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.
If you’ve not heard of Trapster.com you may soon. Trapster is the online and mobile phone based application to warn drivers of speed traps (still in beta, according to the Trapster site’s info). It’s the virtual equivalent of flashing your lights as a neighborly warning that “There’s a cop with a Wookie sized radar gun pointed in your direction over the next hill!”
It’s insanely simple and elegant but it does require a few tech pieces to work.
- A GPS aware mobile phone
- A Trapster account
- Other drivers similarly equipped
In theory this should work very well and it also should work, I’m assuming, with a GPS aware laptop. It’s got an API tie in to Google Maps and there’s even a BlackBerry specific version; get the instructions here: http://www.trapster.com/bbinstructions.php.
There’s a lot of blog debate about the viability of the service, particularly if it should become illegal. What? Could this become the first illegal mobile phone application? Perhaps in Canada, which seems to have intensely Draconian views toward traffic violations. But how could anyone technically detect that someone was using the mobile service? Not that this couldn’t happen, but talk about Orwellian visions!
I understand that there will continually be a battle between traffic policing and countermeasures. If the law enforcement community was smart about this, rather than Byzantine or intrusive legislation and straining resources to enforce those questionable laws, wouldn’t it be smarter to swim in the same pool? If I’m running a county traffic program, why don’t I just get numerous Trapster accounts myself, pass these along to my staff, coordinate the “dummy”traps (places where we have *no* intention of actually monitoring traffic), and set up literally dozens upon dozens of false reports? Two things are likely to happen:
1. Trapster’s data integrity would be severely threatened, if done right, so people would be less inclined to trust it and less inclined to use it.
2. There would be so many ‘hot spots’ listed in the Trapster reports, some real and some not, that the county becomes much more placid from a traffic perspective (and this would be the end goal anyway).
Or maybe law agencies outsource this? Hmmm, do I smell a business opportunity here? Not for me, personally; I like to play on the ethical side of games. But it does demonstrate a particularly intriguing maturation and inherent vulnerability in social networking. Value depends on truth.
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!
It’s almost fascinating to see the ongoing direction and advancement taking place at LinkedIn (LI). For professionals of any stripe, this community, along with its attendant tools, is continually stepping to the front of the line for both its usefulness and relevance.
LI just announced that your personal network stats will now be available via an RSS feed. I’ve been using RSS feeds to a few LI answers categories for a while now, which is a great place to view the collective cognitive ebb and flow on specific business and technical topics. They’re great. The LI feed on your personal network is a welcome addition.
Please pass the anti-hoax spray before I get bitten again
Okay, you probably also have good friends, family members and co-workers who love to share everything from amusing to alarming news, photos, and alerts via email. Sharing can be good. Broadcast emails to everyone in your address book is not and particularly so if it’s something intrinsically false.
The following story, although not in the form you see below, was forwarded to me by a good friend, which was forwarded from a forward, from a forward, etc. Despite the trust I have in my friend I do not trust forwards from unknown sources, so, being the annoyingly cautious person I am, I bothered to check it out. It’s not hard to do. Just (please!) Google some of the text in your amazing/alarming message or visit some of these hoax-busting sites:
http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/
http://urbanlegends.about.com/
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/
The email that was sent supposedly reflected a holiday confession from Ben Stein. Perhaps you’ve seen it. The message, at least the basic thrust, is marginally corroborated at http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/benstein2.asp (an excellent location for the original context of this message) as well as at Ben Stein’s website (benstein.com).
As with many, many forwarded messages, what you get in your in box is easily tainted by the opinions and good intentions of so many others along the line. And, occasionally, someone with the compassion and integrity of Catbert. So for the real story, I’ve omitted the message that was forwarded to me and just present the transcript. It’s good and worth a read. The incidental lesson: always check your sources; if you’re not sure, don’t quote them. A basic journalism principle that has applicability in what we broadcast to others in email for you never know who will forward what you’ve written to the world, with your name and email attached. What’s really weird but unfortunately not too surprising is that the errant version of the quote (which is also available on the snopes site) was included in its entirety on a number of blog sites, again errantly attributing to Mr. Stein words he never spoke or wrote.
One more thing, if you feel compelled to forward a message to all your friends & family (all 143 of us), please, please use BCC email distribution. This isn’t rocket science. Like me, you may be painfully familiar with internet based scams/attacks/security risks because of your line of work, and I guess it’s incumbent upon us with that experience to instruct and warn those who are not. Unless you really love phishing attacks and endless gigabytes of spam over the years we at least need to try.
Oh, to those of my friends and family to whom I forwarded that web vid about charging your blackberry from an onion and Gatorade (which was a…er… ahem, a hoax—honest, I didn’t know!), you know what you can expect from me under the Christmas tree this year 
–@–
Origins: Ben Stein, a lawyer by training, has also served as a speechwriter for President Richard M. Nixon, has to date authored sixteen books (both novels and non-fiction efforts), and continues to write editorials and columns for a number of prominent publications. He is perhaps best known to the world at large, however, for his in-front-of-the-camera work as the dreadfully dull economics teacher in the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (and his similar role as the monotonic science teacher Mr. Cantwell on the TV series The Wonder Years) and as the keenly competitive host of the Comedy Central game show Win Ben Stein’s Money.
Mr. Stein currently offers occasional commentaries for the CBS Sunday Morning news program, and the item quoted above is based on one such commentary, entitled “Confessions for the Holidays” and delivered by Mr. Stein on that program on 18 December 2005, one week before Christmas. However, the version widely circulated via e-mail includes some transcription errors and modifications that were not part of the piece as originally aired. Here is the full version as broadcast, taken from a CBS News transcript of the program:
CHARLES OSGOOD (host): We all have our own thoughts about the holidays. Here’s Ben Stein with his.BEN STEIN: Here at this happy time of year, a few confessions from my beating heart. I have no freaking clue who Nick and Jessica are.(Footage of People magazine; Us magazine)
STEIN: I see them on the cover of People and Us constantly when I’m buying my dog biscuits. I still don’t know. I often ask the checkers at the grocery stores who they are. They don’t know who Nick and Jessica are, either. Who are they? Will it change my life if I know who they are and why they’ve broken up? Why are they so darned important?
STEIN: If people want a creche, fine. The menorah a few hundred yards away is fine, too. I do not like getting pushed around for being a Jew, and I don’t think Christians like getting pushed around for being Christians. I think people who believe in God are sick and tired of getting pushed around, period. I have no idea where the concept came from that