Category — Online

Macy’s HSN and Adidas are working with Intel “to bring the convenience of online shopping to the offline world,” reports Hadley Malcolm in USA Today (2/8/12). “We are on the frontier of a really neat future of retailing,” says Michelle Tinsley, general manager of retail at Intel. It is a future of digital shopping walls, such as the one that recently debuted at the Adidas store in London (video). It stands 7 feet tall “and is split into sections that can be detached to alter the width.” It features a touch-screen “showcasing digital representations of a product” along with information, availability and price, as well as a Twitter feed of customer comments.

Customers “can check out through the wall as if they were online” and pay at a designated checkout counter. Dummy shoes are available for those who want to try the shoes on for size. Adidas says “it saw a 500 percent jump in sales of the soccer cleat available through the wall, compared with a similar shoe it launched six months earlier at the same price.” Macy’s, meanwhile, has introduced the “Beauty Spot kiosk, a rounded, roughly 7-foot-tall, 4-foot-wide structure inlaid with interactive touch-screens on both sides” that enables shoppers to browse the store’s makeup selection. (video)

Macy’s is testing the kiosk in four stores and the retailer says it’s too soon to know whether it is a success. HSN has a digital wall for airports that would allow shoppers “to virtually browse knife sets while waiting for a flight, complete the purchase through their phone and have the item shipped home.” It has another wall featuring games with Wolfgang Puck (video). Mitch Joel of Twist Image says digital shopping walls importantly eliminate traditional inventory limitations. “You can have a store in Peoria sell as much inventory as if you were in Times Square,” he says.

Like it or not, Klout, PeerIndex and Twitter Grader are scoring your online influence, reports Stephanie Rosenbloom in the New York Times (6/26/11). How well you score could "determine whether you receive a job, a hotel-room upgrade or free samples at the supermarket." On average, people score only in the teens — on a scale of a hundred — on Klout and PeerIndex. If you score in the 40s, it means you "have a strong, but niche, following. A 100, on the other hand, means you are Justin Bieber."

However, the number of followers you have on Twitter or friends on Facebook is not a determining factor — your score depends on the extent to which "you inspire those followers to take action. That could mean persuading them to try Bikram yoga, donate to the Sierra Club or share a recipe for apple pie." Joe Fernandez, co-founder of Klout, sees the endeavor as a kind of "democratization" of influence. "For the first time," he says, "it’s not just how much money you have or what you look like. It’s what you say and how you say it."

However, Mark Schaefer of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, sees the emergence of a "social media caste system." Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter group says social scoring is "dangerous" because it does not factor in offline influence. He further notes that it lacks "sentiment analysis," meaning that someone could have a high score because of a negative reputation. And yet, some "2,500 companies are using Klout’s data." Audi is using Klout scores as a basis for offering promotions on Facebook, and the Palms Hotel in Vegas is "using Klout data to give highly rated guests an upgrade or tickets to Cirque du Soleil."

A mix of celebrities, quizzes, algorithms and monthly subscription fees is reinventing online shopping at sites like JewelMint, reports Claire Cain Miller in the New York Times (5/2/11). The heart of the idea is "to filter the seemingly infinite options online and show a small selection, catered to an individual’s taste." So, at JewelMint, shoppers first take a style quiz, including preferred colors and celebrity styles. They are then presented with a selected array of items, which they can either buy or not. If not, a monthly subscription fee — $29.95 — is applied to any future purchases.

"When you type in anything to search on the internet, it’s almost terrifying the tidal wave of information you get back," says Kate Bosworth, who is the celebrity face for JewelMint. "The idea of harnessing search for different, sought-after things on the internet is really the new frontier." JewelMint is far from alone: Other sites taking a similar approach include Send the Trend, ShoeDazzle, JustFabulous and Sole Society. In the works is a sister site to JewelMint, called StyleMint, which will feature T-shirts designed by the Olsen Twins.

"The first generation of e-commerce was abut taking care of your chores — that’s Amazon," says Jeremy Liew, of LightSpeed Ventures, an investor in ShoeDazzle. "That’s not what gets people excited in the real world about shopping. This is about making shopping fun again." For the retailer, the approach also "eliminates much of the business risk of ordering inventory … because customers are urged to make a purchase each month and the companies learn to predict which items shoppers will buy." It’s also less expensive selling direct to the shopper, as it eliminates many of the markups that happen along the way in conventional retail.

Penguin Group ceo John Makinson sees a future for books and the stores in which they are sold, reports Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg in the Wall Street Journal (5/9/11). John draws a distinction between a book reader and a book owner. The book reader, he says "just wants the experience of reading the book, and that person is a natural digital consumer … The book owner wants to give, share and shelve books. They love the experience," he says.

It’s a similar situation for bookstores, says John: "A lot of the issue is not just that there are too many bookstores, but that they are too big. How do you diversify the offerings to consumers in order to make productive use of space without losing the experience of a bookstore?" Good question. John is himself the owner of a smallish bookstore, the Holt Bookshop in Norfolk, England. He says he doesn’t harbor any illusions in the face of Amazon’s competitive threat, but he doesn’t think it’s a hopeless situation, either.

John argues that "people will willingly pay a higher price in an independent bookshop knowing they can buy [the same book] for less down the road." He continues: "That’s because consumers feel an emotional engagement with the bookstore and feel that bookstores are providing a public service as well as a commercial service. I see no evidence that independent bookstores will become obsolete." Penguin is one of a trio of publishers backing Bookish, which will promote books directly to consumers.

A "new generation of websites" is allowing people to share their "personal browsing histories for public viewing," reports Austin Considine in the New York Times (3/6/11). As crazy as this sounds, "sites like Dscover.me, Sitesimon, and Voyurl are "banking on our willingness to take that next step toward taking our lives public." Paul Jones, cofounder of Dscover.me, sees sharing one’s browsing history as "a way to better share common interests … while living in different parts of the country." All three ventures claim to "take privacy very seriously," and note that "their success will ultimately be predicated on trust."

To make good on that promise, the sites do not include links to secure sites (like banks and credit-card transactions) and users have the option to turn off the tracking software at any time. Dscover.me also has a "white list" so that "only links to an evolving list of approved sites are shared." However, Steven Gutentag of Sitesimon thinks that a "white list" of pre-approved sites defeats the purpose. "You visit the same couple of sites in general, but then you click off and go to another one," he says. "You don’t want to have to add that to the white list for that to be shared."

Mina Tsay, a Boston University communications professor, meanwhile suggests that this type of sharing might not be such a healthy thing. "In some ways, this might produce a society in which we end up conforming to buying the same products, seeing the same information, going on the same trip, depending on the same sources," she says. However, Adam Leibsohn of Voyurl thinks it’s just the opposite, that the tracking will make people less passive because they are more aware of their own online behavior. "It’s holding up a mirror to a reflection that I don’t think people knew they had," he says.

A London-based startup is offering to pay people a commission on selling their shopping data, report Julia Angwin and Emily Steel in the Wall Street Journal (3/8/11). As crazy as this sounds, Allow Ltd. "offers to sell people’s personal information on their behalf, and give them 70 percent of the sale." Co-founder Justin Basini says he’s attracted 4,000 people so far. The first thing he does is "make individuals’ data scarce, so it can become more valuable."

He accomplishes this by removing his customers "from the top 12 marketing databases in the UK," and listing them "in the official UK registries for people who don’t want to receive telemarketing or postal solicitations." He then asks his customers "to create a profile that can contain their name, address, employment, number of kids and shopping intent — in other words, lists of things they’re thinking about buying." Customers can then choose which marketers are free to contact them.

Among Allow’s customers is Giles Sequiera, a real-estate executive, who says he has earned about nine dollars "for letting Allow tell a credit-card company" that he’s looking for a new card. "I wouldn’t give my car to a stranger," he says, "So why do I do that with my personal data?" He says he hasn’t yet heard from the credit-card company, but is already smitten by Allow. "I don’t think it’s going to make a life-changing amount of money," he admits, while adding, "I can see this becoming somewhat addictive."

Information theory "proposes that reality is composed not of matter but of bits of information," reports John Horgan in a Wall Street Journal review of The Information, by James Gleick (3/1/11). This is a mathematical theory of information, based on a 1948 paper by Claude Shannon, who was working for Bell Laboratories a the time. In it, Claude "gave information an almost magically precise, quantitative definition: The information in a message is inversely proportional to its probability. Random ‘noise’ is quite uniform; the more surprising a message, the more information it contains."

Claude reduced this idea to what he called a "bit," which was shorthand for "binary digit. A bit is a message that represents one of two choices; yes or no, heads or tails, one or zero." It was a "simple formulation that provided a framework for coding information digitally and hence more efficiently" and "helped spawn today’s digital devices and communications technologies … The insights of information theory also have helped shed light on the interplay between randomness and order in so-called chaotic phenomena, as well as on the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics."

Claude’s work further laid a foundation for John Wheeler, a physicist, who proposed that "all the components of physical reality … derives its function, its meaning, its very existence" from "answers to yes or no questions, binary choices, bits." So simple, and yet, so … complicated. Toward the end of the book, James turns his attentions to "the torrent of information released by our digital technologies, and echoes the questions raised by Nicholas Carr in The Shallows: "Is the amount of information inversely proportional to wisdom? … Will the false and trivial overwhelm the true and meaningful?" The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.

The Yellow Pages is on track to do a billion dollars in advertising this year — on the internet, reports Jefferson Graham in USA Today (2/16/11). The Yellow Pages site — YP dot-com — doesn’t get anywhere near the traffic Google gets, but with 24.8 million visitors, it ranks right behind Yelp, which gets 26.1 million, according to ComScore. Google, by comparison, gets 178 million visitors, 20 percent of which Google says are local searches. This makes David Krantz, ceo of AT&T Interactive, which owns the Yellow Pages, very happy.

"There aren’t a lot of billion-dollar internet companies out there, especially in the local space," says David. "Local is an incredibly powerful market." AT&T is also an incredibly powerful network, boasting "a huge 5,000-plus salesforce that has been calling on more than one million local businesses for decades." Heck, the Yellow Pages has been around since 1883! So, although Google "will continue to dominate due to its sheer power and size," analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence thinks that YP is well-positioned.

David Krantz figures that people naturally think of the Yellow Pages as a place to find “phone numbers and information quickly.” That’s different from, say, Yelp, which is more about reviews. And unlike Google, YP is inherently local, with its “main page broken down into three categories — “live, eat and play.” Listings often include “video links that are produced by YP for the advertiser.” David thinks the YP app, which has attracted 40 million downloads to date, is even better. “You can carry it with you on your mobile device — it can be everywhere you want to be and not just on your kitchen counter or drawer,” he says.

Men trail women "when it comes to shopping for clothes online," but surpass them in terms of luxury apparel purchases, report Ray A. Smith and Paul Sonne in the Wall Street Journal (2/10/11). According to NPD Group, online apparel sales for US women "rose 11 percent, to $10.5 billion in 2010, compared with a seven percent rise to $4.5 billion for men." Meanwhile, American Express reports that "the share of dollars men spend on luxury apparel has grown more rapidly than women’s since 2007, up 81 percent for men versus 57 percent for women."

Sensing opportunity in that dichotomy, Net-a-Porter, the highly successful online retailer of women’s apparel, is launching Mr Porter, a companion site just for men. "We know there’s a demand for this," says Net-a-Porter founder Natalie Massenet. "I don’t think shopping right now really appreciates the way men shop." Mr Porter’s appreciation will begin with avoiding the term "fashion" itself, on the theory that men aren’t comfortable with the word. Instead, the site will talk about "style." The site will also "feature profiles of men from real life," rather than models.

Nor will Mr Porter feature celebrities, because guys don’t necessarily want to try to replicate Brad Pitt’s look, for instance. The site itself will "be designed to resemble a broadsheet newspaper, figuring that men find that format more reassuring than a glitzy magazine design." Mr Porter’s layout will be simpler than Net-a-Porter’s, with more white space, and the product assortment will be smaller, too. "We just want everything to not be shouting at you," says Jeremy Langmead, the site’s editor-in-chief. "It is a subtle, calm, hand-holding journey into buying products."

A group of Cornell computer scientists have released a study of Twitter #hashtags, and why some topics catch on quickly while others languish, reports Natasha Singer in the New York Times (2/7/11). The study "analyzed the 500 most popular hashtags among more than three billion messages posted on Twitter from August 2009 and January 2010." It found that "the latest conversational idioms," such as #cantlivewithout or #dontyouhate, tend to picked up more quickly than "contentious themes like politics," where people need to see a topic "four, five or six times on Twitter before posting it themselves."

This might explain why the hashtag #icantdateyou scored 274,000 mentions on Twitter in a single hour last Tuesday, while #Mubarak garnered just 11,000 during the same timeframe (granted, the Egyptian government had cut off the internet at the time). However, regardless of the topic, "people often wait until a number of friends or trusted sources have promoted an idea before promulgating it themselves." The "structure of a social network" also matters "more than the size of the group," with a smaller, more connected group wielding relatively more influence than a larger, less connected one: a tweet by a leading blogger with a few thousand followers could be more influential than Ashton Kutcher’s six million devotees.

Similarly, Stanford University researchers found that, in some cases, "bloggers, over time, had more influence than mainstream publications." The study actually provides "a quantitative way to predict which stories will hold attention and which will fade rapidly, based on who covers the material first." The study’s authors predict that, within a few years "we will be at a stage where marketers will be more mathematical and less intuition driven." Meanwhile, a 2009 study of Cyworld, a South Korean social-networking site, ironically found that the least connected network members tended to be more influenced by friends’ purchases than the most connected members, who "often resist peer influences."