Marketspace Advisor

Social Shopping Sites and New Technologies Are Revolutionizing the Shopping Experience

I’ve recently read an article by Jeffrey Rayport called Demand-Side Innovation: Where IT Meets Marketing, in which Jeffrey talks about the dramatic impact that technology has had on media and consumer behavior in the past few years and how the online social networking marketplace is changing today’s business.

One of the new emerging trends he mentioned is the influence of social shopping sites like Stylehive, Kaboodle and ThisNext on consumer’s buying behavior and purchasing decisions:

“On ThisNext, for example, users create profiles, maintain personal blogs, post recommended product lists, and promote their recommendations across these platforms. Their results are accessible to the community and also searchable from across the Web. Whereas Amazon and Shopzilla provide effective ways for users to confirm what they want and determine how best to buy it, sites like ThisNext guide consumers to discover what they want long before they've considered a specific product, category, or brand. In that sense, social shopping sites have the potential to wield enormous influence over what consumers actually consider and buy, and therefore, over how retail dollars flow.”

Indeed, Jeffrey recently pointed me and my colleagues to another article which provides a fascinating illustration of how social shopping might enter the physical retailing environment in very powerful ways and revolutionize the shopping experience. The article describes the new technology unveiled at the National Retail Federation convention that helps tech-savvy, young adults connect in real time with their friends to share their shopping experiences. For example, they can invite their friends to view what they tried on and get "hot or not" votes for each outfit, along with text messages. The “Social Retailing” demonstration, aimed at women ages 17-24, was featured in the X07 Store of the Future area of the exhibit hall and is currently tested by a high-end designer Nanette Lepore in her shop in New York's Soho. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal also did a good story on this technology that brings community-building tools and user-generated content capabilities into the retail store.

It will be really interesting to watch this space and see how these new social shopping sites and state-of-the-art retail technologies will reshape the future of retailing. Any thoughts?

Fashion / Beauty 2.0

I came across a pretty interesting site today called SeenON! which aims to be "the definitive source for products seen on screen.”  The site is owned and operated by NBC Universal through a partnership with DeliveryAgent.com, which specializes in “shopping enabled entertainment” (i.e., selling products related to entertainment content).   

The site offers a good illustration of how many Web 2.0 sites are providing new and better ways to source, filter, and monetize content.          

Regardless of whether it succeeds or not, sites like SeenOn! (Glam.com is another example) offer a preview of how verticals such as fashion and beauty are likely to evolve – this includes:

·         Using lightweight production of specialized content through aggregation, user-generated content, and blogs      

·         Offering better ways to filter and sort content through social intelligence (e.g., tagging and voting), behavioral targeting, and customizable filters

·         Enabling active user participation and social interaction

·         Enabling commerce through affiliate links

Three Gems From IT Conversations

via Phil Windley's weekly message:

The Future of Entertainment - Web 2.0 2005 (Rating: 3.0)

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A diverse panel of players in the current and cutting edge of entertainment discuss the future of entertainment at this panel discussion from Web 2.0. Mark Cuban, Michael Powell, Evan Williams, and Reed Hastings share insights about the effect of the increased availability of broadband on entertainment delivery and discuss the conflict between the forces of control and the forces of freedom. They also discuss the future of content delivery, the inherent differences between audio and video, and the trade-off between convenience and quality.

http://ipost.com/rd/9z1z3e58m4ii8v9q5b4q17v6f4rdkp38uk91k2qbj60

Social Applications - Where 2005 (Rating: 3.2)

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The future of social mobile applications is wide open, according to the Where 2.0 Social Application panelists. They expect to see many new applications with clean, rich client interfaces that provide significantly more functionality and managability than is currently available. However, they are all quick to point out that the future is as much about social aspects as about the technology. The discussion focuses on breaking down barriers and energizing participation, as well as controlling usage and unforeseen behaviors.

http://ipost.com/rd/9z1ztr9e45hqvj68ntqo935ju9kna9r8dg28gi5hceg

Seth Goldstein - Applications for the New Attention Economy (Rating: 3.7)

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The new Attention Economy is grabbing the attention of alpha geeks and businesses hoping reap the rewards of innovation in this emerging marketplace of clickstreams. In this talk, Seth Goldstein introduces us to Root Markets' Root Vaults, one of the first applications to make use of the data provided by the AttentionTrust's Attention Extension. These new applications and analytical tools help individuals take charge of their own attention data in order to understand patterns, share with others, and harness attention's growing economic value.

http://ipost.com/rd/9z1z2ig3bga9pm3udphaf7g1nsbdt7l8pmnurvb82mg

Beyond MySpace

I posted over on my personal blog about interesting technical directions for MySpace-style communities, based on a class I help teach at MIT.

http://www.octavianworld.org/octavianworld/2006/05/beyond_myspace.html

Are your customers becoming your extended workforce?

We’re seeing the line continue to blur between the roles that customers play as “outsiders” being sold to and served by a company and the roles they play as “insiders” generating new content, proactively acting as marketers or sales people, and self-servicing their products and accounts.

Here’s a dramatic example from BusinessWeek’s current cover story: “Residents [of online game Second Life] spend a quarter of the time they're logged in, a total of nearly 23,000 hours a day, creating things that become part of the world, available to everyone else. It would take a paid 4,100-person software team to do all that, says Linden Lab. Assuming those programmers make about $100,000 a year, that would be $410 million worth of free work over a year. Think of it: The company charges customers anywhere from $6 to thousands of dollars a month for the privilege of doing most of the work." 

Since most prognosticators believe that massively multiplayer gaming is in its infancy, the creation of customer-generated value will likely grow exponentially in the coming years in this area alone. 

But customer-created value isn’t only happening in sectors such as gaming or among other “Web 2.0” companies that may be being dismissed by more traditional firms.

In working with a leading financial services client, we learned that many customers preferred to solve their problems themselves, essentially to be their own service rep.  For many service issues, only when self-service channels like the company’s website failed to meet their needs did many customers pick up a phone or visit a branch.  Improving the effectiveness of self service interfaces is therefore eliminating a significant amount of these expensive human-to-human service calls, saving our client tens of millions of dollars per year.  And those 8-digit figure numbers aren’t in a virtual currency; they are real profits in American dollars.

Web Futures: Vast and the Abstraction Vector

Nik Cubrilovic posted today over on TechCrunch about Vast, a "meta"-Edgio.  I posted today on my personal blog about how Vast represents an evolution along something I'll call the "abstraction vector" that can be used as an input to predicting how Web 2.0 applications might unfold.

Web 2.5 Application Ideas

I just posted over on my personal blog about some ideas that the Edgeio launch suggested.  The core that drove the ideas:  if a "listing" tag can be used to define structured data for commerce that can be aggregated, parsed, and usefully presented by services like Edgeio, what other tags could define other forms of structured data that could also be usefully exchanged this way?  My post suggested "events" as one such possibility.  Others?

Edgeio Launches: Who Needs eBay and Craigslist?

Edgeio, http://edgeio.com, launched last week.  Edgeio allows blog publishers to use their own sites as ecommerce storefronts, and uses tags and RSS to aggregate blog publishers' listings.  On the buyer side, it provides a purpose-built interface for browsing these listings to find what you need.  I think this is a good example of a "Web 2.5" application in some respects, in that it follows some of the principles of Structured Collaboration (see http://www.octavianworld.org/octavianworld/2005/12/what_can_web_15.html).

Edgeio was covered in Business week's blogs earlier in February:

http://blogs.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2006/02/edgeio_edges_ou.html

Nik Cubrilovic's post in TechCrunch (a great resource) was also excellent, and the comments provide invaluable market feedback for the Edgeio team (rendering a lot of what I might have had to say superfluous).

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/02/27/edgeio-launches/

Finally, Nick Carr's post on Rough Type, skeptical but partially right on:

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/03/getting_it.php

What he misses, for my taste, is that these services are not intended to grow to the sky.  They are experiments that ultimately make sense only in the context of a larger partner that builds or buys them.

Parsing Terry Semel

I just finished listening to this IT Conversations podcast of an interview with Yahoo's Terry Semel from the O'Reilly Web 2.0 conference last year:

http://www.itconversations.com/audio/download/ITConversations-844.mp3

Semel was knocked by the digerati as too old-school to help Yahoo compete effectively with Google.  He does apply a "the-way-you-win-is-to-have-both-great-content-and-distribution" framework to Yahoo's strategy, but what this interview reveals is an appreciation of the equal importance of technology in the mix (for aggregating and syndicating that content), and an open-minded aggressiveness about balancing deals to scoop up others'  innovations with Yahoo's own home-grown stuff.  Also interesting to hear him comment on Google, its evolution from a search tool to a portal, and how that compares with what Yahoo has done so far.

More on Yahoo:  this podcast of Paul Levine's (GM of Yahoo Local) talk at Where 2.0 on the "architecture of participation" (a term he borrows from Tim O'Reilly):

http://www.itconversations.com/audio/download/ITConversations-807.mp3

If you're not familiar with Web 2.0 stuff like map APIs and tagging, this might be useful to help familiarize you with these services as Yahoo implements them.  If you are, this will be less interesting and feel more like an ad for Yahoo's experiments.

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