I love Amazon, not always for the user experience but for the idea machine that never gives up. Amazon has unveiled several new ways to shop, all powered by high-tech design. Similar in context to Shazam for the iPhone, Amazon’s new iPhone app works like this… You’re shopping in a retail store, you obviously want the best price but don’t want to write down the product name or SKU. Now, all you need to do is snap a picture of the item with your mobile phone. Then upload your pic to Amazon, add it to your e-Commerce shopping cart and the system returns a bargain hunting price. Then you can 1-click buy online as usual. Mobile shopping is also 1-click away…
“The ability to be able to take a snapshot of a product with a phone and see a full database of prices completely changes the game — particularly when a consumer is in a brick-and-mortar store, where the consumer still makes over 95 percent of purchases.”
As Amazon increases it’s product base to span electronics, apparel, digital media, and numerous other retail categories, seems they’re positioning themselves to go up against discount retailers. Watch out Wal-mart.
Jingle bells, jingle bells… To date in 2008, $10.41 billion has been spent online. Moreover, according to comScore, “Upcoming ‘Cyber Monday’ Represents Strong Historical Bellwether for Total Holiday Season E-Commerce Spending.”
“The Monday after Thanksgiving, popularly known as “Cyber Monday,” represents the first significant spike in online spending activity for the holiday season. The phenomenon results from Cyber Monday being the first working day following the Thanksgiving holiday and the fact that purchases from work still account for approximately half of all e-commerce spending.”
comScore reported a 4% decline versus the same period last year. But in total, Black Friday totaled $534 million or represents 1% in growth over last year. Now that’s a little bit of good news!
Free software, free Internet content, free mobile applications versus the world of paid software, pay-per-use content, and regional coding. As all sorts of corporations are delivering products via the Internet and as such they often include DRM in one way or another. But how can corporations protect their content without surveillance and copyright protection. How do they face the question: Do you want to sue your customers? And more importantly will your customers want to sue you? Add branded-content and user-generated content models and there’s a slew of issues to consider in terms of the balance between rights we protect and the interests of the customer to engage with the protected works. “So the limits are equally important as the rights we create.” There in lies the dilemma.
In June 12, 2008 Canada’s Industry Minister Jim Prentice introduced copyright reform legislation which triggered considerable debate over the future of Canadian copyright policy. Michael Geist, leader in the cause, is the research chair of Internet and e-Commerce at the University of Ottawa. By summer 2008, Geist had 90,000 people join his “Fair Copyright” group on Facebook and in so doing, started a grass roots movement to debate the issue. YouTube, Wikis, bloggers and even Boing Boing picked up the cause and sprouted international media stories about Canadian copyright reform. In this documentary Geist goes to the people to try to explain “Why copyright emerged as such an important issue to Canadians today?”
I’m honored to be speaking at nextMEDIA about Affiliate Marketing on Tuesday November 18th, in the CiRCA ballroom at 2:40 PM. I’ll be presenting strategies and tactics designed to get the most out of Affiliate Marketing programs.
Although mostly ignored in Canada by big advertisers, in the context of the economic downturn, Affiliate Marketing will come into its own and thrive by offering a lower-cost way of finding customers in tough times.
To explain, Affiliate Marketing is an innovative sales channel that trades online traffic and conversion for a commission on sales. It’s a critical part of the eCommerce ecosystem, and, you could say, the digital enablement of the word of mouth economy. In other words, something is for sale online, you recommend it, someone buys it, the merchant makes a sale, you make a commission.
In the US and the UK, advertisers (or merchants) are spending 10 to 15% of their online marketing budget on affiliate marketing and payouts to affiliates range from $250,000 to $500,000+ monthly. Sounds easy but it’s not. Only the top affiliates make a substantial amount of money.
Download the presentation on SlideShare. Please also see the nextMEDIA schedule for other interesting sessions.
According to Chris Anderson, the idea of “feeconomics” is not a new one; making money by giving something away has been going on for some time. Chris Anderson is one of my favorite speakers. I had the exalt and the pain of following Anderson at an Infopresse conference last year. At the time, he was on his book tour for The Long Tail based on his 2004 articulation of how technology enabled infinite shelf space and make niche markets viable. His article shook up business thinking in a lot media & entertainment boardrooms.
In January 2008, Anderson wrote the thought provoking article Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business. In it, he explains that the new model of “free” is not based on a cross-subsidy or the shifting of say a “free” mobile phone in exchange for a 3-year contract. But because the cost of products is falling so fast, brands can offer “free” for free and charge for stuff that costs them money. “Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy.”
Has Anderson picked up on an idea or are we all monkey typing on our laptop keyboards? Years ago, when Adam Neate was starting out as a software developer come artist, he left about 6,000 paintings on cardboard on the streets of London. Today his paintings sell for tens of thousands of dollars but as I write this, Neate and his band of friends and collaborators are leaving 10,000 of his paintings in all 32 of London’s boroughs. Free culture, free art, free internet - a world wide Web.
