Archive for January, 2009

search engines – an outlook

January 27, 2009 at 4:51 am · Filed under eMarketing, tech stuff ·Tagged , , , , , ,

popular search engines 1.0

popular search engines 1.0

search engines are our main tool in order to navigate through the internet (31 billion search requests are sent to google every month). they work precise, fast and on request.
most of us just use the engine without knowing how it works. where does google receives all the information from? well, to keep it short: it permanentally crawls the internet for new information using links for references and site content for description. google repeats object-describing information.

from a web 1.0 perspective (google is very much 1.0 from my pov) this works good for text based media such as websites, less good for image based media such as pictures and video.

neues-bild-11

manual meta tag @ polar rose

web 2.0 brings text to image. swedish startup Polar Rose is a good example for storing meta information regarding the content in every picture (i.e. in exif meta file). facebook already combined this technology with a social network. and Riya, a US-based ‘visual’ search engine, combines not only text information than as well color and pattern information in order to find better results. the upcoming generation of search engines will use meta tags in order to improve search results. examples for image-meta-data: date picture taken, GPS information, who is in the picture, etc.

what is the future of search? well, lets just assume that the memory power will improve, pattern analyzers will become better and footage resolution will raise.
computer will start to search for individual, personal properties and compare them to each other. comparing eyeballs or face patterns from a surveillance camera to a database – concealable fingerprints that are available on every picture. we know this already from CSI or Minority Report and it is very likely that it will become real. royal palm middle school in phoenix USA installed face recognition video surveillance as a first pilot.

just imagine a public-available search engine starts crawling the internet comparing eyeballs or face patterns to each other. Riya, on a much more sophisticated level, could deliver excellent search results. we might find pictures and videos of ourselves we did not even know about. others might find pictures and videos of ourselves we do not want be known about. the ‘anonymity’ of the internet might finally catch up with us.

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online shopping without US address

January 25, 2009 at 7:58 am · Filed under asia, eMarketing, usa ·Tagged , , ,

online shopping in US stores can be very disappointing when the message “we deliver only to customers in the USA” appears. One Now gives customers from asia the possibility to fool the mechanism.

after registration the user receives a valid US address from the One Now store. when purchasing articles in US online stores the user can use this address for delivery. Now One picks the articles up and forwards them to any address in asia. a simple business idea with great effect.
does someone know a similar provider for the european market?

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eMarketing region asia-pacific by RADICA

January 20, 2009 at 8:54 am · Filed under asia, eMarketing, entrepreneurship, hong kong ·Tagged , , , , ,

radicasys

radicasys

RADICA is a company focusing on email marketing in region asia pacific, located in six countries employing about 35 people.
i had the pleasure to meet CEO francis kwok, a young, bright mind who started RADICA in 2000 at the university of hong kong. we had a very interesting discussion and francis showed me some new, for me unknown, approaches on how marketing can be successful.

fact is that marketers try to match products to target groups. as better the match as higher the chance consumers will buy. but when is a match a match? a man will not buy a woman’s watch. that is for sure, you do agree! and many marketers do agree. but maybe that is wrong. it is not always a question of need, more a question of addressing the right way. “valentines day soon – seeking for a present? buy her a watch…” only because i do not need an item does not necessarily mean that i wont buy it. a consumer that is attracted to a brand will purchase to ’spread the wealth’.

marketers experience that personalization plays an important part when addressing marketing messages. state of the art is to address the consumer by name, but as better the content fits the consumer as more likely s/he will purchase a product. by that i do not mean “knowing the need” than “knowing the person”. the consumer wants to feel understood, taken care of.

nowadays marketing is able to address very precise due to the huge amount of information available to every consumer. shopping behavior from payback cards, walking patterns from surveillance cameras (CCTV DM) or location based information from mobile devices. marketers just have to read between the lines, define a profile and address consumers.

francis gave me an inside in one of the most successful campaigns RADICA ever launched. the company was launched for a well known fashion brand. they analyzed the shopping behavior: where do people buy, what do they buy, how often do they buy and what is their family status. “people that used to buy expensive items will continue doing this. we do not send cheap offers than propose expensive items that match their actual collection. those people do not care about the money. they search for high quality products that amplify to the existing collection. And most of all they like to be taken care of, personalization is a major point.”
all mails were signed by shop staff in order to assemble a personal connection. “the consumer got the impression that the message was sent from a specific person and got back to this person when entering the shop next time. our goal was to get closer to the consumer.”

the campaign became the most successful one in the history of RADICA, mainly because the consumer was carefully analyzed and specifically described. a couple of hundred personalized emails can higher the ROI tremendously compared to traditional mass mails. one can assume the price per email became very expensive, but the ROI was above all expectations.
the art of being able to have such a high revenue is to gather the right data. “often the problem is that wrong data is gathered and wrong assumptions are made, this is a problem because it is likely to loose a consumer when addressing him/her personally.”

just imagine someone using my online profiles in order to offer me marketing information. i am awaiting a call telling me to buy nike running shoes…

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CCTV Digital Marketing

January 14, 2009 at 9:47 am · Filed under eMarketing, tech stuff ·Tagged , , , , , ,

camera-warning-sign

cctv warning

predicting consumer behavior is the goal of every retailer. knowing how consumers behave, act and move opens the possibility of placing products the right way and addressing the consumer precisely.

the newest trend for analyzing consumer behavior is to use surveillance cameras, so called cctv (closed circuit television). most retail stores have already cctv in place, originally installed for security reasons. these systems are now used in a new way, for digital marketing purposes. cctv becomes cctv DM.
the technology for analyzing behavior patterns looks as followed; every angle of a retail shop is covered by surveillance cameras. the video information is sent to a central server where movement patterns are analyzed. a software compares different pictures of the video and analyzes movement. because the whole store is covered by surveillance cameras the software can predict hot and cold areas and tell the shop manager what products and areas people tend to like or not like.

the shop manager can then act based on the information cctv has gathered. he may place hot products near the entry, replace cold products or even change the shop setup in order to stimulate consumers to experience more areas of a shop – and buy more.
until today the technology is only able to analyze movement patterns but some solutions already aim on recognizing gender and age of consumers. in future it will be possible to recognize users by face recognition.

cctv consumer tracking

videomining tracks consumer movement using cctv

the concept and technology is pretty new. videomining, footfall and fujitsu already deliver working solutions, cable&wireless, shoppertrack and silent witness will start to deliver solutions soon.
the market potential is huge taking into account that
A. retailers have a need of such information and
B. most of the infrastructure in form of surveillance cameras is already in place and just needs to be upgraded.

from a retailers perspective cctv digital marketing might be a step ahead, from a privacy perspective it is a huge step backwards. lets hope that the constitutional law will be taken into account when implementing cctv DM.

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CMS review

January 4, 2009 at 4:29 am · Filed under europe, germany, tech stuff, usability ·Tagged , ,

for the new adidas intranet we were looking at different content management system (CMS) and i would like to share the findings with you. the following functions were required:

- good usability (preferred what you see is what you get (wysiwyg) editor)
- web 2.0 technology (meta tagging, AJAX technology, etc)
- SAP integration
- authentication via LDAP
- acceptable price
- (optional) collaboration tools wiki, bulletin boards, IM

we looked at many CMS, had workshops and discussions with a lot of companies including the leading ones (by gartner): reddot (opentext), interwoven, sdl tridion, first spirit and others.

all CMS are quite powerful but i have to admit that i was pretty disappointed by the quality of the products. last time i had something to do with CMS is a couple of years ago and i expected that they made a huge progress. i was expecting tools with the usability of wordpress and a setup for interfacing SAP and LDAP easily. and a price not above 100.000 euros (of course we were considering using open source like joomla, papaya or opencms but they will need a couple more years of improvement and tests in smaller environments before we can really start using them for such big projects). thanks to AJAX technology some CMS have wysiwyg editors out of the box. this actually is a great step ahead from the time when i dealt with CMS last time. but no CMS uses AJAX the way i wish it would be used. i would like to write a text, add one two or ten pictures, crop the pictures, drag and drop a movie, rearrange everything, and publish. like wordpress – quick and easy. but there is no tool that really offers this kind of functionality. you still have to define the templates, the exact amount of media, the exact alignment etc. its like hard coding html-sites, way not as dynamic as it could be.

regarding interfaces: we want to authenticate the user via LDAP and show private information from SAP. as well we want a seamless login to our SAP portals. all CMS we looked at somehow offer SAP integration but, to be honest, most of them more or less just try to.

at the very end we have to decide for the lesser evil with the best chance to meet our requirements. we have to accept some drawbacks and a very high price. a couple more years development and open source projects will hopefully be as powerful as the major commercial CMS providers. they are already much cheaper…

Gartner MarketScope for Web Content Management, 2008

Gartner MarketScope for Web Content Management, 2008

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