My friend Mark at Level 11 Consulting just told me about Wordle and it’s really a great way to instantly create a visual image of data or as they call them “word clouds”

Here’s a Wordle of my first book, Rethink.

Give it a try.

In fairness, this issue isn’t limited to UPS, that just happens to be the source of my most recent bad experience with this.

What’s the shipping dinosaur?  SIGNATURE REQUIRED.

When you ship something to your workplace, it’s no big pain. The delivery person seems completely disinterested in who signs as long as they get a scribble on the wireless device they use to document receipt.  I get that, but it’s not really a very useful step in the process when anyone in your office can sign for something, whether they are your boss or a temporary worker you don’t really even know.

At home it’s an entirely different story. 

I recently ordered a birthday present for my son who will be ten next month.  The shipping organization chose to send the package “signature required” and didn’t give me any other alternative.  So when it shipped, I went online to track the package and checked every box there was to check to have them notify me via email when the package got closer to delivery.   In my limited experience, FedEx does a decent job of this going so far as to tell you when it’s on the truck to give you some idea of at least what day it will arrive.  In the case of the birthday present for my son, I got one alert, notifying me that it had left Hong Kong.  Not very helpful.

So the next day I get home from work and there’s a sticker on my door that they tried to deliver it and that they would be back the next day before 10:30 AM.  It just so happened that I had very important meeting at 9:00 AM that day and there was no way for me to be home at that time.  I called family,  friends, and neighbors and that time was bad for everyone. 

So why is this such a dinosaur?

In this day and age, when shipping organizations have satellites circling the globe, and we now have very mature GPS tracking technology, it seems that there ought to be a much better way for the shipping organizations to ask us if there are some preferred times to receive the package (the birthday is still three weeks away, so I was in no rush at all) and do a much better job of sending me messages about projected arrival time.  Moreover, even though I am not a huge fan of going to the UPS customer service building in South Seattle, I certainly would have preferred just going to pick it up there when it got to Seattle than work on blocking a two and a half hour delivery window that UPS was proposing.   After three failed delivery attempts they would have to sent it back to the shipping organization and that gave me some stress. 

To be fair, this isn’t limited to the signature required world.  Sometimes people order perishable things in the mail so it’s vital to not have a failed delivery attempt.  And this isn’t just FedEx, UPS, DHL and that crowd, this applies to the USPS as well.  The USPS comes to our houses six times a week.  That’s nutty if you stop and think about little of the mail we want (never mind the jumk mail we don’t want) is really urgent in the first place.  The folks at doxo have figured that out, but when you realize that there are probably a healthy percentage of people like me who are willing to go pick things up at UPS, and sometimes at the USPS, given the cost of gas and scheduling and resources, it’s a little hard to believe we haven’t already seen more rethinking in this area.

I did get the package for my son in time.

-Ric

I was reading this morning and in it there’s a huge ad from a company called eton with an idea of how to help disaster victims in Japan.  My initial reaction was “Great! I’m in, where do I sign?”

Anyone paying attention to the multiple crises unfolding there should have the same reaction.

The basic idea seemed really solid, there’s an image or an emergency radio that doesn’t require batteries – there’s a hand crank to generate the energy needed.  Brilliant.  Very specific item that helps in a really obvious way, and from the looks of it I would be surprised if the radio is more than $10.

Much better than just giving $10, you are giving something really tangible with very clear impact.   I love it.

But then I started reading the fine print next to the logo for the American Red Cross, and from what I could tell, it seems they actually want me to buy the radio and send it in.

Why not just set up a number to text like they did for Haiti and say just send a text to this number and my credit card will get hit for the amount to give and ship the radio.  That seems like a much easier way to do it, and the Haiti cause already got us familiar with that format.  I went to the web to look for a copy of the ad, but I found an eton blog and it explains all of the information you need to provide about yourself to participate in this.  Way too complicated, and they shouldn’t need any information about me – my money for the radio is what’s going to help Japan, not my name and e-mail address. . .

Hopefully they will rethink this promotion and I will happily be the first to text in the help.

-Ric

If you saw my last blog post, about five major trends, then you may remember that #2 was paying money for something and not getting anything, the so-called Virtual Goods business and Farmville creators Zynga lead the charge on that front.

So when I was reading the paper this morning about Coinstar, talking about something I blogged about weeks ago,  but also in that five trends blog, I saw a reference to a company I hadn’t heard of called Rixty.

As I have learned, Rixty has done some really clever rethinking in the world of credit cards and they have very cleverly placed themselves smack in the middle of the virtual goods world and their customers are on the one hand the greatest credit risk (by definition – which I will explain shortly) yet on the other hand the greatest consumers of virtual goods.

As the article in the paper described, Rixby targets people who can’t get credit cards (which I thought was an oxymoron these days), younger kids and people with bad credit, and it allows them to use Rixby to pay for their virtual goods.  That by itself is really smart, but the piece that really cracks me up, is that with virtual goods, if somehow the person fails to pay, it’s virtual goods, so it’s not like Zynga has to write off a sale.  There were no real goods exchanged, so a bad debt is really pretty meaningless.  Clever.

I expect that on the back end of it that Rixty is actually reporting behavior to credit agencies, so that if you stiff them, you will never get a credit card from anyone, but I still love the model of having a credit card company helping people buy fake stuff.  It’s one of those case studies that if I were to try to explain it to my grandfather, who doesn’t even’t know what the internet is, I just don’t know where I would start, with any hope of him saying “I get it.”

Well done Rixty.

-Ric

 

P.S. Fingers crossed for those folks trying to cool down the reactors in Japan.

I spend a lot of time looking at and writing about disruptive business models (many of them are discussed in my most recent book, Surviving a Business Earthquake, and lately I have been talking about a handful that I think are really meaningful that will continue to mature over time and work their way into lots of other industries.

1) Friending.  No, it’s not new.  At all.  But the friend trend that I have noticed is that the practice has jumped the social networking fence and is becoming useful as a function in not-so-social industries.  A company that I have blogged about before, doxo, is the one that really opened my eyes to this.  What doxo figured out is that it’s OK for us to have to log on to our credit card site and our utility site, and our Fidelity site with our passwords and what not, but it’s better if we can do that from a single place, and effectively “friend” the businesses that we interact with on a regular basis.  Call it a handshake or friending or something else, but now that we have gotten so familiar with it through places like Facebook and LinkedIn, we understand the definition of “friending” and “connecting” from these sites, and now these terms and their actions are primed to jump into other places that are not social, but where certain levels of trust need to be established.  This is big and the companies like doxo that figure that out, there are some great new businesses to start.  And for already established organizations, now’s the time to put on your thinking cap and figure out where friending may play a role for your employees, customers, and partners.

2) Getting nothing, but paying for it. Farmville from Zynga is probably one of the more familiar examples of this, though Icelandic gaming company CCP is another great example.  In a gaming environment, if you want your farm to do something more or in Eve online you want your spaceship to be cooler or faster and you don’t want to have to do all of the hard work to make it happen, you can pay for it so that your gaming experience is better.  With Eve, you are already paying a monthly fee to play the game, and you can also pay a lot more to personalize it faster.  So you are paying for something and you don’t get anything tangible for it.  I predict that as people get more familiar with this notion, like friending, we will see this bleed into other industries.  To be clear this isn’t like buying a ring-tone that is intellectual property, and I am clear that you can argue that this is just paying more for the entertainment you are already paying for, to be more entertained, my point is simply that as people get familiar with the idea of paying and not really getting anything tangible for it, we will see this proliferate.

3) Getting something, but not paying for it. This is a subject I have blogged about before as well, most notably with alice.com, the online merchant that sells goods at cost with free shipping.  They make their money by charging huge rates for ads and coupons because they provide the age, gender, and ZIP code of customers that respond to the ads and coupons in real time.  Now I still think that’s a huge idea, but when I found out Coinstar (dump your coins into a big green machine and out pops cash you can spend) was no longer charging a 7% fee for the service they provide, and now the service is free to the customers (you can still pay the 7%, but if you choose to load up all of your cash on a card for a specific merchant, like amazon, then it’s free to the customer, and amazon pays Coinstar a fee).  Costco is actually another company that doesn’t make any money selling their products, they make their money from their membership dues.  The monster trend I see here is companies figuring out how to not make the customer pay for their costs – so the customer gets a better deal.  Back to Zynga, I am not an expert in their games, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see them selling bottled water for the farmers and the user getting the choice between Dasani (from Coca-Cola) or Evian and then selling the data of age, gender, and ZIP code back to those companies about who chose which product, for example.

4) David beating Goliath. Historically, a tiny company beating out a monster company has been rare, for really obvious reasons.  Amazon took out Barnes & Noble before becoming a monster company in their own right, being way more than just a book store, but that’s not the kind of trend I am talking about.  The poster child of this new trend is Rovio, the makers of the crazy-popular game Angry Birds.  It has been a top free and paid application in the iPhone store for a very long time.  What I love about the story is that it’s still a company with less than 20 employees based over in Europe.   So the Rovio’s of the world can stay tiny companies and create markets that we would expect someone like Microsoft or EA Sports or some other massive gaming company to own.  Will someone buy Rovio?  It kind of doesn’t matter.  The point is that with the platforms of smartphones and the internet in general, tiny agile companies can have a very real,very large global footprint and be very successful.  I am not saying that Rovio is going to put EA Sports out of business, I am just saying that they are competing in a space that is way bigger than they are, and they are winning big.  I think we will see a lot more Rovio’s soon, and that’s the trend.

5) Adding a third party to two party transactions. This borders on sounding like a repeat of #3, or a nuance of it, but I felt it an important enough nuance to give it its own bullet.  In most traditional business models, there is the merchant and the customer (and these days at least one middle man).  Companies had to charge the customer enough to cover their costs and make as much profit as the laws of supply and demand would permit.  The fact that Alice, and Costco, and Coinstar can get their costs covered by someone else, that is massive and I think it’s the biggest trend of all.  Yes, it’s great that the consumer wins by getting a better deal (point #3), but taking the basic two party transaction, and adding a third party is a pretty incredible thing to be able to do.  Per my Dasani water comment in #3 above, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Zynga get more into this space (if they haven’t already – as I said -I am no Zynga expert).

So those are the really big trends that I have been seeing and talking about lately.  I’d love to hear your feedback (and corrections).

-Ric

P.S. And we are working to fix the issue that if you do an internet search on my name you get an unexpected result.  As you might expect we are investigating whether we need to firm up security a bit on the site.