WorkHappy.net has a good article on why you should consider accepting PayPal and Google Checkout in your online sales. The full article is worth a read but here’s a few tidbits of note:
…according to a recent survey by JupiterResearch. Among Internet users, 33% said they had a PayPal account and 23% called it their preferred way to pay.
18% of U.S. online shoppers in a recent PayPal-sponsored survey said they would not have made a purchase if the retailer had not taken PayPal.
Some of the Checkout fees are being waived until Jan. 1 2008
All the good stuff aside, the readers’ comments point out a few complaints about the process/user flow in Google Checkout. I imagine they’ll improve the service as it matures.
The Vancouver International Film Festival has come and gone for about a month now. The way the website is set up makes it very hard to find any information about the films as each film has its own blog. I’ve been poking around their site and selecting films randomly and I finally found a few entries but nothing too exciting. As you can imagine, because their website is not user-friendly, there is no discussion to be found.
Adaptive Path (a user experience design firm in San Francisco) has a wealth of articles on their site which, as a designer, I find interesting. Many articles are of interest to a broader business audience – such as this interview with Chris Conley.
Conley notes Pixar as a great example of creative business success which “basically create[s] a new billion dollar franchise every four years or so”. Truly an amazing track record. He discusses what makes them so successful, which boils down more or less to:
strongly adhering to a higher purpose – in Pixar’s case “To create great stories”. Fabulous storytelling is more important than fancy computer graphics. Mission and focus is paramount.
dynamic leadership & a talented team – every project is led by a director-producer pair that brings complementary strengths to the table and is responsible for the project’s outcome in different ways. Their team is made up of artists and technologists that can make their work better through critique. A strong team is diverse and challenges each other.
a highly iterative and tangible process – experimenting and sketching begins on day one. There is no waiting for mounds of research or scripts holding back the creative process. The great story they’ll tell gets figured out along the way. You needn’t have it all figured out from the start, get out there and do something.
Finally, Conley says
If corporations were to adopt these principles, behaviors, and values in their innovation-oriented work, they would be orders of magnitude more successful.
There are some good ideas in that list which resonate with me. What do you think?
We’ve written about wikis before, but sometimes words just aren’t enough. The folks at Common Craft have come up with a great video that explains how wikis can be created using the Seattle based company Wetpaint. Wetpaint is a company offering free easy-to-use wikis. Their video demonstrates how easy it is build your own wiki. I poked around the wetpaint site, but I got sucked into the hero wiki and the Buffy forever fan site… Before I knew I forgot why I was there…
Using wikis for fan sites is very popular, but non-profits societies, associations and any other group of individuals who simply don’t have the funds to build their own may find this service very useful.
I bought a pair of Chaco sandals last year before heading out to do the West Coast Trail. I loved my Chacos. They are much nicer than Teva’s and their one strap technology is easy to adjust and fits my feet whether I am barefoot or wearing woolly socks. Unfortunately upon retreaving my luggage from the conveyor belt in Bordeaux this summer, one of my sandals was missing. The Chaco website told me in their FAQs that I could purchase just one shoe, but I asked all of the retailers in Vancouver and none of them would do it. I was quite delighted to receive compensation for my lost sandal this week, so this morning I went out to buy another pair.
When I bought them last year I chose the strap, type of sole and then placed my order. I waited 6 weeks and then went back to the store to pick them up. This morning I thought to myself, shop must have my name in their computer and be able to tell me exactly what I had bought previously. Nope! My name was in a book written in pencil. Or it would have been last year, but they only keep the book for a few months. These guys are selling $500 gortex jackets, high-end tents, sleeping bags and hiking books good enough to trek around the world and they don’t have a computer system? I must have spent over $1000 in outdoor gear in that store alone, yet they don’t have my name on file. Even my hair dresser keeps a file on me with the type of bleach she uses!
The funny thing is that this morning I read a story on Rohit’s blog about semacodes. H&M have come up with billboards allowing users to purchase the items of clothing advertised using their cellphone. It seems like it’s all or nothing. While some businesses are embrassing technology, which I’m not convinced will work, others are just refusing to go digital.
It will be interesting to see if in a few years time, I’ll be able to purchase my next tent from a billboard, while listening to my radio teaching me a new language in my car that knows my travel itinerary….
The 46 Must-Read Productivity Tips for Freelancers on FreelanceSwitch is full of great stuff. In fact there must be hundreds of tips if you click through to read all the links in the article. But really any business person can benefit from some of these ideas.
For some of us, summer is a quiet time of the year. With all of this free time it’s good to take a step back, take a look at your business and see if your brand needs refreshing. In her recent newsletter, Liz from Market Navigators wrote a great piece about branding and why it’s important to give it close attention. There are 4 key times when a company should consider re-evaluating its brand. Her colleague Rachel Bennett from Frank Branding explains:
When you want to grow. Your brand is all about differentiation—what makes a customer choose you over someone else. Solid branding helps define what makes you unique. It provides focus, gives staff direction, and simplifies marketing decisions.
When you’re competing to attract and retain employees. In a tough labour market, a strong brand can create an emotional connection with your employees as well as your customers. Brand strategy provides focus for decision-making, increases employee engagement and retention, and helps you attract the right kind of new talent.
When you’re looking for funding. A strong brand communicates that you are serious about doing business, have a professional approach, and consider your business market-viable. In addition, a brand can be a corporate asset—the better you are known in the marketplace, the higher the value of your business.
When your service reputation has slipped. Your customers are your most important promoters. If your reputation has slipped, evaluating your brand promise—the experience customers associate with your brand—offers insight. Once you clearly define it, you can ensure it’s delivered in all customer interactions.
I know that sitting on the beach is quite nice, but while your there take a few minutes to do some brand evaluation.
Worried that your good work could be plagiarised or that someone’s going to steal your thunder on the Internet and not reference your writing appropriately? There’s a solution to every problem and this one comes in the form of Creative Commons. An offshoot of a US non profit organisation, Creative Commons was founded in 2003 with the help of the University of Ottawa Law and Technology Program and the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic.
The service allows you to license your work easily and at no cost. With various different license offerings based on how much freedom you want to give people to use your writing and in which forums, Creative Commons steps you through an easy process to find the right license and then you simply download some HTML to your web-site and your covered like so:
People using the works are then morally and legally obliged to use them accordingly (or not at all if you so choose). Whether or not people act appropriately remains to be seen and there’s also the issue of the global reach of the Internet with different laws governing different jurisdictions but if this plagiarism is a concern for you then Creative Commons is definitely a step in the right direction to protecting your work.
Imagine a large dispersed staff collaborating on projects just as effectively as they would do if they were all in the same location or a small organisation avoiding costly overheads for bricks and mortar premises. This is not a pipe dream but reality for many organisations taking advantage of wiki technologies. Wikis are on-line tools that allow users to collaborate in real time over the Internet.
The best known example of a wiki is perhaps Wikipedia the on-line encyclopedia where anyone can login and contribute. Take that functionality and apply it to organisations and the ability to interact easily to get the job done is reality. Right now the most common applications of wikis are text based knowledge management, light project management and documentation related but wiki functionality is quickly being enhanced by the incorporation of voice, video and IM capabilities. Users are able to work on documents whilst simultaneously discussing and even viewing each other’s actions.
Have you ever wondered what life would be like if it was like the Internet? The folks at Elastic Path have come up with great videos to illustrate this fact. The following hilarious video shows what shopping would be like if it was like on-line shopping.
