A quick round-up of what we liked on the web this week, ending 24th July.
Conference Call
If you’ve ever had to endure conference calls, this video that’s been doing the rounds this week will bring a smile to your face.
A classic example of what’s wrong with retail.
A bit of a single issue rant, really, when you might expect more from this site, but, nonetheless, it raises a few excellent points on how & why a lot of eCommerce is still failing to understand the importance of being customer centric.
This post by Patricia McDonald, chief strategy officer at Isobar, builds on a few earlier ones (linked in the article) about how, perhaps, it’s now time to sit back from the constantly running stream of social media newsfeeds, and also looks at the consensus about the connected consumer, changes to how we percieve brands and more that have been reached in the past few years
Oxfam released figures that the World’s 85 Richest Are Now Worth as Much as 3.5 Billion Poorest, timed to coincide with the World Economic Forum in Davos. The numbers are shocking but this video of Kevin O’Leary’s reaction to the announcement has been getting almost as much attention.
Are We Ready for the Personal Web?
Your web, with content, jokes, TV shows and advertising personalised just for you, invisibly & automatically, and all based upon behavioural data that’s been captured over time….hmmm. Personally, I’m not convinced of the benefits beyond less annoying adverts and I believe we’re a long way from truly workable data-driven personalisation at the level this article espouses but things can happen very quickly on the web. But I’ve been wrong before and, with massive leaps forward in artificial intelligence (see Google’s acquisition of Deep Mind in light of their Nest purchase), we may be talking a few years rather than decades before big data driven personalisation is a reality.
Amazon’s PR Machine is in Overdrive
It seems like Amazon has gone into overdrive recently, announcing extreme ideas that, at first, seem feasible but, on closer examination, are quite ridiculous. We’ve had the Amazon Prime Air drone delivery system, which would be dangerous and impractical in any urban environment, but now we have the “anticipatory shipping”, a method to start delivering packages even before customers click “buy”.
It could shave minutes of your delivery time (WooHoo!).
Squarespace’s Logo Creation Tool
Some designers aren’t happy about The Squarespace Logo Creation tool but it is what it is, a tool for making a pretty, if somewhat generic, logo. We built a similar logo designer tool in Flash for a laugh back in the mid-noughties.
Branding is so much more than a logo, but this is a fun toy for the small businesses who just want to get a logo sorted out and the results are far better than using a bit of clip art. If you’re a designer and you feel threatened by Squarespace Logo Creator, it’s probably time to reassess your career.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBQ3FW8HaTA
http://www.squarespace.com/logo
Well, that about wraps it up for this week. Tune in next week for the next round-up.