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.
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.
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.
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:
Ecommerce will shift toward home and couch and bed, from primarily work.
The iPad will succeed
Netflix is going to kill on the iPad.
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.
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
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.
“(the iPad is) not nearly as good for creating stuff. On the other hand, it’s infinitely more convenient for consuming it” — PogueIn one sentence this anonymous scribe captured the essence of the iPad. It’s a consumer oriented cash generator with almost every form of payment waiting for you to join. We may well get out of this recession because Steve Jobs willed it to be.
One analyst just raised his 2010 sales number for the iPad to 8-10 million. Which is a ridiculous amount when you consider the category doesn’t exist yet. Which is silly for me to mention it’s not like the analysts spotted the housing crash, the dot com crash or any of the other eighty three recorded fiscal bubbles…but still, they are analysts and presumably they have more wisdom in their domain than I, so I listen.
But what I am guessing and feeling is that the iPad is going to revolutionize in a different way. The notion of personal browsing. That ecommerce+ will be at your fingertips and it will be incredibly powerful. This is not a browser who’s history you have to wipe to keep corporate from reading it, but instead your own that you carry with you…history of all messages, commerce browsing, blogging, writing, photography. The iPad will be the window into your own lives and others.
Ecommerce only represents 6% of total commerce in the US…but it’s the fast growing segment and will be for years to come. It is expected to grow 2% a year for the foreseeable future and that is without mobile factored in. The iPad will do an interesting thing in that it will help migrate those who have been resistant to ecommerce by way of a more friendly environment where commerce will, perhaps feel less threatening. So it will increasingly steal from the physical side of commerce. For the cognoscenti ecommerce will grow faster due to a deeper wallet share. Suddenly commerce that never would have happened over the web will be possible, be it the hot dog vendor or bike parts for a kick ass bike/community/commerce app. Those who comfortably spend on the web now will see their spending accelerate as the software grows to meet capabilities in the new hardware.
And in that way the iPad will work to combine the aspects of commerce that are already appealing with those of geo-tagging, nearest physical product, best price within five miles, and much more to move a large percentage of wallet share to the web. So ecommerce will grow, again at a much faster rate than it has. And it will grow in new, unexpected places that get the distinct advantages of this format. For instance in-game digital product sales might well grow at an astonishing rate.
And Android will follow along with their impossible to beat “Better Than Free” model and slowly and they will own the lower pricepoints. Yet this is a market that is already proven, the $275 netbook is very desirable. Add in a touch screen and phenomenal OS and it will be a dream browser. The Tablet is here to stay. And so is the app. A web page is nonspecific brochureware for the dying 2000s and an app is the perfect hyper-focused one purpose tool for which this generation was born to use.
High price-points will be Apple‘s as there is something luxurious in software and hardware designed together. But Android’s breadth of connectivity to massive data sets creates opportunities that I don’t have the brain power to imagine. Apple and Google do something that no other companies do, they create moments when the current and future exist at once. It’s this strange feeling, as if for a moment, we get a moment of living in the future just by way of a new product release. What a cool capability.
Tablets will not have to war for its share of computing. It will instead be the third form of computing and within 36 months the primary mode for ecommerce.We won’t stop using our laptops and desktops and we can’t give up our mobile phones.” The world never converges, it only diverges into more ways that we can stay in touch, buy, say hello, record our thoughts, support our existence.
Every since AOL spammed the planet with discs, et al. there has been an never-ending strata of web users who just can’t seem to get the simplest aspects of the web. I’m not sure if people have stopped explaining it to them or if these things are real stumpers. I’ll try to clarify. It’s not that I have extra knowledge, I failed algebra four times in college. There are plenty of simple things that I just can’t get the hang of, like shoe-laces and brussel sprouts.
For the web stragglers, here are a few simple things:
1. Facebook‘s message queue is not email. Really. It can forward to email for some. But for many of us Facebook is kind of losing it’s appeal. So I never check the message queue. Yet my siblings write away as if my email address has in some way changed. It’s just another private message system, no better than the one at Ebay.com. Worse actually, Mom doesn’t write me at Ebay and the get teary-eyed when I don’t respond.
2. The navigation bar and Google‘s search input are separate things. Really. You can type a company’s domain (company name) in the navigation bar and press enter, and skip the step of typing it into the Google search field and then clicking their number one paid result. Save the world some money and save you time.
3. Etsy is the new Ebay. Sorry Ebay. You had it all for so long and we all miss you.
4. Never reveal anything on Facebook or a blog that you wouldn’t happily chat about with your manager or someone who you may have to interview with someday. In fact, don’t say anything to anyone that you wouldn’t like to share on TMZ or some such thing.
5. Give Your Child a Pseudonym: He or she deserves an ability to make mistakes and have them photographed or videoed and yet not connected with their real name for the rest of their life. We all did things when we were younger that we wouldn’t want to have on Facebook now…at least I did.
7. www is dead. Long live direct navigation. When you are typing www before an address your just trying to be old school. and away from specialization was just wrong. And I wish I could fix it immediately.
They launched the sixty second smart phone app that wil allow you to have any product for sale in sixty seconds, including photos. This may be the coming of the seccond age. All hail Ebay.
Pepperdine, which according to Business Week (who apparently really really dig MBAs cause they spend about 50% of their editorial calendar blowing and fluffing the MBA programs of the world.*) is not a top tier business school. They sadly fall into what Business Week labels the “Second Tier”. Second tier in MBA programs is as appealing as being a Grenada based medical schools.
The problem in Pepperdine’s integrity goes as least as deep as its marketing department and its inability to write a survey. And writing survey’s is kind of thing one at a business school. Kind of the med school equivalent of stitches.
Yet at the end of their survey they ask this question which is nothing more than scum sucking attempt to either force an honest person to lie or they can choose to tell the truth and sign up for either the Presidential spam package or the Executive.
“* Would you like to learn more about Pepperdine MBA programs
PRESIDENTIAL MBA
Executive MBA
No, thank you. I have an MBA”
The correct thing to do would be to offer a fourth option, something like, “No thank you, I’m not interested in your marketing materials.” No need to debase those confused few who do not have MBAs and have yet to discover the many study’s that show that an MBA is as wise an investment as multi-level marketing or making deals to help the daughter of the ex-president of Zimbabwe free up some of her father’s cash which is unfortunately held by hooligans.
Which is to say big and loud and fast and it’ll piss a lot of people off.
Ironically it’s those in the Netbook world who look shocked and say, “look how much more we give for half the price?” I’ve got bad news for Netbookians…your computers suck. They’re slow and painful and cramped. But oh yes, they were cheap. And we love cheap.
But the iPad isn’t a nicely done Netbook. It isn’t a Kindle with color. It’s not an iPhone that met a steam roller. It is the the next fom of computing and it’s beautiful. Yes, as always, it’s missing some things. But it’s not like a boat missing a motor. It’s more like, well, an iPhone that launched without cut and paste. We suffered along while we all worked to change the world.
The truth is we carry 100X the computer we need in our laptop most of the time. Buried in a slow loading inconvenient poorly designed behemoth. The iPad can accomplish 95% of what we need our laptops for. Oh, we won’t get rid of our laptops. That five percent is crucial. We will just add the fourth form of computing to our lives. And it will be beautiful and we will wonder in two years how we ever ordered off a menu that wasn’t pre-loaded in our iPad with our built in payment system.
The iPad is our wallet, portfolio, memory, communication, calendaring…well it’s our life. It’s just not our phone replacement. Our bags got lighter. We’ll take the laptops home one the weekends for heavy work.
Desktops? How cute…they’ll be good for towing behind cars or some such anti-world recreation. But the iPad will be our center.
And yes Android will follow and it will be good. It will be the Chevy 3/4 ton to the beautiful Pininfarina like lines of the iPod. Change is good and at first it will look effete and snobbish. But soon it will be real. And Microsoft and RIM and others will head for other shores, other businesses where they don’t have to compete with such smart people.. Most of our computing is simple and can even be fun. and it’s always better when it has location. The world continues to change whether we bought a two pound Droid with a worthless keyboard or not. The iPad makes me happy.
I’m way off the back on this but I had to to jot it down. UStream launched their iPhone app recently and it’s simply one of the coolest and scariest pieces of technology I’ve ever seen. The app turns your iPhone into a realtime broadcast device. Your camera films and transmits whatever lies in front of it.
You have to see it function to feel the impact and realize how our lives have changed forever with this one application. Lets say you get pulled over and are concerned about how you are going to be treated. Flip on the app, spin the phone to face the side window and broadcast in real time your experience. Officer Friendly is, unbenknownst to him on live TV.
When you visit their site it is astonishing to see what streams are currently live. Endless litters of puppies under heat lamps…and and audience of 25 people watching them sleep. And the watchers happily chat with each other.
The scary side is that, even though the technology for video phones has existed since the 60s, but most people don’t want to be seen most of the time. Broadcasting our lives is uncomfortable and yet you no longer get to decide whether somebody’s iPhone UStream camera feed is catching you at any given time and broadcasting it to the world. Giving up your privacy is scary. Giving individuals the power to broadcast is amazing. The world will never be the same. Rictus.
Oh, and the application is beautiful and works seamlessly, shouting out to (I can’t say the sill word tweeples) twitter, broadcasting your location and allowing you to chat with your audience at the same time. Truly brilliant development.
As a relative newbie in much of the spam world I find myself Mayberry-like ignorant in the massively abusive world of bulletin board attackers. I naively ran my comments section on this blog, pretty open because nobody comes here but my son, who’s four and…only then when he’s sitting on my lap.
So I was surprised that 2,600 spammers were doing everything in their power to help the world get rich quick and do so with astonishing manly prowess. It took me about an hour to ding all the spammers and in doing so I lost the fifty excellent comments from my reader(s?).
And I then I started dorking around searching for a something that could handle the spam load without the word Barracuda in the title. I’m sure that there are many happy ‘Cuda users but it must be a world that is Windows 3.1 centric.
And then I found WP-SpamFree and it’s amazing. I have no idea how it works (first sign of a great product…it’s none of my business how you get rid of spammers, the less I kn0w the better) and yet it hums along dinging would be mass marketers left and right. I’ve rarely been so happy with a product. And this one was, I think, free or one of the many excellent flavors of open source that passes for free. Or maybe I’ll get a bill in 30 days, fine with me. Nice work over there at H6 Web Geek.
Cool, Google’s new UI only shows 39 characters on the screen, including logo, TM and spaces. And I probably counted that wrong. Until you roll your mouse and then the regular UI reappears all Harry Potter and the Invisible Map style. Credit Veruus for pointing it out.
Image doesn’t relate to the article…I just knew this guy back in the day and Zemanta thinks that “O’Reilly” and “Reilly” are somehow related in its really cool suggest an image tool. Oops. Whaddup Tony?
An O’Reilly reader asked the question, “should I dump my iPhone for an Android?” and it seems to be a question that is being asked more and more. The simple answer is no, unless you are a very early adopter with a massive tolerance for behaviors like your phone crashing. There is much criticism of AT&Ts network and the occasional dropped call. I, being a pathetic dork, carry both phones at the moment. I lose one or two calls a week due to AT&Ts shoddy network. And my iPhone crashes maybe once a month…maybe less. And that’s the thing with my phone, it’s like a light switch or a car, you want it to work every single time you turn the key or flip the switch.
A crashed OS and a bad network leave you with the same result…no phone. That’s not okay. AT&Ts network seems to be improving faster than the next version of the Droid will arrive.
And the Android crashes constantly. They use nice words like “forced restart of search application” or some such thing, but the truth is I have to sit and wait for my basically beta version phone to settle down and begin working again. I am confident that by version 3.0 things will be rock stable. But right now the Droid is the crash-o-matic.
The question is kind of a, “should I buy an Acura or a Maserati?” thing. One of them is cool and works beautifully all the time and the other one doesn’t look nearly as cool ’cause it’s in the shop several days a month. But Maserati’s are cool in their own way. If you want a second phone, Droid it up.
Phonegap is a new open source multi-environment development tool. One of my biggest fears around the incredible race between Apple and Android has been about the cost of doing dual application development. Mobile feels a scary enough jungle when you are looking at Apple development, but add in the multi-verse of Android phone builders with a myriad of screen sizes and other strangeness and it looks like a massive amount of friction. Thankfully the software world is filled with the smartest people in the world who perceive problems beyond the horizon time and again and rush to fill the coming void.
My guess is that the Apple Tablet will be an overwhelming hit which will change personal computing once again…but add yet another layer to development. And my guess is that Phonegap will be there quickly as well. So thanks Phonegap. Read about it on CNET
At Backcountry.com the Gearheads have great latitude in resolving problems and doing whatever they can to make the customer happy. But this example is like no other I’ve ever seen. Follow the link to see the customers full post on her blog FoolsandSages.com. Here’s a small excerpt.
“After I placed my order, I sent their customer service folks a mail telling them how much we loved their site and asking for the shipping to be adjusted to reflect our original wish to combine shipping. I fully expected for them do graciously do so, but was absolutely not expecting the response I received:
‘Hi Andrea,
Thanks for contacting us at Steepandcheap.com. We love you, too. We would marry you if you weren’t already married. And we weren’t a company, but rather a young shy boy lost in the throes of love, yea, a misty-eyed dreamer looking towards the future, still unscathed and unpolluted by the hardships of mid-adulthood. We would ask your housemaid to deliver white flowers to you, with an anonymous note that read “Heaven nor hell could provide me the joy and pain your approval or lack thereof might impose upon me.” Then, that very night at midnight we’d stand outside your window playing a love sonnet on the violin–a heartfelt ribbon of swaying notes and flittering string plucks. You could get out of bed and come to the balcony to listen. Instead of saying anything, you might drop a single white handkerchief slightly soaked with your tears.
But none of that could ever happen, so instead I just gave you a full refund on your shipping costs. I think it was like 8 bucks. Thanks for the love.’”
“National Geographic Adventure will cease operations, it was announced today, a victim of the down economy and systemic changes in publishing. The final issue is December/January.”
Bummer. That about covers that. No need for me to do any clever editorializing. I’m sad to see it go; it’s been a solid bastion of true adventure journalism amongst the thick weeds of men’s magazine‘s that offer editorial breadth of a weightlifters glutes: Endless teasers which claim they can make any desired body part either grow or shrink, depending on the need.
Steve Casimiro was the west coast editor…a title that seemed odd for an adventure magazine that covered the globe. It didn’t seem the title stopped him from taking a bevy of hot models to Ibiza to test “30,40,50 SPF – We Tell You the Truth.” Steve has lined up the finest jobs in the magazine world as the most well known editor of Powder magazine and the co-creator and first editor (with Rob Story) of Bike magazine. Casimiro is a man who knows the soul of adventure. I’m hoping his next beat will be another great step in the life of one of the finest adventure writers and editors in the world. He’s also handy with the Cannon Snappy.
The iPhone is the most beautiful design and business exercise I’ve ever seen. I am happily humbled by Apple for their vision and incredible operational excellence. They saw and created a future of which I hadn’t even dreamed. The iPhone set me free.
And yet…so did Compuserve in its day. Compuserve and the Mosaic browser let me run about the web as fast as my 14.4k modem would allow, from one Star Trek fan site to another. And it became both my vocation and avocation. The iPhone, ten years after I first started working on the mobile web finally delivered on the promise of the richness of the web combined with dynamic community and localization. Thank you Apple.
When we take our first timid steps in a new technology we seek safety, familiarity and comfort; and the iPhone delivers. It lets us safely download apps that have been approved and search around the well lit corners of the nice part of Internet town…but it’s a bit like a cruise ship. You can’t ever really get in trouble. It’s kinda fun for a while, but the captain never invites you up to steer it or do donuts with the thing. And eventually you want to see the whole ocean.
And the Droid…well, it’s like Netscape 1.0. It crashes more than I did in high school, which is to say, a lot. And it lets you get the full unfettered internet, location and community access. Want to download an app that steals your private data…go ahead. Want to download an app that instantly violates federal wiretapping statutes…it’s one click. Seeking something really unsavory, it exists or is in development right now. I don’t even dare to imagine the things that are to come.
The world of Adult entertainment has often been the north star of the internet, showing us where web business is going. Take a look at the origins of most video streaming software or even internet traffic tracking companies.
And trust me, the iPhone’s bevy of bikini girl apps is really not going to satisfy the seemingly insatiable cultural appetite for prurient content. And in that part of the world the Droid wins hands down. The porn world has gotten a seat back in the game.
In the 90s Yahoo failed when it couldn’t keep up with the endless requests for sites to be added to its directory. It was excruciating to wait and see if your site would get accepted and practically business death if you weren’t. And Yahoo was unblinking as they ignored every request for information on how or whether you would get in. Even when they started charging $300 to get guaranteed placement it still didn’t really satisfy a webmasters desire for instant inclusion. Which is why DMOZ came about and eventually things like Wikipedia. The community does a better job policing massive amounts of content then a small group of censors with unclear by-rules.
And the four week wait for a developer to see if their efforts to fly in the Apple world just isn’t going to work. In the Web3.0 world we are being trained to expect real time in absolutely everything.
Android delivers the vicious one-two punch of instant inclusion and boundless content. And that is too mighty for Apple to beat. In the late 90s we ran as fast as we could from AOL into the arms of Earthlink and Comcast so that we could get the full web and not the pre-chewed variety. In 24 months or less the iPhone will be the choice of fussy Meerschaum pipe smoking ascot wearing professors and the rest of the world will be carrying Android 4.o phones that allow us full unfettered access to the world of content and applications.
It seems likely that a wikipedia of applications will come to fruition with a community of trusted testers and a standards body run by the community will come about. And when we see that BBB of mobile web, we will find trust. Until then, buyer beware.
But it’s going to be a cool winding road getting there…filled with missteps, crashes and eventually government intervention.
And Google will become a bevy of little Googlets, split up by the privacy fear mongers. This is the coolest movie I’ve ever not seen and I can’t wait.
I tried to grab one more day on my KTM before the snow took over for realzie but unfortunately I was beset with personal mechanical failures.
Y’see I’m not real handy around the house. I replace a light bulb if it isn’t over shoulder high but after that I’m hiring someone who understands things like why smoke detectors beep for years after the battery is removed.*
So I attached the KTM to my new UltimateMX Hauler and within fifty feet it popped a wheelie like a circus freak and looked at best unsecure and even more likely that it would do a full el rollo before cartwheeling down I-15 until some Suburban cleaned it out like a gnat. Of course I didn’t discover that until my first refill.
I didn’t exactly follow the directions. I don’t generally. I think if a product is any damn good it shouldnt’t need a book to tell you how o use it.
I have never heard or seen anyone read the directions on a urinal. It’s designed in such a way that we all figure out how to make it go. So I assumed the MX Hauler would be much the same. But I was wrong and it was past midnight and time to give in. Now I have to figure it out while my neighbore makes comments like, “wow, you put it on all wrong.” Yeah, I got that. That’s why I’m in Ranch Place instead of ripping to the top of Wile E’s favorite Mesa.
*(Handy tech tip when a smoke detector just won’t shut up; detach the offending smoke alarm and remove the nine volt battery (it won’t do anything but makes it lighter.) Take the smoke alarm and put it inside three large freezer Ziploc bags. Then drive the largest car you have over it back and forth at least 20 times. This won’t have stopped the noise but it is now half the volume and has a backbeat that could make it a hit for Bjork on the laughable improbability of man.
Open the bags and fill with pumpkin pie filling, carnation concentrated milk, and beets. These ingredients do little to stifle the noise, maybe 25%, but at least you have used only items from your pantry that you wouldn’t eat unless it was a full-scale thermonuclear war. Put these bags in the freezer. It’ll still beep every once in a while, but muted to such a level that it’s livable. Wrap them at Christmas and send them to your least favorite cousin.
Don’t get me wrong, slide rules are cool. We never would have gotten a man on the moon without them. I’m always envious of anyone who can run a slide rule or an abacus or even the classic Texas Instruments 12-C. Tools like these are amazing, deeply layered and powerful. They are often the engines that true scientists use to change our world, innovation by innovation.
As I slowly get to understand the Droid I realize that it is a far more layered and powerful machine than I realized at first glance. It is rife with problems but even more deeply loaded with innovation and promise.
The App market is the wild west, with every download a gamble; many of them crashing right out of the gate. And I wonder if I’m giving login information to hucksters. I just don’t have the faith in the Android marketplace that I do in Apple‘s App store. But it’s cool.
There are physical aspects of the Droid that are wonderments, like the haptic touch screen keyboard. And there are physical aspects that are embarassingly bad, like the slide out QWERTY keyboard. It’s wholly unnecessary due to the excellent software.
The more I explore the more I learn to love the Droid. But it does not make me love my iPhone any less. The iPhone just works and it works beautifully and when it comes to communicating, be it text or voice, I want something straight forward that never crashes and has the usability of a simple light switch. In mobile simple is great. But the Droid, while overloaded with stuff, is a fascinating device.
The Droid is far more phone than I gave it credit for initially. It’s seems inconceivable but in the two weeks that the Droid has been available the Android OS has suddenly amassed 20% of the mobile internet traffic in the US.
RIM, which is the DOS of mobileInternet, is watching its awkward mobile traffic share swirl down the drain. One could reasonably guess that the market caps of the trailing providers will follow.
Palm, the inventor of the space, will likely be gone in a very short while. It’s sad as it is a once great company that made understandable wrong turns.
Microsoft is so busy competing in a raft of worlds that it perhaps did not determine that only one path mattered; mobile. They can lose the living room and even the server room but mobile was a must win. And in years of OS (CE, Mobile, etc.) releases they never seemed to be able to envision the endless vista that mobile truly represents.
What matters is that for anyone looking at mobile development the paths will have to be bifurcated. Releasing apps for one world won’t be enough anymore…and we have yet to release even one. To find the world changing so quickly, even before entering the game is a frightening prospect from an enterprise planning point of view. I cling to the hope that where change is fastest is also where opportunity is greatest.
It’s been a year full of challenge. A year rife with pain and growth. And as I set out hopeful to join my friends Raspberry and Blueberry for dinner I can’t help but reflect for what I am thankful:
A son who didn’t let me sleep a wink last night but began the day by saying, “I love you all the world Dadou!”
A friend who ignored tumult to invite me to his Thanksgiving dinner
A businesspartner who supported me through a challenging year and who I hope I’ve done the same
A company filled with the finest co-workers and people I’ve ever seen assembled in one place. I’m humbled every time I enter work by the sheer quality of the people. Backcountry.com is what professional means.
A country that rewards innovation and allows two entrepreneurs to start Backcountry.com with $2,000 and grow it to what it has become.
Co-workers who get so inspired that they go on to create their own empires in Avantlink, CamoFire.com and GearDigger.com to name just a few.
Semi-retired co-founders like Christian Gennerman and Bob Merrill without whom we never could have built this company.
Mentors like Jill Layfield, Scott Klossner, Kelly Phillipps, Dustin Robertson and many more who teach who I am, my many shortcomings and all and yet who I desire to be.
A boss who is a mentor and yet not afraid to call it as he sees it.
An ex-wife who retakes the phrase and turns it into a wonderful thing.
Endless support and energy from Sara H and Lyndsey who show me what energy I would like to face the world with.
And deep boundless friends who have been with me since I began accruing them at six and I never seem to stop.
And a friend who doesn’t rush.
The humbling of 2009 never seems to stop but that is as it must be for now. Thanks to all who help me get back up and figure out yet another way to tackle a fresh set of problems. I have more to be thankful for since I turned toward lightness and away from the inexorable darkness that is available to us all. I wish you all a happy Thanksgiving.
2010 is already filled with more opportunity than I ever dreamed possible. I hope you all tear off a chunk.
What I hadn’t realized when I got the Droid is that market economics don’t apply. You don’t have a customer in the Verizon store comparing the heft of the iPhone and the Droid and saying, “hey, nice, if worse comes to worse I could cudgel a would be attacker to death with this five pounds O’Droid.
What I mean is that people are so fooled by their wireless contracts or about the disinformation about network superiority or inferiority that they aren’t doing true comparison shopping. I picture Tina Turner, again from Mad Max saying to people at Verizon stores, “You know the story, Bust the Deal, Face the Wheel!” And those people, white as ghosts from fear and from being relentless geeks with 80 plus hours a week of laptop tans, subsuming their will and instead of walking out the door and going and buying an easily superior product in the iPhone, instead saying, “what do you have that’s iPhone-ish?” I mean we all saw how Clark Griswold ended up with the coveted Family Truckster.
And that I get. After two years of pent up geek demand as they steadfastly didn’t give in to apple the Verizon faithful are going to line up long and deep and keep the factories Wii busy for ages to come. And we will have an actual two horse race for a little while.
And so my believe is that la familia, mi cosa nostra…etc. have a super hit on their hands. The mafia like entities Verizon and Motorola coming together to craft a blood oath under a waxingg moon with the naive Google is laughably funny. If you’re Google. See the old men from Schaumberg will do okay but somehow Verizon got tricked into being a dumb pipe again. Ouch.
If you read the best article on the wireless landscape in years, by Bill Gurley, he espouses a notion of Less Than Free and it’s powerful. When you look at the Droid you see Google taggers hammered the place. You can’t take a morning constitutional without the Droid scouring google for words like loamy or brown. Google is so deeply integrated into the Droid that they have uncorked the largeest champagne bottle of clicks, searches and paid clicks since Bill Gross first invented this little idea at a company known as GoTo.com.
Well played Google. Y’seee Verizon and Motorola…they can dance this dance again with anyone they like. There are lots of hardward vendors. And Verizon your right to dip your toe in the click stream was the play…but you didn’t make it. You made like the record companies not knowing that Apple was using you to sell iPods and create an ecosystem. And now Google has played the telcos in order to lift the cap off of their market cap. Double in 24-36 months. Nice work Sergey, Nice Larry.
Lets see how well you play the trust busters when the game next changes. B-Gates is still ahead of you there.
Here’s a video about how we used to market at Backcountry.com circa 2007. It’s kind of a B- performance. Sorry. There is some good data in here though:
Wow. When Goliath finally decides to step up and kill David you expect some fireworks. I mean Motorola isn’t exactly new at cell phones. They practically invented the Bat phone and those huge things that Crocket and Tubbs lugged around on ‘Vice. So when Google and Verizon and Motorola teamed up for the wireless Malachi Crunch I expected something really cool. Unfortunately the first go round with it suggests that it kinda sucks.
I remember my two year-old son was able to operate my iPhone and unlock it on his own. He was quickly navigating through the interface without any help. I was able to make the iPhone work without resorting to a manual. I was annoyed by the touch screen typing but I got used to it in a few weeks. Already I’m jonesing for my touch screen QWERTY. The Droid is confusing and awkward and lacks, well, UI. As the CTO at my company often says, “soft is hard”. And boy the User Interface just plain stumps someone with my room temperature IQ.
The hardware is okay. The flash on the camera is nice and the speaker is better. There’s a nice use of vibration/haptics in the interface that I like. And it’s got a nice heft to it so when I finally get annoyed enough it’ll go clear through the window as opposed to bouncing off as the iPhone might.
I will say it’s better. The iPhone has forced the rest of the world to raise the level of their game. But all you Verizonites who can’t seem to understand that it’s only about $100 to break your contract will be happier on the Droid than on the DOS like Blackberry. But it’s no iPhone. The droid is the Corvette of phones…which is nice if you’re into that kind of thing.
I came across this text on one of our sites last night..in the cart:
Sorry the item(s) in your cart are unavailable. The item(s) have been removed from your cart.
Ouch! The previous text is in red for those who are RSS readers. I think red text is as offensive as the blink tag. It actually makes me nostalgic for the blink tag.
Lets just never use it again. And lets stop using plural(s) like this…oy.
Ten years late mCommerce has arrived. Due to our convoluted quilt of 12 wireless technologies like the laughably bad TDMA (AT&Ts previous technology that could manage only eight calls per cell) we find ourselves arriving a decead after iMode revolutionized Japanesepop culture.
Apple‘s iPhone strategy has been the most beautiful business ramp in the history of technology. The OS is, despite some minor flaws, excellent. A year ago it became the one material possession I would save with me if there was a fire (pardon the duh factor of grabbing a phone). In the past my laptop was my most vital possession and yet quickly my iPhone has supplanted. Yet convergence is just as far in the distance as it ever was. I use my laptop just as many hours a day…it’s just the the iPhone has eaten up all the space that comes between. Even a pause in conversation is enough to have me idly unlocking the phone, considering a spin through the app store. Divergence is alive and well as it always has been.
Much of the business world is still grappling with what kind of opportunity the iPhone really represents. Often the thinking goes that mCommerce should be like the Tommy Hilfiger web model. I believe that is the wrong tack, taking traditional eCommerce and just shrinking it to a smaller form factor.
What needs to exist is the notion mobile is leading us to a new model for computing that I’ll call for the moment, Better than Web.
Better Than Web is, well, just like it sounds. eTailing always runs a few years behind the content revolution and generally also just doesn’t do things as beautifully. There isn’t an ecommerce site in the world that has anything like Facebook’s beautiful UI and phenomenally layered business logic. I dream of an eTailer that hits even 70 percent of the Facebook mark.
And in the world of Apps the gap between the A players and the eTailers is larger. I have yet to se
e an etail example using GPS, shared browsing, haptic interface, audio, accelerometer and more. With GPS, turn by turn navigation and some simple work Walmart could have every one of their store’s guide you through a real map your current stadium like store. Add a list function and it could walk you to each product you need while offering you coupons on nearby or similar items. Average cart could climb and time in store could go down. Need a clerk. Hit the big panic button and scan the bar code and have an instant call back…from the call center in Mumbai.
And for us rare pureplays the world just gets rosier. Show only reviews from my state, current location, in the last fifteen minutes, from my friends, etc. No longer need a person in Naples Florida be greeted by puffy down coats on the homepage. We could actually personalize. If it’s a ski site like ours and we’re able to track vertical skied in one day then we would know much better what skis to recommend.
Simply put, in eTailing your retail App better not be a slimmed down dimmer retail store with itty pictures that works in conjunction with your web site. It instead needs to be the next generation or etailing offer much much more. The move to dynamic localized and personalized content just moved up a few years. Ebay is averaging $89.95 per download in revenue and we haven’t even hit the holidays. Mobile is the future of etailing, duh. And Better Than Web is the future of mobile.
Two billion downloads. You can’ t really say that enough. It’s hard to appreciate the magnitude. Most of my life growing up I watched the Mcdonald’s sign change from 10 Million Hamburgers Sold to 100 million and finally a billion. Then one day they gave up and just said, billions of hamburgers sold…but that took me from the 70s to the 90s. And yet Apple served up two billion iPhone apps in less than a year. It can’t be overstated, this is the fastest consumer growth the world has ever seen. It’s amazing.
I’ve spent a lifetime watching new dotcoms launch with incremental improvements in user experience. And I’ve tried to copy the best of it for Backcountry.com and our associated sites. And then along comes Mint.com and it humbles me completely. The site works so beautifully and seamlessly that it leapfrogs all other interactive design. Almost everyone is nervous about sharing financial data on the web and yet Mint tackles by pulling in your data so quickly and efficiently it almost happens before you know it. And then it’s all parsed into instantly useful information. It’s so brilliant in its simplicity.
The first rigid frame tent Dad bought was a tan three-man from LL Bean back when they were the cool gear company. Dad was in awe of its ability to hold itself up just by flexing a few aluminum poles. When the coastal winds of Maine ripped the tent off the beach and flung it skating across the ocean surface Dad just said, “wow, look at it float, look at the way it holds its form.” He watched until it sailed out of sight.
Last night I spent eight hours gear testing a Tent Cot—the unholy mating of a hunting cot and a boy scout tent—and thinking semi-deep thoughts about tent design and tent life. Any time I was tempted to stray to a different topic another drop of water would form on the nylon ceiling above my forehead and, water torture style, get me back on track.
I remember the Bedouin-style tents Dad would erect every summer on the coast of Maine. The gargantuan center pole was as heavy as an I-beam, surrounded by four stout pig iron poles at each corner. The trick was to rig a series of high-tension guy lines all around the tent—and in the full dark of the first night Dad would swear a blue streak as he rigged these origami like structures. The lines functioned like crafty trip-wires and at least once every trip I’d bring the homestead tumbling down when I face-planted over a line. Our clan of seven lived in these circus domes for three weeks every summer. Dad called it vacation.
The best-designed tent I ever spent the night in was on a bitterly cold -26º Vermont night, with winds peaking at over 50 mph. We were students of Sterling College on a four day winter hike and the only tent materials we were allowed were two sheets of cheap plastic and some rope. My hiking partner Steve Bastress channeled MacGyver as he bent a 12-foot sapling over, sheared off two downward facing limbs, and made stakes out of them. Then, using 18 inches of line, he staked the tip of the tree to the ground, forming an arch. Over the top of the arch he strung one plastic sheet. The limbs of the tree splayed naturally to form the perfect frame of a dome tent. All night long we heard our teammates’ two-stick-poles-and-a-plastic-sheet tents whipping about and collapsing.
In the morning the instructors seemed to feel we’d bent the old “leave only footprints, take only artifacts” commandment when we hacked into the virgin sapling. Apparently it was okay for them to teach us Swedish limbing techniques in class, but it was not so kosher to practice it in the field. These outdoor instructors, so fussy.
Last night I lay in the badly leaking Tent Cot and looked enviously out on The North Face Vector that I had foolishly loaned to a friend. Throughout the pounding hail and rainstorm I watched my loaner tent sit unperturbed. In the flash of lightning I could see the Unobtanium poles–as light as a muon–hold the shape of the tent just so and send the water packing.
In the morning I was wet in that eight-hours-in-a-completely-soaked-sleeping-bag kind of a way. My buddy hanging in my TNF continued to saw logs as I glared in his direction. To fail at Warm and Dry 101 is a quick Darwinian slap, a reminder that in many ways we are lamer than those who came before us. Dad would have rigged up some line and oil skin to keep himself dry. Steve Bastress would have built a log cabin. Me? I’ll be getting my Vector back.
After I interviewed for the Managing Editor position, this is thank you I wrote. Huh….
John Bresee • 1104 Ashton Ave. Suite 204 Salt Lake City, UT 84106
• 801-486-1388Fax 485-2735 • wcr@xmission.com
June 26, 1997
Steve Casimiro
Surfer Publications
PO Box 1028
Dana Point CA 92629
Dear Steve:
Thanks for the day at the Powder offices. It was both challenging and fun. I mulled your interview questions over on the way home, and couldn’t help but laugh a bit. “What makes you snap?” Is roughly equivalent to “have you stopped beating your wife? Answer yes or no.” In an interview situation it is never easy to jump into a topic as awkward as the last time I snapped. Yet in the face of questions like this, and “rule breaking” one is left with two alternatives, the truth, or a bald face lie so transparent as to be pathetic. “I, sir, never snap!” was the obvious, yet unacceptable answer. At any rate, I enjoy mentally awkward situations, and in retrospect it was fun.
The group at Powder seem like a great team, and it was good to meet with everyone. I appreciate your effort in putting the day together.
I rudely neglected to thank you for lunch, so please accept my belated thanks.
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