The People's Supermarket?

I co-wrote a book about the future of retail many years ago: didn't think we'd come this far, so soon.

Tesco has said it sees the future of its online offering as an open platform to which anyone can contribute.

From New Media Age. Interviewed Tesco and they were always ahead of the game but...

Tesco, along with its digital agency EMC Conchango, Microsoft and Nesta, is inviting developers to an open day, called T-Jam, in August to introduce them to the initiative.

Nick Lansley, Tesco.com head of research and development and head of special projects, told new media age, “We’re opening up our affiliate programme to allow people to develop for whatever device they want, whether it’s a website, mobile phone or set-top box, and make money for each new customer that comes to us as a result.

“The reason we’re doing this is that although we have lots of ideas we don’t necessarily have the resources to do them ourselves,” he added. “So the new API allows developers to write whatever they want, benefit us but also make money off the back of it.”

Great stuff.

Follow Me, Follow You

From the New York Times - out the door service:

A new Web service, called Abandonment Tracker Pro, is in beta testing and scheduled for formal release next month. Developed by SeeWhy in Andover, Mass., the service will alert a subscribing Web store when a visitor places an item in a shopping cart or begins an application and does not complete the final step.

What distinguishes Abandonment Tracker Pro from other services is its enabling of remarketing “in real time,” SeeWhy says.

The idea that a visitor isn’t entitled to leave an online store empty-handed without being pestered sounds distasteful enough. But having that contact start immediately seems a new form of marketing brazenness

The Here, There & Urban Everywhere of Information OverLoad

Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it's long been recognized that city life is exhausting - that's why Picasso left Paris - this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.

From Boston.com.

A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to constantly redirect our attention so that we aren't distracted by irrelevant things, like a flashing neon sign or the cellphone conversation of a nearby passenger on the bus. This sort of controlled perception - we are telling the mind what to pay attention to - takes energy and effort. The mind is like a powerful supercomputer, but the act of paying attention consumes much of its processing power.

Ok, let's throw in wi-fi, mobiles, IPods, PSPs, cameras....


Who says the city narrative isn't changing?

WalMart: real time retailisation

From O'Reilly.

WalMart is a better example of Enterprise 2.0 than any of these more trendy examples of user contribution systems. If Google's key innovation with PageRank was to recognize that a link was a vote, which could be counted and measured to get better search results, so too, WalMart recognized early on that a purchase was a vote. Each company built real-time information systems to capture and respond to that vote. WalMart built a supply chain in which goods are automatically re-ordered as they go out the door, with algorithms based on rate of sale controlling the reorders. Google built a better search engine, in which pages that were "better linked" were given priority over the ones produced by pure keyword matches. They went on to build real-time systems to measure what John Battelle called the database of intentions, as expressed by people's queries and subsequent clickstream data, as well as an ad auction system that prices ads in real-time based on the predicted likelihood of the ad being clicked on.

Retalisation.

Why Travel?

CUPERTINO, California—December 16, 2008—Apple® today announced that this year is the last year the company will exhibit at Macworld Expo. Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, will deliver the opening keynote for this year’s Macworld Conference & Expo, and it will be Apple’s last keynote at the show. The keynote address will be held at Moscone West on Tuesday, January 6, 2009 at 9:00 a.m. Macworld will be held at San Francisco’s Moscone Center January 5-9, 2009.

From the Apple site.


And then there's the Scobleizer:

So, what should we expect over the next year? A lot of bad news for big trade shows.
What’s killing them? The Internet. You can launch a product live now from a living room. Thanks to Stickam, Ustream, Qik, Kyte, YouTube, Flixwagon, Viddler, Vimeo, SmugMug, etc and blogs.

Just give the people on Facebook something to pass along and talk about and your product is out there, big time.

Some Random Nerd: is interesting on Web 3.0

The more I think about it, the more I think that it's the move away from the PC that will mark the next stage of the evolution of the internet; the idea of the internet was of connected and networked computers. The idea of the Web is all about interconnected and networked documents. The move away from the PC and towards other devices— a "Web of Things"— seems to me to be the next logical step.

The idea of the PC as the "hub" of your information is starting to feel a bit dated; as the number of devices that we are using regularly increases (mobile phones, laptops, netbooks, work PC, home PC), the idea of a central device that everything else revolves around seems to me to be an increasingly outdated way of organising your technology; it's too much to rely on. I know 2 iPhone owners who illustrate this point perfectly; one doesn't own a computer, so her iPhone is tied to a friends' PC (and iTunes account), so much of what I would call the important functionality (the ability to transfer files, download software, back up contacts lists, install updates etc.) is lost to her. The other owned a laptop until it recently got stolen, so there's no way for him to upgrade the software on his phone without first completely wiping it (and in the process, losing the music, photos etc. that he now has on his phone, but with no other copies.

More here with background from Some Random Nerd, via Krista Thomas and Reuters.

Solar wi-fi: now that's Retailisation

Yesterday, wireless networking provider Meraki started shipping the world’s first solar-powered WiFi mesh device. Meraki’s groundbreaking energy-independent device is powered by a single solar panel and solar-charged battery. Since the unit requires no grid-derived energy, it can be set up in areas lacking power supplies, like parks, golf courses, rural areas, and resorts.

Meraki.


Retailisation.

James Murdoch May be going Shopping

Murdoch called the Sun the UK’s largest short-break holiday company and said it is making tens of millions of pounds a year from its online bingo game.

From PaidContent.