Data Alchemy

I've spent the last 10 years messing with someone or other's data and helping turn it into shareholder value - from multi-national Fortune 100 companies to tiny bootstrapped startups and with full-scale Enterprise Business Intelligence to just a few guys and a machine-learning algorithm in the cloud. There's a common thread running though the most successful cases - these are the companies that really nailed it. (November 2011)

The Value Added Aggregator


Retailing has been with us for as long as we can remember. Aggregation and Comparison Sites are today's drivers of traffic and how consumers search for products. Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) has yet to take off bringing the ability for consumers to interact with vendors of products. Do retailers need to behave more like aggregators, particularly as they grow their marketplaces? How are retailers gradually and perhaps unconsciously beginning to adopt VRM practices?
(July 2011)

VRM, Fourth Party and the Empowered Consumer

What happens when you reverse the marketing funnel and you allow a consumer to specify exactly what they want? So a merchant or manufacturer would be able to go to the market and ask 'who is looking for this item at this price at this location?' and will obtain a list of qualified buyers. A number of ideologies and start-ups are taking advantage of web-technology to allow consumers to publish their needs and wants - will the end-result be a new breed of electronically enabled 'middle-men'? (April 2011)

Retail Futures - The Technology Imperative

The provocation is that a traditional retailer’s current set of capabilities and differentiators no longer delivers competitive advantage: Drop Ship Vendors, Third Party Logistics and Last Mile Delivery, Electronically Fulfilled Products, International Fulfillment Agencies, Payment Transaction Handlers, Auction Sellers, Marketplaces and Full-Service Ecommerce Cloud Services have removed the barrier to entry. A host of new entrants, not instantly recognizable as retailers, is turning the retail experience inside out.

Priming the iPad for for Frictionless Retailing

Back in the late nineties Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com coined the term 'frictionless retailing' - throwing down the gauntlet to online retailers to improve product search, personalization, customer loyalty, recommendations and simplified carts and payments - yet today the consumer experience is far from frictionless. The arrival of the iPad could enable online retailers bring their shopping experiences up to date.