Seeing a huge spike in keyword traffic for JuicyCampus.com right now, turns out they are on 20/20 tonight. This is the web site that allows you to leave any type of gossip about a school mate or friend. Due to the anonymous nature of the posts it has caused some what of a controversy in the press. Right now the official website is down due the 20/20 mention. Here at Mahalo we are seeing huge spikes come through for it. I guess people still actually watch the television news? They just go to the Internet to fill the many gaps it leaves.
At Mahalo we’ve been talking about our How To articles recently, the “How to Get a Car Loan” page for example is an amazing resource that performs very well. I’ve done some how to articles just here on my personal blog and I’m always amazing how well they perform, and of course monetize. If you are doing any type of content creation and not doing How To articles you are really missing out.
Now what is it going to take to get a loan for the above ride?
This Friday at noon I’m speaking on a small panel about avatars and their role in modern technology. The talk takes place at farmlab, an interesting little downtown think tank a friend from G4 introduced me to. I’ll mostly be talking about my experiences with Second Life and the many unique folks I met there.
When I do these type of talks (which I rarely do) I tend to speak loosely and not try to plan it out ahead of time. I also hate when someone gets up and reads cheesy powerpoint to me. So instead I collected about 20 nice avatar pictures from my archive and I plan to just free form talk about them. I’ve embedded the sideshow below for anyone interested. Some of you may even find yourself there
“This week’s Farmlab salon confronts the computer age’s latest multiple personality disorder: avatars. An avatar is a computer user’s icon or representation of himself to another party in a chat, instant messaging or multiplayer gaming session. It’s a caricature, not a realistic photo, and can be a simple image or a bizarre fantasy figure. In the noon Friday, May 16, salon called Identity and Virtual Space (Or, Are We Our Avatars?), a panel of experts will discuss just that - the meaning of relationships, fame, experiences and community in a virtual world. Among them are Sean Percival, a Second Life expert, and Kristen Rutherford, an actress and writer who starred in the Alternative Reality Game ilovebees (and whose voice, they readily admit, still terrifies the game’s players). Farmlab Public Salons are at 1745 N. Spring St., #4, (323) 226-1158 or farmlab.org.”
Zappos has had no shortage of coverage these days, and I just found out why.
About Zappos
An e-commerce website that launched in 1999 with next to no sales. This year they are projected to do over 1 billion in sales. Any e-commerce site owner simply needs to take a look at the company to see how its done.
My Experience
Personally I *hate* shopping for shoes. Mostly becuase I tend to wear a pair of Converse till they are literally falling apart. This is when they are at their prime actually, like the fillet minion of foot comfort. Having to find and break in a new pair is always a pain. I also wear a size 12, (crude jokes allowed in the comments below :P) so it can be difficult to even find shoes in stock.
So after hearing so much about these guys I finally gave it a shot last week. The ordering process was beyond simple, within minutes I was done. Two nice new pairs of chucks on the way. All the emails received from the web site are helpful and personal in nature.
Since the company is very social media savvy they have a presence on several services including Twitter. Here they have 4000 followers, or friends, I mean customers, or maybe fans? Honestly in this case it can be hard to tell. Regardless I’m now one of them, there I can make a direct connection with the staff and even Tony Hsieh, the companies CEO. I thanked them with an @ message and received a direct message reply from Tony himself. To consumers who are used to dealing with huge faceless companies, this is huge.
Shortly after that I received an email notice that my order was upgraded to faster overnight shipping (at no charge). The email was amazingly well crafted in this case too. I’m not sure if this was because of my contact with them on Twitter or just something they do for new customers. Ether way, an incredibly unique way to reward customers.
Now I really wanted to get my hands on the order. As it turns out UPS dropped the ball and mis routed the package for some reason. I complained on Twitter, not so much at Zappos but UPS. Again I get an email from the company apologizing the delay and including a coupon for my next order. Here was an issue, by no means their fault and they went out of their way to right it. Really just amazing.
Other Completely Crazy Things Zappos Does
Free Shipping Both Ways: Online shoppers are notorious for what is called “abandoned shopping carts”. This is when they add items to their cart but sometime during the checkout process they leave the site. Often this occurs at the order summary when shipping and taxes are shown. Offering free shipping is tough to do in some cases but a great gimmick to keep customers coming back.
365 Day Return Policy: Almost unheard of in the retail business, especially online retail. With free shipping on returns within a year this alleviates customers fear of not liking the fit/style. I imagine even if the customer is unhappy with the product, few actually go through the return process. People are busy and lazy, however having that reassurance they could return them is very valuable.
Loyalty Business Model: Their level of service and customer engagement creates evangelists. Even in the Twitter echo chamber this is highly effective. I hate to coin it but lets call it “Scobles Law”. Get the right people to talk about your product and it can reach thousands more. In my case I’ll tell 5-10 people in my close online and offline circle. Based on common marketing returns about 1-2 of those people will actually make a purchase on the site. Word of mouth marketing done very well. Some people might even write an “over the top” praising via blog post.
Customers Are the Worst Part of Any Business
Ok thats being a little dramatic, but its not completely untrue. Customers, clients, prospects they really can be a huge pain the ass. They are difficult to work, even harder to please and sometimes just out right unreasonable. You either don’t have not enough of them or wayyyy too many to deal with. I’ve run a e-commerce site for a few years so I have some experience with these types of customers. We have about 5-10 orders per day and 100K in annual sales. Even on a smaller scale the customers can make it hell sometimes. Dealing with them positively and going out of your way every time isn’t easy. Thankfully my wife has taken over that part of the business because I just didn’t have the time or patience for it. Handling that customer relationship from start to finish is probably one of the most important pieces of successful e-commerce sites.
So as a happy and new shovangelist my work here is done. I encourage you to give them a try yourself and share your thoughts below in the comments.
An earthquake measuring 7.8 has hit south-west China, according to the US Geological Survey. Reports said tremors could be felt as far afield as the Thai capital, Bangkok, and Hanoi in Vietnam. The quake struck 57 miles (92km) north-west of Sichuan’s provincial capital, Chengdu, at 1428 (0628 GMT), the survey said on its website. Via: BBC
As in previous cases news broke very quickly on Twitter, Scoble even become some type of hub of information from the scene (Twitters local to the quake).
Check out Summerize’s search for earthquake right now.
I see Twitter having its own natural disaster and crashing any moment now. Sunday nights are notoriously bad for any server/data center.
When I look at technologies like Qik (which allows you to stream live video from your cell phone) I can’t help but think back to the more humble roots of the cell phone. At one point simply having a still camera on a cell phone was a novelty, something only available on high end phones and used by a select few. The images caputred from these first camera phones were shit and hard to get off the phone in most cases. Naturally this has changed and today we now enjoy higher quality photos that are easier to share with others. Most importantly though, the camera has just about become a standard feature on many cell phones.
Something similar is now happening with video on your cell phone. It’s becoming available on more and more phones and complimented with a service like Qik, much more useful. Just like before the entry level is currently high in both terms of cost and ease of use but that wont last forever. I’ve been playing around with Qik the last week and whipped up a few thoughts, please let me know yours in the comments.
Why is everything cooler/harder/faster/stronger in Japan?
Tell me about it, the tipping point for me regarding Qik was actually seeing Eric Rice steam from Japan recently. While I had seen the service in use several times before the initial experiences were not good. The United States cell network being what it is turns many Qik streams into a clunky buffering based hell. However, in Japan the network is of course faster and better equipped for streaming. Eventually we are going to get something faster, until then its going to be an uphill battle to effectively use the service. Japan and other countries are likely to be the innovators in this space until once again, we catch up.
Insight, Behind Closed Doors and Archived
Technology aside what really interests me here is the opportunity for streaming from unique places and experiences. Sharing something like this with those who can’t be there is a very powerful technology. Events, interviews and general “scrapbook” life memories can now all be captured. The live feature isn’t even so important here as everything is nicely archived as well. If you are writing your Twitter autobiography a service like Qik can serve as the highlights reel.
Sweet Sweet Piracy!
Can I take a Qik enabled phone and stream what ever I want? How about paid events like concerts or movies? Oh course doing something like walks all over someones copy write/IP and in a sense you are giving away what many are paying for. For now I imagine we can get away with a lot but probably not for that much longer. Eventually the big companies are going catch wind and let the C&D notices fly.
Death Casting is the new Life Casting
Ok, lets get a little morbid for a second. When are we going to see the first life and death use of a service like Qik? Think back to the demand for online videos during the Indonesian Tsunami, now think of the value of having that video live and interactive. How about the worlds first live streamed suicide? Once again lets let Japan lead the way here. Creepy, morbid but certainly possible and I would even say inevitable. When Steve Jobs snuffed Violet Blue and it was captured on Qik it literally brought the service to its knees. Lets hope they are able to scale when the first big life or death moment makes its way there.
I’m looking forward to seeing where this all goes, what else does the future of life casting via cell phone hold?
You may have already read over on Jason’s blog that Mahalo is looking for a great system engineer in los angeles. As our traffic keeps growing its more and more important we have the right people behind it, manning the systems and keeping everything running smoothly.
Here is the job description:
Please send your deets to jason at mahalo.com and cc mark at mahalo.com with the subject line “I kick ass“
Systems Engineer, Los Angeles
Mahalo.com, Inc. is a new human-powered social search service backed by Sequoia Capital (the world’s #1 venture firm), Newscorp, CBS, Elon Musk (Paypal founder), and others. This kind of opportunity is extremely rare in LA: these high-profile rewards are usually found only in Silicon Valley.
We’re looking for a seasoned Systems Engineer. You should be expert in massively scalable architectures, how MySQL and Linux interact, how MySQL and memcache interact, sharding, replication (including multiple
master replication) and how to tune MySQL based on various schemas for maximum performance and availability. You are a HANDS ON implementor, a get-it-done kind of developer. The right person is a self starter with the “general get it factor”. You work well with a team of like-minded engineers, and have a genuine desire for excellence.
You should be expert with:
Applications: PHP 5.x, MySQL 5.x, memcache 1.2.x
Protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, Unicast and Multicast socket programming
Scripting languages: Unix shell scripting
Other languages: Applicants with C, Java, and Objective-C experience preferred
Bonus: Hadoop / HBase, Lucene, Nutch, Spread
As a bonus, if you can help find the right person we are offering a $1000 bonus and tickets to the upcoming TechCrunch50 event (a $2000 value). We have a great team at Mahalo is there someone out there up for the task?
Let’s find out! I just installed the new Seesmic Wordpress plug-in here on my blog. From what I recall I first saw video blog comments over at Mashable. Mike at Techcrunch followed shortly after (come on buddy gotta keep up with us kids) using Seesmic. So really though, the question is are people going to use them? Personally I think its a great way to keep the conversation going on a blog post. Ok, so some users have a face made for typing, still anyone can better express themselves through audio/video.
There is one nice feature with this plug-in which allows for anonymous video comments. This helps lower the bar a bit becuase not everyone is has Seesmic account. All the user needs is an active web cam flash installed to get started. I’m going to leave it open and see if anything interesting comes through. Just no video Viarga comments please.
Look in the bottom left corner under the comment box. Say hello!
Update: Seesmic put together a little video about the plug-in as well.
This is great, every Simpsons Intro ever (just about) sliced together and sped up. Check us this insanely detailed wikipedia page with a list of all intros.
Second Life, the virtual world that millions call “home” and millions of others enjoy having a good laugh at. An experiment, the future, completely useless? Those statements are probably all both correct and incorrect at the same time.
People like myself gravitate to a platform like Second Life for many reasons. Constructing anything in 3D can be a powerful experience and until recently out of the reach to most. Second Life lowers the entry level (perhaps too low?) and offers a platform that has yet to be matched in terms of a complete solution. Introduce the concept of an economy and naturally you’ll get your wantrepreneurs, scammers, greifers, and general weirdos that make things interesting. Following the local news and gossip here and you’ll find its very much some bizarre society seen commonly in Twilight Zone episodes.
On the infrastructure side there have always been problems. Talented residents work around the issues while Linden Labs (creator of Second Life) appears to apply “scotch tape” based solutions or simply ignore the issue all together. A major rework of the infrastructure/client is in order but how? That would be similar to asking the cable company rebuild their entire “grid”. They are too entrenched in what can only be SQL database hell and VPN purgatory.
So looking back to the residents, like any society you have generations or loosely connected groups of people who build, change and contribute. Second Life isn’t very old so it’s initial residents only date back a few years, for example some of the oldest residents are sometimes referred to as “The Class of 2003″. While there is no shortage of talented residents funneling into Second Life many are starting to turn their back. I can’t help but wonder what this says about the service when some of the most dedicated users are looking for the teleport out. Let’s take a look at a few:
The infamous antagonist just today announced a strike, or vacation, or who knows. In any case she’ll return but is she ever going to turn her back for good? This is a resident who has probably spent more time in-world than many of the Lindens themselves. Her blog posts tend to be absurdly long (that last one was 2000 plus words) and she has observed/complained about/poked just about every corner of the virtual world of Second Life. While many would gladdy take a Second Life without Prokofy (at times I’m one of them) her role is still significant here.
Eric’s departure is a little quieter (which is a bit surprising if you know Eric) then someone like Prokofy. Eric at one point owned 4 simulators (an $800 per month investment) that he used for various types of development. He coined the term “Massive Multiplayer Photoshop” which is probably one of the better Second Life descriptions. I know I’ll see (or at least hear from) Eric in other virtual spaces, however I wonder if we’ll ever get the chance to sit around the fire and shot the shit in Saijo City again.
Sean Voss (Sean Percival, aka Me):
If you are reading this blog or following me you probably already know I wrote the “Second Life Travel Guide“. The book deal came to me by chance almost, literally setup over a dinner in Palo Alto. I had already started to explore Second Life and felt the market could benefit from such a guide. I took the better part of 3 months and spend insane amounts of time traveling, cataloging and preparing the book. Along the way I discovered why so many were drawn to it, the reasons go on and on. I’ve invested somewhere between $3000 into the service over the last year and own two ocean SIM islands. Between the myriad of grid issues and increasingly busy first life, my free time and interest have wained. While I know I’ll return (or at least check in), for the next few months you aren’t likely to find me on this grid. If you are a reader of my book please contact me by email any time (me at seanpercival.com), I love all the feedback I’ve received so far. I’m going to keep Landmark Island online so feel free to drop by there as well. I still plan to go to SLCC in September and hope to return to a better virtual world at this time.
I still have no doubt virtual worlds have some place in the future. However I can’t help but feel they will be given to us by companies and not the user-generated polar opposite. Perhaps they can meet somewhere in the middle, I for one want to build my shit in Liberty City.
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