To my knowledge the newly launched search engine Blekko is the first to have its own superhero (Blekkoman – on the left).

Buy that’s the only reason I like it.

I read this article by Damon Darlin and could not have agreed more with the basic premise of the company, which is that because search has proven to be a many billion dollar industry, any dent they can make in terms of attracting users will be worth a slice of the many billions, and with *only* $25 million in venture back, even a $100 million slice makes it a worthwhile bet.  Smart business.  You don’t have to win – you just have to be a little bit relevant to be in the game.

So I went out and tried Blekko on some things that I commonly search and I have to say, their results had much more relevant first page results than I ever get from bing or Google.  So from my subjective perspective, they are already on to something.

I also like Blekko’s blend of humans and technology where they combine the muscle of smart algorithms with a bit of dirt-under-your-fingernails human input by having “experts” rank the relevance of content (a la the Amazon Mechanical Turk, but with free wiki-like input, as Darlin explains).  I think this is some great rethinking and I bet Blekko has a very bright future at this rate (though there’s nothing to stop bing or Google from fast-following this approach).

Having said that . . . if I were a venture capitalist working with Blekko, I would give them some additional guidance.    While I think the use of slashtags (described in the article) is a very good way for us to improve our search results, if I really wanted to carve out a search niche, I would really focus on some top search verticals, such as healthcare and look to not just get a raw X,000 searches per day in the land of ComScore, but have it be industry/category specific.  Once you have established at least a toe-hold on a niche, that’s a lot more interesting and valuable to advertisers and that makes you a lot more interesting as an acquisition target.  Follow the money and the money will start to follow you.

I did already add Blekko as a favorite site, and if I continue to get better results, I will make it my homepage.  If I had to make early guesses on who should buy Blekko, I would think bing before Google, but Blekko could also license their model to specific industries, and I would think someone like WebMD would love to have better search, as one example of a less expected suitor.

-Ric

Uber is a cool new car service  that Jenna Wortham recently wrote about in this article for The New York Times.  Intersect is an equivalently cool new site that for all practical purposes is the opposite of Twitter that is all based on location and what is happening in a specific location at a particular time so it becomes a chronology of everything that happens at that location.  Their web site does a better job of describing it than I do. 

So what?  And what do these two totally different companies have in common?

I’ll get there, but it reminds me of something my friend Tom, who is an executive at Microsoft, was telling me a couple of years ago about modern phone technology (in this case the design of Windows Phone 7).  He pointed out something pretty obvious, but at the same time prettty incredible.  Historically with computer technology the size of the screen of the device software was written for was known and fixed.  Also, things like “up” and “down” were fixed.  Now with mobile devices like phones and tablets, we expect to turn the device upside down and have it turn the screen around for us, and if we want to change the amount of information in the screen, we are now able to pinch in and pinch out and slide – and we expect that.  That has been trasformational for mobile devices.

Back to Uber and Intersect.

It wasn’t so long ago that it was a safe assumption that when we were on the internet and using technology, that we were sitting down looking at a screen in a pretty knowable location, such as home, work, a coffee shop.  What has changed just in the last couple of years is that more and more of us use our mobile devices all the time all over the place, checking sports scores, checking to see if The White House is going to release the recent photos of bin Laden, e-mail, you name it.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that Intersect is taking that fundamental shift in assumption, and they are assuming they want to write about what they are doing wherever they are.  Foursquare makes a similar assumption.  Intersect takes a different tack and uses the location of the cars to determine which car is closest to the customer and then lets the customer track where the car is as  it gets closer.    The Intersect assumption is that everyone (in their target market) has a mobile device with location services and they then use that location information to bring together two people who don’t know each other, and who haven’t met, and who might never see each other again.  Location based supply and demand in real time.  That wasn’t possible  for the masses until very recently. 

It’s companies like these that are going to continue to transform the way we socialize and transact business and rattle core assumptions we used to have about how we get through our day.  It’s all opportunity for the entrepreneurs out there, and all risk for the established organizations that don’t take a step back and rethink what this means for them.

-Ric

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.