Times is reporting that Amazon is going to open a bricks and mortar book shop.
I’ve long thought that if I were Google, Amazon or any company that has very powerful brand or product base you should have retail presence. Stores build brand, create a feeling of solidity for E-tailers and most importantly are an effective alternative to traditional media marketing spend.
This all comes back to customers buying and experience rather than just a product. Apple proved the theory and many will now follow the strategy.
Twitter Founder, Jack Dorsey, has his new payments system called Square which is now out in the public domain. It looks great but begs the question when will we be able to drop the credit cards all together for payments? We have devices and they can be set to pin access only. We have apps on those devices which also can be secured so in essence the Credit Card is superfluous in the next decade in my opinion. I think what he has done is brilliant. The no credit card approach will win in the end, and hopefully it’s a good guy like Jack.
Asia shouldn’t be underestimated, it is growing so quickly that it will rival the power balance the West holds in this very generation. In this revealing video from TED India Hans Rosling depicts Asia’s Rise.
There is clearly a rise of infographics going on in the web. Just like meta data gives us information about data (data about data), infographics enhance what would otherwise be very vanilla looking graphs. Infographics appeal to humans because we are visual creatures.
In his video’s on GapMinder or TED you can see other examples of how Hans adds a new dimension of time to create dynamic infographics. The result is that he can get the data across in ways that static words and numbers can’t.
In Alvin Toffler’s world of information overload, our businesses have a constant struggle with diminishing attention offered by customers. To tackle this the creation of a per customer communications profile can help. The metaphor is a pre-nuptial. It specifies how your relationship will exist between your business and your customers. How you create this communications profile can vary from a social unwritten contract like a retailer has with their customer or it might be more explicit like a form your customer fills in to specify when and what correspondence they want to receive from your business.
Every piece of communication you send to your customer demands their time. There is an equation that roughly says the more you demand then the less attention the customer will probably give your demands. If you annoy them too much, they stop listening and reading. So logically you can attribute a cost to each piece of communication. This attention economy is all about treating this attention like a commodity. Every single email, letter or phone call is an exchange of value. If you are selling something and not giving anything then you are spending a large piece of the attention dollar the customer affords you. If you give education then it is lower. If you solve a problem or save their time then you will probably be adding to the attention piggy bank you have with that customer. They will want more.
So you can design this relationship so both you get more attention and the customer gets more value. If you can monitor customer behavior and reaction so as to understand how they would like to relate to your business rather than how much, then you can grow the attention piggy bank. The customer will give you more time because you have created a bespoke or targeted approach to their communication needs, to solving their problems or giving them the actual information they want rather than fire the 12 gauge information shot gun at them. The catch is that this costs time or else money to automate it.
There are many approaches to move to a communications profile model and some very interesting business models are springing up to help businesses achieve this. Companies like Datarati are dealing with medium enterprise in this area using bleeding edge technologies like Marketo. It’s a data driven approach that at the end of the day will have a robustness above the implied or gut feel approach that most business owners currently rely on. Other simple things that can be done by small business are forms that asks customers what they want from your business when they become a customer. Many inexpensive email systems now have features built in to give you insight into customer behaviour so you can provide them with just what they want and when they want it without even asking them.
This is all about the customer deciding rather than the business. Put the customer first, then the business and sales will follow. Listen and watch their behaviour or ask them what they want rather then serve up an overload of communications and information.
All business will be done this way in the future so it really is just about how fast you get there.
Saasu has a long history of developing a mix of community ideas into our products. At the same time we like to apply some of our own ideas as an innovator where we see the opportunity. After all, we are a research and development company.
Introducing CrowdTheme™
Soon you will see stage one of Saasu’s CrowdTheme™.
CrowdTheme™ will support themes for your invoices and statements. You simply apply a theme to each template you have in Saasu (or create and submit your own). What’s more exciting is that this allows you to build a raft of workflow documents such as remittances, packing slips, purchase orders and print labels to name a few. Really it’s only limited to your imagination.
CrowdTheme™ will also be used to cover themes for Reports and Customer Self Service screens in a future release.
We will write about CrowdTheme™ in detail at our Product Blog in coming days.
Innovation background
At the moment Saasu crowd sources ideas from our blog, websites and application into our development candidate list. One such popular request was multiple templates for invoices. Many of our customers wanted to send invoices and quotes using more than one brand for their business. Slight changes between invoices and quotes for specific circumstances are another reason.
In essence the request we receive are what our customers want to do rather than how they want to do it. So this is where Saasu comes in with the innovation twist. We work out ways to solve the problem but at the same time create innovative approach that we think will add a whole new layer of benefit. We have to do this as it’s in our company mantra to create extremes in price relative to competitors while also creating extreme benefits.
Not wanting to let an opportunity go we decided it was time to use a themes approach we have wanted to put into Saasu that goes back to when we started blogging in 2003.
It was also a result of identifying that there is a vast complexity of international reporting and documentation requirements in accounting. We always felt that in the end only crowd sourcing themes and templates solves this issue. New document themes can be quickly added by the whole community and shared in a social service model and then applied to individual Saasu templates. This reduces the development cost and thus the cost of our communities Saasu subscription. More features for less cost = win win for all.
What’s this mean for the future of accounting?
We believe that Web3.0 is now starting to form it’s foundations. Companies like Saasu will increasingly allow users to design web applications by their use or by their own design (or a combination of these approaches). Themes are one mechanism that allow this. They will start to extend beyond Content Management Systems.
We also believe the web is becoming more and more organic as it gets a life of it’s own above it’s many tiny masters, the people who use it and the people who build on it.
One of the most important things we can do as a human species is take a step back or change our perspective when we look at a problem. In the movie Dead Poet’s Society, Robin William’s character, has his students stand on their desks in order to change their perspective.
This advert for the RWE found on Vimeo is another example of how the problems seem quite small but also the solutions are here and quite do-able when looked at from the giants perspective.
How could you change your perspective when looking at your business?
Ever wondered what your content profile looks like? Word clouds can help highlight keywords and other language patterns in your content. Wordle a nifty website lets you generate fun word clouds by simply cutting content from a document or website and pasting it into a window that then generates a word cloud.
I generated the following cloud from Saasu’s About page on our website to see what the content looked like. Visit the full size image on Wordle. Hat tip to the Stubborn Mule where I first read about this bit of fun.
Service Seeking is a Saasu customer who’s business is getting businesses competing head to head to try and win work from a buyer. Service Seeking produced a Start Up Online series of videos. Saasu was included in one of the videos – thanks Jeremy and Oliver for the mention!
Saasu use a couple of the tools mentioned in the video (below) which is the third in the series. It was nice to see we think alike. One tool is tech related but the others can be applied to most business models.
Got a video about what technology or services you use in your business? Let us know.
Ever wondered what Web3.0 is shaping up to be? There are two things generally agreed in the technology industry. It’s not clear and it’s complex.
The following presentation on this topic is from my talk at CeBIT Webciety this year. The topic was What web Web3.0 will look like. This is all about the "Data" and the "Data Generation". Concepts such as the Semantic Web, Data-on-Data and more recently the Datarati have evolved in recent years to deal with the concepts.
If you are interested in the data area and how to use your business data to influence your business then Will Scully-Power’s blog is a great read. Previously of MarkSydney (part of the M&C Saatchi Group) he is seeding a new business in the data space.
On Friday before Silicon Beach drinks I had a catchup with the other Webciety companies that will be at CeBIT Sydney over the next 3 days along with Saasu.
What will Web3.0 look like? Web3.0 is in early stages, but the picture isn’t clear. Web3.0 is bigger than the sum of it’s parts and accordingly we have trouble seeing what it is.
Times is reporting that Amazon is going to open a bricks and mortar book shop.
On Friday before