With Syndicated Commerce, the customer is the destination, no matter where they are or what technology they are using.  I can’t think of a better industry than Ground Transportation to capitalize on this phenomenon.  Think about it, ground transportation is the last and ultimate leg of any trip.  For ground transportation companies, Syndicated Commerce serves as the extended, oh so desirable, trusted personal concierge service.  Who better than your trusted chauffeur to give you a recommendation while you travelling?  And better yet, a recommendation and a great deal on a restaurant, event, or a service close to the location where you are?  Ground transportation providers are in the unique position of knowing their customers’ preferences, where they are, where they are going, the context of their journey (for example, business trip or family trip) and when they are travelling (after all, timing is everything!).  Welcome to the new frontier for advertising and marketing – Syndicated Commerce gives ground transportation providers a new way to acquire new customers profitably, engage existing customers, drive new revenue streams and build loyalty in a differentiated way from all the advertising noise in the market.

Ground transportation providers can participate in syndicated commerce as the “Advertiser”, syndicating their content across Deem’s online and mobile platforms of Brands.  Think Amazon, Sabre, Carlson Wagonlit and SuperShuttle which all participate in syndicated commerce by publishing Deem offers from multiple merchants across all categories.  Deem can syndicate an offer for a stand-alone Limousine reservation, or, if the Ground Transportation Provider prefers, bundle it together with a local restaurant, wine tasting, or sporting event, for example and track every respondent.  Even more exciting is ground transportation providers acting as a ‘Publisher’ as several of Deem Ground Transportation Providers are doing today. Being able to offer relevant deals directly to their ground customers through proprietary digital marketing channels is the ultimate way to both build loyalty with existing customers and build new revenue streams through commerce revenue sharing.

So, yes, next time I am travelling for business, I am counting on my trusted ground transportation provider to offer me a recommendation AND a fabulous deal at a local Italian restaurant with great home cooking and an upbeat atmosphere.  But please, save the Family Fun Pack for when I am travelling on vacation with my family of 5 over the holidays!

Last week I had the privilege of sitting on a panel at the Wells Fargo Tech Transformation Summit conference in San Francisco with industry legends John Hagel, co-chairman, Deloitte LLP Center for the Edge, Toby Redshaw, the former CIO of American Express and Ray Wang, CEO and principal analyst at Constellation Research. The panel, moderated by Fortune’s Miguel Helft, pivoted off of the March 5 Wells Fargo Securities report by Jason Maynard, “Next on the Horizon – Syndicated Commerce,”  which is a new commerce category primed to turn the industry on its head.

We all agreed: syndicated commerce is the next great monetization opportunity. Here’s why:

• Historically, CMOs have been able to syndicate content to drive awareness, customer acquisition and some level of brand engagement, but with little in the way of measurable results. With syndicated commerce, they can now syndicate actual transactional experiences based upon their customer’s identity and/or location and/or context across any surface that the customer may be operating in. It could be a website from a third party, a mobile application or even an email. With syndicated commerce, the user becomes the destination, not the retail site.
• This is a fundamentally better way to deliver engagement and monetization because it’s measurable, and now, marketers can close the loop from intent through the purchase. As Toby put it, “The fundamental principles that they have been teaching in business school for 20 years around the four Ps of marketing are just going away.”

So where does Deem fit in? As Ray Wang mentioned during the panel, “Deem is an arm’s dealer” in syndicated commerce.

Deem is a highly configurable white-label solution that can be embedded virtually anywhere across web, mobile and other social surfaces. The technology powering the platform — our “relevance engine” — correlates the identity, preferences, location and context of a user with the unique availability, capabilities and offerings of merchants to deliver personalized deals and offers. In this virtual commerce cycle, the customer, merchant and host site all gain significant benefits: the customer experiences more relevant content and an easy, seamless, direct purchase; the merchant gets broad reach targeting brand right customers and high performance marketing in the form of transactions versus leads; and the host site maintains customer engagement, retains brand consistency and shares revenue.

The takeaway from the panel was this: Syndicated commerce is real. It’s in the wild. And it’s gaining scale. And, as Toby said, “Platform guys like Deem who get there first and scale fast will win.”

With a rapidly-growing roster of partners – SuperShuttle, Sabre and CWT signed in the last few weeks alone – and some major deals in the works, that’s what we’re aiming to do.

As we look to accelerate that momentum in 2013, we will continue to focus on streamlining operations and driving traction of the Deem commerce platform. In that vein, we announced today the sale of ExpenseWire to Paychex, which will enable us to stay laser-focused on our Deem@Work product line.

We originally purchased the ExpenseWire business to accelerate our speed to market, but it was always our intent to build native expense and purchasing applications into our platform. And as part of the Deem@Work product line, Deem@Work Corporate (formerly RPA/Rearden Personal Assistant) continues to play a crucial role in our business strategy and remains a key priority for Rearden.

The team has made significant strides since launch to make Deem@Work even better. Here are some examples of that progress:

• Ongoing innovation and added emphasis on mobile: In our on-the-go society, conducting business with the touch of a phone is imperative. Soon, our travel app within Deem@Work will have added functionality to not only search for hotels but book them as well. And, get ready for our offers to be sent directly to any of your mobile devices.
• Offering even more inventory at great prices: It’s our goal to give you as much choice and flexibility as possible, while still offering great prices. As such, we’re increasing our inventory of hotel offerings, which means a larger selection of discounted rates.
• New promotions with our partners: As you may know, we already have over 650,000 business products and services at pre-negotiated discounts that are usually better than what you can find at other marquee e-commerce sites. We’re looking forward to announcing even more great new deals very soon. Stay tuned!

I work every day with the Deem@Work products and see first-hand how this suite of applications helps businesses and end-users save time and money on the services they buy every day. By streamlining our operations, we’ll be far more prepared to grow our network so that it’s a well-oiled machine, poised to serve you even better as we head in to 2013.

When asked about Mobile, I decided to put some real wood behind the HTML5 arrow (with some qualifications of course). Sure enough, just as I was espousing its virtues, Mr. Zuckerberg decided to throw HTML5 under the proverbial bus. Excellent timing Mr. Grady, excellent timing!

I’m now forced to expound a bit more on my position so here it goes.

HTML5 is an emerging Web standard that holds huge promise in making Web-based applications behave like native applications. Many companies like LinkedIn have leveraged HTML5 to create very successful mobile applications and received industry accolades for its responsiveness, beauty and usability. Netflix has also used HTML5 coupled with native components with great success. Rearden Commerce has leveraged HTML5 as a part of its hybrid mobile development strategy to deliver mobile applications to four mobile platforms and six different brands.

So why did Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently say that Facebook’s “biggest mistake was betting too much on HTML5”? The fact is that this statement was taken out of context, and doesn’t encapsulate the nuances involved in this emerging technology. As Facebook users moved increasingly to media such as photos and videos, which slow performance, the natural limits of a Web-based application began to emerge. With such rapid device innovation and continuous evolution of HTML5 itself, it’s difficult to ensure the same experience for all users, especially for a company like Facebook with its millions of members on numerous devices and platforms. The problems of a pure HTML5 application emerge due to the rapidly changing landscape of devices and form factors.

Rearden Commerce’s suite of applications is built upon a hybrid platform which marries the best characteristics of HTML5 and native applications.  Since our applications are not heavily media-dependent, we avoid many of the limitations related to latency and speed of large transfers. When we need support of native features of a phone, we leverage native components (such as our photo receipt capture for the Expense feature).  Consider these advantages of a hybrid architecture:

• We have experienced up to 90% code re-usability in our application which allows our team to ship iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and Mobile web versions of our application almost simultaneously.
• Development speed is increased up to two times, allowing us to iterate faster with a smaller team.
• Automated testing tools can be applied cutting down testing cycles dramatically. We can cover over 200 operations in less than 90 seconds.

Bottom line: the benefits of incorporating HTML5 into our mobile development model has resulted in the ability to service our customers and partners faster and at a lower cost than ever before. It has also allowed us to adapt to new mobile devices and protect us, and our partners, from the rise and fall of certain mobile platforms.

So in the end, it’s all about the application of HTML5 that determines the success or failure of a company’s Web and mobile development strategy. In fact, as HTML5 becomes a standard, companies are creating entire operating systems based on it and telco operators are supporting it. Not every company has the same issues as Facebook, so Mark’s statement should not be viewed as a blanket condemnation of HTML5.

That said, I’ll make sure Mark and I are in synch next time we’re covering the same tech topic – should make life a little easier!

The recent release of the MasterCard Business Network is a service for small and mid-sized businesses. The platform, powered by Rearden Commerce’s Deem platform, allows business owners to save time and money while managing expenses simultaneously.  This one-stop-shop is a reflection of the company’s commitment to “perfecting commerce” by pairing businesses with the right consumers; and in this case, businesses are the consumers.

All current MasterCard card holders are eligible to register. There are plans for an updated network release in upcoming weeks, and mobile applications are also in the works.

Managing Time
The network didn’t leave the soft costs of running a business unnoticed. Cardholders can review restaurant ratings, book dinner reservations and hotels for trips with no booking fees. With instant mobile and email alerts, travelers can be informed of any last-minute changes. There is also the capability for managers to set policies for employee travel.

Saving Money
Currently, the site advertises discounts on over 650,000 products. Cardholders can receive free shipping on merchandise orders placed through the network until the end of September, which is a huge bonus for new or expanding businesses.

Managing Spending
The standout feature for the network is the built-in expense managing capability. The basic plan is free and allows cardholders to manage basic expense reports. The upgrade is $9 per active user per month and provides for enhanced services like importing transaction data from MasterCard accounts and managing receipts.

Who Will Benefit?
Current card holders will be able to choose services a la carte and decide if the systems trump those already in place. Smaller businesses without a large administrative staff are most likely to benefit from the travel and expense managing services as it enables business owners to take control of their (MasterCard) expenses in a single platform. However, the monthly fee for an upgraded expense management service is a possible deterrent, depending on the efficiency and cost of the company’s current finance software.

Cardholders should evaluate the business network for themselves. Competitive pricing and support for services remain to be measured against specialty e-commerce sites and leading software brands.

However, it is an excellent perk for MasterCard holders. Discounts paired with free shipping and 0% APR offer great potential savings for consumers who would like to open a new card; and I would look for an aggressive marketing campaign that encourages this scenario.

This is a guest post by freelance writer and blogger Eliza Morgan. She enjoys writing about safe credit card practices for the everyday consumer. You can reach her at elizamorgan856@gmail.com.

I hate to admit it, but I used to be a fixture in the cab line. My background is in customer loyalty — heading up world-class rewards, offers and marketing programs at global enterprises. My job had me on the road frequently, but I rarely spent even a moment thinking ahead about cars, buses or limos. What I did think about (always) was how my organization could build loyalty among its customer base. Travel, as we all know, is a personal (even emotional) industry. A good travel experience goes unnoticed, while a bad one may never be forgotten. Building a series of great travel experiences is critical to building loyalty with your customers.

With Deem, our goal is to enable our partners to deliver a best-in-class experience to their customers, while growing their own revenue streams.  By integrating Deem Ground (formerly GGA) into the Deem family of offerings, we now offer an integrated door-to-door travel solution for our small- and medium-sized businesses and corporate clients — seamlessly bringing efficiencies to our partners while providing our end users with a faster, easier, more reliable way to get to their destination on time and with great value. Deem Ground enables ground transportation commerce by connecting buyers and sellers. We deliver a more robust and reliable Ground automation solution to our corporate clients and TMC partners. For our large network of merchants, we deliver cost savings as well as ways to build their customer bases. And we promise that our upcoming enhancements, such as mobile, will encourage ground transportation to become a more integral part of the trip planning process. The end result: long-lasting loyalty amongst our clients, merchants and the users who appreciate and benefit from that added value.

More than 6,000 people are traveling to the GBTA convention in Boston as we speak. Many will try to hail a cab at Logan, and $30 later will arrive at the Boston Convention Center, potentially late. Our Group Ground offering, powered by Pow Wow Smart, will soon help meeting and event planners efficiently arrange and manage ground transportation for groups of any size, automating ‘cab sharing,’ car service reservations and bus transport across an organization. I encourage any meeting planners to ask me about this fabulous new service.

For those of you who will be at GBTA this week, I would love to meet you, so please stop by booth 718. I am excited to discuss how we can offer the best full service ground solution for buyers who are looking to engage their users and fulfill ground solution for buyers who are looking to engage their users and fulfill on their ground transportation needs. I am also looking forward to working together with our merchants on ways to build their business and manage their costs. Not only will Deem Ground help merchants run their business more efficiently, but it will create happier users who just keep coming back.

Amy E. Harris is SVP & General Manager, Deem Ground.

The feelings I’ve had leading up to the launch of Deem at Work are like those of our customers when they start their own business or launch a new product or service: hope and excitement for what lies ahead, matched by anxiety about all the details and inevitable kinks.

MasterCard recently turned to Deem as a white-label offering to power their MasterCard Business Network, bringing big business buying power and expense management to its 15 million members. MasterCard chose Deem for its performance, scalability and reliability. Millions of small business owners counting on the network require the peace of mind of zero failover.  Like climbing behind the wheel of a car and expecting it to start, customers require their purchasing and T&E needs to be met on demand.

Deem also offers a golden ticket to companies like MasterCard looking to add as much value as possible to their customers. Not only does the integration save small businesses significant time and money, it also opens doors to targeted new business leads.

This personalization is enabled by our cloud technology, which allows us to analyze purchase history, serving up relevant products from our catalog in anticipation of future purchasing needs. This personalization is enabled by our cloud technology, which allows us to analyze a user’s inventory, activity, as well as purchase history, serving up relevant products from our catalog in anticipation of future purchasing needs. For example, if a machine shop keeps 6×18” flat sheets in its inventory, Deem will sort through the products in our catalog and offer similar sheets from quality suppliers at up to 30% savings.

Small businesses save not only the time of comparison shopping, but also dollars that can be invested back into their core business. Small businesses like having us on their side, earning their trust, saving them time and money and increasing their customers’ loyalty, whether directly, or through a white-label partner.

I breathed a big sigh of relief when we successfully launched Deem at Work. But, we cannot rest on our laurels. It is critical that we stay a step ahead, anticipating the products, tools and features small business owners will need, regardless of industry or size. Back into the trenches, I go. And check out Deem at Work for a good deal on a shovel.

Today we announced Deem is powering the MasterCard Business Network, helping more than 15 million small businesses save time and money by operating smarter. MasterCard selected Deem because the platform offers a complete solution that delivers relevant and personalized experiences to customers, as opposed to a stack of one-size-fits-all ERP and T&E applications that don’t even complete the sale.

Simply put, the Deem Network connects buyers and sellers, regardless of industry. The Deem Network includes Deem at Work and Deem Offers, creating an ecosystem where all buyers are sellers and all sellers are buyers. Deem at Work is our application suite for purchasing goods and services, travel and managing expenses, empowering any company to work more efficiently and buy smarter. Deem Offers allows any company or merchant selling goods and services to deliver branded marketing offers and daily deals to their users.

At the risk of sounding cliché, it’s a win-win: Deem connects all participants on either side of the buying and selling equation. Sellers are exposed to new potential customers and buyers are exposed to a wealth of other products and industries, just by virtue of their participation and access to the Deem Network.

The MasterCard partnership moves us forward, closer to our vision of perfect commerce — helping companies buy what they need, when they need it, at the best prices from the best merchants. Whether buying office supplies, booking airline tickets or making a dinner reservation for a new business prospect, Deem handles all of the capital- and time-draining logistics that keep small business owners up at night. As a result, MasterCard is empowering its 15 million small business owners with increased cash flow and time to focus on building their core business with the best possible customer experience.

Let’s hear it for the underdogs.

It would be an exaggeration to say that technological advances necessarily make work easier, no matter what your specific type of business. However, certain technological improvements can at least help minimize some of the annoyances and busywork that impair your productivity. Incorporating such improvements into your everyday work life could provide a significant time savings. Cell phones have become significantly more advanced than their brick-like ancestors. Modern smart phones can now run apps of all types, including several that can be invaluable for entrepreneurs.

Evernote is an app that can be useful to professionals in any field imaginable. If you are like many entrepreneurs, many of your best ideas come to mind while you are in the middle of another job that you might not be able to put down at that moment. Using Evernote, you can save notes for yourself as pictures, audio recordings or text, ensuring that you remember them when you have some free time. If you wish, you can also use the app to automatically send this content to your main computer.

If you ever find yourself in need of a way to keep track of your hourly rate on the go, the TimeClock app might be perfect for you. It allows you to set your hourly rate, then start and stop a timer as necessary. It calculates billable hours and lets you export the data to a spreadsheet for your record keeping. It even has sections that allow you to record the client’s name and job information. The Deem at Work app offers even more capability, with the ability to create your own expense reports on the go, as well as to plan for travel and other business expenses quickly and efficiently.

For individuals in a retail business, the iMargin app can be a lifesaver. Never again will you find yourself losing out on a prime inventory opportunity because you lacked sufficient data to make an informed decision. iMargin allows you to calculate and compare margin percentages in a few seconds no matter where you are.

For those involved in the legal field, one such app is called Fastcase, which is a mobile library that allows you to search by cases and statutes for every state through one convenient interface. It also comes with all the advanced features you would expect from a more traditional legal database, such as filters and search history. Android phone users could also try an app called Droid Law, a free application that offers most of the same features as Fastcase. Additional reference materials such as the U.S. Constitution are available as add-ons for a small fee.

One issue that plagues any business that uses computers for most of its day-to-day operations and record keeping is data loss. You never know when some type of system glitch or power failure could make you lose important client or case data. A simple hard drive crash could leave you spending weeks trying to recreate lost data — a task that in some cases could prove impossible. It is for this reason that cloud backup services were created. They are vital for many different types of business, but particularly so for law firms due to the vital and sensitive nature of the data involved. A cloud backup service simply creates an image of your hard drive that you can then access via the internet. If necessary, you can use this backup to recreate all or part of the data on your hard drive or computer system in the event of a system failure. The cloud backup is encrypted to ensure that only authorized users are able to access sensitive data. You can set it to automatically update at regular intervals as the data you are using changes. Many different companies now offer cloud backup services, with prices varying depending on the amount of storage space you need.

The technology employed by entrepreneurs might not be as flashy as that used by engineers and scientists, but it is just as vital. Choosing the best of today’s new technology can help remove much of the hassle from your daily work.

About the Author:

Hayley Spencer. Hayley works for a law firm and writes for a website that provides consumer friendly explanations of major areas of law and also helps small business owners to understand business law.

I’m constantly reminded by our entrepreneurial customers that starting a business is an enormous achievement. Maintaining and growing that business is an even bigger one. The challenges inherent in managing all the aspects of a small business — simultaneously playing the roles of CEO, product manager, marketing lead, customer service and help desk — aren’t always enjoyable. Small business owners must be more dedicated, disciplined, resilient and organized than the rest of us. They must learn to understand finances, record-keeping, taxes and employment law — all while serving customers and growing or strengthening their business.

There are many challenges that face all businesses.  Small business owners have the added hurdle of dealing with issues unique to their size. It’s these issues we at Deem hold in the forefront of our minds as we work with small businesses everyday:

1. “I can’t give my customers a deal unless I am getting a good deal on what I need to buy.” Leveraged buying power and group purchasing can help small businesses get the same deals on products and supplies that larger corporations receive.
2. “I am having a hard time keeping track of what I am spending … and where.” Small business owners can benefit greatly from instituting analytics: real-time information on spending, empowering owners to make smarter business decisions and more effectively managing cash flow. Spend visibility facilitates audits and eliminates fraud, while helping business owners make smarter tax moves, negotiate better merchant rates, and ultimately make the best business decisions possible.
3. “I am exhausted.” Entrepreneurship doesn’t come easy, especially when squeezed into an already hectic life involving family, and in some cases, a day job to help pay the bills. Bank of America’s inaugural Small Business Owner Report found that managing the ongoing success of a small business creates more stress for business owners than any other aspect of their lives — spouse, children and personal finances included. The key to managing the stress and exhaustion is to get organized and recruit the help you need to manage it all — with productivity tools and, when possible, support from employees—everything they need to run their business in one marketplace.
4. “I am spending so much time focused on the here-and-now that I can’t think about the future of the business.” You started your small business knowing there would be challenges, and you’ve made it through them all so far. This overwhelming hurdle is one we all face, and the one at the forefront of our minds as we developed Deem at Work — giving small businesses a solution that helps them get done what they need to get done so they can focus on what they love about their business.

Though there is no avoiding the hurdles that small businesses face, there are ways to get organized and ease the pain of running and growing a company. Take a look at this short video above to see how we’re working right alongside small businesses, doing what we can to help them focus less on administrative tasks and more on the business at hand.

It’s the time small business owners spend purchasing supplies, planning travel, reporting expenses, bookkeeping and shipping that interests me most. I wasn’t surprised when we tallied the results of a quick pulse survey to learn that half of those we spoke with say they spend too much time on back-office tasks. Of those who were frustrated with the business of doing business, half said they would spend more time generating new business opportunities if they could find a way to get that time back.

Small business owners don’t branch out on their own because they love managing expense reports, running to Costco and booking their next trip. They hang up a shingle because they are passionate about their industry and their customers. eVoice recently released data finding that one out of every four small business owners would pay more than $500 for one more productive hour in their day. Most of the small business owners we’ve spoken with say they spend about an hour each day managing business operations. Is there a way to gain that hour back? (Without the hefty $500 spend?)

It is not uncommon for us to hear that tech-savvy small businesses use up to three productivity applications (time management, expense management and accounting) — then are straddled with the time needed to manage and integrate those tools. In Bank of America’s inaugural Small Business Owner Report, data found managing the ongoing success of a small business creates more stress for business owners than any other aspect of their lives — spouse, children and personal finances included. Two-thirds say they wish they took better advantage of technology innovations to run their business (and cut down on that stress).

I take great pride in being part of an organization that supports small-business owners, helping them gain time while saving money.  I hope you’ve managed to take the time to make the most of National Small Business Week, as I have. Let’s celebrate small businesses and support their success every day.

Randy Reynolds is a small business champion and Vice President, Product Management at Rearden Commerce.

With my background as the CEO of HomeRun.com, I am passionate about matching merchants with consumers and businesses that are in the market for what they are selling. I have long believed that the “daily deal” has incredible potential as a performance-based marketing innovation, but that in their current incarnation, daily deals remain inefficient to the detriment of both the merchant and consumer. This is why HomeRun joined the Deem ecosystem last fall. Today, it has all come together for us at Deem as we expand the Deem Network, giving merchants of any size the ability to target individual and business buyers with relevant offers that benefit both buyer and seller. We are confident we have the right strategy: Long term success in the “daily deals” model will require frictionless marketing programs that provide real, concrete value for local and national merchants, through capabilities such as audience insights, campaign analytics, and highly refined targeting capabilities. These in turn will help give merchants higher returns, and the deals model more stability.

With the growing wave of deals in the market, consumers are demanding good value on the things they need or want. Merchants want to acquire new customers who will provide value either immediately or in the near future. Our offers capabilities are built on the belief that we can use relevance technology to find the right balance between value to a consumer and value to merchant. There are two connected but distinct keys to success in the offers market: merchant value and relevance. Simply put, offers must generate quality leads for businesses — not just coupon chasers, but people who are likely to return and become loyal customers. And they should provide insight into a merchant’s customer base. In terms of relevance, it’s time the industry moved away from “daily deals” in the strictest sense to thinking more broadly about providing truly relevant offers.

Deem’s broad distribution channels include some of the world’s leading brands such as Google Offers, giving merchants the potential to reach more than 200 million consumers and 10 million businesses. We’re closing in on our goal of perfecting the relationship between buyer and seller, with more progress soon to come. The players have come together: Rearden Commerce, HomeRun and Ketera have united under Deem; and our merchants and consumers are already taking part in smart commerce. Join us!

Learn more about the expansion of the Deem Network here.

In my work with small/medium businesses and entrepreneurs, I hear a near-constant refrain: overwhelm, overwork, and lack of productivity. While there’s no one silver bullet that can solve all of these problems in one fell swoop, choosing and implementing the right technology can make a HUGE difference not only to how you work, but to your overall bottom line in your business.

In particular, online or cloud-based tools (that is, applications or services that you access via the internet, instead of being installed on your computer) have a number of benefits for your small business. With online tools, you don’t have to worry about computer compatibility and you won’t need an IT person to make sure your software works – as long as you have access to a browser, everything is handled on the service’s end. Also, many cloud services are either low-cost or free, which can be a huge boon to a small business – no more $500+ outlay of cash for an upgrade to your office software suite. Plus, you have the added benefit of being able to access your data from any computer, anywhere.

Even though online tools can be great, as with any technology, you need to choose wisely. You want to look for cloud services that solve a real business need that you’re having – whether it’s CRM, project management, accounting and finance, or something else entirely – and choose a tool that will bridge that gap for you. Gain some skill and mastery with that tool, and then move on to solving another business need. Don’t make the mistake that I see all too often of signing up for multiple services at one time – that can lead to even more overwhelm than when you started, and you’re not likely to solve your problems when you’re in a state of overwhelm.

To make the selection process a bit easier, I’ve created a curated list of some of my favorite services, tools, and apps. Since I’m constantly checking out new cloud services, I’ve spent my time separating the wheat from the chaff. If you’d like to leverage the work that I’ve already done, my list is yours for the taking here.

A big part of my job is helping my clients navigate the seemingly endless array of online tools that are available. I know it can be daunting! I’m always on the lookout for tools that are specifically designed for small businesses, and especially ones where the company actually cares about the needs and goals of SMBs and entrepreneurs. I partnered with Deem as we have the same philosophy toward empowering small businesses, to maximize their productivity and find success.

Joshua Zerkel is a Certified Professional Organizer® and the founder of Custom Living Solutions, a San Francisco-based productivity and organizing consulting firm. Josh is also a two-term past President of the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of the National Association of Professional Organizers. Although he doesn’t consider himself freakishly organized, Josh does admit to spending some of his free time alphabetizing his comic books.  You can find Josh online at  or follow him on Twitter.

As I continue to have these conversations, it is reinforced for me that small businesses are the backbone of the American Economy. According to the Small Business Association (SBA), small businesses create two-thirds of net new jobs in the U.S., and over half of all working Americans either own or work for a small business. And as there is still tremendous ongoing pressure and uncertainty, adversity is nothing new for our small business customers.  And they, along with their employees, are stretching themselves to the limit as they look to grow their businesses with hard work and dedication. In talking to small business folks, this small business balancing act definitely comes to life for me. I know technology can help small businesses manage some of this burden — which is why we’re working so hard to make Deem at Work a time- and money-saving solution for small businesses.

I’m excited to be attending this week’s San Francisco Small Businesses Week, recognizing the “Heroes of Our Economy” and celebrating the contributions small businesses make to our cities and towns. Small businesses are coming together to collaborate, join forces and inspire each other — finding ways to not only survive but to thrive. Team Deem is participating in the conference and talking with small business owners about their views on business productivity. (Watch this space for more results of these conversations.) We’re also inviting small businesses to try Deem at Work, which gives them big business buying power. We believe it will help make the jobs of small businesses a little bit easier.

Let’s do what we can to support small businesses, and help them thrive. And if you are also at the San Francisco Small Business Week conference, please come talk with us about your business at our booth in the Expo!

Randy Reynolds is a small business champion and Vice President, Product Management at Rearden Commerce.

Sean Madden wrote a compelling piece for Fast Company entitled, “How Companies Like Amazon Use Big Data To Make You Love Them.” Sean cites the fact that customer loyalty is rarely cited as a benefit of Big Data: for example not by McKinsey’s omnibus report on Big Data and not by The Wall Street Journal’s Big Data blog series. Sean, you are right-on in saying, “Efficiency is a worthwhile goal, but from a customer’s perspective, data has far more power at the personal level.” Sean recommends five ways companies can harness Big Data/Personal Data to show customers you love them. It is well worth a read.

At Rearden Commerce, we’ve long been fans of the Amazon model. And our Deem Analytics team works diligently each day to improve relevance and personalization across our consumer and B2B platforms. With our vision to perfect commerce, it’s not enough to win those side-by-side comparisons. We must truly delight our customers.

As a long-time mobile enthusiast, I am excited to see so many people embracing mobile to travel smarter. We’re extremely close to an era when travelers will easily book and access their itineraries, make changes to their flights, find a hotel, book a taxi, make a dining reservation, and find great local offers — all from their mobile devices. Business travel will be less of a headache and leisure travel will be a whole lot more fun and collaborative.

The smartphone conversion cycle has only just begun. So let’s think big! In the not too distant future, I’ll be talking to an agent to book travel again, except it will be a virtual agent in my smartphone. What are you most eager to do with your smartphone while traveling? Tell us in the comments below.

*Adult as I may be, I am happy to report that Pew Research tells me I am 79% Millennial, hip to the coming of age generation. Take the survey to see How Millennial You Are here.

This behavioral shift has brought attention to the concept of Consumerization of IT, what Wells Fargo Securities says is a holistic change that “is going to reshape how technology is built, sold, and delivered.” Wells Fargo, in conjunction with its Tech Transformation Summit, has released an equity research report titled “Bizumers Rise Up! The Driving Force in The Consumerization of IT.” “Bizumers,” Wells’ tag for business consumers of technology, are the driving catalyst in consumerization. The report speaks to how bizumer technology solutions – still in early stages of development – will differ from the enterprise tech solutions of today, citing 10 major principles and indicating, “These design principles are not only going to reshape corporate IT but also the tech industry”. Consumerization is the new norm.

I firmly believe user experience is everything when you are driving commerce – it’s why I founded Rearden and why we’ve built Deem. The consumerization of IT will drive better user experiences across the board, as companies will be forced to think of customers and employees as the individuals they are. More ammunition for the Smart Commerce revolution!

The Mobile Wallet

Today only one-quarter of Americans are comfortable using a mobile app that would store credit card information, allowing them to make purchases at a retailer or business as they would with a credit card, according to a recent Harris Interactive poll. But it’s interesting to me just how many forms of electronic payment there are, and how simple they are to use — from my desk or my smartphone. I can store my credit card for use with a merchant, use electronic bill pay or peer-to-peer payment networks. There are QR and barcode readers tied to my credit card as well as a Premium SMS initiative that bills purchases or donations directly to my phone bill. At “Bricks and Mortar” establishments there are Google Wallet-type services and geo-fencing services just around the corner.

Millions of people conduct billions of dollars in e-commerce each year — with more than $35 billion spent during the 2011 holiday season according to ComScore. We freely link our credit cards to the Apple iStore and Amazon.com. So many people are comfortable downloading music to their iPhones and e-books to their tablets. So why do 90% of the people I ask tell me that they have not used mobile payments? Where is the disconnect?

They are thinking of the futuristic idea of swiping your phone instead of a credit card — what is called a mobile wallet. The hurdles are high for consumers to embrace the mobile wallet concept — but certainly not insurmountable. First and foremost, security must be addressed to educate consumers and to limit fraud. A mobile wallet will actually be more secure than traditional credit cards! Second, behavior must change — people must have a compelling reason to change their habits (beyond “You won’t need to carry your wallet anymore”) and the industry must clearly communicate these reasons to consumers.

When I look at the future of mobile payment, here’s what I see.  What if when you entered a store, the business and its suppliers alerted you to where to find the items you seek and where you might be able to save money (much as Amazon does today when recommending a book)?  What if you could scan a code in a store and buy it all securely from your phone?  Stop and Shop grocery chain is three-quarters of the way there — they provide the ability for you to check out each of your items as you walk through the store, using your smart phone.  A natural extension of that convenience is the ability to pay with your phone.  For consumers, the technology is there, but behavior must converge with technology for one convenient, secure, uniform experience to be possible.

We stand today at a crossroads. Today’s technology capabilities are outpacing consumer behavior. Though many of us will wait hours in line for the latest iPhone or iPad we still don’t take full advantage of the convenience, time-savings and environmental benefits of mobile payments. Consumers have to adopt and merchants have to offer a mobile payment alternative. If the Merchant can’t take your mobile payment, you are both out of luck.  So think about how you will use mobile payments in the future. It’s not far off.

Tnooz recently published a piece by Jason Dickson, citing recent PhoCusWright research covering the levels of frustration travelers endure when booking trips online. PhoCusWright found that 48% of travelers in the US have been frustrated by their online travel experience — with the leading complaint (not surprisingly) being “I had to sift through too much information.” With this, the author states, “The business opportunity here is clear — the site with the most helpful browsing experience will likely be the one that becomes the regular traveler’s default option.”

Yes! With Deem Travel, we are building a platform that provides individuals and groups with a personalized experience for discovering and planning travel. Our relevance engine does the work of information sorting, relying heavily on analytics to connect people quickly and effortlessly to the most relevant flights, hotels, rental cars, restaurants and more — all while helping them collaborate on trip plans with friends, family and co-workers. Our mobile app makes it simple to make purchases and change itineraries from the road. In short, Deem is designed to take the hassle out of the entire trip lifecycle.

It’s innovative, yet entirely logical. With Deem, we are confident we have the opportunity to evolve entire industries, beyond travel. The future of commerce and travel will be driven by personalization and user collaboration. We are closer than ever to our mission of perfecting commerce.

All customers are not created equal. The ability to understand and use data to recognize the value of different customers through programs such as tiering is complex. In fact, Brands struggle with integrating relevant and personalized messages and information across all customer touchpoints. Applying customer insights in a timely and relevant way in the path of commerce creates even more challenges for Brands. Loyalty marketers need to have the right analytical capabilities to do this correctly; otherwise they risk negatively impacting customer satisfaction. Technology has become a critical ingredient to deliver not only the ‘wow’ factor, but in raising the bar in terms of differentiating the customer experience. Applying segmentation and personalization strategies in new emerging channels, such as social and mobile, can be even more daunting without the right technology tools.

For consumers, loyalty is driven by the relationship that they have with a Brand. Ultimately, if the Brand delivers on a promise, recognizes the customer and shows genuine appreciation for their business, consumer loyalty will naturally follow. Across the board, consumers report a declining perspective on loyalty programs with regard to saving money, delivering real value and influencing future purchases. And relatively few consumers are interacting with brands online or via mobile devices. However, despite overall customer frustration with loyalty programs, Forrester reports that consumers who actively participate in loyalty programs have deeper engagements with those Brands. Specifically, customers will engage with Brands online or via mobile and will advocate for those Brands. This is fabulous news.

So let’s do loyalty marketing the right way and give consumers what they want: great products supported by meaningful loyalty programs with real value, the functionality to recognize them and to deliver an experience that is relevant and simplifies their lives.  And if that just happens to involve cool technology, like making it easy to plan my son’s 6^th birthday party and to buy 10 Sharks Tickets and 10 “Sharky” shirts from my iPhone, so be it.

As an example, one of the most important pieces of information we account for is on-time performance for flights.  Accost a random traveler from the business rank and file and ask him how he avoids arriving at his destination late (or not at all) from a cross-country flight. Chances are you’ll hear “don’t connect through O’Hare in winter” or a similar pearl of folk traveling wisdom. But what’s Plan B? After all, winter is winter. Perhaps the alternative will be just as risky. Out of the frying pan, into the fire, as they say, or in this case, out of the ‘fridge, into the freezer.

Many common connection points are subject to weather delays. Weather is but one factor, as you can well guess. The national network of US airports is complex system that works well much of the time, but as the data show, it struggles under peak loads.

Anecdotes and conventional wisdom have their place, but the data are paramount. To demonstrate some of the analytics driving Deem, we have prepared an animated infographic depicting seasonal patterns in on-time flight performance based on the last ten years of flight data by US airport.  In this case, the data is carrier-agnostic — meant more to help us help our customers plan the best air travel routes, supported by a decade of hour-by-hour data. The video speaks for itself, but you’ll notice some interesting regional and nationwide phenomena you may not have known about.  For example:

1. Winter is indeed fraught with flight delays, but the summer vacation period is just as bad. Interestingly, July 4^th is a notable exception — averaging exceptional on-time performance. (Perhaps folks would rather watch fireworks from the ground than out an airplane window.)
2. At the end of the school year, the system sweeps from better than average on-time performance to worse starting in the southeast and sweeping toward the northwest — mapping directly to the timing that school districts set the kids free for the summer.
3. The system returns to better performance, sweeping from northwest to southeast just prior to July 4^th, then improves again across the board in late August as schools come back online.
4. Best month to fly: April. Secondarily, with some regional exceptions, September until Thanksgiving is a good time to fly.
5. Worst month to fly: December. (No explanation needed.)

SiliconANGLE ran a piece this morning on this data, citing the importance of Big Data as an area of research across the travel industry, for its vast potential in bringing benefit to travelers.  We couldn’t agree more.

Take a look at the animated infographic, and play with the playback speed settings to inspect particular regions at particular times of the year more closely.

Today, nearly 20 years later, while next-generation companies in most every web-based category (Social Networks, Software-as-a-Service, Collaboration, etc.) have begun to deliver on the promise of their predecessors, we’ve seen very little – with Amazon.com as an exception – in the way of true ecommerce innovation.

When I founded Rearden Commerce in 1999, the hype around Business-to-Business and Business-to-Consumer commerce was at its peak. Within the B2B market, hundreds of “Marketplace” vendors existed and industry leaders were valued in the tens of billions of dollars. Their promise was to bring buyers and sellers together in a way that removed friction, delivered transparency, optimized transactions for both parties, and allowed for whole new public and private ecosystems to emerge.

Today, it’s clear to see that those marketplaces failed to deliver, with many having been built more on hype than substance. The companies lacked robust and flexible technology platforms to enable merchants and buyers to quickly on-board and transact. Instead, each integration was a custom one-off implementation requiring a school bus full of newly-minted consultants and systems integrators to assist in this effort. Further, they had primitive matching and personalization capabilities so transactions lacked relevance and value, making the user experience pretty awful. For buyers, marketplaces did little more than automate the approval process for purchasing products. For sellers, they provided very little value, lacking distribution vehicles and forcing sellers to compete on price alone.

It’s clear now that the marketplace business models were deeply flawed — and once the artificially-induced demand (which was fueled by classic capital-market bubble hysteria) disappeared, virtually all marketplaces and vendors went away. The few that did survive retrenched to focus on solving simple purchasing and related problems with vertical applications like sourcing, procurement, travel and expense management — with varying levels of success.

In the Business-to-Consumer space, there were positive and sustainable developments in the mid-to-late 90s with companies automating vertical-specific transactions such as Travel, Dining, Events, Books, Electronics, Home Services and more. These companies built destination sites and consumer brands and helped fuel the keyword-based search model that has worked so well for Google. For consumers, there was tangible value relative to previous phone and paper-based search and purchasing. Today, web 1.0 seems so limited, but as compared to the traditional Yellow Pages, it was revolutionary.

I founded Rearden Commerce with a vision of a much smarter Web – one that understands the identity, location and circumstances of users and works on their behalf,  to manage their day-to-activities in the most personalized and relevant way possible.

Today, our Deem ecommerce platform is on the verge of delivering on this vision. Deem will correlate an individual’s preferences, location and circumstances with all the options and attributes of what products and services merchants can truly deliver, and will execute the perfect transaction for both.

We enter 2012 primed to take ecommerce to the next level. With the backing of $340 million in venture and corporate capital, and a decade of platform, application and ecosystem development, Rearden Commerce is ready to deliver on the ambitious and transformational mission of perfecting commerce through absolute relevance.  Join our revolution.

What do I mean by convergence?  We all wear many hats – business person, volunteer, consumer – and want to be acknowledged as people with individual needs. Why have “profiles” that denote our preferences with various suppliers and merchants when we end up getting lumped together in mass generic offerings? Merchants desire effective communication with the right buyers to drive new revenues, and buyers want to be connected with sellers that offer the product or service that is relevant to them as individual consumers. This is the convergence revolution being powered by Rearden Commerce’s Deem platform.

Because Rearden is best known for its travel platform, I’ll illustrate the need for relevance, convenience and convergence in online travel booking. When the ash cloud crisis hit Europe (I was there at the time), travelers found themselves stranded, with landlines unavailable, and no real way to obtain information, find a hotel or restaurant or complete the re-booking process. This was a very specific point of need for those travelers, many of whom needed support both as a consumer and as a business traveler. Ideally, in that situation, the business traveler would receive via mobile device flight status info, a rebooked flight or the ability to change/cancel, and a hotel and restaurant suggestion that is contextual and relevant — all while ensuring that traveler’s company understands where the traveler is located and the associated expenses. It’s this type of need that Deem is working to resolve.

Travelers are demanding more control over their travel environment and have been asking for more efficiency in the process. Let’s face it: business travel today is sometimes … just not that enjoyable. Anything companies can do to improve the experience for their employees should be high on the list of priorities. But companies must be able to offer this while maintaining control over the T&E category.

Deem will now make available all the necessary travel related categories along with an offers and procurement platform that will link the buyers and sellers who actually need and want to connect. No longer will it be acceptable to send a mobile offer to a traveler for an amazing steak house – when that traveler is a vegan. Tofu anyone? Deem harnesses the power to do precisely this: link buyers and sellers with absolute relevance. Now that is targeted marketing: location, context, relevance and real-time.

Add to this the ability to effectively connect relevant buyers and sellers to conduct commerce real-time, on the fly through mobile devices with relevant offers, and we are approaching ecommerce being perfected.

As I settle into this new seat at Rearden, I am very eager to hear what you think will contribute to the next revolution in travel services and in ecommerce overall.  What do you need, what do you want, what are the examples of innovation that will spur true revolution? For sure, the train has left the station and each one of us is on board. Although our individual seat assignment gives us each a different vantage point, the one thing we all need to do is hold on tight … this is going to be quite a ride!

Here’s what I’m most looking forward to in 2012:

1. 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 help consumers navigate the Web in a way that is useful and relevant to them as individuals. The opportunity to provide truly individualized and contextual offers has yet to be seized fully — but technologists and marketers recognize there is a massive disruption opportunity by delivering offers for products/services in a truly relevant way. Paul Todd said it well in his recent Fortune Brainstorm piece: “Relevance-powered search is the future, and it’s already taking hold in travel and online retail.”
2. Collaborative Travel Planning will (Finally) Take Hold: As Tnooz’s Kevin May predicted, “With a dizzying number of trip planning sites either up and running or in beta, 2012 will be the year that defines the sustainability of the [social travel] model.” Those with established roots will best succeed in truly integrating social commerce into business travel, fundamentally reshaping the way colleagues travel together. Travelers will be able to surface personalized travel options and enable travelers to collect, organize, collaborate and purchase a trip that best fits their collective needs. The romance just might make its way back into travel.
3. Social Commerce: In 2012, White Label Will Rule: Credible brands with engaged audiences are leveraging Deem Offers to provide their audiences with relevant, contextual deals. Folio.com cites Yipit research, which predicts that overall white label social commerce transaction volume will double to as much as 20% of overall volume in 2012. In consumer-fatigued 2012, it’s no longer quantity but quality of the deal – and the more that merchant offers can be personalized to the specific customer, the more they will “buy” in. We’re certain to see more Offers consolidation accompanied by significant developments in offer targeting and the introduction of new deal delivery technology in 2012.
4. It’s All about Mobile: I must quote Marc Andreessen on the smartphone revolution: “Most of the people in the world still don’t have a personal computer, whereas in three to five years, most people in the world will have a smartphone…. If you’ve got a smartphone, then I can build a business in any domain or category and serve you as a customer no matter where you are in the world.” The potential of mobile is incredible, especially in an industry like travel, where users rely so heavily on real-time updates. Feature-rich mobile applications (like CWT To Go) are emerging to make the hectic life of the business traveler easier — enabling travelers to access their travel itineraries, verify flight status, check in, research alternate flights, review and select dining options, and find destination weather information, etc.
5. The Business Web will be Consumerized: Financial services organizations and B2B retailers are leveraging ecommerce platforms to bring Business Travelers the benefits of a world-class consumer experience … but in the context of their company’s policies. In 2012, the focus will become even more on the individual buyer—as ecommerce platforms will help merchants understand patterns and preferences of the individual, whether they be transacting on behalf of their business or personal lives. The next phase of the Web will be one that is much, much smarter.

I have high expectations for what we, as an industry, can accomplish in 2012.  And it will take some incredibly smart people to make this happen. In closing, I want to thank my amazing Deem Team, who together have worked to give Rearden Commerce another year of hyper-growth.

Happy New Year to all of you!

Here are my humble words of wisdom for a Friday: Be smart. Don’t over share. Protect your personal information with the same intensity and focus you put toward protecting your wallet and car keys.  Ecommerce and social networking are only in their first few innings. We’re all learning as we go. We’re seeing the benefits of providing certain personal information—it helps to give us a truly relevant experience online. But with that comes responsibility that we must take on ourselves. Take it seriously and eventually we will all see the benefit of a relevant, personalized Web.

So is marketing dead?  I hope not, because I’m basically a marketing guy.  But I think classic “segmentation” based marketing is broken. We are all individuals with unique needs.  And as much as marketers try, it’s hard to put us into “catch all” segments or clusters. As a former airline marketing VP, I have been part of the problem: so feel free to blame me first.  We used to celebrate a 0.25% response rate to inserts in our airline credit card mailings. Really? So 99.75% of the people didn’t care about our offer.  A 1% click-through on a keyword ad gets celebrated, too.  So why do marketers celebrate irrelevance?  Because the math still pens out:  you can make money in the short term on a 0.25% response rate or a 1% click through rate.  But what’s the long term cost?  More important, what’s the lost opportunity?

For the past couple of decades, marketers have fine tuned methods to segment and target customers in order to make marketing campaigns more efficient and to boost sales. Sophisticated marketers know that creating clusters and segments of consumers — based on some combination of behavioral, demographic, geographic and psychographic data — and then matching the right offer to the right segment is both a “job preservation” exercise and a means to drive incrementally higher response rates.

Better response rates require, of course, that the segmentation work is done correctly. Ecommerce and online advertising and targeting are improving. Collaborative filtering, and now social media, have helped to make ecommerce more relevant while reducing some of the “spillage”. There is enormous experimentation happening now with real-time, location based contextual offers, but it’s very early. No one has emerged as the clear leader and the door is open for innovation.

Recently I’ve noticed some decline in the “tonnage” in my mailbox which is, despite the impending downfall of the USPS, a very good trend for most of us. But in the digital marketing world, the bombardment of ads and offers is going strong. The opportunity to provide truly individualized and contextual offers has yet to be seized fully — but technologists and marketers recognize there is a massive disruption opportunity by delivering offers for products/services in a truly relevant way. Search is at the forefront of this effort to provide more relevant results for people who are in “seek mode”.  Paul Todd said it well in his recent Fortune Brainstorm piece: “Relevance-powered search is the future, and it’s already taking hold in travel and online retail.”

So, on a personal level, one of the reasons I’m truly psyched about my new role at Rearden Commerce is to be part of the revolution in ecommerce that is happening in Silicon Valley. Being at the forefront of building a technology platform to deliver true ecommerce relevancy is daunting and exciting all at the same time (like climbing a big mountain – achievable with focus, hard work, and smarts!). Deem represents one of the most ambitious endeavors to make services across multiple categories — travel, retail, entertainment, dining, staycation getaways, you name it — available to consumers in a contextual and relevant way. It won’t be easy to pull this off, but it will be meaningful and rewarding work.  I’m excited to be part of a team of really smart people who are building break through technology to deliver a “smarter web” that delivers compelling and relevant services.

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 options floated easily to the surface, based on your personal preferences, your location and your previous purchases or searches? You’d have more time to make the Christmas pudding, sing carols and … get back to work!

Read more about how relevance and personalization are defining the future of online search in my Guest Brainstorm piece on Fortune.com.  Then tell us, how much time have you spent shopping online so far this holiday season?

Happy Holidays to all!

1. We don’t know what we don’t know.
2. We know we don’t know.
3. We don’t know we know.
4. 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 not only become good leaders and mentors, they build an organization of mentors for others. We all have a lot to learn. Learn more here.

Mobile was again a big topic this week, as more people felt comfortable browsing and buying via mobile devices. According to Practical Ecommerce, citing the IBM Coremetrics Benchmark Report, “On Cyber Monday, 10.8 percent of people used a mobile device to visit an ecommerce site, more than doubling the percent of online shoppers who visited ecommerce sites via their mobile devices in 2010. Mobile sales accounted for 6.6 percent of 2011 online revenues versus 2.3 percent in 2010.” That’s a lot of commerce through a SmartPhone.

On a side note, if shopping during work hours doesn’t get you fired, ranting about your boss or workplace via Facebook just might.  Attention shoppers: we have entered into shades of gray when it comes to social media, workplace and individual privacy.  Defense lawyers across the country are dusting off the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which gives private-sector employees certain rights to complain about pay, safety and other working conditions. The Wall Street Journal’s Melanie Trottman published a telling overview.  It will be very interesting to see how it all unfolds. We would love to hear your thoughts on where the lines can/should be drawn.  Until then, have a great weekend.

May’s article highlights the fact that there are more questions than answers for these sites, and potentially worrisome issues include scale, investment, and differentiation. The article reminds me of Paul Todd’s recent post on the inhibitors of travel innovation; there are clear obstacles in the way of both young companies and innovators. Over the next few years we’ll see which travel sites make the grade, and which simply cannot get off the ground. (Note:  Deem is predicted a winner by Robert Cole’s PhoCusWright poll.)

Though not a travel site, Groupon Now seems as though is not a shoe-in to lead the way on this frontier. As reported in Business Insider, Groupon’s “deal on demand” platform generated just $1 million of gross billings in September, despite availability in 25 markets. Mike Taylor at MediaPost notes that these disappointing numbers have been overshadowed by Groupon’s IPO announcement earlier this month, but the media is starting to take notice. While Groupon Now is said to have the potential to transform the multibillion-dollar market for local commerce, according to research findings, “there is a striking disconnect between Groupon’s initial projections and reality.”

And finally, some good news this week from the U.S. Department of Commerce: U.S. retail ecommerce totaled $48.2 billion during the third quarter of 2011, an increase of 13 percent compared with the third quarter of 2010. Ecommerce sales in the third quarter of 2011 accounted for 4.6 percent of total sales, a slight increase over Q3 2010’s 4.4 percent increase. Fourth quarter numbers look good too – a great sign that the economic environment for ecommerce companies is greatly improving. For companies like the new travel sites we referenced earlier, this is a chance to grow and thrive.

That’s the roundup for this week; we hope you have a happy and safe Thanksgiving!

In is his iconic book “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” Christensen captures one of the most common inhibitors to innovation: the existing business.  A current business model is often threatened by a fundamentally new innovation to the point where it makes sense not to invest in the innovation or to deny its value.  Even without encountering the innovator’s dilemma as described by Christensen, however, the existing business can be a counter to innovation.  In order to promote new ideas, companies must divert time and resources away from revenue-generating business areas and devote them to innovation. The risk of losing short-term profits at the expense of long-term gain is often too difficult for companies to pass up. And oftentimes, organizations have limited resources to begin with, and can’t expend them toward innovation strategies.

Another common deterrent to innovation is the fear of failure. Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway, said in an interview earlier this month that kids in the United States are taught, above all else, not to fail. He says this is a reason the U.S. has lost its edge in innovation: “A consequence of being unwilling to fail is that you’ll never try really big, bold things. Once you define success as loss of failure, we’ve lost innovation.” Dean is absolutely right. We should be teaching our kids the virtues of learning from failed projects. How many failures did Steve Jobs experience before launching the Mac or the iPhone? Virgin Group founder Richard Branson once wrote, “(the) ability to bounce back after a setback is the single most important trait an entrepreneurial venture can possess. If innovation is at the heart of your business, obstacles come with the territory. How you react to and navigate those hurdles will make the difference between failure and success.” This is a great mindset for companies seeking to clear innovation hurdles.

But what holds back innovation in travel, specifically? There was a great article on Tnooz.com recently that explored this topic. Glenn Gruber argued that “organizational baggage” – most notably a lack of sustained commitment to the innovation process, as well as a fear of cannibalizing existing solutions – holds back travel innovation the most. Without structured processes in place to evaluate and incubate ideas, innovation fails to take hold within an organization.  Our belief is that the mindset of innovation must permeate all aspects of your business.  At Rearden Commerce, we start by recruiting engineers who have intuitive technical insight and we recruit product managers who have natural product insight, then we impose a structure that builds some focus around that type of mindset by actively encouraging each team to follow the three characteristics of proven innovators.  All team interactions need to be grounded and tested around these three elements.  In my former position at Google, we worked on the presumption that a small team of a product manager plus five engineers could solve any industry problem.  After six months, if the team was not making enough progress, the company would shift into acquisition mode to secure the needed product or technology (e.g., Google Video prior to YouTube).  A true advantage of this model is that at this stage, the team really understands in detail what capabilities are needed, what drives the industry and therefore what an ideal acquisition target needs to encompass.  Aligned with this kind of thinking, at Rearden, we set specific project timelines with full recognition of the reality that every product – or industry – innovation has its ideal window of time to spark its intended audience. We need to look for the opening and work toward it, not beyond it and miss the mark.

I chose to work at Rearden because it’s a great breeding ground for innovation. Earlier this year, we announced a $133 million funding round that we’re using to invest in the growth of our Deem platform. We’re making innovation a priority: we’re adding close to 200 engineers to the technology team in 2011, expanding our development center, and next year will announce new services aimed at wireless carriers, device makers, small businesses and individuals. The sheer breadth of our business makes us think about the human user, rather than just a single persona (consumer, business or employee).  That drives expansive thinking and use cases that are more fundamental to building solid foundational platform and applications that can be easily adapted to varied audiences.  We build a product you can take with you in any context.

The U.S. was once a great breeding ground for innovation, and it can be again. Innovation shouldn’t be a nice-to-have at your organization; it should be a key component of your business plan.

The much hyped IPO was met with varied reactions in the media, ranging from enthusiasm to skepticism. A number of media outlets viewed the success of the IPO as an indicator of more good things to come for tech startups, especially as big ticket companies such as Zynga and Facebook get closer to entering the markets. According to an article in The New York Times, A Good Day for Groupon and Internet Start-Ups, “analysts say [Groupon’s] strong first-day could usher in a second wave of investor enthusiasm for the next generation of Internet start-ups and embolden those companies seeking to go public.”

At the other end of the spectrum from The Times’ positive take on the event is an article by GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram, All the Groupon IPO really proves is that the bubble is back. Raising concerns about the viability of Groupon’s business model, Ingram argues that the success of Groupon’s IPO was driven by the tiny float of public stock (less than 5% of the total shares) coupled with high demand due to a long-term shortage of high-profile technology sector stock offerings. A Reuters article outlining similar concerns citing the low barrier for entry into this space as a real challenge for Groupon. Here at Rearden Commerce,  we expect that the “daily deals” model will only succeed when offers engines provide real, concrete value for merchants – something we work toward every day. Audience insight, campaign analytics and flexible offer options will help give merchants higher returns and the deals industry more stability — this is not the stuff low barriers to entry are made from.

The huge success of Groupon’s IPO confirms that the offers industry is – despite some of  the negative media hype – booming. According to MarketingVOX, “BIA/Kelsey is predicting the daily deal market will reach $2 billion this year, from $873 million in 2010. In 2015, the daily industry will be sized at $4.2 billion for a 36.7% CAGR, the firm reports.” Pretty impressive stuff.  Rearden Commerce stands at a unique vantage point, we have a robust technology platform and a distribution channel aligned for merchants and consumers to accrue mutual benefit through the transaction of daily deals. It’s smart commerce and we like it.

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 help consumers navigate the Web in a way that is useful and relevant to them as individuals. Users are still drowning in the “stream” of information available. Our philosophy is that it’s time for technology to work for humanity and not the other way around. The next phase of the Web will be one that is much, much smarter.

I do know that naming a movement is not a simple task.  In August, we at Rearden Commerce branded our ecommerce platform “Deem”. Why Deem? Because we believe the future of ecommerce can be driven by one single simplified engine that helps people find exactly what they want to see.  Our goal is for people to be able to “Deem it,” and make it so.  We created Deem to transform ecommerce. Deem will bring buyers and sellers together to make transactions online easier and more personalized. To fuel the growth of Deem, we recently acquired HomeRun.com and partnered with Google to be part of their Google Offers feature. We can see the future.

Take this example: You need to book a flight from LAX to Logan. A simple web query will come up with hundreds (even thousands) of choices — far too many. But imagine if your search was smarter and already understood your personal preferences. It would know as well as you do that you must have access to wifi, you always like to take the first flight of the morning, and you only fly direct. It would also know that you have loyalty points to redeem on a particular carrier. Your search results would be much easier to sift through and you could more easily book the best flight for you.

Now let’s take it one step further and imagine your flight from LA to Boston has been re-routed to New York due to a mid-winter Nor’easter. In the next phase of the Web, your car service will be notified and rescheduled, the restaurant where you have a dinner reservation in Boston will be alerted and your reservation will be cancelled.  And your hotel will accommodate you with a reservation at a sister hotel. This concept isn’t just an idea. We are making this level of personalization and convenience a reality. And it’s not just for travel anymore. In the future, it will be for all aspects of commerce.  Imagine that it just so happens that this LA/Boston trip is at holiday time and your family gifts that were purchased online were set to ship to Boston.  The smarter web knows that these were gifts and that you are no longer going to Boston, so it asks … “Would you like your purchases sent to Aunt Jane’s in Brooklyn?”

So, back to my opening question … what is in a name? The article suggested we call the evolution of the Internet “Web 4.0.” I suppose that works. But better yet, let’s call it exactly what it is: the Smart Web. We stand at an exciting moment in the history. The Smart Web is here.

It is within this context that a new infographic from BuySellAds is especially interesting. As posted on SocialTimes.com, the infographic illustrates both the positive and negative sides to the nature of the deals being offered to consumers and how they affect merchants. Amazingly, nearly half of all consumers access daily deals, and 60 percent of those use more than one site. On the merchant side, though, 82 percent are not satisfied with repeat business following a Groupon, and more merchants than not say they wouldn’t work with Groupon again. What all this points to is a key tenet for us here at Rearden: for the daily deal industry to succeed, offers must benefit merchants. With our recent acquisition of Homerun.com, we are aiming to help merchants prosper. It’s not just about sending out great deals, it must be about using great deals to open new doors of customer loyalty.  Our president of merchant services Brad Brodigan has made it his mission to make this the rule.

Many daily deal sites today are looking at new ways to reach consumers with relevant offers, and a primary method for this could be location-based targeting. With advertiser demand for location-based services growing, GigaOm’s Ryan Kim writes that more and more advertisers are pursuing mobile ads that include location data because they can find users where they are, target specific areas and drive consumers to take actions locally. There is a great opportunity for merchants to provide immediately redeemable coupons for consumers on any device, anywhere. Relevance is key: of course deals should be fine-tuned to take into account a user’s locations. If you walked by a coffee shop and received a $1 off deal on your phone, wouldn’t you be more apt to stop in?  A transformation of commerce that puts the both the consumer and the merchant needs in the bulls eye zone will win.

In the end, it all comes back to that 10 letter word my colleague Paul Todd is consumed with these days:  i-n-n-o-v-a-t-i-o-n.  The WSJ Magazine unveiled the winners of its first annual Innovator of the Year Awards.  Set apart from technology innovator awards, the Innovator of the Year celebrates the people and ideas changing our world in all categories, everything from art and design to food and philanthropy.  Highlighted in the coverage are contemporary artist Tom Sachs’ ten bullets on innovation.  Interestingly grounded in the challenges of the real world, Sachs’ tenets may make you re-think your definition of what spurs innovation.  Take a look and tell us, how do you define innovation?

One of this country’s greatest strengths has always been technological innovation, and that’s why we at Deem are so honored to be a finalist in a coveted travel industry award for innovation. The 2011 PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit will honor global companies innovating to forever change travel planning, purchasing and memorializing. We will be competing on November 15th with 29 other companies for the DEMO Award for the Most Game-Changing Travel Innovation.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be contributing a series of posts exploring innovation. Today I want to focus on where innovation begins and what the current opportunity is for innovation in travel.

A good place to start is with innovators themselves – what makes them tick? What characteristics do they possess? Malcolm Gladwell once said of innovators: “they’re all obsessive characters.” To me, innovators share one (or more) of three characteristics:

1. Unconventional insight.  It’s always inspiring to see people who have a clear and apparently simple insight that changes an entire industry. In the 1960s no one thought about using computers for personal reasons or otherwise, but Gordon Moore – the namesake of Moore’s Law – founded Intel and invented microprocessors, upon which millions of PCs have been built. I mentioned in a previous post how Jeff Bezos’ revolutionary approach at Amazon changed how we shopped for books and other goods. His drive and risk-taking nature made Amazon a success, too. Where other founders might have delayed launching until they worked the kinks out, Bezos charged forward and fixed mistakes on the fly.  He did what true innovators do, he brought consumers a new way of doing something before they truly realized they wanted it.
2. Resilience. Innovators are people who bounce back. Marc Andreesen founded Mosaic – the first widely-used web browser – which eventually became Netscape. Netscape lost the so-called “Browser Wars” to Internet Explorer and Microsoft, but Andreesen was far from finished. He went on to found Opsware and Ning, and now serves on the board of several leading technology companies, including Facebook and eBay.
3. The compunction to fix broken things. These people can look at everyday situations (that most people accept as status quo) and recognize that they are broken. James Dyson is a great example; he created the bagless vacuum cleaner that doesn’t lose suction. Steve Jobs also comes to mind with the myriad of personal computing advancements he pioneered, but you could argue that he falls into all three of these categories.

This last innovator characteristic strikes me especially as I look at the current state of the travel industry – commerce is broken, and that’s something that affects all of us throughout our lives. The internet has gathered together ever-increasing options and ways to create new and better travel plans.  But all of this choice has come without any systematic way of making sense of all the choice and there are little to no mechanisms to collaborate with fellow travelers in the planning and booking process.  Today’s travel experience lacks both relevance and collaboration tools.

Consumers spend time and energy searching dozens of websites, each of which knows nothing about them. There’s an innovation opportunity here – it’s why I’m so excited about our Deem platform and why we’re a finalist in the PhoCusWright competition. Deem improves web personalization and connects user and travel service better than ever before, and delivers innovation in the form of cost and time savings and convenience – whether you are traveling alone or together.

These are innovations that can impact tens of millions of consumers, and have the opportunity to evolve whole industries – not just travel – and the way that users interact with the internet. The future of commerce and travel will be driven by core insights around personalization and collaboration of users. I’m excited to be part of a team making that future a reality, and we look forward to presenting this vision to the PhoCusWright community and to seeing what our innovative brethren bring to the table.

News headlines from the past few months might lead you to believe that the daily deals industry is over-saturated and over-hyped. Doubts about the industry’s viability, questions about whether these sites will ever bring customer loyalty and ROI to merchants, and the big question marks hanging over Groupon’s highly-anticipated IPO certainly haven’t helped the general perception of the space.

But the fact remains that consumers continue to be excited about deals and offers delivered to their inboxes (the fatigue factor on daily deals has been grossly overstated … just take a look at this recent study by Rice University, as reported in AdAge.) The opportunities persist – so what will it take to turn this industry around? There are two connected but distinct keys to success: merchant value and relevance.

1.      Merchant Value. For the industry to succeed, offers must generate quality leads for businesses – not just coupon chasers, but people who are likely to return and become loyal customers. An offer service should do more than just get these people through the door; it should provide insight into a merchant’s customer base – how old are they? Male vs. female? Are they socially engaged? Local residents or tourists? This information would allow merchants to not only gain deep insight into their target audience, but also to develop and manage their own ongoing relationships with customers.

2.      Relevance! This one gets an exclamation point because it’s time the industry moved away from “daily deals” in the strictest sense to thinking more broadly about providing relevant offers when consumers need/want them. It’s quality vs. quantity. While some merchants might benefit from selling 2000 orders in one day, others might benefit more from selling 10-15 orders each week over a longer period of time. Still others might benefit from ensuring the sale of perishable inventory until that inventory has expired. Providing merchants with flexible campaign options coupled with the data and analytics needed to see campaign success in real-time (and fine tune those campaigns accordingly) will allow for greater alignment with their services and goals, and higher ROI.

From the consumer perspective, success in this industry is not about the daily deal; it’s about the right deal – and the more that merchant offers can be personalized to the specific customer, the more they will “buy” in. This personalization might be location specific (and not just city-wide, but where the customer is standing at that moment), within price level parameters or spheres of interest. It’s time we as an industry got creative about how we understand relevance. Taking advantage of situational changes and perishable inventory creates huge opportunities for merchant success while providing real benefit to the consumer. For example, if a consumer’s flight is delayed past the time that public transit runs, offering a car service could produce a win for the service and ensure that the consumer gets home quickly, conveniently, and safely – merchant value, and relevance.

We’re thrilled … through this partnership with Google Offers our merchants will benefit from affiliation with the various Google brands as consumers search for deals in their neighborhood, and the Google Offers Marketplace will gain additional scale through an increase in quality merchants.

Creating an adaptable team with leadership that empowers engineers, increases innovation and functionality in production, and encourages each team member to lean on their individual strengths to find all of the possible product problems and solutions. While software is intolerant of ever-changing application programming interfaces (APIs), finding a clear path of communication within a team will speed along product adaptations that work with API specifications.

I recently wrote about the challenges that people often face when transitioning into a leadership role. Being a good leader requires skills that are fundamentally different from the skills that made them excel in their previous positions.  More often than not, being a strong leader is about asking the right questions to produce the results you want.

Google, for example, is well-known for allowing their engineers choose which projects they work on. Engineers have the opportunity to align themselves with people they seek to learn from and are encouraged to allot 20 percent of their work week to pursuing their own software ideas, a methodology which Google credits as leading to the creation of Gmail and Google News.

By contrast, many companies work with a well-defined set of processes that cover the full life cycle of a product’s development and delivery. The waterfall method of management works, but it may not be effective in the sense that feature delivery can be both slow and expensive, and leaders may find that those they lead are unhappy.  In today’s fast paced and ever-changing world, consumers expect constant updates to their favorite products and devices the minute they provide their input.  Employees, particularly engineers, are motivated by the same rapid pace of tangible progress.

Companies all over the world suffer from communication failure across product management, engineering, operations, the business line and the customer.  Many find they need a fundamental change – such as migrating to Agile. As an engineer, I know that structures, communication and process matter. They’re not just happenstance – they have direct impact on the end result.

Creating an agile team makes each engineer a stakeholder in the product and encourages consumers to become stakeholders as well. Frequent, smaller changes to a product keeps the engineers’ gears turning and gives consumers the satisfaction of getting what they want, when they want it, without jeopardizing the core of the software or team structure.

Why are so many consumers willing to part with their personal information and browsing habits? Part of it is in exchange for benefits they value, like frequent flier miles, cash back on credit cards, etc. But it’s also because personal information and preferences – when integrated with semantics, data analytics, rich content – lead to better, more personalized search results. That’s how we at Rearden Commerce help people make better, quicker buying decisions.

In more personalization news, David Harry writes a very detailed post about search personalization and the user experience for Search Engine Watch, noting that user feedback is traditionally hard to attain for search engines because people generally aren’t interested in actively providing feedback on how their search could be improved. And so instead, a more implicit type of user feedback is required, including query history, time on page/site, scrolling behavior, interactions with advertising, etc. This is a great post for understanding how search is becoming more personalized and how information retrieval is changing.

Despite the advancements we’re experiencing in search personalization and in user relevance, finding what we need and want online can still be a time-consuming process for users. In a humorous video posted on Tnooz, Google Analytics demonstrates the frustrations many users must go through with online checkouts, especially when the guidance is less than helpful. This video highlights a pain point for many travelers booking flights online. Rearden is striving to eliminate this very issue with the ability to power more relevant search results for our travelers.

In the wake of high-profile data hacks – from Operation Shady RAT to Sony Playstation – the response from a frustrated public has wavered between apathy and a deeply felt breach of trust toward organizations that want to collect customer information. Sadly, most of the time consumers are less concerned about hackers and more concerned about how the companies they do business with will use their personal data.  At the end of the first quarter of 2011, around the time of the RSA SecurID data breach, a survey conducted by Koski Research found that 92% of respondents were aware that some of their information was being tracked by online entities. Nearly the same number of respondents said they were bothered by the fact that their information was being tracked.

Still, today’s consumers are becoming increasingly accustomed to sharing private information. With 800 million members, Facebook is a consumer staple and Google+ is estimated to already have attracted over 25 million users. Clearly, social networking is not going away and is in fact growing at a rapid pace across all demographics, particularly when the offer of true value in exchange for data is part of the equation. So how can the providers of Web services and applications provide the requisite assurances to consumers while providing the personalized experience they seek? We can start with stating and understanding the seemingly obvious:

1. Customers are willing to share their data

The amount and depth of information depends on what is provided in return and how convenient and personalized a service or experience really is. And, if it is clear that there is an easy way for customers to opt out of sharing their information, they’ll be more likely to engage in a process that requires collection of their personal data.

2. Value is a two-way street

Clear articulation of the value delivered is paramount. Consumers have a long history of sharing personal information that is highly valued by merchants and marketers in exchange for perks – airlines miles, supermarket and drug store member cards, bookstores and even online stores. People share information in exchange for benefits they value. It might be frequent flier miles, extra bucks or cash back on credit cards. The key is to provide something specifically relevant to the target consumer.

3. Secure the data, dummy

The promise of convenience or personalization isn’t enough. As a purveyor of goods or services, companies have a responsibility to secure customer data and should be transparent about this security process with customers. Physical and technological safeguards on customer data are a prerequisite for today’s business. Customers should know that their information is encrypted and that there are checks and balances within an organization to ensure that no one person can put personal data at risk. Proper provisioning of employees who come in contact with sensitive customer information and proper log management to respond immediately to any irregularities is de rigeur in today’s environment.

4. Give the customer control

If consumers choose to opt out of any program, they should be able to do so with ease. Complete and easy-to-find access to privacy policies not only sets the right tone for the customer relationship, it also encourages customers to understand that ultimately the protection of personal data is a shared responsibility.

The next generation of ecommerce solutions will be smarter. With connected devices, smart applications and Web 3.0 rapidly changing the dynamics of the online marketplace, how customer data is handled and leveraged to provide more personalized service will be key in defining the next generation of technology and brand leadership.

Jeff Bezos' "Napkin Diagram"

This weekend’s WSJ feature on Jeff Bezos is an entertaining read on the frenzy of the early days of a company that changed the face of ecommerce. For those of us working to continue to evolve ecommerce, Bezos’ early insights remain timeless. In his simple and iconic “napkin diagram”, as shown to the right, Bezos captured one of the great insights of the Internet, namely that the Web enables the aggregation of inventory which in turn creates amazing selection for the consumer: “we will sell more if we help people make purchasing decisions.”  Bezos applied his insight to physical goods and Amazon allowed the user to search for goods through a templated experience where she can use indexed attributes to guide her search and discovery experience. Bezos’ insight applies equally to services such as booking flights and hotels, restaurants, activities, etc., even though the workflow in booking these services is not as standard as it is across, for example, books and electronics.  The advent of services aggregators (such as SideStep, FareChase and Mobissimo in the early days of flights aggregation) meant that seemingly endless units of inventory could be found in seconds rather than hours.

But in solving one problem, inventory aggregation creates a new problem for the consumer: how to select the right piece of inventory from the thousands available? I might read a book by Dostoevsky and love it, but how would I find it if I didn’t already know I wanted it? All products and services suffer from this same issue – how to find new and valuable goods and services. The solution to this problem can be executed in two stages – 1. structuring the data and 2. personalizing the data.

Gift guides are a good example of the first stage: structuring data. By looking at the way groups of users purchase gifts, clusters of behavior can be identified. For example, people might be looking to buy a gift for a person (friend or family member) or by price (e.g., in the range $50-$100) or by type of product (e.g., gadget). To achieve these clusters, the items need to be identified or tagged as suitable for each choice. The clusters then cut across existing structures and allow the user to see many different choices that match their intent. So the gift buyer looking to find a gift for her mum who adores the latest design trends can find suitable ideas covering jewelry, clothing, fitness attire, etc.

Clusters are, by definition, the aggregate behavior of groups of users. But any individual user is likely to have slightly different preferences to the group. That’s where the second stage, personalization, comes in. The ability to tell us – explicitly through preference, or implicitly through behavior – allows us to fine tune the clusters and make them personalized. Pandora Internet Radio is an example of this approach. Pandora tagged their content manually according to a Music Genome that consists of 400 musical attributes covering melody, harmony, rhythm, form, composition and lyrics. Once tagged, songs can be connected by any combination of these attributes rather than by traditional classifications.  More recently, the advent of semantic ontologies and other approaches creates the possibility of further automating these tagging methodologies rather than re-creating them manually.

These two stages together provide relevance for the user. They solve the discovery problem that the Internet has created. It applies to flights, hotels, dining – in fact, any service that is multi-attribute. Expect to see more personalization as web infrastructure and data mining continue to improve. I can only assume that Jeff might approve!

We’re shopping on our phones too. This week Google announced the launch of Google Commerce Search for Mobile, aimed at helping customers grow their mobile sales. The search giant discovered a major opportunity for the product when realizing that nearly 80 percent of its biggest customers do not have a mobile-optimized website, according to an article from PCWorld. Given that more people than ever are using their phones to access the Web, Google’s move has major implications for the future of mobile search.

So, we’re shopping, we’re searching, and of course, we’re reading.   In a previous generation, getting your news fix was limited to a handful of content sources: your morning newspaper, the evening newscast, drive-time radio updates and your best-informed friends. Nowadays we can get news whenever, wherever, and however we want it. This 24-hour newscycle from thousands of sources is great, don’t get us wrong – but even the biggest news junkies among us would admit things were a lot simpler back in the day. Fortunately, semantic technology is making huge leaps in helping us manage to the content that interests each of us, thereby vastly improving the news/information delivery experience.

Case in point: News360, a personalized news reader on major mobile/tablet platforms this week announced an integration with Google+. News360 now personalizes user news using Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, and Evernote – in addition to Google Plus, providing a comprehensive picture of a user’s interests. Here’s how it works, according to ReadWriteWeb: “Rather than using social data to recommend stories just because your friends liked them, News360 creates a semantic map of what stories actually say, determining relevance to the user based on the content itself.” New news sources are popping up by the day, and the technology is helping us not only save time, but learn more about the issues we care about.

Exciting stuff. Check them out … perhaps on your new iPhone 4S!

For example, from the perspective the Travel industry, Tnooz has an excellent take on how Jobs transformed the industry. Though Apple doesn’t have a travel division, sell products on a supplier’s behalf, or provide search services, Jobs gave consumers new ways to experience travel, from the ability to research destinations and products, to interacting with brands in new ways, to relying on mobile devices while in transit. The power of Apple is forcing travel businesses to embrace the “always connected” aspect of everyday communications and to make their websites mobile-friendly or develop an application for existing and enhanced services. Kevin May was spot-on when he said, “To adapt a well-known phrase: when Apple sneezes, everyone catches a cold.”

PowerRetail posts an interesting piece about Jobs’s obsession with the consumer experience, and how he shifted the ecommerce industry’s focus from the power of technology to the power of the consumer — the way people use technology in their everyday lives. He changed the way we consume content and make purchases. We, at Rearden Commerce, are passionate about connecting consumers and businesses in the most meaningful way possible. We remain inspired.

Apple looks poised to continue to advance both travel technology and the consumer experience. USA Today reports this morning that nearly a third of travelers today use three mobile devices — a smartphone, laptop and tablet computer/iPad — on hotel Wi-Fi systems vs. a single one just three years ago — this  according to hotel broadband provider iBahn, citing an “iPad Revolution.” And TechCrunch today reports an unlocked version of iPhone 4S will be available in November. One thing we are counting on is for Apple to continue to bring its trademark excitement to consumers.

A final note for this week … working in the technology industry in Silicon Valley, almost everyone has a six degrees of separation story about the great Steve Jobs.  I leave you with mine … Steve was a genius, he was a perfectionist, he did not suffer fools, he held his teams to impossibly high standards, he could be very difficult at times, but with all that, he was a true leader – and the world most certainly knows true leadership when they experience it. In tribute to the Steve Jobs legacy, be inspired to lead.

Image courtesy of Mike Wang, Sr. Graphic Designer, Rearden Commerce.

Einstein once said, “A clever person solves a problem, a wise person avoids it.” As an engineer, I’m used to both solving and avoiding technical problems – that’s my job. In the past year, however, the challenges I’ve faced haven’t been technical. Instead, they’ve been about how to transform myself from a good engineer into a good leader, and transform an organization with some flaws into one that other engineers want to be a part of. I am not a transformation expert, and I am still figuring things out as I go. But I’d like to at least share the lessons that I have learned so far.

As I’ve been undertaking this transition, several people have recommended a book by Marshall Goldsmith, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. I’d love to tell you to read it, follow it, and succeed – but the truth is, I haven’t read it. (If anyone has read it, feel free to share your insights below.) They say you can’t judge a book by its cover – so let’s just stick with the title instead.

The title sums up one thing I have learned along the way: transitioning into a leadership role requires a fundamental shift in approach. We all have something at which we excel, and if we are very good we are rewarded with an ever increasing scope of responsibility until at some point, we become a leader. Unfortunately, few of us actually get coaching along the way about the finer points of leadership. We excelled by having the solutions to hard problems and by having the answers to tough questions. Especially as an engineer, success comes through creative problem solving and unique insights into the technical problems facing a company. In the move from individual contributor to team leader those skills can continue to serve well, and if you are leading a team of five to ten people, you might continue to be successful simply by being a brilliant problem solver.

But the problem is that true leadership isn’t about being the person with the solutions; it’s about being the person with the questions. When you become a leader, you have to shift your mindset from answering questions to asking them – even when facing problems that need to be solved. This may sound bizarre – and it may be the hardest challenge most of us face as we expand our professional scope. Workers are loyal and committed when they feel a sense of ownership and responsibility, and workers can only own the solution to a problem if they helped contribute to it. It is your job to lead people to the solution by challenging them to solve the problem themselves. Even when someone asks you for help, you need to consult, not dictate. A leader asks instead of answering. In a way, this is still problem solving – only now instead of directly solving the problem, the challenge is to discover what set of questions to ask that will uncover the solution by your followers, not for them.

I’ll be the first to admit – I haven’t mastered this yet. I am, and always will be, a problem solver. When a particularly hard problem is laid before my team, my instinct is to roll up my sleeves and just start solving. At this point I probably manage to resist doing that about 50% of the time. The remaining 50%, I have to remind myself to keep an open mind to alternative approaches, to allow exploration into areas that I personally wouldn’t consider, and to ask questions that will challenge others to solve the problem themselves. I try to remind myself that what got me here won’t get me – or the amazing organization I am tasked with leading – there.

Starting to make holiday travel plans? If you’re on Facebook, your friends probably already know where you’re spending Thanksgiving. Thanks to the newest Facebook platform enhancement known as the Open Graph, your friends can now see when you “book” a flight, “stay” in a hotel, “hire” a rental service, and so on. “Like” you expected anything else from Facebook, right? In a guest article on tnooz.com, Travis Pittman explains why Open Graph is landmark move that will affect thousands of travel companies using Facebook to engage with customers, as well as Facebook’s hundreds of millions of users.

Our next story this week looks at one of our favorite topics – the Semantic Web. Angela Guess at SemanticWeb.com examines a new article by Lee Feigenbaum, who puts it bluntly, “the Semantic Web lets you do things fast.” But “fast” might not mean what you think. Feigenbaum writes that while speed is usually measured in “stopwatch time” – how long it takes to boot up a laptop, for example – “fast” also represents the raw performance of the Semantic Web, i.e. how long it takes to load 100 million records into a database or how many queries per second a “SPARQL implementation does on the Berlin benchmark with and without a recent round of optimizations.” Intense stuff. As we’ve maintained here, the future of the Web is making the experience more relevant and actionable for users. And, as Feigenbaum might add, making it faster as well.

Finally this week, speech-recognition software provider Nuance released an upgrade to Dragon Go!, its multipurpose app for iOS devices. According to tuaw.com, users can say things like “What’s the best steakhouse in Kansas City,” or “find me some pictures of Lady Gaga,” and the app will understand and almost always return useable results. This is the future of the Semantic Web on mobile – allowing users to search and find information they need however and on whichever device they choose.

In AdAge, Kunur Patel reported on a study out of Rice University about consumers’ enthusiasm for daily deal sites. Despite recent less-than-glowing headlines about some of the big name companies in this space, the study found that consumers still have a hearty appetite for these offers. With Rearden Commerce’s acquisition this week of HomeRun.com, we reaffirmed our belief that the offers market has great promise. When relevant offers are delivered to receptive buyers, both merchants and consumers win.

Another article that we couldn’t agree more with is from GigaOm’s Stacey Higginbotham. In her piece, the reporter talks about how mobile technology has forever changed the web travel business. Mobile allows users to receive a “concierge-like” experience when booking travel, whether it’s for family or for business. Higginbotham sites examples from companies like Expedia that are focusing on app creation in order to meet the demand in the mobile travel space. But the article also warns that while app development is key, there are other areas like tablet, desktop and TV that still need to be central areas of focus. Rearden has long believed in the idea of turning a mobile device into a personal concierge, delivering you personalized, relevant, contextual results.

And for our last article in this week’s round up, we end on a topic near and dear to Team Deem’s hearts: semantic Web. Search Engine Watch reports that in an effort to make results more relevant for users, Bing is adding “Action Buttons”. The idea is to leverage semantic Web technology to help people actually complete the tasks they are researching during their searches. The future of the Web is making the experience more relevant and actionable for users.  Cheers to Bing this week! We think the Action Buttons are a… Home Run.

The daily deals market has incredible potential, but this market remains inefficient.  As a part of Rearden’s Deem platform, we will be focused on perfecting the delivery of far more than the basic daily deal. By providing a white label offers platform to the impressive list of Rearden partners, as well as adding social gaming features, simple integration with social media platforms, and making our offers sync within consumers’ existing daily mobile life, we will be able to create an experience that is richer, deeper and easier to use than any other social commerce community.

With support from the Rearden Team we will also provide a fully sustainable merchant experience to give businesses more control over demand aggregation, offer creation, campaign data and the ability to develop and manage their own ongoing relationships with customers.

We are thrilled to be a part of Rearden’s Deem ecosystem and to be working across the industry to build the premiere social commerce platform. Like our new family members at Rearden, we think the idea of making the Internet work for us is a Home Run.

With this mission at our core, this is an incredibly exciting time for us. Just this week we announced that we’ve secured $133 million in private equity funding from current investors American Express and JPMorgan Chase, as well as from new investor Citi. We’re putting this funding to work to accelerate the development of our Deem platform, which leverages statistical modeling and semantics to enable buyers and sellers to exchange goods, services and information in a highly-relevant way. We’re seeing excitement for Deem all around us. American Express, CWT, TravelPort and JPMorgan Chase are among the dozens of strategic partners already using the Deem platform to transform the interaction with their customers into a more meaningful one.

Deem was turbo-charged this week with our acquisition of HomeRun.com, creator of the HomeRun social buying service and OfferEngine, their third-party white-label platform. With HomeRun.com, we will truly be able to provide merchants with a demand generation tool that gives the merchant control over offer creation and management. Merchants can optimize their marketing spend by leveraging powerful, consumer-contextual offers, and dynamically adjust pricing based on shifting demand and perishable inventory.

I am excited about the unique capabilities that each of our partners brings to the Deem ecosystem. These are some of the world’s leaders in commerce — for consumers and merchants alike — and I believe that the combination of their assets and the Deem platform are indeed transformational.  This new round of funding and the integration of HomeRun.com onto the Deem platform spotlight the magnitude of the opportunity that exists for the category of Smart Commerce.

Join us on the journey!

The next article, written by Larry Smith for TNooz, encourages companies to embrace semantic technology in order to improve the travel shopping experience. Because there are too many options presented while trying to make travel decisions, Smith says people tend to make the easiest or cheapest choice, which isn’t necessarily the best choice. By embracing semantic technology, companies can help make travel decisions less overwhelming, more personalized and fun. We are working to make this world of semantics a reality. Getting the Web to produce results that are relevant to the user will make planning your next family vacation or business trip a much more pleasant experience.

And finally, the U.S. General Service Administration wants to hear from you! Lauren Darson from Business Travel News reports that the government agency is asking for feedback on how to improve the Federal Travel Regulations – they want to hear from the people that these rules impact most directly.  The agency is hosting two industry days next week, to get more information on how you can contribute to this conversation click here and don’t forget to share your thoughts on this blog!

In the first story, Richard MacManus details the findings of a study from the UK’s Technology Strategy Board. The lengthy report concludes that the future of the Web will be a convergence of services into a ‘brokerage’ model — essentially a relevance engine that brings the world wide web together in a way that is tailored to each user’s needs. We couldn’t agree more and we are well on our way to delivering the Smart Web experience. Repeat after me: The web should work for us!

As a long-time communications practitioner, I’ve long been a user of Dow Jones Factiva.  An article by Jennifer Zaino covers the service’s use of semantics to surface relevant information in search queries.  Zaino says that subscribers to Factiva have helped the service develop “personas,” based on semantics, that identify the type of Internet user you are, within your business organization.  I like to think I am a  “Compass,” but most days, I am probably a “Captain.”  How about you?  Or are you a “Compass,” “Captain,”  “Miner” or “Scout”? Read more to find out and let us know.

Our final article this week was surfaced by our fellow Deem Team member, Dan Pritchett. It lists seven ways retailers can make ecommerce smarter and more social — thereby becoming personalized for users. As an industry, the more we can embrace the use of social commerce, the faster we will get to the truly Smart Web.

What’s the biggest smart commerce news item of the week for you?  Share it with us on the blog.

Technology will continue to evolve, and developers will always chase the latest innovations. But in reality, most people don’t care what technology is being used.  What they want are apps built and designed with superior usability and their specific needs in mind.

For Uomoto’s recommendations on how to create a successful mobile development strategy, read the full article here.

In an effort to open up this blog as a forum for sharing ideas and perspectives, we will regularly round up relevant stories, articles and announcements that have an impact on our world. When these items give you an idea or spark a thought, please join in on the conversation.

We’ll start with a study from Nielsen, reported by GigaOm, that found 40% of all cellphone users in the U.S. are now smartphone users. While that may come as a shock to some, we think that sounds just about right. Everyone wants to have relevant information for personal and professional use at their fingers tips. Smartphones make that a reality.  Our focus is on making smartphones and the web, even smarter.

Another interesting study reported on by Business Travel News found that spending on global business travel is expected to jump 9.2% from last year and cross the $1 trillion mark.  In 2009 the industry experienced a bit of belt tightening with an 8% drop in spending.  But in 2010 things seemed to be staging a comeback with an 8.4% rise.  If these numbers are realized, it will be the second year in positive gains. Even without this new data, we’ve known the industry seemed solid, especially given the enthusiasm and participation in the GBTA conference this year.

The final article we’re sharing is on a new feature that can be added to your Google or Bing search. ReadWriteWeb reports that Wajam has released a tool that puts links shared by your Facebook friends and Twitter followers at the top of the page after you conduct a search. For instance, if you are searching for spas in Denver, Wajam’s new feature will display the names of people you are connected with who live in that area as well as information they may have shared that can help your search. This is a great example of a tool that makes the Internet work for you, and we’re all for it!

Let’s look at air flight search as an example. Travelers today are presented with an overwhelming selection of flight options, many of which are essentially the same. A recent search for a flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles turned up 1,004 flights. Forty-five of those flights cost between $184-$187 – only a three dollar price range! Even when applying standard search filters like departure time or price, the results still varied widely in relevance.

Now imagine if you could also filter based on which options or amenities you value most. For instance:

• Are you looking for the fastest route from point A to point B?
• Are you more concerned with entertainment (such as on demand videos) or productivity amenities (e.g., in-flight WiFi)?
• Is company policy the foremost deciding factor in your purchasing decision?
• Or is that unused ticket and/or your frequent flier status more important to you?

While these are all personal preferences, relevant search results don’t require giving up your personal data. Leveraging information about things like flight amenities or frequent flier mile options produces valuable data that can be used to filter search results.  This type of data, while not PII, is highly relevant. Rearden Commerce’s recent partnership with SeatGuru brought just this type of capability — by using SeatGuru’s information on travel amenities such as Wi-Fi access, reclining seats, legroom, and overhead baggage space, we can power more relevant search results for our travelers.

(Of course, your in-flight seat mate has a lot to do with the quality of your trip — though there’s not yet an app smart enough to weed out the non-desirables. But I digress.)  Whether you seek a meaningful boundary between flight times (is 5 minutes truly shorter?) or insight into an unused ticket, wouldn’t you like a lens that would focus in on the best option for you?  We think so.  And we’re putting our money where our mouth is.

As Macintosh greeted the attendees at Apple’s annual meeting on January 24, 1984 in Cupertino California, that one word launched a revolution.  Steve Jobs’ creation came to life in a debut that rocked the world.  Tears formed in the eyes of those of us who played a role in that momentous event.  The vision was out of his head and on the stage and we were part of it.  No network.  No printer.  No cursor keys.  Nonetheless, there it was.  The redefinition of the personal computer, expressed in a cute little luggable box that didn’t do very much.

“I alternate between wanting to hug it and wanting to drop kick it out the window,” said a Stanford professor after purchasing one of the very first production units.  Mac ignited an emotion, formed the cult of cool and in so doing, began the long journey from archetype product to tattoo brand. Today, Apple is the world’s most valuable company—value derived directly from the powerful relationship between its brand and its customers.  Apple products lend identity and affirmation to the people who use them.  I have an iPhone; therefore I am.

Launching such a revolution in the mid-Eighties was difficult.  For one thing, there was no public Internet, no networked computers, no desktop publishing, no smart phones, no mobility. You needed to build something tangible to show what was possible.  Personal computers hadn’t yet found their place in people’s lives, either at work or at home.   Most of the functionality we take for granted today hadn’t yet been conceived.  And yet somehow Macintosh conveyed an inflection point for the industry.  It became a platform for innovation and changed the world.  All with just 256K memory.

Fast forward to 2011.  What a different world!  A global economy has emerged wracked by both the Internet bubble burst and the housing crisis coupled with 9/11 and war in the Middle East.  Hardware hardly matters, software is outdated and everything is in the Cloud.  Social networking drives communication; search is prevalent in everything we do and gamification has become a noun.  So much is happening so fast.  Announcements of new products are simply added to the real-time news stream with everything else.  A revolution might not look like a revolution.

But something very new is definitely happening.  The Web is getting smarter.  And we, at Rearden Commerce, are taking advantage of it.  We think a revolution is in the making.  The Smart Web is not merely having the world’s information at your fingertips.  It’s the promise of relevance and personalization.  For us, that’s Smart Commerce and today Rearden Commerce is announcing that we will converge our business and consumer applications onto a single smart commerce platform we’ve dubbed Deem.  It incorporates a “relevance engine” that leverages new analytics and semantic data tagging technology to enable personalization on a whole new level.  Deem solutions are designed to be identity-based, location-sensitive, context-aware and inter-operable and will enable people to exchange goods, services and information in the most meaningful manner possible.   The idea is to connect buyers and sellers through absolute relevance.

Our first solution to express this personalized relevance is travel.  We’ve improved  flight search functionality with a new ability to display flight options in a segmented and meaningful way including fastest flights, lowest cost, company value and in-flight experience. We’re offering up this solution your way.  Now that’s smart.  And empowering.  If we play out our vision, we’ll be able to offer up commerce in general your way—goods, services and information.  Very empowering.

Could Deem be a platform for innovation and change the world? Could absolute relevance in our archetype product lead to a tattoo brand?  Could one word start another revolution?

I Deem therefore I am???

At Rearden Nation, we have no shortage of opinions on ecommerce — the rights, the wrongs and the vast potential of the web. This blog gives the team a platform to share our thoughts, updates, opinions, and insights about the industries we serve; major news events and trends; and the work that we do here every day. What we’re doing is about much more than SaaS and app development – it’s about making the web more meaningful, unified, and relevant – for everyone.

This blog will focus primarily on the areas crucial to our mission: smart commerce, technology innovation, customer experience, and business solutions. Here are some of the fascinating, forward-thinking folks from Rearden Nation who will be joining me regularly on the blog:

Dan Pritchett – Our CTO has a deep background in foundational Internet infrastructure and system architecture engineering. In Dan’s own words, “I’ve spent more than half my life learning the craft of software. I’ve always been fascinated by it conceptually.”  Dan will share his views on technology breakthroughs and insights into evolving trends; and he’ll explain exactly what these breakthroughs and trends mean for the rest of us.

Paul Todd – Former Googler and Partner with McKinsey & Company, Paul is our Chief Product Officer.  Paul’s knowledge of the roadmap of the ecommerce industry is well-earned — he led product strategy for Google’s travel products (among other areas) and served as the leader of McKinsey’s North American high-tech strategy practice.  We trust his judgment on what products will resonate with people implicitly (and are more than a little impressed that he was awarded a Full Blue in soccer from Cambridge University).

Mark Biestman – Our Head of Global Field Operations, Mark is a 30-year veteran of such tech leaders as Netscape Communications, Commerce One and IBM. Rivaling Paul for our most avid sportsman, Mark brings a competitive edge to Rearden Commerce — and a hands-on knowledge of the efficiencies that can be gained by a more relevant Web.

Rick Simonson – Straight from Nokia’s mobile business to Rearden Commerce, Rick is a BIG driver of efficiency and cost-effective growth — while pushing us to expand the Deem ecosystem.  Our CFO, Rick has a degree from the Colorado School of Mines as well as a master’s from Wharton, making his perspective on underground movements and above-the-board business strategies invaluable.

You’ll also hear from our CEO Patrick Grady when he has insights to share from his discussions with major players in the commerce markets, and on how breaking news and trends will affect Smart Commerce.

Here’s the key point: There shouldn’t be a “vast world” of ecommerce, but one single simplified engine to find exactly what you want to see.  You should be able to “Deem it,” and make it so.  Rearden Commerce will soon deliver Smart Commerce, and we want you with us every step of the way.