In No Particular Order

I was really pleased to be invited to moderate a discussion at the Google Retail Summit – on “eCommerce Excellent – winning this Christmas”.

The event brought the great and good together to hear from Google and each other and followed the successful and enjoyable inaugural event last year (Google’s site, my blog post).

On my panel I was joined – with great humour and good will – by Steve Robinson, CEO, M&M Direct, Nick Lansley, Head of Innovation and R&D, Tesco and John Hinchcliffe, CMO, N Brown Group. We’d decided beforehand that we’d avoid the blander approaches one sometimes gets at industry events and try to deal head on with some of the hard choices and real differences this Christmas. I was really pleased that they entered into this and can’t remember chuckling so much during a panel before Hats off to Steve, Nick and John.

Here’s the eminent Peter Fitzgerald of Google opening proceedings: note the Lolo colours, courtesy of ToyCamera iPhone app…

The next panel was on KPIs and featured Michael Ross of eCommera (@manross) in fine form on his pet topic – KPIs. I won’t quote some of his excellent one-liners since not only would that be ‘goal-poaching’, but because Michael’s doing an article for November’s Internet Retailing magazine and I don’t want to scoop ourselves. Watch this space.

Finally on the photo front, here’s the lab squad (or some other name) of Google engineers around to answer questions. All good fun.

I understand that the event was filmed and so – if our panel session makes it past the censor’s cuts for language, sarcasm and career-limited comments – I’ll post the link.

These my micropostings and bookmarks – August 30th through September 5th:

• Flexibits | Cameras – Found this neat little plugin:

  "With familiar System Preference functionality, Cameras allows you to manage what happens when you connect your:

  * Digital camera
  * iPhone
  * Digital media reader
  * Any photo device

  In addition to launching a specific application when you connect a camera, you can also have your images download automatically. Never again spend time launching the right app or quitting apps that you didn't want to launch."

• Perian – The swiss-army knife of QuickTime® components – Perian is a free, open source QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats.
• Review of Maturity Models::immeria::web analytics blog::Stephane Hamel – Six approaches to maturity models compared, with the aim of finding an ideal one for the Web Analytics Association. The review is a useful round-up though for anyone interested in maturity models and their applicability.
• Starting a new business – free advice, tools and resources | Start Up Donut – The Startup Donut – from Business Hotline Publications
• iO | Innovation Onboard, integrating portable devices into your car – Bluetooth Music Streaming & Hands Free kits. iPhone hands free car kit & iPhone music integration into your vehicle – Neat way to get iPod/phone music into an old car
• Blogging is back, thanks to Posterous | Blog | Econsultancy – Nice, enthusiastic review of Posterous, with mullings on microblogging. Chris didn't mention that 'annotated delicious tags' are also microblogging too…
• Retail Retweets (retailretweets) on Twitter – Retail retweets? Great idea

These my micropostings and bookmarks – August 4th through August 25th:

• Data Based : The Relational Model turns 40 –
• Walmart.com – see it in 3-D –
• Barclays, Orange Partner on Mobile Payment | AFSCM – Contactless payments using Mobile. Hmm – Octopus.com.hk anyone?
• Ronan Le Goff – Impressive sailor and nice guy who owned the house we stayed in while in Brittany.
• Teens Don’t Tweet; Twitter’s Growth Not Fueled By Youth | Nielsen Wire – Interesting factoids from Nielsen on how twitter under-indexes the overall web use for the under 25 segment.
• Apple Wants To Build A PayPal Killer, Say Wall Street Gossips (AAPL, EBAY) – This makes immense sense to me. iPhone users are used to their iTunes app and make micropayments ($0.79, say, for a tune up to £20 for an app and £100 for their .mac account…). In the absence of a PayPal app on the iPhone (invoked how? with no multitasking and clunky hand-shaking between apps…?) this would make sense.

  Certainly it's no more onerous than Google Checkout and would be better integrated.

  Cat, pigeons, amongst.

I was really honoured to be asked to keynote at Econsultancy’s 2009 FODM in June 2009.  I’d spoken before and found the audience to be tough but receptive. It’s one of the more difficult speaking gigs of the year, I find, and there’s always a pressure to perform well (and Ashley commenting that there’s “no pressure” of course just makes it worse… ). At least this year he didn’t promise I’d be “funny” (a throwaway remark that gave me my first night of lost sleep in 10 years as I imagined that I’d been forced to perform a standup routine at the Comedy Club without a script! Wah).

Anyway, the event was held at the rather spectacular Congress Hall and upon entering I realised both that is was a great presentation venue, and that 350 marketers is quite some audience

There were some spectacular and energetic speakers (Jonathan MacDonald in particular), and two sessions that interested me in particular on digital publishing and ecommerce in retail.

The presentation went well and I used the time to reprise themes from previous FODM presentations, wander into the realms of Augmented Reality, build on some KPI discussions I’d been having with Michael “KPI” Ross and finally introduce the “Obama-Preedy Pricing Principle” (the result of a beer-supported discussion with Tony Preedy on how discounts and promotions should be related to a specific place, time and – increasingly – appropriate behaviours). Maybe it should have been the Pavlov-Preedy Principle??

You can see all of the presentations on the Econsultancy page (you need to be a subscriber), or you can see my presentation via the Slideshare link:

These my micropostings and bookmarks – July 12th through August 1st:

• House of Fraser directors to join Crombie | News | Retail Week – House of Fraser directors June Lawlor and Colin Porter are to leave the department store to join menswear brand Crombie in September.

  June Lawlor, who was director of womenswear, accessories and beauty at House of Fraser, and Colin Porter, who was commercial director at the department store, will join Crombie as joint managing directors.
  The duo plan to revamp the brand, focusing on its heritage and on producing classics with a twist. They also plan to expand Crombie’s network of standalone stores, concessions and its website.

• Songbird – Open Source Music Player – iTunes alternative that – w00t – plays FLAC (lossless audio format) files. Will play at high definition (24bit/96Mhz) and so with an external DAC makes your mac the storage and source "heart" of a digital uber-hifi system.
• Blue Circle Audio, Inc. – The USB Thingee HO – DAC and pre-amp. Rave reviews, characterful (unique) construction and a fifth of the price of the Benchmark DAC 1 PRE…

  Now, where do I get one of these in the UK?

• GoodSound! Equipment Review – Benchmark DAC1 Pre Digital-to-Analog Converter and Preamplifier (2/2009) – Wishlist… wish wish wish
• X Lossless Decoder (XLD): How to create flawless CD rips on Mac OS X :: What.CD – Setting/tutorial for the XLD ripper for OSX that creates FLAC files.

What makes a good logo?

Leaving aside my antipathy to tooth-rotting schmaltzwasser, this is a great timeline of competitive head-to-head logo change.

From http://justcreativedesign.com and via @peterabraham

These my micropostings and bookmarks – July 11th from 15:42 to 16:52:

• Linn Records – specialists in Classical, Jazz and Celtic music – … and now with Studio Masters available for download
• AIX Records – Audio Fidelity Beyond Reality – High definition audiophile downloads…
• HDtracks high resolution audiophile music downloads – High Definition downloads. 24bit/96Khz. Limited selection for now – just like CDs in the old days
• Ripping it Right! – High Quality CD Ripping | Home Entertainment – Quality ripping tips – squeezing all of the quality out of a CD. Doesn't include upsampling tips.
• Computer Audio for the Audiophile | Home Entertainment – Outboard DAC review and roundup of audiophile-grade audio playback from a Mac. Now the question is how to get 96Khz audio into iTunes in the first place. Oh, and getting a cheaper DAC – $4k isn't really 'audiophile' – it's "divorce"

These my micropostings and bookmarks – July 1st through July 8th:

• MAMP: Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP – Quoth ye site:
  "The abbreviation "MAMP" stands for: Macintosh, Apache, Mysql and PHP. With just a few mouse-clicks, you can install Apache, PHP and MySQL for Mac OS X!
  MAMP installs a local server environment in a matter of seconds on your Mac OS X computer, be it PowerBook or iMac. Like similar packages from the Windows- and Linux-world, MAMP comes free of charge.
  MAMP is installed in the typical Mac fashion: very easily. MAMP will not compromise any existing Apache installation already running with your OS X. You can install Apache, PHP and MySQL without starting a script or having to change any configuration files!"

  Sounds interesting and a nice way to play server without messing up one's MBP…

  Furthermore, if MAMP is no longer needed, it is sufficient to delete the MAMP folder and everything returns to its original status (i.e. MAMP does not modify any of the "normal" OS X).

• About & Tour | Sifter – BaseCamp lookie-likie bug and issue tracking software. Hosted, not cheap, but certainly cheerful looking.
• KartOO : The First Interface Mapping Metasearch Engine – Looks pretty. Some interesting links. Not the hyperbolic tree viewer I'd expected, so that's good. Via Mark Russell
• Maturity Model approach to web analytics – from http://blog.immeria.net/2009/06/tale-of-web-analytics-near-miss.html

  Interesting to see the CMM approach now applied to as assessment of an organisation's approach to web analytics.

• A tale of two retailers – Very interesting article comparing the IT approaches of two retailers – House of Fraser (disclosure: a client of mine) and ASOS. The two IT directors comment on the approach to IT. At HOF it's the ecommerce team are the digital 'haves', while at ASOS it's more pervasive (as befits an ecommerce pureplay). The challenge is the extent to which legacy systems and business approaches are a 'defensible investment' or a drag on progress.

These my micropostings and bookmarks – June 24th through June 30th:

• Ruder Finn Intent Index – Interesting index on consumers' intentions for their use online, and some lovely graphics too.
• Alice.com – Managing home essentials online – brands, direct to customer rather than via a supermarket… Interesting to know the ownership of Alice… P&G? Big Brands? Challenging the supermarkets…? Or another WebVan?
• Quicklist: Diptyque luxury body and beauty products from Liberty – Nice quicklist feature (right hand side – purple button).
• Gift-Library.com : About Gift Library Luxury Shopping – Personally 'curated' gifts. Nice tone of voice and clear idea of the persona
• Direct2Dell – Direct2Dell – DELL COMMUNITY – Horse's mouth story of the success of Dell's twittering – $2m in revenues

These my micropostings and bookmarks – June 21st through June 23rd:

• Customers given too many choices are 10x less likely to buy | Derek Sivers – Useful summary and factoids:

  "For 10 years, Columbia professor Sheena Iyengar has been studying choice. For her research paper, “When Choice is Demotivating”, they ran a great test:

  They set up a free tasting booth in a grocery store, with six different jams. 40% of the customers stopped to taste. 30% of those bought some.

  A week later, they set up the same booth in the same store, but this time with twenty-four different jams. 60% of the customers stopped to taste. But only 3% bought some!"

• Sheena S. Iyengar – Research – When Choice is Demotivating:
  Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?
• Vans Custom Shoes – Like Nike ID, but you can 'invite your friends to design with you'.

  Produced by fluid.com

• Lucky Brand Jeans – The use of video is well-integrated and restrained, while the 'chat to a friend' feature on every product page is straightforward and actually works.
• Almond Cookies I – All Recipes – These worked – most tasty. I made with an extra 30g of ground almonds instead of the flour.

These my micropostings and bookmarks – June 9th through June 17th:

• activeCollab 2.1.2 is Available for Download | activeCollab – Project Management and Collaboration Tool –
• Microsyntax.org –
• GE | Plug Into the Smart Grid | Augmented Reality –
• SOFA – Design, Interfaces & Software – How beautiful is this design? really? 'Tis luscious.
• 50 Alluring Typography and Grid Focused Websites | The Design Cubicle – Nice list of very attractive sites.

These my micropostings and bookmarks – May 25th through June 2nd:

• House of Fraser boss urges retailers to support retail diploma | News | Drapers –
• YouTube – What's Your Moleskine In? – ay yi ay. What craftsmanship! Handmade leather covers for Moleskines. What a pity that the paper's not worthy of this, but wonderful nonetheless. I want one.
• Royal Mail Environmental Policy – Sustainable Mail –
• Can you believe it? New Yorker cover done on iPhone app. – Interesting, but there are times when surely a piece of paper and pencil have more to offer
• Tonchidot’s Sekai Camera iPhone application – Augmented reality coming to iPhone – Augmented reality – tantalising demo. Sadly not yet real. Very very interesting though… Imagine this + merchandising engine… Add a head-up display and we're much closer to Star Trek…

Inspiration Index – MyDeco takes the top spot in the “Customer Engagement” dimension – Internet Retailing

So – it’s not official: MyDeco.com has grabbed the top spot.

You can read the full results and analysis of the second ‘dimension’ of the Internet Retailing Inspiration Index (IRII) at the post above.

The next dimension is open for voting NOW and for a week, just a week, until 8 June…

Vote here:

https://ecustomeropinions.com/survey/survey.php?sid=349531418

Vote now. Tell your friends.

This time, it’s “Operations and IT”: who do you envy? admire? copy? Tell all – the gloves are off!

These my micropostings and bookmarks – May 20th through May 25th:

• Mobilizy – Wikitude AR Travel Guide – Augmented Reality travel guide. Looks like a product. Only on Android atm
• Impressive Augmented Reality Game Possibilities on the iPhone – Augmented reality. The demos and mockups are getting better…
• Plugging In $40 Computers – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com – $40 -aka "soon to be nothing"; self-configuring IP… "every lightswitch can be a server"… etc.

  Leaving the hype aside, the combination of small, cheap, robust and lightly-programmed simple(r) chipsets in pluggable and robust armatures is a further step towards sensors, feedback and 'extensions' everywhere.

  Interoperating node + sensing + extension + data portability = interesting.

• Polaroid Two – Digital Instant Camera – buy at Firebox.com – I want!
• Google Announces Support for Microformats and RDFa – O'Reilly Radar –

These my micropostings and bookmarks – May 18th through May 19th:

• A Collection of Social Network Stats for 2009 « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing – Social network stats and where/how to access them. Useful.
• Staction – Simple communication based project management and time tracking – Hm – two passions in one: project/management software AND command-line interface and rich fingertip control. Worth watching. Can't help that this is all thanks to UNIX geeks meeting Twitter interface and making beautiful sweet love.

  Thanks to @offmessage for this. You know me too well

• Bazaarvoice Releases Traffic Stats – "Austin-based Bazaarvoice, which provides online applications to online retailers for ratings and reviews, said Friday that the firm now has served what it says are over 50 billion user-generated ratings, reviews, and other information through its platform. The company said it now serves up 4 billion pieces of user-generated content each month. The firm did not say what that translates to as pageviews or unique users. Bazaarvoice provides tools that allows ecommerce providers to display and collect ratings on products they carry, which it offers as a software-as-a-service offering. The firm said it now has 525 brands using its products. "
• True Knowledge – Blog: How to build a Universal Answer Engine: ten vital principles – Interesting post on their principles of knowledge, the corpus of data, inference, contribution – and OS software and speed. Good insight.
• How Our Primary Source of News & Information Changed in the last 200+ Years – Moving from Traditional Media to the Internet – Nice graphic in the changing mix/source of news over 200 years. Via @azeem

We’ve been fans of Nelly Duff for ages, and our growing collection of prints attests to this. Cassius & Co are not only knowledgeable and infectiously enthusiastic, but also full of great ideas and a sense of fun.

The latest ‘wheeze’ was collaborating with Eine (rumoured to be, ahem, Banksy’s print-maker and of course recognised creator of the alphabet of ‘circus font’ stencils that adorn most of Shoreditch and Hoxton’s store shutters). The collaboration involved a world record attempt for the largest number of individual screens and colours in a single print. More info is on Eine’s page at Nelly Duff.

The print is a w-less alphabet, with each letter taking 3 separate passes: the base colour, the outline/border colour and then the stripey fill. None of the colours are used elsewhere in the print so this is 3×25 ie 75 individual screen passes, plus the black and white – 77 in total. All of course need to be precisely in register.

We ordered the print white, but there’s also a run on black and on gold.

The private view on 7 May, 2009 was a real scream. It was held in a car respraying place just north of Brick Lane. The added cunningness was that they’d pulled a print at each stage of the printing process (ie #1 had only the white base, while #76 had every letter finished, bar one final colour pass). The whole 77 series was arrayed around the room. You can see the panorama of the PV at the top.

UPDATE: See the photos of the event on Nelly’s blog.

A couple of months ago the folk at Google asked if I’d contribute to a YouTube channel they were creating, soliciting input from a range of practitioners, thinkers and leaders in eCommerce on the subject of how best to survive the economic downturn.

I agreed (very pleased to have been asked) and then immediately regretted it (a combination of _hating_ being filmed and a bit of a panic attack that I’d have nothing to say in such august company).

Both of these concerns were well founded and the first attempt was utterly awful. Google kindly allowed me to hit the virtual ‘delete’ button and re-shoot. I (and all viewers) owe them a debt of gratitude

The format was a difficult one: a straight-to-camera piece on a topic. This requires more skill and preparation that I had understood. I generally prefer a ‘Q&A’ approach – being interviewed by someone else makes it easier to keep on topic and respond to a lead.

That said, I’m really pleased that I’ve had this experience. At InternetRetailing we’re starting our video podcasting programme in June and going through this experience has been a timely shock that I hope will improve our approach.

In the meantime you can find me burbling and only loosely in charge of a Welsh accent here:

In fact, this piece was a ‘version’ of my ‘profit per pixel second‘ metric provocation that I’ve been covering in print. It’s an area in which I’m interested, but I think it suffers here from being too long (maybe I’m too used to giving this as part of a presentation?).

All of this goes to prove Mark Twain’s (well, Blaise Pascal) thought: “I have only made this [letter] longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter”. The same seems true of videos

You’ll see in the linked videos some very impressive (and more succinct!) contributions from a great range of people – from Boris Johnson, Mayor of London and Martin Sorrell of WPP to numerous leading academics and practitioners.

I’m pleased to be in illustrious company (even if as the slight splotch on the otherwise immaculate canvas) and I’ve learned some good lessons about video presentation.

You can see the whole channel here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/survivalofthefastest

These my micropostings and bookmarks – May 7th through May 14th:

• Introduction to Wolfram|Alpha by Stephen Wolfram – Just amazing. This is a step ahead of TrueKnowledge in terms of polish and presentation, but seems only to focus upon 'things that may be computed'. TK is more flexible and 'relational' – an 'inference engine'. Be interesting to see how WA is populated, but it's extremely exciting.
• Ken Rockwell: Leitz Minolta CLE – Ken Rockwell pronounces on the CLE. Now that he's blessed it, my chances of getting a cheap second body on ebay have totally, utterly disappeared
• le hook rigging hook keyring safety hook clip fastener quick release key ring climbing camping – I so need one of each size, and two of the K66. Or maybe three. And the K50. Make that 6 of each.
• Get your SPINS for the Leica M! – What a great idea – interchangeable pinhole camera 'lenses'.
• Why text messages are limited to 160 characters | Technology | Los Angeles Times – Great story.

I’ve posted the fuller story elsewhere, but I’m so pleased I couldn’t let this pass without a post

The Post-Graduate Diploma in Internet Retailing (which I created along with Econsultancy.com) has just been accredited by Manchester Metropolitan University as the UK’s first Masters programme in Internet Retailing…

We’re about to change the marketing blurb and website to proclaim ‘MSc in Internet Retailing’, but for now I’m just enjoying the glow of pleasure after over 3 hours of grillings!

Thanks to @cragster and @groovegenerator for their hard work.

It’s been a busy time speaking of late. In the last month I’ve:

• given a keynote for the DAS/Omnicom “Innovation in Retail” CEO briefing, along with Mary “Queen of Shops” Portas, FutureLab and Oxford University;
• provided the keynote for the FDIH (the Danish eCommerce Association) conference in Copenhagen on social media
• opened the Royal Mail’s in-house Retail Insights conference in London

• For BBDO University’s CEO conference outside Paris, and
• a presentation to Westfield’s “World Retail Study Tour” in London.

I was particularly taken with the venue for BBDO U: an hour outside Paris in a chateau run by Chateau’Form, a business-only venue format that takes stately piles, renovates them and then makes them available for business summit and conference hire. For more cost-effective and characterful than hotels, and providing a convivial atmosphere – ideal where networking and team building go alongside the more formal presentation and conference activity. Chateau’Form de Mello was a chateau on top of a fort and a really amazing place:

I managed to grab a few mins to try my hand at archery. Ahem:

While I’m pleased with getting one on the target, the two in the wood show my aim’s a bit ‘off’ and I’ve ignored the arrows on the floor and in the trees behind!

After my presentation and Q&A I headed back into Paris for meetings, pausing only just long enough to wander through the Jardins du Luxembourg and get caught in an almighty downpour: here’s a panorama from my shelter: