Coffee, Sun & Technology

Finally got a moment to login to my hosting provider and pay the dues, which means the ugly “account suspended” message is gone and the blog’s back up. I don’t know about other bloggers, but after close to 4 years of blogging now, I’ve realized this blogging thing isn’t really something I feel is high priority in my life. Besides, I don’t have anything smart to say every week, not even every month… or in a year. And Twitter, Facebook and others are better places for publishing informal content from time to time. Just easier.

I know I’m not the only one. Amongst my blogging friends, I’ve found two groups forming over the years. Casual bloggers — and serious bloggers. Casual bloggers drop a blog post once in a while, say every quarter, to share some general updates or just to say something. Serious bloggers put a lot more thinking into it, some people I hear put in 10-20 hours a week, every week. And there are other groups too. The personal journal group. Or the corporate bloggers. In fact I keep hearing about these companies like IBM which encourage all their employees to have a blog, use Twitter, etc etc. Maybe that’s where it’s all going — blogging as a profesional tool.

Let’s move on to a few personal updates. Earlier this year I’ve started a new business called Liveclicker, in the video commerce space. I am really excited about this project because it’s got a grand vision, but also very exciting tactical steps to get to it. I will have many opportunities to share this vision later this year, early 2009 when we launch. Currently we are working with top-notch beta partners in the eRetail space, which is highly motivating.

And now a few words about a conference I’ve just attended, Internet Retailer 2008. Gigantic event, with lots of interesting people and many vendors pitching. I have three candid remarks,

(1)  Some vendors still think they call pull up the buzz words, the free tee-shirts and fine dinners to impress their prospects. On Tuesday at a sponsored evening event, I got a non-stop 15-min pitch of a “marketing” dude talking about some personalization technology invented by another dude from Amazon, that’s supposed to increase sales between 10 and 13% with no implementation work, etc, etc. I tortured the guy a little and asked the tough tech questions. At the end of it, the 25-something year-old guy just gave up on me and dropped exactly this: “Well, I’m a Stanford Computer Science Major so you have to believe me when I say this”. And he still had not asked me a single question about what my background was, what were my interests, etc.

(2) I was actually impressed by the large number of new companies in the personalization/recommendation space, and we do seem to have gone full-circle on that too. I personally think that the algorithms haven’t gotten better than 5-6 years ago, but with eCommerce platforms maturing and everyone looking at that micro conversion increase, anywhere, such technologies become interesting again.

(3) I’m under the impression (perhaps I’m mistaken) that affiliate marketing is making a strong come-back. All the major networks were at the show, and I saw a few new interesting approaches that blend social networking concepts with actionable and credible marketing programs.

And this last thought as a mental note for the future - the hot question on everyone’s lips: what’s social e-commerce?