allows people to exchange information on their phone by just touching (or bumping) their iPhones together.
iPad will revolutionize publishing – someday
Jan 29th
v1.0 shows platform still a work in progress
By now, even my disconnected mother sitting on a beach in Florida has heard about the iPad. And while geeks debate the name, whine about its lack of a memory card slot and USB port and slice Apple a new one for once again handing AT&T a golden egg, I find myself thinking about my mom, and whether her world changed a bit yesterday.
See, she reads books. Lots of them. She’s also a technophobe who views her laptop with a curious mixture of fear and indifference. 
Publishers tend to appreciate folks like my mom because she drives demand for their wares. Unfortunately, printing books is a complex, expensive and often messy business. As the record industry discovered in the 1990s, the Internet is changing the way we consume this content, and the industry would like – indeed needs – to transition my mom and everyone like her into an electronically distributed reality.
But in the absence of a realistically usable device or form factor – no, she’ll never read a book on her Byzantine-for-her laptop – that simply wasn’t going to happen. Amazon’s Kindle showed us the possibilities, but despite its pioneering success in defining the e-book reader market, it’s failed to break out beyond a niche product for cash-flush book lovers. It isn’t, and probably will never be, the reader for the rest of us. Read the rest of this entry »
How are your users surfing?
Jan 21st
It is no secret that I believe that a company’s web presence is a direct reflection on the quality of their brand and by extension their products or service offerings. Is it fair that consumers judge a company by the quality of their web interaction? Probably not, but it happens millions of times a day all over the world. 
The difficulty in producing a good user experience on the web lies in the fact that there are so many components that go into making a “good” web site or web application. There are the content providers, the information architects, the graphic designers, the web developers and potentially many others. Sometimes, in small organizations, these roles are each fulfilled by the same person. Sometimes, in larger organizations, the people that fulfill these roles might never meet. Regardless of the development dynamic, a lot of effort is expended on many different levels in order to produce a web site or web app. Read the rest of this entry »
The decade of convergence and the (n)ever-changing risk landscape
Jan 6th
A full decade after convergence was hailed as the next big thing, right around the turn of the millennium; this elusive concept is making a comeback. The difference is that we now have a massive infrastructure, a vast audience, and the will to make contact. Indeed 10 years ago, the potential of the Internet to connect people and deliver efficiencies was identified, but the model was unproven and not enough adopters meant an uphill battle for every XML developer, every PDA manufacturer and for eCommerce sites in general. 
Read the rest of this entry »
The “Holy Grail” of marketing with mobile web access
Dec 16th
Looking ahead to 2010, I expect to see more articles online and offline about how GPS technology is exploited more “fruitfully” by enterprises reaching out to persons carrying the latest PDAs.
While it is always fascinating to discuss the latest technological developments that have potential for applications, sometimes we miss the mark – am reminded of the time in 1998 when Motorola and Timex joined forces to create their “Beepwear Watch”. Just because a technological marriage is possible, doesn’t mean it could be a marketing success. The Pocket pager style “beepwear watch” won a CES Innovations award, only to fail as a consumer product because it was soon eclipsed by a decline in the cost of cellphones.
When I emphasized the word “fruitfully” I am reflecting that technological considerations alone will not arrive at the ‘killer application’ we seek. The solution to a blending of GPS and PDAs has to come from a marketing angle. Read the rest of this entry »
