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2

Fish and chips? Non merci

Posted on November 2nd, 2010 by Hervé

These pasta are eaten in the UK and certainly look yummy!

Completely off-topic but I just read that the British Tourist Authority, VisitBritain, has recently done a survey interviewing about 26,000 would be travellers and found that, unsurprisingly, tourist from continental Europe rated British food as “very bad”. And French tourist are amongst the harshest, followed by Germans, Spanish and Italians.

As a French national who’s been living in the UK for more than 11 years, I have to comment on that “travel related” survey and fly the flag of my host country. Day to day cuisine in the UK can be a great experience. There is far more diversity over here than there is in France, Germany, Spain or Italy. If a tourist (or for that matter someone living here) wants to have top food from Italy, Spain, India or wherever, he or she can find many good places to satisfy his/her craving for it very easily. That’s because Britain and London especially are very attractive to a whole range of culture. But in Paris, Berlin or Madrid, you’d be more hard pressed to get as much choice of different cultures. You’d get delicious local food but not diversity . Additionally, Britain has evolved dramatically over the last 10/15 years not just on the business side but on the way of life too and you’d get excellent gastro pub that would certainly beat french restaurants hands down, no doubt. Just ask me, I know a few around to recommend…

(photo by zitona)

Posted in chilling | No Comments »

22

Prototype, workshop and Agile approach

Posted on October 22nd, 2010 by Hervé

Wormhole: models of software development?

September and October have been very busy and November is looking to be quite hectic too. As we are gradually growing business, we have had in September the pleasure to host our first workshop in New Delhi with Osvald from TheRouteBox.com. Osvald is the founder of a company called Drivania which has been providing ground transportation services for about 10 years. During this time, Drivania have developed a significant amount of IP in this space which is one of the rare segment of travel which has not seen a lot of technology development. Everybody can book a flight or a train very easily but how to book a private car very easily from where ever in the world? There is no market place right now and this is what TheRouteBox will be providing very soon.

The way we work with our customers who need development service is on what is known as an Agile basis. In essence, the philosophy of Agile development is to prioritise collaboration over documentation, accept change of requirements even late in the development phase and have tight collaboration between technology and business owners. We are a little bit like shells of wormhole, we are progressing by iteration, starting small and aiming for perfection (well, I stress it, aiming for only. I personally believe wormhole do achieve perfection as shown on this post picture, so maybe we should aim to be wormholes?) As we often develop complex platforms we also work by prototyping tools (we like Just in Mind tool www.justinmind.com) so we can have upfront a good definition of what the solution will really look like from the user’s perspective even before the development effort starts. It also helps to avoid communication errors. With a prototype quite mature and the development already on the way, we’ve had Osvald in Delhi for an enjoyable and very valuable workshop with some of the development team. That not only help everybody to get to know each other pretty well but we’ve also been able to synch up on all the changes that had been made on the prototype over the last few weeks and those planned in the weeks ahead, making full benefit of our Agile development approach. We’ve done a little video of the workshop which you can see on our what we do page. I’ll put the video in the blog soon so that we can get your feedback and make the next one even better

(photo by jurvetson)

Tags: Agile, Just in Mind, prototyping tool, software development
Posted in Agile, Development, Internet stuff | No Comments »

12

Do you want some content after this advert sir?

Posted on October 12th, 2010 by Hervé

As we know, video is now more or less the norm in reliable ecommerce platforms which is creating a huge demand on infrastructure. This is notably causing the whole debate about net neutrality. And the trend now is to add little adverts, embedded in the video, creating more opportunities for e-commerce marketers.

Are you annoyed by these clips that last a few tens of a second (I don’t know if there is a norm by the way, I would be curious to see what viewers acceptance is, any study has been made out there?). Well, if you are, you should be greatly relieved that you are not living in the early days of television where these “clips” were much longer! See the Texaco advert below…

(via Video commerce consortium)

Tags: advertising, e-commerce
Posted in Online marketing, chilling, e-commerce | No Comments »

6

Free delivery: US retailers are fighting back

Posted on October 6th, 2010 by Hervé

But how will the free returns work!

U.S. retailers have been feeling the effect of Amazon Prime, the membership program of the e-commerce behemoth which, for an annual fee of $79, gives its customers free two days shipping. People have been subscribing to this membership in large numbers, shipping being naturally a very visible difference customers can feel when buying online compared to when buying in the high street. In reaction to Prime, a number of U.S. retailers have just released their very own collaborative program, called ShopRunner. Across a range of retailers, members of ShopRunner will be able to enjoy not only free shipping but also, just to up the ante, free return. Interestingly, these retailers have not limited this scheme to a unique retailer in a specific category with for example, both Borders and Barnes and Nobles both participating in the scheme.

Appetite for the Amazon solution, which has just below 10% of the e-commerce market share in the US, was very high when the membership was launch in February 2005 that whilst the volume of business of Amazon did increase 24%, earnings fell 30%. So for retailers who are sharing the scheme amongst AND offering the free return, one could reasonably assume that such a venture will be tough to be made profitable, considering the huge operational implication of ops and communication across retailers.

My guess is that UK retailers will also look into that initiative very closely and I would not be surprised if they were to replicate a similar initiative, probably at the invitation of GSI commerce who is managing the scheme.

(photo by Beverly & Pack)

Tags: Amazon, e-commerce, free shipping
Posted in e-commerce | No Comments »

23

We are beating Facebook!

Posted on September 23rd, 2010 by Hervé

As you may know, Bloospring has committed to give one percent of its revenues to environmental NGO. There are a whole raft of reasons for this, including the fact that we believe businesses have to be the force of change and that hard nose capitalism is on its way out. Having said this, luckily for the good causes, there are other people who are committing if not 1% of their revenue but a portion of their wealth. And Mark Zuckerberg, found of Facebook, has just announced that he was to donate $100Mn of his wealth to Newark schools. Admittedly, that is unlikely to make a dent to his $6.9bn net worth as estimated by Forbes, putting him incidentally ahead of Steve Jobs. Actually, doing the numbers, that means that if we were to take company worth in the case of Facebook ($23 bn) and our commitment related to turnover in the case of Bloospring, with Zuckerberg giving $100Mn and assuming other don’t give much, we are beating Facebook in the “philanthropy” department. Cool! Well, granted, complex but makes us feel good

Tags: facebook, philantropy
Posted in One per cent for the planet | No Comments »

7

Leak in the Gulf of Mexico: tragedy for some, boon for others…

Posted on September 7th, 2010 by Hervé

We know that big corporation are spending large amount of money on search advertising. The details are naturally a little bit less known. Well, they were until recently thanks to AdAge who had access to an internal document from Google. The article is well worth reading for those curious about these things. The bits I did find interesting are:

Apple spends about $1Mn in the month covered by the data (not visible in this chart). That was at the time of the launch of the iphone 4 but I would have thought that such a large budget wasn’t needed for a product like the iphone. I wonder if the antenna issues prompted the Cupertino firm to spend so much or whether their search normally always spends so much for products launches. I would assume the former rather than the latter
AT&T is the largest buyer in this period. Again, the iphone launch had probably an impact in their online marketing spend and it is still very small compared to its yearly TV spend of $1.8 bn!
Despite the size of the spend by big US advertisers, these 10 big boys only represent 5% of Google total US revenues…
BP, like all major oil corp, is normally a small buyer of search advertising but jumped in the top 10 “thanks” to the leak in the Gulf of Mexico. Whilst $3.6 Mn in a month is a large amount, it is still small compared to the nearly $80 Mn spent in the first half of the year (compared to about $90Mn in 2009). As we say in French, “le malheur des uns fait le bonheur des autres” (which could be translated to “What is a tragedy for some is a boon for others”) and the tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico certainly please the advertising industry as a whole and Google in particular…

Tags: BP, Google
Posted in Online marketing | No Comments »

10

Peak District:1 Mallorca:0

Posted on August 10th, 2010 by Hervé

What is great with e-commerce solutions is the massive amount of data which can be gathered and used for marketing purposes (for example). It’s also very interesting to correlate e-commerce data with macro-economics. When it comes to travel, iknow uk has recently released some data which, whilst being exactly in line with “expectations”, are also demonstrating that the recession has “hit” some of part of the travel industry and benefited others.

iknow-uk, a domestic travel website focused on (no point for guessing here) the UK has reported a large increase in visitors 25% in July, with more than 90% of their traffic coming from the UK. In essence, less Brits heading to the Spanish beaches and more people heading for the peak district (iknow-peakdistrict.co.uk is one of the most popular web destination). I am not sure whether this qualifies as real “stay cation” but people might well prefer to head for short break accessible by car, hence saving on the airline travels and possibly the accommodation due to the euro’s increase in strength. If the total spend by tourists were to be the sam, economists would say that, overall, it’s a no sum gain (or a displacement or any other fancy word economists love using) but I am pretty sure that the Spanish tourist industry does not see it this way… Spain has done very well in the World Cup and England rather poorly, so at least the credit crunch has helped the British economy score one point at the expense of the Spanish one…

On another note, this is typically the type of initiative which big G probably does not like as iknow-uk has certainly optimised on a whole raft of keywords (with URL dedicated to key destinations), hence cunningly developing web destination(s) and cutting revenue opportunities for big G (not that we would worry for them either!). Clearly another reason why Google should not go try to go down in verticals, there is so much diversity which entrepreneurs can focus on, it can’t compete on all fronts and should instead focus on strengthening its core technologies and developing new services that we can then all embed and make the most of.

Note: BAA released interesting numbers with the overal traffic from its airports down 0.4% but traffic from Heathrow seeing a 2.9% increase. A little for the way: it recorded its busiest day on the 18 of July with 232,000 passengers passing through. So business is up, using Heathrow, foreign hols are down (“stay-cation” are up) with airports like Glasgow, Stansted or Southampton all seeing decreased volumes

Posted in Entrepreneurs, Online marketing, Travel technology, e-commerce | No Comments »

5

Is God an investor?

Posted on August 5th, 2010 by Hervé

This is not a proselyte post. I just video interviewed a great serial entrepreneur and learned about one of his business in the sport sector. He made what is undoubtedly the most unlikely exit. Won’t tell more, more on this shortly, small clue in the title of course …

Posted in Entrepreneurs | No Comments »

27

Our value proposition

Posted on July 27th, 2010 by Hervé

Ok, this is a little bit MBA/consultant-ish but as we are evolving we are gradually firming up how we are supporting our customers. And (brace yourselves) as one picture is more than hundred words (I did warn you), we’ve put it all nicely around our logo. We’ve actually thought about it when we created our double looped logo. The two main legs of our business, customer software development (with a slant on e-commerce platforms) and online marketing are represented by the double loops and the upwards motion is the one we thrive to give as an outcome of our collaboration with our customers.

We’ve just come up with the picture with some words around to make it more explicit. The design is far from being final but we will work on it over time, nothing is perfect first go (or how to use agile principles even in marketing pictures!). Talking to clients and prospects, the feedback on our logo and the concept has always been great which is obviously very nice to hear and gratifying (especially considering the hours we spent on coming up with the name and the double loop design, anyone who has ever had to come up with a company name actually knows what I mean…).

So, enough words, here is the picture…

Tags: Bloospring, Marketing, Value proposition
Posted in Bloospring | No Comments »

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