The Future of eCommerce and Online Retailing (Versandhandel Kongress 2009 presentation)

I spoke at the Mail-Order Congress 2009 / Deutscher Versandhandels Kongress in Wiesbaden today, on the topics of the Future of Mail-Order and Online Retail, Social Media & Social Commerce. If you were there - and even if you weren't - here is the PDF, below. Please re-use, tweet, spread, remix, morph... as you see fit.

The Future of eCommerce and Online Retailing (MailOrder Congress 2009)

View more documents from Gerd Leonhard.

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Some recent Twitter-related wisdoms you should read for sure

Twitter is indeed a game-changer and is quickly becoming a major force in social media, news, search and mobile communications. I have written about Twitter quite a few times, already, so today I will just share some really important Twitter-related stuff that I just discovered, myself (via the people I follow on Twitter, naturally ;)

First, the always-seriously-cutting-edge Umair Haque just published a blog post on 'Twitter's 10 Rules for Radical Innovators' which is simply a must-read. Here are my favorites morsels: 

"Open beats closed. Anyone can use Twitter, make friends with anyone else on Twitter, and read anyone else's Tweets, unless they're locked. Here's Oprah, for example. Openness is important because it unlocks 21st Century economics — the new economics of interdependence"   The new economics of interdependence - that's a crucial term, in my view.  I like to think about this as Egosystem becoming Ecosystem...;)

"Connection beats transaction. In the 20th Century, what was viral was mostly the flu. Today, Twitter is the master of viral economies. I got this awesome link from you got it from he got it from them. In the 21st Century, virality can make many different kinds of value activities significantly more efficient and productive..."  Circuits beat channels. Twitter isn't building a new media channel. It's turning yesterday's channel into a circuit. ...Twitter has dropped a neutron bomb of real-time feedback into the heart of media: yesterday's inert, rigid channel becomes a flexible, ever-shifting, reconfigurable set of circuits instead. Efficiency is gained — and monopoly is vaporized — as demand coalesces around supply, and vice versa"

No comments required here;)

Second, be sure to read TIME's recent ode to Twitter: how Twitter will change the way we live. The goodies, quoted, my comments are [...]

• In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it.
• For as long as we've had the Internet in our homes, critics have bemoaned the demise of shared national experiences, like moon landings ...But watch a live mass-media event with Twitter open on your laptop and you'll see that the futurists had it wrong. We still have national events, but now when we have them, we're actually having a genuine, public conversation with a group that extends far beyond our nuclear family and our next-door neighbors
• Put those three elements together — social networks, live searching and link-sharing — and you have a cocktail that poses what may amount to the most interesting alternative to Google's near monopoly in searching
• One of the most telling facts about the Twitter platform is that the vast majority of its users interact with the service via software created by third parties [I call this the Rise of the API Culture - and it's a crucial driver of 21st century content economics]
• As the archive of links shared by Twitter users grows, the value of searching for information via your extended social network will start to rival Google's approach to the search [This is often called Social Search - and imho, it will beat the pants of Search 1.0 within 9 months. Another reason why Google will buy Twitter, for sure]
• Today the language of advertising is dominated by the notion of impressions: how many times an advertiser can get its brand in front of a potential customer's eyeballs...but impressions are fleeting things, especially compared with the enduring relationships of followers. Successful businesses will have millions of Twitter followers (and will pay good money to attract them), and a whole new language of tweet-based customer interaction will evolve to keep those followers engaged: early access to new products or deals, live customer service, customer involvement in brainstorming for new products.
• In its short life, Twitter has been a hothouse of end-user innovation: the hashtag; searching; its 11,000 third-party applications; all those creative new uses of Twitter — some of them banal, some of them spam and some of them sublime. Think about the community invention of the @ reply. It took a service that was essentially a series of isolated microbroadcasts, each individual tweet an island, and turned Twitter into a truly conversational medium.

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The Future of Selling - my presentations at the eCom Berlin Conference

On Tuesday March 5 09 I was invited to hold the Leaders Lecture at the inaugural eCom Berlin event; on Wednesday March 6 I had the pleasure of delivering the closing keynote on "The Future of Retail".

Here is are PDFs, below (provided under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial, Attribution License, as usual)

Wed closing keynote Download Future of Retail eCom Gerd Leonhard(10MB PDF)
15MB PDF Future of Selling Ecom Berlin Gerd Leonhard (Tues)

This work by Gerd Leonhard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

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Selling 2.0: The Future of Selling (slideshow)

Here is a collection of slides I have just cooked up for an upcoming presentation. Music (optional) by Natasha Beddingfield (congrats to Sony Music UK for making this happen 'for free' - good work). Enjoy and RT @gleonhard.

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THIS is the Future of Content: Attention Revenues first, copies second!

Clearly a major shift. It will be a huge task to build this new ecosystem. Deep and sincere collaboration is required. Domination is toast. Control is - like email, soon - for yesterday's emperors. Google and the Telcos need to dive into Content 2.0. Openness becomes a default requirement, not just a 'nice to have'. Friction is Fiction. Really. It's hard work. Yes.

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Dining 2.0: it's the EXPERIENCE (and the good content)

I just had a very unique and nicely futuristic experience eating at the Inamo Restaurant in London, with Omid Ashtari (who works at Google in London), who turned me on to this amazing place. 

If you want to get a glimpse of the future - and I mean beyond eating - you should check it out: the interactive ordering system really rocks and is based on a surface computing system (MSFT I would guess - but yes, it did work well;) that is projected onto your table. You can change the color of your table's surface, select, view and order food (of course), and even play battleship (see first picture, below), in case your lunch date is utterly boring (nope, not in this case;).  I have added a few photos below. 

But here is the key point: I will most definitely come back here, because:

• It's really easy and great fun to use this system to order & browse the menu (and I probably ended up ordering more than I should have, because of it!) - even for non-geeks, I think
• It's a great idea to be able to change your environment at the click of the mouse (i.e. apply your own table surface designs)
• It works very well and there is no waiting time to make a new order
• You can watch the chef via your table surface, if desired
• The food is fantastic (and that, of course, is crucial, too)

All in all: the content was great (i.e. the food) but the CONTEXT - the Experience is what makes it rock. Lesson learned: Dining 2.0 > Media 2.0 > Content 2.0 - right?
Youtube, of course, has some videos on Inamo, too, like this one

4 bottom lines of the Internet economy: participation, engagement, attention, content = ads

This, below just became clear to me this morning, on the 6.50 am flight from Basel to London (airplane trips always make good occasions for lofty thoughts I guess):

• People nowadays seem more keen to participate than to just consume - quite a stunning reversal if compared to mass media traditions. The culture of participation is spreading very quickly. See: flickr, youtube, blogs, twitter,

  Image by gleonhard via Flickr

  wikipedia, amazon ratings, digg...
• People are much more likely to check out, and maybe even like, a brand (or their advertising) when they are being engaged rather than marketed-to (i.e. yelled-at). See: Nike+, Bacardi & Groove Armada, Dell Idea Storm, Comcast on Twitter etc
• Attention is becoming more scarce by the minute (maybe even more so than time), and as a result attention-data -what do I where, how, with whom, when - is becoming more valuable as well. 'Paying with attention' will become a real option once a) content becomes available on the basis of attention-revenue sharing,  b) new forms of advertising (yes, call it 2.0;) that can exploit this data are becoming more mainstream. Watch this video from my talk at Google UK, to find out more.
• Content will become completely mashed up with Advertising. Since, as Cory Doctorow said back in 2006 (!), Conversation is King - not just Content, we will see more and more innovative advertising based on sponsorship and product placement concepts injected into conversations around content - after all, this is what social networks are all about!

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Social Media Today: list of freevertising products and services

Link: Social Media Today. Excerpts from their list of free things that are based on Advertising:

Telecom : Skype, Mosh  Mobile , Pumbby, Talkster, Jaxtr, Pudding Media [and I would add Blyk here]
Airlines: From low fare to no fare?  Forget low cost carriers: keep an eye on Ultra-Low Cost Carriers  (ULCCs) handing out free seats by the bucketload. These include: Wizz Air, SkyBus, Spirit and AirAsia.  
Car  rental • As-good-as-free automotive examples: LaudaMotion  lets Austrian and German customers rent an ad-plastered Smart car for exactly  three days at the cost of just one euro per day
Photo  prints • An interesting idea that’s been put on hold after an  apparently too-successful launch: French MesPhotosOffertes offered free picture processing and home  delivery in exchange for ads on the bottom of pictures
Student textbooks • U.S.-based  Freeload Press provides free college textbooks in electronic  form with advertisements inserted at chapter breaks
Travel guides • Dutch free postcards  pioneer Boomerang Media’s latest addition to its free portfolio is a free (paper) city travel guide. Created in cooperation with travel guide publisher Mo’Media.
Wifi  • With most hotspots still charging prohibitive fees for casual users, ad-sponsored wireless access points could be the next FREE success story: Metrofi has secured agreements with several cities across the U.S. to design, build and operate ad-sponsored, free municipal wifi networks for residents, visitors and city workers. Metrofi is able to  provide free access in these communities through online advertising supported by  local and national advertisers. WIGO offers free wireless internet to registered users and is available in coffee shops, commercial areas and restaurants in the Manila area. WIGO users will see a ‘WIGOBAR’ on the bottom inch of their screen, displaying banner ads from sponsors. Meanwhile, booting out T-Mobile, AT&T is installing wifi hotspots at over 7,000 Starbucks stores in the US, offering two hours of free wifi a day to Starbucks Card holders. Rollout starts early Q2 and will take until the end of this year to be completed. Next?
Google’s free wireless plans,* sponsored by, what else, Google AdWords. 
Stock  photography • Yet another FREE LOVE war in the making: stock  images. Getty Images is now competing with free sites like  Britepic, everystockphoto and stockvault. .
Notes and  photocopies • FreeHand Advertising distributes free notepaper to  students on their way to class. Japanese Tadacopy offers university  students free photocopies
Games  • In Q3, Electronic Arts will release a new, free, online version of its  popular Battlefield series, called Battlefield Heroes.
Bikes  • Copenhagen’s City Bikes are free to use: users find a bike in one of over 100 bicycle racks found around the city, throw in a DKK 20 coin (USD 3.45 / EUR 2.70) to unlock the bike, which they get back when they return the bicycle to a rack. 

Carfi @ Flickr has a nice slide that relates to this, via the SocialCustomer blog:

People now pay more to express themselves - and less when they consume

Something I picked up in the various Picnic conference conversations (and yes.... they were many;)
My own, Music 2.0 presentation at Picnic is a good fit with this realization

Image via David Reece @ Flickr

Madanmahan Rao has a good summary of the Picnic 08 conversations, btw, here

The increasing trend towards Decentralization - every page is 'Home' now (comment on Guy Kawasaki)

Guy Kawasaki (one of the smartest guys that feed my RSS inbox) has a great nugget in this blog post:

"Every page is now a home page, each of which will have a wider reach, a lasting shelf life, and the ability to attract a new audience like never before. To capitalize on this, ensure that every page has a strong, clear global navigation scheme and related content that is visibly promoted.... Remember, every page can be accessed in any conceivable manner and in any conceivable order—you can’t design properties to control user flow anymore"

This is indeed crucial and very much documents the global trend towards decentralization. Search, RSS, add-this & share-this widgets, deep-linking, digg, furl, and soon maybe the new socialme search etc have fueled this trend tremendously. People now come into web properties from all different directions, and quite a few don't come through the front-door anymore. The bottom line is that we don't control entry or exit any longer - we only 'control' the merit that we offer (or not).

I already commented on this blog post earlier... read more, here

Soon: Widgets on your TV (talk about Changes for the TV Business!)

TV-Widgets are here: Samsung just announced their first series of TVs that will be connected to the Internet, by default (see a demo of  Samsung's See'N'Search set-top box here). But here is the real big deal, imho (quote): "The Widget Channel - its official name - will be powered by Yahoo Widget Engine, allowing you to sit back on your sofa like a lazy couch potato, and enjoy small internet applications such as news and weather, all from your remote control." "Content will be accessible through an integrated Ethernet port or a Samsung wireless adaptor...." says ShinyShiny. 

What does this mean? Well, if you are into widgets (i.e. embeddable content objects, both web-based or desk-top based) on your computer or your iPhone (I think this crowd counts about 170-200 Million people right now - so this very early, still - but all of us brave consumers that buy those cool iPhone apps are basically widget users, now, too!), very soon you can, and probably will 1000s of widgets available on your 50+inch TV screen in your living room (or wherever else you "like to watch"). Imagine: stock tickers, tweets, RSS feeds, music widgets, social network messages, video streams, contvertising ;)  Now what will THAT do to the TV industry? Talking about competing for attention - a real challenge, imho.

Contagious Mag adds: "Yahoo! and Intel have joined forces to develop a Widget Channel which will allow users to access their favorite internet content whilst watching TV. The Widget Channel will utilise a comprehensive software network, built around the Yahoo! Widget Engine and delivered via an Intel set-top box. The result will be a series of TV Widgets, or as Yahoo! describes them - 'small Internet applications designed to complement and enhance the traditional TV experience'.  What this means, is that viewers will have instant access to news, sports results, weather reports and even feeds from websites such as Flickr. In order to make the fusing of internet and TV as seamless and intuitive as possible, there will also be a Widget Gallery function made available at a later date. This will allow users to customise each widget and how it is displayed, as well as publish them across multiple TV's and related devices"

Truly, we are heading into the Attention, Conversation and Participation Economy at mindboggling speed. This will also help to boost interactive services, 3D and Virtual World Experiences. More via the Yahoo/Intel press release, Video here (quality is not so hot but it's a good start)

Trendwatching.com on the "Free Love" trend: the War for Attention, and how the Net seems to drive pricing for 'content' towards zero

Trendwatching just released a hot new report here. Some excerpts and comments:

According to Trendwatching, the rise of FREE LOVE can be attributed to:

• "An all-out war for consumers' attention (make that saturated consumers), including various handout and sampling techniques. (*Gerd's comment: It's all about Attention now - Distribution is a given. Scarcity is dead. Friction is Fiction - well.... mostly!)
• The online world, with its amazing capacity to create, copy and distribute anything that's digital, with costs that are close to zero, forcing producers to come up with new business models/services, which are often purely ad-driven.(*Gerd's comment: I think a new kind of advertising - advertising 2.0 - will be crucial here, but I do think that's still 18-24 months off)
• The ever-decreasing cost of physical production makes it easier to offer more (nearly) free goods in the offline world too. In fact, many goods have actually become insanely cheap...
• The avalanche of free content created by attention-hungry members of GENERATION C.
• C2C marketplaces enabling consumers to swap instead of spend, making transactions cash-neutral.
• An emerging recycling culture.
• And all of the above fueling consumers' expectations to get online and offline stuff for free"

I highly recommend reading Trendwatching's five manifestations of FREE LOVE: 'Any excuse to advertise', 'Courting saturated consumers', 'C2C', 'Swapping, not spending', and 'Less is more', which all incorporate one or more of the above drivers.

2015 Predictions: Social Shopping

I found this very interesting chart on Shopping Innovations on KenRadio.com (I think). Imagine shopping via / on your favorite social network, people i.e. users collaborating to produce new products... and holographic sales assistants.

Speaking of holography, yes... it's real.Check out this video, below (Cisco):