Likes & Launch

Feb 14

For more information check out our City Love page!

What city do you love? Share it!

Feb 13

“Twitter is about you. Facebook is about you and your friends. Google is about searching for stuff all by yourself (with someone else’s tool, of course). Apple is about Steve Jobs making the things you crave. And it always will be. He knew what you wanted in a computer with style and grace … in music you made your own and carried around … in movies about kids’ toys that made grownups cry … in a mobile phone that changed everything … in a tablet computer nobody thought they needed.” — You, Apple and Steve Jobs | Tnooz

“Ecommerce sites should consider how they can personalize their sites using Facebook data, as a new study shows 50% of visitors to ecommerce sites are currently logged in to Facebook.” — 50% Of Ecommerce Site Visitors Are Logged In To Facebook | TechCrunch

Feb 09

The Chill Blog: Sunset Blvd. -

chilllive:

We’ve built something new at Chill. We’re calling the feature Sunset Blvd.

The concept is simple: you’ve got friends on Facebook and Twitter who aren’t yet on Chill (shocking, we know). So we decided to make it easy for you to find and watch the videos these folks are sharing. Any video links…

Feb 07

gtrot:

There’s exactly one week left to get your Valentine’s Day plans together. If you’re a slowpoke or simply clueless, we’re here to help you!

Your No-Nonsense Valentine’s Day Guide will give you a few suggestions on how to make this Valentine’s Day the best one yet:

SAY IT LIKE YOU MEAN IT.

IScreenYouScreen has lots of prints to help express how you really feel.

MAKE YOUR RESERVATION NOW.

The OpenTable app is the easiest way to make a dinner reservation. Download it now!

HEARTBEATS.

Personalized gifts, FTW! Create a CD/playlist for your lover’s ears only. The songs can be from your first dance, a live concert you attended together or just a tune that reminds you of that special someone.

DO SOMETHING TOGETHER.

Get close and personal! We have a lot of couple friendly deals on gtrot. There are so many options ranging from a chocolate & wine tastings to dance lessons. Search for your city on the gtrot homepage and once you’re in, click the Deals tab to see what’s available.

DONATE AS A GIFT.

Show your partner your soft side. Make a donation to a charity:water or a charity of your choice in their name. It’s the gift that keeps giving.

We hope you all have a wonderful Valentine’s Day!

Valentine’s Day is one week away!

Wake up Barnes & Noble!

Growing up, my parents often took us to Barnes and Noble. Whether it was Friday evening after dinner or a rainy Sunday afternoon, trips to the bookstore were a rare occasion that fed the curiosities of everyone in my family — something they believed should be practiced often.

These trips to B&N planted seeds to learn something new. My sister would head over to the fashion section; my father to the business or new releases, my brother often to the video game magazines and my mother to the travel section or novels. Although we found ourselves browsing different areas, there were always new conversations at home that led to us understanding each other’s interests and goals better than before.

Since I grew up going to Barnes & Noble, the recent New York Times article, “The Bookstore’s Last Stand,” frustrated me even more. In it, B&N spells out their plan to focus solely on selling the Nook and digital content to save the fledging company.

Sound familiar? It should: it’s an uninspired “me-too” strategy following in the footsteps of Amazon. But here’s the difference — if B&N continues down this path, they’ll be transforming a brick-and-mortar book browsing asset into a device retailer that more closely resembles Best Buy or Radio Shack.

Stores are an asset
I’m a self-professed Amazon fangirl and admire what they’re doing with the publishing industry. They’re taking an inefficient and unreasonable economic model and turning it upside-down, democratizing a platform that has been inaccessible to thousands of would-be writers. In the end, writers, readers and trees win.

Rightly so, B&N, as well as the publishing industry, is terrified of Amazon. But in the quest to drive more e-book sales, B&N risks overlooking one of its largest competitive advantages: its stores. Despite the profession that “our stores are going nowhere,” CEO William Lynch is focusing on the wrong areas of his retail spaces:

Back in New York, Mr. Lynch has been working to revamp the look of Barnes & Noble stores. Last year, the company expanded sections for toys and games and added shiny new display space for its Nook devices. In another sign of the digital revolution, Mr. Lynch expects to eliminate the dedicated sections for music and DVD’s within two years — while still selling some of them elsewhere in the stores. He also plans to experiment with slightly smaller stores.

I’m astounded by the shortsightedness. If these moves are taken to be true, Lynch will be ignoring the core tenets of the bookstore, cited elsewhere in the same article:

What publishers count on from bookstores is the browsing effect. Surveys indicate that only a third of the people who step into a bookstore and walk out with a book actually arrived with the specific desire to buy one.

B&N doesn’t need to rethink the book — they need to rethink the store. Expanding the size of toys & games doesn’t cut it. People go there to learn something new, be entertained, or find information.

So how do you rethink the retail experience and take advantage of 703 stores in 50 states? Pull an Apple. Even better, it’s an area where Amazon will be hard-pressed to compete.

Barnes and Noble 2.0: Creating Experiences
What large bookstores have always been successful at is their ability to provide access to thousands of topics in a single place. B&N should embrace this promise by dedicating 15-30% of floorspace to a theater/classroom. The Prince Street Apple store in New York City comes to mind — offering a comfortable auditorium where ideas can be shared or classes taught.

Want to learn to cook? Interested in WWII history? Taking a trip to Thailand? All of these answers sit on the bookshelves of B&N. Harnessing all of the knowledge in the space to get more people into the store is only the beginning. Providing a third place in a community where people can spend time learning is the bigger vision.

Educational content at scale
Providing in-depth classes, teachers and a curriculum is a huge undertaking but thankfully there is a growing trend in a new educational model. Instead of recruiting teachers for a strict curriculum, content will be driven by the community. SkillShare and Dabble, startups that allows anyone to teach or take a class, have proven there is demand for learning from our peers. “Teachers” (people with passion about a topic) offer their courses for a set price, attendees purchase tickets online and classes are taught in person. The company takes a portion of ticket sales.

Whether B&N would build the same technology or license/buy an existing company is up to them. They already have the advantage of an massive distribution system: email, retail, loyalty customers. This could see an additional revenue stream from their retail spaces and would match well to selling books that match the topic taught in each class.

Publishers need a new perspective
A seemingly misguided publishing president said, ”the biggest challenge is to give people a reason to step into Barnes & Noble stores in the first place. ‘They have figured out how to use the store to sell e-books,” she said of the company. “Now, hopefully, we can figure out how to make that go full circle and see how the e-books can sell the print books.’”

This overlooks two major opportunities for publishers. First, publishers, just like music executives a few years ago, have to realize that making money off of the content alone is a dying business. Packaging the paperbook as a limited edition, adding media or access to the author will become more common as ebooks drive down the price of books. B&N doesn’t have to just be a sales channel for paperbooks, it can be a personal plaform to sell the book, author and extra experiences.

Second, the key to a successful book is attracting an audience. Good writing is essential, but customers are key to making money. The publisher’s role is to distribute, promote and market the story to find the audience. Cutting through the noise of thousands of books on a bookshelf is no small feat, but there is a huge opportunity to reach the thousands of people walking into physical stores to make them part of that audience. Publishers should focus on how to grow the audience more than just the medium in which content sold.

How could book stores help with that? Imagine if media, video and voice recordings from the author came with the book. They could distribute the ideas of the author, her true voice and vision into rich experiences across the country. People would show up to be entertained and may leave as new readers. We’ve seen movies made from books drive more book sales, why not let every author have that chance using new media? Even a simple video of the author reading a passage is a low cost way to spread the message. If B&N can provide the audience and the instant gratification of retail, it seems like a win-win.

Bigger vision, bigger mission
In a country where unemployment borders double-digits and higher education is showing the signs of a bubble, there is a huge opportunity to create a third place to learn new skills and feed curiosity for new opportunities. Barnes & Noble already has an existing advantage of presence in communities across the country, so instead of being concerned about being disrupted by an online retailer, it should instead focus on disrupting another industry entirely: education.

Barnes and Noble shouldn’t just be thinking about reinventing the book, but rather, the bookstore. And perhaps in the future, my family will travel to Barnes and Noble on a Friday evening to spend an hour learning together — and, who knows — we might even buy a book.

I’ve made a habit to write when I have ideas about different industries. I’m going to start sharing them instead of keeping them in a folder. Comments, thoughts and advice on better writing are welcome! @br_ttany

Feb 06

“Again doesn’t just define the things and experiences we love, though. It’s part of the decisions that define who we are.” — Brian Bailey | Again

Jan 30

TechCrunch misses the point on personalization -

caterpillarcowboy:

TechCrunch published an article yesterday about the challenges of personalization and why no one has been able to innovate beyond what Amazon did 10 years ago. Leena Rao makes a good effort in trying to understand the challenges, mentioning the need for intent-based data, making sense of social, and privacy concerns. All are true. But the framework with which she’s approaching the problem is wrong.

The right way to look at this is by splitting the world of products into two: products that age and products that don’t.

Books retain value over time. A book you wanted to read last year is something you’d still consider buying today (hence, the existence of airport bookstores). Same goes for movies, which is why Netflix beat Blockbuster.

Fashion items (shoes, clothing, accessories) do not. Softlines (the retail term for fashion items) are extremely seasonal; items go out of style within months and unsold ones end up on the discount rack.

You’ll notice that successful personalization tech is tightly focused around items in the first category. Books, music, video, kitchen appliances, gardening equipment, (to a lesser extent) electronics - all things that Amazon’s recommendation algorithms are good at. (I would know, I was the product manager for that team). That’s because these products have a long enough shelf life to reach a critical mass of purchase data. You need dense datasets to do personalization right.

Where does personalization suck? The second category. To make it even more difficult, items in this category tend to be ones that you can look at and within half a second decide if you like it or not. They are visual, tactile, sensual. They are also highly individual - a watch that I love is also something you might hate, even if we share the same taste in movies. Hell, I might even love one watch but hate another that almost looks exactly the same. People shop in this category by gut feel and emotion, not by attempting to maximize a list of requirements and system specs. The result is a very sparse dataset with items going out of style too fast for the algorithms to become useful. What you end up with is least common denominator recs (like white socks and undershirts) that completely lack joy and delight.

The solution, like Leena points at, is social, although she gets it slightly wrong. I’ll follow up this post with my thoughts on how social can really make personalization work.

Very much agreed. Locations can split the two. Just because you went to a restaurant a year ago didn’t mean that you liked it. If you like hot dogs at 2 in the morning, it doesn’t mean you want to eat them for dinner. There is a balance between an expiring good and a permanent one. We’ve had a huge focus on personalization for local at gtrot. We find that social helps create stronger signals and looking at places you’ve been help surface similar places but it still isn’t perfect. Taking into account the what’s happening now is also part of it.

Jan 29

(Source: onlylogan, via tumblrgym)

Perspective.

(via justbeenjustin)