John Bresee

“(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% [?]

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.’”

Wow…how unusual. Here’s her full post.  http://www.foolsandsages.com/2009/12/03/making-customer-service-fun-what-a-concept/

Popularity: 4% [?]

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’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.

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• User Experience = $5 Million per Employee (adaptivepath.com)

Popularity: 1% [?]