Tangent Thought Gallery

Shopping carts—that everyday fixture for every online store—has its origins in overcoming failure.

1934—the pitch of the depression. An entrepreneur named Sylvan Goldman bought several bankrupt Southern grocery stores. It was a risk. How to mitigate?

The new owner studied his customers shopping habits and observed: women (yep, back then men didn’t do it) shopped until their hand carried baskets were full. Then they checked out. Not folding in to frustration, inspiration struck. He built a solution (from 2 baskets, a folding chair, and several wheels). If you’re thinking of something reminiscent of a contemporary Japanese shopping cart, you’re there.

Testing, he placed several in the store. Nothing happened. Shoppers continued to carry the hand baskets. Creatures of habit, don’t you know?

Sylvan didn’t give up. He hired people to go in to the store, play the part of shoppers, and push around the carts full of groceries. Adding to this, he had employees offer in-coming shoppers the carts. He struck gold. Not just in incremental sales, though. Goldman garnered a fortune as he established the first shopping cart manufacturer: the Folding Basket Carrier Corporation. Personally, I’m glad the common name shifted to shopping cart; folding basket carrier would be a terrible online metaphor.

Not only did Goldman’s ingenuity make him a millionaire a number of times over, it also made possible retail business models not previously possible, such as super markets and big-box retailers. Hard to picture those as successful with clientele restricted to totting their purchases in hand held baskets.

How many sites have you seen in your lifetime? How many stand out among that crowd? You know, I couldn’t even begin to guess at the number of sites I’ve seen but I can guarantee there are precious few that rise above the rest.

One that whacked me up side the head this week was Burger King’s stroke of marketing brilliance in support of last year’s Simpson’s movie: SimpsonizeMe.com. I had seen a few Simponized avatars/icons around the web and had suspicions that there was some tool to do that but hadn’t found it until last night. The Simpson’s have been on screen (broadcast and DVD) quite a bit in our house over the years—definitely not my wife’s favorite, I think she’s got it pegged a few rungs down from the Three Stooges, and although I believe the writing had gone downhill some years ago, I just had to try this online toy.

So, after a little while, my wife comes down into my office and asks “What are you up to?” Caught!

“Well, er, I was kinda burned out on the tech issue I was wrestling with and found this, uh, site.”

She, moving closer to my desk, asks, “Oh really; anything interesting?”

Me, feeling like a 9 year old with his hand in the candy jar, “eh…yeah, well, it’s this site that lets you make a…” (I’m thinking, “Might as well say it, Kolb”) “…a Simpson cartoon character out of your uploaded photo.”

I quickly add, “But it doesn’t really look like me though.”

Zooming in for a closer look at the screen she bursts out laughing, “No, it looks ‘exactly’ like you!”

Now I feel like a 6 year old because my son comes in, takes a quick look and, laughing as well, agrees with her.

I’m over it.

But the site, IMO, is brilliant. It couples a Flash application, a configurator, a commerce engine, personalization, plus enough eye and ear candy to make it seem like an amusement park “A” ride online, and makes it all easy to use. You then can buy personalized merchandise like hats, shirts, etc. And that’s not even the purpose of the site. It’s to promo the movie and subtly blast Burger King’s image into your mind while you’re playing and buying stuff.

There are few sites of that caliber that can capture not only their customer’s attention but also their inner child.

Oh, BTW, Happy April 1st!

Back in ancient times, oh, let’s say around 2001, the repertoire of Google apps was much more humble. “Earth”, “Trends”, “Analytics”, “Maps”, and a host of other well know tools had yet to be prefaced with big G branding. But they did have search. Make that Search, with a capital S. As the world knows, that’s done nothing but continue in stride.

Google became a corporate entity 10 years ago this year. Remember Lycos, Excite, AskJeeves? How about Alta Vista? All of these former heavyweights had strong positions until rocked out of place. The early version of AskJeeves used to be my personal favorite until Jeeves staff mucked around with the interface and ruined it. I guess it was someone’s “good idea”, but that’s not how a lot of former AskJeeves aficionados judged the deliverable. We switched to G.

But even back then, in the pre-Blog days, the huge Google lever for me was Usenet (Deja.com) news group postings—all 500+ million of them at that time. You simply couldn’t match having the collective intelligence of all the thought processes and decades of collective thinking that went into all those questions and answers at your disposal—at your queried disposal, no less. This feature alone was worth the price of the internet. For a great compendium of Google milestones, be sure to check out http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html.

Moving forward to 2008, hopefully you’re already familiar with Google Analytics. One of the more intriguing features to be rolled out recently (mid-March ’08) within the Analytics space is Benchmarking. According to Google…

“Benchmarking is an optional Google Analytics service that shows how your website’s statistics compare against other industry verticals. In the beta version of this service, you are able to compare your site’s Visits, Pageviews, Pages per Visit, Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site, and New Visits data against benchmark data from categories of other participating websites. You can use this data to gain broader context for your site so you can identify additional opportunities to improve your site’s metrics.”

For the authoritative word on Benchmarking see: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/topic.py?topic=13909

To keep pace with the G can be daunting but one element that makes it a bit more approachable is their blog spaces. With several flavors available you should be able to find one suited to your taste:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ — the mother of Google blogs.
http://analytics.blogspot.com/ — one of my personal favorites. Be sure to check out Conversion University videos!

Last of all, another recently introduced API is Google’s OpenSocial, which is defined as “a common API for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.” You can test this out with an Orkut account (Orkut is another Google initiative). I believe a common API for social networking applications has huge potential and I believe Google has the horsepower to pull it off.

Don’t know how many industry/trade magazines I’ve subscribed to over the years. There are some I definitely pick up and read or scan regularly and then there are the others that I wish did not have my contact info. There’s yet another category that can evoke varying emotions among us—those no longer in publication.

Among that last group there are a small subset that I miss; those which were stellar in their markets (e.g., “Business 2.0”, which bit the dust in October just last year), had consistently great article/authors, excelled at segment coverage, or maybe I just liked the way they made me think. The Industry Standard was one such mag; it did a phenomenal job of covering online business. Liked it so much I kept the final issue as a memento when it ceased publication some years back.

I was really pleased to get an email this week that the pub was back online as a beta. Here’s the mag’s elevator pitch:

“The Industry Standard features news and analysis that covers emerging technologies and companies, venture funding, acquisitions, site launches, and other developments in the internet space. Additionally, The Standard aggregates community knowledge in a quantified fashion, thereby ranking both the knowledge of the individual community members themselves, as well as the value of the information the community provides as a whole. This system is built as a prediction market, intersected with a reputation-based social network.”

So it looks like the new, web 2.0 incarnation will build more on the strength of its readership. It’s not the first community based prediction engine out there, but, if the caliber of readership is like it used to be, it has potential to be one of the best. This could be good.

http://www.theindustrystandard.com/

Earlier this year the business.com domain name sold for (gasping for air here!) in excess of $300M US. While that specific instance is a record, and certainly caught news wind, I continue to doubt its value. But that’s just me. I think it’s an occasion of multiple bidders (and there were several high profile organizations in on the action) at an auction all “perceiving” increased value because the others are also perceiving that sense of value. E.g., is a 1950’s era Les Paul guitar worth $20K to over $50K? Intrinsically, no. However, there will never be another one produced. Others, primarily investors who aren’t even marginally decent guitar players, think that fact adds value, so they bid on EBay to monstrous dimensions. Is that truly shopping victoriously?

We all take risks, that is, if we’re indeed doing our job well. They’re calculated. They’re mitigated. But they’re still risks. Despite my perception that Business.com was overpriced by several orders of magnitude, someone, some group more likely, felt otherwise. Only time will tell if their risks were well handled or foolish.

Let me ask a question. Prior to implementation, promotion, launch, more promotion, and adoption, what were the respective values of ebay, yahoo, google, linkedin, flickr, youtube, etc., etc.? That’s the basis for my perception. Succinctly, I’d rather have some crazy, off-the-wall domain name that I bought for chump change, focus strategic energies into a successful marketing campaign, then promote the site and its value with the cash saved. In general I believe that’s the wisest approach for almost all instances with perhaps the primary deviation being domain names built upon branding or, to a lesser extent, niche markets. Oh, and personal names

Some businesses handle their approach to digital assets well. They’re the firms that know where they’re headed with branding, with products over their respective life cycles, and the markets they want to penetrate and in which they want to grow. They have a gut feel for global reach. They’re not going to be caught off-guard with email from some back alley domain hoarder, who, attempting to strike hearts with fear, asserts others are laying claim to “their domain name”.cn, .hk, .asia, etc., which he says he can fix for a price, nor are they going to fall prey to a bidding war over online real estate of questionable value. These are the firms that tend to truly win.

Makes me wonder if they also bought Business.cn? If they didn’t I might know someone who can fix it for a price.