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)

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)

The Retail industry continues to evolve, shaped by the business environment, advanced through technology and at the whim of global tradewinds. Whether it is consumers that initiate the change or that retailers force change upon the consumer can be debated, but it is the change that is inevitable. The question is what will those changes look like? (May 2011)

According to this article on BargainBabe.com it is possible to trick the airlines into giving you a cheap flight by getting off the plane at a layover point. In an age of Security Checkpoints, Data Mining and Social Networks the implications of this could be deeper than you might guess (May 2011)

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)

I'm feeling a little like Goldilocks and her porridge at the moment - some of the explanations are toooooo complicated and others are tooooo simple - and nothing was just right... and then I found it - so just wanting to share. (February 2011)

The effects of Social Media have been felt by traditional News Media for some time. Traditional eCommerce Sites maybe about to feel the same effects from technology -centric startups. An experience with the New York times led me to think about how news sites should examine possible friction points and work on ways of removing them

Times are a-changing and each Holiday season brings with it technology innovations and whole new models for retail businesses. Consumers will expect more and to stay competitive, merchants will need to deliver on promise.

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.

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.