iPhone app helps people with autism communicate

We have talked a lot in this class about how improvements in telecommunications will affect companies and people in the next 5 years. This article on boston.com has reminded me that our lives are already being affected today. The city of Boston is teaming up with MIT and a local mom of an autistic child to create an iPhone app that helps people with autism communicate. The idea is to use the built in camera and video capabilities to show real images that an autistic person can interact with to express meaning and emotion.

Internet Retailing and the Physical World: Insights from Academia

I’m on the e-commerce/retailing team, and one of the issues we’ve been looking at is the impact of virtual world commerce on brick and mortar retailing, and vice versa. A recent article in Knowledge@Wharton entitled “Geography Lesson: Why Internet Retailers Should Pay Attention to Where Potential Customers Live” (free registration may be required for access) shares findings from two recent academic articles to come out in this area. Both papers find that there is a strong symbiotic relationship between online and offline commerce, or in the authors’ words, “understanding local geography still matters a good deal for 'borderless' retailing.”

The first paper, “Traditional and IS-enabled Customer Acquisition for an Internet Retailer: Why New Buyer Acquisition Varies by Geography and by Method,” compared traditional methods of reaching customers (e.g. word of mouth among friends and neighbors, magazine advertising) and web-based methods (e.g. blogs, virtual communities and keyword searches). It finds that offline word of mouth had a higher impact on Internet customers than online word of mouth, and concludes that “geo-targeting will be vital to the success of Internet retailers, especially those with limited resources.”

The second paper, “Preference Minorities and the Internet: Why Online Demand Is Greater in Areas where Target Consumers Are in the Minority,” studied people whose shopping needs differed from the majority of folks in their physical area (e.g., “young parents living in a zip code populated mostly by elderly people”). The paper suggests that these so-called “preference minorities” are underserved by their local brick and mortar retailers, and finds that Internet retailers “draw more sales from regions that contain them, holding the absolute number of target customers per region constant,” that preference minorities are less price-sensitive, and that this effect is stronger for niche (as opposed to popular) products, which “draw a greater proportion of their total online demand from high preference minority regions.” It thus comes to the managerial implication that “selling niche brands in high preference minority markets is an especially attractive proposition for an Internet retailer.”

The full text of both papers is available at the link above for those who are interested in the complete details of the studies. Insightful and timely research!

The Publishing Industry

We feel that in the next 5-10 years, the big issue for publishing is going to be less about content delivery and more about the data that comes with people consuming that content.

It's a given that as the digital world progresses, people will be consuming less content in the traditional manner. Companies like ours need to embrace that in order to survive; however that will not give them any sort of competitive advantage - delivering digital content will become a prerequisite for doing business. These companies need to figure out a new way to compete and add value based on this newly available data. They are going to have access to A LOT of consumer data, the key question is "what are they going to do with it?"

What do web coupons know about you?

This article sheds more insights into the power of data and the growing role of privacy in the network era.  may be the following paragraph is enough to urge you to read the full article..

A new breed of coupon, printed from the Internet or sent to mobile phones, is packed with information about the customer who uses it. While the coupons look standard, their bar codes can be loaded with a startling amount of data, including identification about the customer, Internet address, Facebook page information and even the search terms the customer used to find the coupon in the first place.

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More on Twitter's 10 Billion Tweets

Here's a bit more detailed look at the 10 billion tweets to get a better handle..

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Enjoy. 

Google's Twitter Search

Steps to search Twitter using Google:

1. Conducting a Google search
2. Click "+Show options" link (Upper left side, below the search box)
3. Under "All Results", click "Updates" (5th link)

You will see Twitter search results and this is a big step in real-time social search.

Twitter data usage by U.S. Library of Congress

An interesting article that fits well with our class discussion on Twitter. As we debate over commercial benefit of twitter data, The U.S. Library of Congress has announced that it will be acquiring the entire archive of Twitter messages back through March 2006. According to another article on its site "Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress". It will possibly use this massive data to discover patterns of social interaction.