E-Commerce Blog

Cyber Monday, once considered the No. 1 shopping day for e-commerce and retail Web sites, has become the official kickoff to the holiday season and a key marketing event for the online community. As with any economic marker, it is vulnerable to credit crunches and significant financial tide changes. Just as weather predictions help us to plan accordingly, knowing what to expect from holiday shoppers during the highest selling season of the year enables online merchants to prepare properly.

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Cyber Monday Is Not Extinct - It Has Evolved

Sometimes you walk away from a user group meeting concluding that the company didn’t introduce much that was really new. You might get the usual product announcements or the dot-version releases and you may take a course that makes you a little smarter about the fine points of some esoteric feature that helps you to do your job. You might say that such gatherings are evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Last week’s Oracle OpenWorld was nothing like that.

Original post:
Oracle’s OpenWorld Revolution

The other day I had a conversation with some nice people from the market research company Coleman Parkes Research. They wanted to tell me about a study they have recently concluded about social networking. I have to say it was pretty interesting stuff. I will leave it to you to search for them and to download their full report. What was interesting to me is the evidence they turn up about adoption and how the adoption of social media to date by companies follows an early adopter pattern.

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The Social Media Puzzle

“Peak oil” is a term that resonates very little with about 95 percent of the population. I discovered this by asking a lot of people and getting blank stares. A few hardy souls ventured a guess, and those guesses were not far from reality. If you take those words to a search engine you will be surprised by the number of hits you get. I got nearly 5 million hits the first time I searched on the term. The online community is awash in blogs and publications from experts in the oil industry, economists, investment bankers, geologists, scientists and many others.

Here is the original post:
The Next Big Disruption: Peak Oil

This is an interesting time of year for me, mostly because there’s so much to watch. I call it “analyst season,” not so much because of anything I do, but because the big guys tend to publish a lot of new reports documenting their view of the pecking order. In addition to the publication of new analyst reports, there is a rush of user group meetings and trade shows to attend between now and turkey day, as everyone tries to generate leads that will close before year end. Generally, there is a lot of good information — perhaps too much.

Excerpt from:
Analyst Season