Archive: 2011 December

With 2011 coming to a quick and demanding close, I offer my perspective on the imperatives of 2012, which promises to be the year that several significant advances of the past five or so years finally take their foothold.  As I see it, this is the year that the Smart Web — specifically Smart Commerce — is realized. Here’s what I’m most looking forward to in 2012: Relevant Commerce will Emerge: The data-driven ‘Net is here, but the overall industry has not yet fully evolved to leverage the capabilities of big data, statistical modeling and semantic science to...

If we learned one thing this week, it’s that online privacy continues to be an issue for each and every one of us.  Whether you are shopping online, or friending as many people as you can before the holidays, it’s increasingly clear that retailers know more about us every time we get online.  Is online privacy a thing of the past?  New York Times columnist Nick Bilton said this week, “As much as it pains me to say this: privacy is on its deathbed.” He quotes Maneesha Mithal, the associate director of the Federal Trade Commission’s division of privacy and...

Over the years, I think I have tossed hundreds of pounds of junk mail into the recycling bin. When my Labrador brings the local paper to the front door in the morning (yes, I actually trained her to do that), inevitably there are numerous inserts promoting used cars or underwear that spill out onto the floor as I reach for the sports section.  Then, when I power up my iPad (before my kids can steal it from me to play Angry Birds), I am greeted with two pop-ups serving irrelevant daily deals, which I instinctively close without reading. The only time I might actually pay...

It’s December 7 and the holiday season is well upon us.  Last week’s Cyber Monday was, by several reports, the heaviest U.S. online spending day in history. I can picture it now: thousands of people sitting at their desks combing dozens of websites for deals on gifts. The process is long and tedious, burdened by double-checking prices and comparing user reviews. Now, picture this. What if – instead of having to sift through unorganized search results on those dozen sites – the options had been dynamically structured and organized for you so the most relevant...

Many years ago at a management training class the instructor went over the 4 stages of knowledge progression. I found it a reasonable perspective. They are: We don’t know what we don’t know. We know we don’t know. We don’t know we know. We know we know. I, like everyone, am in all of these states, all the time, on different areas. I wrote a piece in my Adding Simplicity blog to encourage us all to embrace the fact that we are each in Stage 1 much more often than we are in the Holy Grail of Stage 4. Those who can put ego aside and make the journey toward knowledge...

Here we are, into the first week of December — with Black Friday and Cyber Monday now just a memory.  With Americans spending a reported $1.25 billion online on Cyber Monday alone, up 22% over this day last year, ecommerce killed the mere $816 million spent this Black Friday.  This year, even the travel industry got in on the Cyber Monday frenzy, joining the daily deal sites and traditional online retailers.  Hotels, airlines and cruise lines have for years seen how much retailers have benefitted from Thanksgiving Weekend sales.  Early 2012 will be a Great Travel...