South African eCommerce Awards 2008

I was asked by Jump Shopping to help judge these awards. Fascinating process, and great to delve into some of SA's less known sites and projects. I'm glad the usual cronies didn't rule the roost at these awards.

SA eCommerce was set to hit over R1 billion this year. Even though the global recession will most likely curtail it's progress, it's getting even easier to hawk your wares online.

In my opinion, range is no longer a differentiator. It's too easy to provide range. Layer supplier upon supplier upon channel upon affiliate upon fulfillment partner and anyone can provide range.

The big win is in user interface, peer review community and emarketing.

Congrats to the winners...

• Best E-Commerce Web site - Look & Listen (http://www.lookandlisten.co.za)
  
• Best Auction Web site - Bid or Buy (http://www.bidorbuy.co.za)
• Best Automotive Web site - Autostyle Motorsport (http://www.autostyle.co.za)
• Best Online Bookstore - Kalahari.net (http://www.kalahari.net)
• Best Clothing and Accessories store - Edgars (http://www.edgars.co.za)
• Best Computer Store - eDreams (http://www.edreams.co.za)
• Best Electronics Store - Nivo (http://www.nivo.co.za)
• Best Flower and Gift Store - NetFlorist (http://www.netflorist.co.za)
• Best Food and Wine Store - Woolworths (http://www.woolworths.co.za)
• Best Game Store - Kalahari.net (http://www.kalahari.net)
• Best Health and Beauty Store - Faithful to Nature (http://www.faithful-to-nature.co.za)
• Best Home and Garden Store - eDreams (http://www.edreams.co.za)
• Best Jewelry and Watches Store - Wantitall (http://www.wantitall.co.za)
• Best Kids and Baby Store - eDreams (http://www.edreams.co.za)
• Best Music and Movie Store - Look & Listen (http://www.lookandlisten.co.za)
• Best Photographic Store - SA Camera (http://www.sacamera.co.za)
• Best Property Web site - Property24 (http://www.property24.co.za)
• Best Sports and Outdoor Store - SA Rugby (http://www.sarugby.com)
• Best E-Commerce Enabler - MWEB Business (http://www.mwebbusiness.co.za)
• Best Travel Booking Web site - Flight Center (http://www.flightcenter.co.za)

CNN's hologram - the future of social interactions online?

CNN hauled out some pretty cool tech for the US Elections 2008. Touch screens, live data aggregation, video streaming, user generated content - it was all there.

Possibly the sexiest of all gadgets was the hologram. Quoted here from USA Today.

CNN will have 44 cameras and 20 computers in each remote location to capture 360-degree imaging data of the person being interviewed. Images are processed and projected by computers and cameras in New York. There'll also be plasma TVs in Chicago and Phoenix that will let the people being interviewed see Blitzer and other CNN correspondents. Bohrman says the network can project two different views from each city so Blitzer can appear to be in the studio with two holograms.

Now, let's bust this puppy wide open. The webcam is due for an innovative shakeup. It hasn't really dazzled us with an array of new features lately. Moore's law (I think?) predicts that this gabillion dollar holographic gadget should be pretty cheap in a couple of years.

Why can't holographic imagery be the next platform for online interactions? It would certainly solve the problem of HotBlonde98 turning out to be a crusty geezer.

Video below:

Congratulations, and good luck Mr Barack Obama...

Image from CNN.com homepage at 7:26am SA time.

I'm actually feeling slightly emotional about the whole US election thing - which is odd, considering America is the nation primarily responsible for the economic crisis the world is facing. But that's the power of leadership. That's the power of insipirational people given a world stage.

Although Barack Obama spent over $1.6 billion dollars on his campaign (he who spends more, wins more?), it was masterful series of communications. It was a victory for the web, for social media and for mankind's ability to group around passion.

I wish Barack Obama the best of luck. He has a huge, huge challenge ahead of him...

The Times goes mobile... and impresses.

With 30 to 40 million cellphone users in South Africa (depending on what the networks tell you and how many multiple SIMs we think people have) - mobile sites are riding the crest of a popularity wave second to none.

* 1 in 6 Google Searches originating from South Africa are made off a mobile device.
* Vodafone Live is the largest traffic drawing website, far eclipsing the News24 behemoth.

Into the fray comes The Times, playing a very close second fiddle to the Mail & Guardian in the "innovate on new media platform" stakes. One has to wonder what's happening to M&G now that the Buckland/Maher combo have moved on. Quiteish really.

So back to The Times. The mobile site is excellent. It's extremely quick on EDGE / GRPS. Dynamic. Seems to update quickly. Offers a nice detailed intro lead to each story section and quick links to full articles.


I am mighty impressed. Let's see if they can follow up this nice little BETA with a proper marketing campaign. I'd take a look at Please Call Me advertising if I were them.

Good on ya.

Audience Participation in the Social Networking Model

Just read an excellent article (thanks Hilton Tarrant), prompting a "social networking model for business" post.

I've often spoken to clients, colleagues and conferences about the "rule of thumb" in terms of community or network engagement. This could be engagement in a social network, a community content portal or an enterprise venture. It's a little Jack Walshian in it's approach, but serves to illustrate the point.

* 70% just watch
* 20% actually participate / create content
* 10% shouldn't be there in the first place.

(UPDATE: 1% hide somewhere in there. The troll race! Destructive personalities who leap on hapless participants, causing literary carnage...)

While it isn't backed up with any research or scientific method, it does guide expectations in terms of participation, how to engage, who to engage, how to segment and most importantly, how important your "social kingpins" (the 20%) are for longevity.

The article sites Forrester Research and splits participation as such:

To help companies target their Internet strategies, Li and Bernoff have organized Forrester research into a "social technology ladder," which classifies consumers based on their participation in various types of social networking. At the lowest rung of the ladder are the "inactives," some 44% of all U.S. American adults who were online in 2007. Higher up are the "joiners," the 25% who visit social networking sites like MySpace; collectors, an elite 15% who collect and aggregate information; and critics, those who post ratings and reviews as well as contribute to blogs and forums. Only 18% of all online Americans actually create content, publishing an article or a blog at least once a month, maintaining a web page or uploading content to sites like YouTube.

Food for thought...

ADSL: 30GB Local Bandwidth and Cap Changes

What's going on with Telkom's ADSL capping strategy? I've noticed some interesting changes:

1. Not capped, but over the standard 3 GB usage limit.
2. Local bandwidth is measured separately and capped at a whopping 30 GB.

Is Neotel forcing innovation in the Telkom camp?

ADSL bandwidth usage report

Blended Usage
Uploaded - 647MB or [0.63GB]
Downloaded - 3.60GB
Combined Total - 4.23GB
Percentage used - 78.39%
Status - Not Capped

Local Usage
Uploaded - 0Bytes or [0.00GB]
Downloaded - 0Bytes or [0.00GB]
Combined Total - 0Bytes or [0.00GB]
Local Bandwidth Allocated - 30.00GB

Please note billing for local usage will commence only once allocated local bandwidth is exceeded. Refer to www.telkomsa.net for per GByte charges.

TopUp
Total blended bandwidth purchased - 0.00GB

Please bear in mind that this is a usage-based subscription and, as such, is subject to a threshold. Thresholds are the accumulated total of both your uploaded (sending) and downloaded (receiving) data, which includes the network overheads.

Great Quotes #8 - The Internet & Finance

"The Internet has made it possible for anybody with an online brokerage account and a broadband connection to become a global investor, but with that freedom has come a great responsibility: to know what you're doing without relying on government oversight. And in a world where our ability to trade exotic financial instruments vastly exceeds our ability to understand and value them, that is a very dangerous thing indeed."

-- Paul Kedrosky, NewsWeek

McCain goes high tech...

This one deserves an echo-chamber repost. It's Kevin Rose style humour - but worth a chortle...

FNB goes Crowd-Sourcing

Launching today - a project involving FNB, specially the Premier Banking segment and Quirk South Africa in the crowd-sourcing space.

The brief allows the broader "creative" web community to pitch in on the How Can We Help You proposition, by coming up with ideas to switch customers to the Online Banking channel.


I'd be extremely interested in your thoughts! Leave them in the comments below...

The official release:

Quirk eMarketing has launched www.ideabounty.com, a website that allows brands to post a brief asking for creative ideas and a reward (or Bounty) for the best submission. FNB Premier Banking is hosting the first brief with a bounty of $2500.

“Idea Bounty is the antithesis of the traditional agency models,” says Rob Stokes, CEO of Quirk eMarketing.

The traditional model for purchasing creative output, in the form of creative expertise and ideas, has dictated that a brand pay based on how many people and hours have been used to create the end product. So it’s rare that a budget allows for more than two or three resources to be allocated to solving a brief. “In this model, injecting new energy and diverse thinking by using hundreds of hungry experts, would mean the costs grow exponentially,” says Stokes.

Idea Bounty is based on the principles of crowdsourcing, as coined by Jeff Howe in his June 2006 article in WIRED magazine. It is the process of appealing to the general public in an open forum to reach a goal as an alternative to delegating the task to an employee or outsourcing to a specific third party

“We believe in the concept of an open ideas economy. Simply put, the better the reward, the better the quality of contributions”, says Stokes.

“It’s very important that we allow Idea Bounty users to set the value of an idea upfront. Creatives who contribute ideas do so knowing what their idea is potentially worth. We have established legal protection of the idea exchange ensuring creative’s retain ownership of their ideas until they are paid for them. We have to be conscious of exploiting the crowd so we ask for ideas, not finished work. You can’t expect people to devote hours and days of work without compensation.” says Stokes.

Idea Bounty represents a new way for clients to source creative solutions and the team say that their solution is risk free for clients.

“Clients only pay for ideas they choose to use, and if no ideas are used, no money is paid. We are really confident in the diverse and surprising thinking Idea Bounty will deliver for clients. We want brave clients and so far the response has been fantastic. We are launching with a fantastic brand that really gets the web so we’re excited.”

“Banks are there to respond to the needs of their customer base. Crowd-sourcing is an ideal way to involve our customers in the development of new value propositions, and takes the “How can we help you?” proposition to another level.” said Robert Keip, CEO FNB Premier Banking, of their involvement with the project.

Anyone can register to submit ideas and with a $2500 Bounty set for the first brief from FNB, the response is set to be good.

Online banking is changing. Meet eBank in Japan.

Here's an excerpt from Chris Skinner's blog on SwiftCommunity. It speaks to a changing world of banking - one where it is not only more cost effective, but more efficient for the end consumer to conduct business digitally.

Here’s a brief profile of eBANK:

* launched in July 2001;
* 2.8 million accounts and ¥800 billion ($8 billion) in assets;
* the largest internet bank in Japan;
* no branches or ATMs (customers use the 25,000 Post Office and 15,000 7-11 ATMs); and
* 195 employees.

Yep, you read that last bit right.

An $8 billion in assets bank, with almost 3 million customer accounts, operated by just 195 staff.

195 people in total that is.

15,000 accounts per staff member.

How do they do it?

Well, it may best be illustrated by their account opening process.

The usual account onboarding process requires a visit to a branch, a bunch of documentation, a raft of form-filling, a lengthy process of verification checking and authentication reporting under FATF and AML rules, a little bit of KYC, a range of data entries requiring lots of box-ticking and button-pushing, the production of paper and plastic confirmations, final mail outs and more.

How does eBANK do it?

You go online and enter your information.

You take a digital photograph of your driving licence.

You mail the digital data up to eBANK.

Their OCR reads your driving licence data – name, address, birthdate – automatically and then checks this against your data and public records.

As long as all tallies, it emails you back with new account details or asks you to clarify discrepancies.

No human hand involved.

While that sounds extremely sexy for 10% of SA's population - I'd look to our cellphone banking for where the real leaps and bounds of innovation are going to come.


Always remember - the mantra of Andy: We may have 6 million Internet users and 38 million cellphone users. But in a year or two, when the line between PC and mobile blurs completely, we'll hop straight up to 38 million Internet users.

It's coming.