TheCustomer

I’m sure others have done it before… but this is the first time I’ve seen personalisation made so easy and so affordable. The price premium is small, the design flexibility huge, and if I were 20 years younger, I’d be running around in a pair of these

Link: NIKE iD.

The DMA’s  Currents & Crossroads includes a report on benchmarking email in the UK… very useful – and will become even more valuable as trend data emerges over time.
It’s here:

Here’s a pleasant surprise – not just that Google Print is in beta in the UK, but that  it’s reached even a realtively small-selling title like mine
And the "search within this book" is just as thorough as you’d expect from Google.
It’ll be interesting to see whether posts/links like this one, to Google Print, has any impact on sales…

Link: Google Print Search: Digital Marketing: Using the New Technologies to Get Closer to Your Customers.

um, on the face of it this is one of the least interesting documents you’ll every encounter – data cleaning in local government.
But it contains a nugget, putting a £ savings number on the digital dividend (you remember ‘peace dividends’? – the digital one is what you get by properly applying digital thinking…)

Table 2: Benefits
study summary

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Description	Value	Drivers	Factoid	Assumptions
Accuracy   of Data	£32m –   £64m	The service can be more   responsive to all types of enquiries.   Value could be at least 2 times   costs of cleaning.	Data cleaning gives greater   confidence in the consistency and quality of information.	Cost of cleanup in one   authority £8k.   Repeated / wasted visits difficult   to quantify – £20 per business

the key phrase in there is:
Value could be at least 2 times
  costs of cleaning.
not to mention the spin offs for the folk on the receiving end of more timely & accurate information, and the benefit of not missing out on information not sent because of inaccurate data.
Makes you wonder why it’s not been done before?
Link: eTrading Standards National Project.

Would it be useful if you could choose between buying a book and getting it from the library… but you’d have to know if the book was actually *in* the library… and if it was out on loan, how would you know when it came back in? And you’d really want all that on one page….

This is amazing stuff, and Jon Udell is rightly being applauded for it. The tech’s not complex – just inspired. Take greasemonkey  code, which pulls the library data into an amazon page, and use amazon’s wishlist to run the alert side. Brilliant – and shows the power of data standards to combine applications

Link: Jon’s Radio…. click the flash movie link to see a narrated demo

Launching mid2005 in Boston & NY, this is straightforward, focussed, digital networking – anybody on the network can help anyone else – in this case to find a parking space – and get paid. Link: SpotScout Inc. – Parking the Mobile Generationâ„¢.

Coldplay’s new single will be available as a ringtone before it’s released as a single – Link: Cingular Sounds. pretty logical, in a digital wold

I like Steve Rubel’s thinking – he’s clued-into how blogging (1.0 & 2.0!) are changing digital marketing
Link: Micro Persuasion.

Now this is useful…  Who flies where • Europe • low cost airline routes in Europe • By airports, cities or country.
It takes just moments to work out how best to get from A to B  (my B being Dusseldorf, which I’ve never been to before)