John Bresee

Remember when you first saw the web…? Whether it was a Star Trek page that listed every episode or a dot matrix print out of a naked woman…either way it was something really new in Norwich, Vt/Hanover, N.H. and we couldn’t get enough of it. I immersed myself in Tektronix screens and dotmatrix printers from when I was about eight until I pulled my head out of my iPad three hours ago and saw the striking similarities of web creation all over again only this time with most of the problems solved; portability, not hot to the touch with masses of loud whirring fans, privacy for data entry and storage and and…it’s instant-on. I can’t over-state how cool it is for a computer to come to life instantly and be happy to being searching at your beck and call. Oh Thank You! I’ve been waiting since I first ran a paper tape through a PDP-9 for a computer that at least kept up with my typing. The IBM Selectric still wins on that.

But the iPad, damn is it different. But like any new form of soon to be mass accepted computing it will go through these types of iterations only this time instead of ten to fifteen years it will happen in three. And in those next three years  you will see rocket ships of success and epic failures of old guard companies that couldn’t fathom the light-speed changes that will be thrust upon them by consumer demand and not by Apple‘s creation. Apple has merely created the chalk board. The people will sketch out the story. The wealth destruction will be massive and most company’s won’t see the bullet that hits them. And this comes from an entrepreneur who once started a newspaper company. I’d sooner  own BP’s marketing department. (just kidding)

1. Content creation and consumption. Apple has given us cool new tools to envision digital imagery and sound and space and all of the meta around and between. And the first period will be filled with Ginsbergian exploration as the the walls of this new space are defined and redefined. The content will be overflowing with coolness. Each day new apps filled with wonder, doing things that took us forever to accomplish before. But now not only will we fill our grocery lists quickly but now they will be styled by a brilliant UX person who knows that all dairy belongs together and that your family’s consumption is going to stay within a gallon of the previous week. Smart content, beautifully laid out will lead to page consumption rates that are are unheard of in the wild west of www3.

2. The engine behind the web is always community. People forget this too easily and believe that Moore’s law is an engineering principle relating to processor doubling. Instead it is a law about the power of what happen when at the end of a limitless number of keyboards….Whoopsie, I meant Metcalfe’s law. Those brainiacs are so fussy when you get it wrong. Metcalfe said something to the effect that the network is exponentially more powerful with each additional node. That’s a tough nut to swallow. It’s strains my brain to think that each new netbook in Alabama makes the Internet exponentially more powerful. But I probably didn’t understand the principle. I do believe that each time you attach wetware to the network (smart people) that are far faster, self-educating, adjustable, scalable and increases in strength and numbers forever, the webs power to change the world remains exponential.

The power of the web has always been community. It was sad to see Sun come so close, “the network is the computer”….no, no, no. The network with the people are the application. A computer is boring. An application is endlessly fascinating.

3. Transaction – It is inevitable when you make the largest marketplace people will trade. The platforms/stores/entities will evolve. Prices will come down, liquidity in the system will increase and our economy will move faster. A faster economy, is, as Adam Smith told us  a better and richer economy.

4. But then a beautiful thing will happen. The merchants, marketers, branders and the rest will be held at abeyance; based on the quality of what they have made. And products poorly made or poorly described through crappy images or “All your base are belong to us” cultural incoherency will fail. Because the indescribably beautiful collision of community and commerce will lead to the right product at the right time at the right price. Community content and endless honesty about quantity on hand and and review quality will make the good etailer succeed and the shoddy ones drift out of business like so many hot dog vendors who quietly spew salmonilla in the ally’s away from the light of honest commerce. People who have been trying to unethically garner the consumers dollars for years through the spam cannon of endless informercials will find it harder in the face of real-time customer generated content. Now the retailer is held to the highest standard…that of the collected wisdom of all customers. The age is here and it’s merely been helped along by Steve Jobs making computing more collaborative and communal and capable. Thanks Steve. We’ll do our best to live up to it.

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Popularity: 19% [?]

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.

Popularity: 19% [?]

“(the iPad is) not nearly as good for creating stuff. On the other hand, it’s infinitely more convenient for consuming it” — Pogue In 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.

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Popularity: 100% [?]

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.

6. Internet is to the mobile internet as silent film is to TV.

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.

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Popularity: 16% [?]

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

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.

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Popularity: 10% [?]

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.

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Popularity: 5% [?]

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.

Popularity: 1% [?]

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:

This is a link that may or may not work to a speech to a BYU entrepreneurship class circa 2007.

Popularity: 1% [?]

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.

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Popularity: 1% [?]

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 Japanese pop 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.

Popularity: 1% [?]

The risky way is the safe way and the safe way is the risky way

We stood at the top of a line we had never skied. It was steep, three tight moves over small cliff bands, straight line, then done. Fast, fugly, but doable. As always the Tan Farmer dropped in first, nailed it and moved on. Loki followed seconds later, looking kind of spazzy all backseat, no rhythm, another displaced east-coast bumper trying to ski the West. But he was through cleanly, no lost shoes. I was left with Lawyer-boy, a better skier than the rest of us, smooth. Lawyer-boy said, “I have a job, I have a wife, I love skiing, I have a bad back, I don’t need to do this shit, I’ve got nothing to prove.” And then he dropped in and proved the thing that didn’t need proving.

And like a thousand days before I stood alone at the top of a line, fully gripped. Riddled with self-doubt…and then I dropped. And I came out the ass-end of the chute–jacket chattering in the wind—ripping like I was channeling Seth Morrison, alive! Seth would have laughed at this shot but it was great to be me.

It’s amazing how we have to keep relearning the same simple rules; the risky way is the safe way and the safe way is the risky way. There isn’t much difference between dropping that line and taking a risk at work; or committing in relationships, having a child, starting a company, riding your first century. In all cases the easy way, the safe way is not to go, to stay at home, stay single, stay on the couch.

Eddie Aikau was one of the pioneers of big wave surfing. He disappeared in 1978 attempting a 20 mile life or death paddle between islands. Afterwards his friends would look at the surf and say, “Eddie would go.” I think about Eddie, I think about him in the boardroom, in the backcountry, on top of peaks and during especially tense and painful moments in relationships. Eddie would take the risk, Eddie knew that only in risk is there reward.

As I look at 10 years of work on this company, the hundreds of thousands of man hours that have gone into this, I see the fruition of many hard and painful decisions. Every worthwhile thing seems to come through hard fought gains. Appreciation only comes with sacrifice. And thankfully the people at Backcountry.com have had the courage to ask and answer the question of whether Eddie would go. And they do, time and again, hang it/out risk it all, until they succeed.

Every time I have to relearn this lesson I am surprised at myself, surprised that the lifelong battle is always against fear and if I am not consciously fighting it then I am quietly losing to it.

Thank you Edward Ryan Makua Hanai Aikau

And thank you Larry Hamill for writing the inspiring book, Leading the Revolution. I use your ideas to shape my life.

John on the Playa, happy

Popularity: 2% [?]