Archive for January, 2007

I was sad to see that EW James & Sons decided to pull out of the Lexington market. There weren’t any stores convenient to our part of town, so I wasn’t a customer, but I like to go anti-chain when I can.

In California, my favorite store was Cosentino’s on Homestead Ave in Santa Clara. We avoided safe and bought just about everything there. Michael Chu did a nice write-up about them on Cooking for Engineers. I was horrified to hear they may close, but hopefully it’s just a rumor.

But the Herald Leader reported that Ken Pink, CEO of E.W. James said that they were moving out of Lexington due to advertising costs being out of proportion with the number of stores. While I understand the issue with advertising ratios (1 ad services 3 stores much more cheaply than 1 ad services 1 store) I wonder if passive media or interruption marketing could have been bypassed.

Could they have used social marketing more? Captured the anti-chain market. Gone after a niche and spread their good words via viral campaigns? Seth Godin’s idea of an IdeaVirus may have saved the chain - while huge sums of money are needed for traditional marketing, permission-style marketing would seem a better choice.

Who would have been the “sneezers” for a grocery chain? What could they have done to become another Cosentinos (I never saw one ad for this store, and their website is a mess…but their scoop-it-yourself dry goods isle was known throughout the valley.) What ideas might have been tried?

• What about appealing to specific ethnic groups? How about bringing someone from different ethnic communities and asking them how you could tune a portion of the store for them?
• How about organic specialties with earth and environmentally friendly choices?
• What about a “sin” isle full of the absolute most delicious and wonderful deserts available on the planet?
• How about nutrition and cooking seminars aimed at the busy parent-of-two showing them how to buy items that can be easily prepped for the coming week?
• What if you created a pre-prep section, working with one of the local pre-prep franchises selling a week’s worth of food at retail, cooler exchange and all?
• What if you create a “down home isle” full of items that would never be found in an upscale market - kind of a slap-in-the-face of the snooty stores?
• How about humor? You could put punching bags in the isles that say “In a big chain store this would be a big display of diet drinks. Wail away, let ‘em know how you feel!”
• How about good music? I cringed the other day because I forgot my iPod at Kroger and had to listen to their incessant babbling ads on the intercom. How about LIVE music?
• How about 1950s uniforms? What if you let people TIP the floor staff?

PS: Perhaps they could have been the first chain to locate downtown? As the new residential developments go up all over Lexington, we need a downtown grocery store. I’ll shop there myself, even though Kroger is closer.

The first (and only) time I met Steve Wozniak was in a little laser tag arena in San Jose. He was there with what seemed to be a group of 20 kids, his Mercedes parked out side (license: “WOZ”) and everyone seemed to be having a hoot.

We were all waiting our turn to go in and shoot the dickens out of each other and the kids made it hard to carry on much of a chat, but it was still a thrill. Much to my disappointment, the time to play came all too fast. I admire Woz on several fronts, and was thrilled to learn this morning that he’s speaking at the Ideafestival September 13 and 15th here in Kentucky. I don’t know Woz shot me that day (it was dark, and I was busy bumping my head on pint-sized tunnels) but he still made an impact.

I miss the Valley today.

I can remember seeing “powers of 10″ as a kid on PBS. It started at the atomic level and ended up at the intergalactic scales. I even have one of the original books. This shockwave tool instantly caught my eye. While this works with a pre-set grouping of photos, I would LOVE to see it work with Flickr, or be available as a development tool for use in creating a new generation of ecommerce catalogs. It would need a few mods (grin.)

[click on image to see tool]

It would need to have a palette building algorithm. Colors 0-255 would need to be created from flickr images. If you have enough images you could even tag your images for it. Once you have a tagged set of images, you’d be able to map them to the palette so they could appear in the right RGB configuration. The palette map would need to be cached.  A tool like pic2color is a good first step.

Imagine posting products or brands in this kind of display. Logos of companies could be displayed as well as coupons. Actions or gestures of different types could produce different results such as buy a product, etc.

The photographs could be the catalog. There are endless ways to use layers of photographs to build an emotional branding experience with this.

Here’s the thing. I’ve seen people run into objects trying to dial their mobile phone. So it’s hard for me to imagine millions of people suddenly typing in query after query into mobiles in a crowded airport trying to find the lowest price on rental cars. Now I admit that I’m in the United States, not Europe, where texting has become a high art. I’ve watched accomplished “texters” use their phone keyboards with awe, and feel pretty good that they could type queries while ducking ’round luggage carts and toddlers.

But what I would predict might be better is a bit of live, geographically aware feedreading. Probably through a combination of a smart feedreading app and a deployment of GeoRSS, one could obtain real-time RSS data relevant to where they are in space. As one moved from point to point, pre-set queries would search for tags of interest and attach themselves to keys on the front of the users mobile device. The searches could happen over the web, whereby query engines would flush out geographic references in the web data, or with pure XML and deliberate geoRSS encodings. Example:

This set-up-before-you-go element of mobile search is going to be critical to success. When you’re on-the-go, you need the device to do most of the work for you.

while moving
sushi.feed = discover feeds where distance < 500m
button.attach sushi (”nearby sushi”)
if (sushi.feed == null)
button.attach.sushi(”no sushi nearby”)

Methods of feed discovery:

Bluetooth
Wifi
Mobile networks

Types of feed discovery:

Mobile to Mobile - user profile, social networking, friend nearby, roaming consultant
Advertising - offer feeds, coupons, spacially aware marketing, proximity
Physical Resource Location - nearby resources, closest open facility, etc.
News - relevant news delivery, based on feedreader setup.
User defined - email/CRM/office-specific.

As you walk or drive through space, the mobile device needs to discover feeds that meet your specific needs that are specifically and geographically relevant to you, and then, provide them through a set of user interface reductions that you can easily manage while on-the-go.

Added thought: Provide simple interfaces to change the RSS feed output depending on business conditions - when it’s slow, publish a new feed with more coupons. When it’s busy, reel ‘em in. See my post on this “Senseweb for business”

The “Deli” button on the front of my phone could be attached to (map for illustration only)

Sam’s Deli 200m 10-10pm M-S menu Champion’s Deli 240m 10-9pm 7 days 20% off coupon today menu reviews (Y!) Stickhouse Deli Shop 420m 10-10pm M-F menu

Business Lexington reports that outgoing LFUCG administration of Mayor Teresa Isaac may have let an old Peoplesoft problem languish since mid-2006, preventing key financial reports and possibly losing data about spent by the departments. Mayor Newberry has put a team on it, but if it’s like many other similar problems, the longer you wait, the worse it gets.

Oracle’s Peoplesoft isn’t small potatoes at LFUCG… This $10 million dollar investment is used government-wide for General Ledger, Purchasing, Procurement, Sourcing, Supplier Communication, Accounts Receivables, Billing, Bill Payment, Settlements, Accounts Payable, Asset Management, Inventory, Project Costing, Grants Management, Contracts Management, Budgeting and Business Planning, Cash Management, Deal Management, Risk Management, Human Resources, Payroll, Time and Labor, Benefits Administration, Employee Benefits, Recruitment, Employee Performance Evaluations, Employee Payroll Data, Compensation, Enterprise Learning Management, Workforce Rewards, Supply Chain, Maintenance Management & Work Orders, and, possibly changing lightbulbs on streetlights.

Goals of the system were to eliminate duplication of work, improve audit and accountability trails, reduce paperwork, and improve inter-departmental communications.

At project launch, the schedule was set as

Estimated roll-out or go-live dates are:
Phase I (Financials Core Implementation) – July 2006 (In progress)
Phase II (Financials Supplemental, Projects, Grants, Inventory, Budgeting) – January 2007
Phase III (HR Core Implementation) – January 2007
Phase IV (HR Supplemental) – June 2007
Phase V (Maintenance Management) – TBD after June 2007

Who knows how wide spread or serious the problem is… we’ll need to wait on Jim Newberry’s team to kno…. but I am certain there’s more to come on this one.

personalpost

If you want to create a bit of a stir, open up your digital billboard to the masses (may not be SFW) and let them post what they like. Better yet, post 20 of these on your wall. Grab flickr feeds and give each table in your restaurant a unique theme, or pop them up to match the menu for the night.

This is a small text-only example from one user, but of course the implications/possiblities are wide open. I can imagine customers or motorists rubbernecking to see what is up next. Why not let people send photos from their cell phone cams to billboards at stadiums?

I’m sure this has been done somewhere, but I found it pretty innovative. I know that loctite glue company did it once. It’s an idea that’s not terribly hard to pull off, and one could easily imagine interspersing ads within the text or image (2 for 1 margaritas!) and hanging it on the restaurant wall. Just until the competitors start posting on there (”aye, come next door for free beer!”)