The first Web site was published 20 years ago today. Thank you Tim Berners-Lee. If not for you, we’d still be using AOL or fumbling around with FTP or Gopher.
It’s hard to imagine life without the Internet and the World Wide Web in particular. The Internet significantly changed my life when I was introduced to it in grad school in 1993. It turned out to be how I’ve made my living since then.
Happy Birthday WWW!!!
Mavs beat the Heat 105 to 95 to win the 2011 NBA Championship in 6 games. Dirk started slow, but came through late to help propel himself and the Mavericks to their first NBA Championship. Yeehaw!
Linkedin’s IPO reminded me of this e-mail that they sent out a few months back. Turns out I was one of the first people to join Linkedin. I was member number 12,889. I use it a lot and really like what they’ve done over the years.
My friend Jeb Stone, the smartest guy I know, just launched his new company – Selloscope.
Jeb is one of those rare guys that’s a great data guy and a great marketer. He has the ability to sift through the numbers, make sense of them, and then come up with an actionable plan based on those numbers. Over the course of many years doing analytics work and building propensity models, Jeb has had occasion to study the various recommendation engines out there. He’s come up with something better AND he’s made it accessible to everyone. It’s easy to use and reasonably priced. Here’s how Jeb describes his product:
If you’re familiar with Amazon.com, you may have seen a feature, “Customers who bought this also bought…” Or if you’ve ever used Netflix, you may recall that Netflix will recommend other movies to watch based on what you’ve already seen.
Selloscope does the same kind of thing — help businesses make recommendations to their customers — for smaller sites that don’t have the time or money to develop their own recommendation technology. Selloscope helps ecommerce sites, news and content sites, iPhone apps, and even brick-and-mortar businesses to market the right product to the right user at the right time. Email marketers can even use Selloscope to do all this using nothing but a spreadsheet… no programming required.
I like to say that Selloscope is recommendation technology that’s not just for rocket scientists.
I hope you’ll check out Selloscope. I think you’ll like it.
Another Karaoke joint and another good time. This one’s quite a hike from the city, but it was well worth it. Being in a strip mall in San Jose meant plenty of parking.
Music Tunnel had tons of rooms, excellent sound insulation, and a great sound system. It was clean and comfortable except for the small bathroom, just like seemingly every business around here. They had a cool touch-screen menu for picking songs which worked fine for the two of us, but would have been tricky with more people.
The quality of the music was really good, many also included the video from the original artist’s version of the song. The selection of English songs was good, not great. For example, they didn’t have much classic country (but I’m starting to get used to this). They had plenty of modern pop (which I can’t sing) and a good collection of oldies (Beatles, Elvis, Carpenters).
My friend was having fun with Chinese pop songs that had the actual videos. It was pretty neat.
This is my current favorite Karaoke place in the Bay Area. You should check it out.
Launched in 2004, Amazon Prime is a loyalty program for Amazon.com shoppers that gives them free 2-day delivery on most items and $3.99 next-day delivery. Amazon Prime costs $79 per year.
According to Businessweek, four million online shoppers have signed up for Amazon Prime. These members have increased their purchases 150% since joining the program helping Amazon to grab market share from both online and offline merchants. For consumers, they get their products faster and cheaper. The combination of an extremely wide product selection, 2-day delivery, no shipping charges, and no sales tax (in many instances) makes it hard for other e-commerce sites to compete with Amazon on price and overall customer experience. It’s also a very hard program for all but the largest, most sophisticated e-commerce players to replicate.
But this difficulty for smaller players creates a huge opportunity for a logistics company to step in to help these companies compete.
If I were a logistics company, I’d create a white-label version of Amazon Prime and shop it to second-tier e-commerce players. There is no other way for these players to compete with Amazon, so they’d almost be forced to jump aboard. Whichever logistics company does this will be in position to take market share from their competitors. Plus it reintroduces price competition into the e-commerce space which will benefit consumers. In this case everyone wins – the e-commerce sites, the logistics provider, and consumers – except for Amazon which all of sudden finds their hard-to-replicate loyalty program suddenly copied and put into large scale deployment.
Imagine a $100 price tag for the shipping program for the consumer. It’s split 50/50 between the logistics company and the e-commerce site that sells it. For the e-commerce site, it also comes with deep-discounted shipping fees in exchange for exclusivity for anything shipped under the program.
There could be three approaches:
1) White-Label – The program is only available through the particular e-commerce site that sold it. Much cleaner implementation, but less value if you don’t have enough products to justify someone essentially pre-purchasing shipping in bulk.
2) Consortium (similar to the idea in the article) – The program can be sold by multiple e-commerce sites and works with all participating sites. The revenue would probably be split differently, maybe 80/20 with the logistics company keeping the bigger chunk. In exchange, the e-commerce sites would get even steeper shipping discounts to offset the loss of upfront money for joining the program. The consumer would benefit from having more low-price, quick delivery options.
3) Hybrid – The program is available as either a white-label solution or a part of a consortium with the choice being up to the e-commerce site.
I had the pleasure of attending the Dallas Mavericks v. the Golden State Warriors game at American Airlines Center in Downtown Dallas last night. It’s always great to make it back to Texas to see friends and my favorite home-town teams. Thanks for taking me to the game John. Great seats!
The Mavericks won their 10th straight game by defeating the Warriors 105 to 100. It was an exciting game. The highlight of this game was the unexpectedly good play of the Maverick’s back-up centers – Ian Mahinmi (3rd string) and Alexis Ajinca (4th string). Starting center Tyson Chandler was out with a stomach bug and 2nd string center Brendon Haywood spent a lot of time on the bench with foul trouble. This left the door open for Mahinmi (12 points, 10 rebounds, 1 block, 2 steals, 21 minutes) and Ajinca (3 points, 6 rebounds, 2 blocks, 1 steal, 9 minutes) to impact the game. Before last night, they had only played a combined total of 42 minutes for the entire season.
The Mavericks look really good this year. Not sure if they’re going to be able to beat the Lakers, but they look good enough to go far in the playoffs hopefully avoiding another embarrassing first-round exit.
Big 12 Championship Game - Nebraska's in red, OU's in white.
I went back to Dallas to see the final Big 12 Championship Game. It was definitely worth it – got to see the new Cowboys Stadium in Arlington and saw a very exciting game, not to mention getting some of my favorite local eats.
After going up 17-0 in the first half, #13 Nebraska loses a close one to #9 Oklahoma by a score of 23 – 20. This was the second straight year that Nebraska lost a close one in the Big 12 Championship Game. This is Nebraska’s final year in the Big 12. They move to the Big 10 starting next year.
There were about 80,000 people at the game. There seemed to be slightly more Nebraska fans. The place was really, really loud. I’ve never been to a football game with that much crowd noise. Though loud and passionate about their teams, everyone was well behaved. I was a little surprised by this. I was sitting in the lower level around a bunch of Nebraska fans. It was a great experience.
I give the new Roku XDS a C. Great for video, but terrible for audio.
I picked up a new Roku XDS for $100 at Amazon. I had pretty high expectations after reading some reviews and checking out the product page. I planned to use it to listen to my MP3 collection and Pandora, as well as to stream video from Netflix and Hulu Plus. That’s all I wanted from it. Sounds simple. I figured I’d be able to get rid of my prior generation Apple TV that is only being used to store and play my music. I was wrong.
Video
The Roku really shines with streaming video. When comparing its Netflix interface to that of my Internet-connected Samsung Blu-ray player, the Roku is great. Not only can I access my instant (streaming) queue, but I can also search for movies – something I can’t do with my Blu-ray player. Also, Netflix loads faster, the videos play at a higher resolution, and the UI just seems speedier. Netflix is great on the Roku.
Hulu Plus is also pretty good, but not perfect. There is some overscanning going on, but it’s not enough to worry about. Also, I have to pay extra for it ($7.99/month) which sucks considering I still have to watch commercials. But it’s still better than plugging my computer into my TV.
I recently downgraded my DirecTV package. The combination of Netflix and Hulu Plus are good enough to allow me to stick with the downgrade.
If I had one wish, it’s that Roku would work something out with ESPN so that I can watch ESPN 3 on my TV. I’d pay extra for that. I get it free on my PC as a Comcast subscriber. Currently ESPN only makes it available via deals they cut with ISPs. I can’t buy it as an individual. I hope this changes.
Overall, the Roku gets an A- for video.
Audio
The Roku seriously disappoints here. First of all it doesn’t have a built-in application to play MP3s connected to it via USB or over my home network. The only way to hear my own music is to first upload it MP3Tunes.com. This comes with an annual fee and it takes forever to complete the upload – multiple days for around 50GB of music. But I was willing to give this a shot since this would solve my offsite backup needs for my music.
The UI for MP3Tunes on Roku is terrible – it’s sluggish, under-featured – i.e. doesn’t support browsing/shuffling by genre – and it’s buggy. What’s worse, the service doesn’t handle playlists well, especially big ones. This is a known bug confirmed by their tech support. The Web-based UI for MP3Tunes is better, but only slightly. It’s still buggy and slow. I hate it and wish I hadn’t wasted my time and money on it.
Pandora works decently well on the Roku, but not appreciably better than on my Blu-ray player.
Overall, the Roku gets and F for audio.
Recommendation
If you don’t care about audio, then by all means get the Roku. You’ll love it. If you want to listen to your own music, this isn’t the device for you. You will be very disappointed. Get an Apple TV instead.
Regarding which model to get, the XDS is great because it has more connections and it has a replay button that is missing on the entry-level model. Spend the extra money for the XDS.
I wasn’t digging the weather today in San Fran so I decided to picture myself somewhere else a bit warmer and sunnier. Here’s where I ended up – the Guadalupe Mountains in West Texas. I’m feeling better already.
15-year Internet Marketing Veteran & MBA with Extensive Experience Taking Products and Partnerships from Idea to Marketplace
