John Bresee

And maybe not for the reasons we think.

It browses beautifully. It’s battery lasts all day. It’s light. The color is beautiful. And quite simply you can hand it around the living room as you watch TV and ask your peers what they think about an article, video, post or perhaps more importantly, a purchase.

We have wondered and tested ourselves blue in the face to help determine why online conversion is low and unmovable. And it may be a simple few things like making the experience more friendly and welcoming to peers.

For instance I loved bring the Apple Air to bed to do my browsing…but the little fan couldn’t keep up and it would try to recirculate through my comforter; eventually the computer would slow and annoy me, the fan would whine, I’d feel guilty and I’d shut the whole mess off. But for the first fifteen minutes it was so much nicer than having 10 lbs. of laptop in bed.

I’m not saying the iPad brings you savior faire that before you lacked, but it is at least cool, quite, unobtrusive and can be disposed of or shared much more easily.

This is but one of the technology changes, be it pervasive broadband, to new computing forms that I believe will accelerate the ecommerce trends. There has never been a year where I’ve have more time in the day to go physically shopping and as the tools get better and the industry matures, tools like these may cause huge leaps in immovable conversion rates.

At least I’m hoping that.

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The simple answer is where it will garner you the most measurable sales. Not necessarily the most sales, but the most measurable. An unmeasured sale might not as well have happened. We learned that in 1998. Or started to.

And Chris Dixon, my new hero, recently mentions that the place to advertise is on the sites with the highest purchasing intent and then made some half-hearted suggestions around that without touching on the next real source of advertising revenue: The e-tailer.

Lets face it. Conversion has never been anywhere near where we think it should be. For politeness we’ll say that across the web 95% of browsers don’t convert. So we pay for 100% of visitors and get 5% of sales. That’s a mighty hard business to run. But if you begin both the habit of advertising where your customer is almost ready to buy, a competing etailer in your category, and you sell advertising to your competitors in the same way, it may happen that we create a layer of places that convert better for both sides. The vendors would do well to buy traffic from their retailers and yet still send or sell them as much traffic as they can. Our customers need whatever content they need in order to be comfortable to buy. Your site may have it for one type of customer but not for another.

We don’t know why people don’t buy the way they do in the offline world. But we can get one beat closer by selling and buying advertising nearest the heart of the purchase. It isn’t insane if it converts, both ways.

We may well find a new gold mine of advertising that goes many directions and yet raises nice high margin dollars. And even learn why we don’t convert at the rate we’d like.

Eventually the etailer, with its superior and unbiase customer content may find itself more as the central traffic source for quality traffic than as conversion vehicle. Wouldn’t that be funny.

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The snow has been dumping in Park City, Utah. Falling in huge car hiding piles…for the first time in one of the driest, saddest winters ever. And what drags me out of bed at dawn with a shovel and broken down snowblower was the fact that without some skinny path cleared to my door there was a chance that the FedEx guy might make me the last semi-blogger to get a hold of an actual iPad.

But FedEx came through and I plugged it in and waited for the lightening bolt to strike. I waited and failed through synch after synch…thinking it might be time for for Apple to spend a little time with the iTunes app and making it the happy center of the media universe that it’s supposed to be.

I keep hoping that iTunes will be great at synching this complex media world. And I keep hoping that somehow it will recognize that I am going to exceed the 16 Gigs right as I check the buttons of what I’d like on my iPad. But no, I wait, patiently and run through about fifteen dry runs before I get enough data off to make the iPad run.

But it’s not the optimum data load. But eventually I’ll get the hang of it.

And I inadvertently dumped all of the apps from my iPhone onto the iPad. What a mistake. A small iPhone app doesn’t belong on the iPad. Wait for those that are iPad ready.

And yet once it happens. Once the iPad fires up…the magic happens. It was when Netflix loaded that I first felt the magic. Just the media I want when I want it, beuatifully rendered. I preferred watching on my iPad than my 44″ 1080p flatscreen. The show felt more intimate. And the iPad never got warm in my lap. I thought I felt much of the media world begin shift to a new axis.  And again and again  as I loaded new apps I saw the media world shifting and twisting in, beginning to be caught between the old way of business and the new. Media will benefit first and suffer first. Commerce will come very shortly after.

We don’t yet know what the iPad will change . But there are some guesses:

1. Ecommerce will shift toward home and couch and bed, from primarily work.
2. The iPad will succeed
3. Netflix is going to kill on the iPad.
4. And the rest of the world is  going to have to watch and wait to see what happens as we figure it out with them.
5. Well designed ecommerce sites run just fine on the iPad. No need to hire firms to redesign for a small form factor. Just build beautiful simple focues ecommerce sites and QA on all top four browsers and you should be fine
6. And build apps that have real single purpose that deliver value above and beyond the flat world of standard ecommerce site. It’s time to innovate in return for the gift that Steve Jobs has given us. He has allowed us to once again shift into the future.

Thanks Steve…it’s brilliant.

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Craigslist continues to disintermediate whole industries. And by disintermediate I mean crush them using the beautiful art of capitalism like dancing wu-li black practitioners. They have reduced costs in the ticket scalping industry to zero as

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