Let’s take a look at a few:

Pose is a free iPhone app that urges users to strut their stuff by posting geo-tagged photos of their favorite fashion finds on Facebook, Twitter, and within Pose itself.  Users can then solicit style feedback from a panel of fashion-savvy experts, ranging from celebrated bloggers to other active members of the Pose community. Brands themselves can also leverage the app for promotions and in-store deals.  This is a great way for traditional brick-and-mortar retailers to reignite the thrill that was once associated with in-store shopping.

VIZL is a new real-time app that enables retailers, stylists and shoppers to save time and money: two of the most precious – and coveted – things in our lives! Not only do brands provide abundant catalogs of their newest items, but stylists can snag photos of the must-have goods and get quick e-approval from their clients. And shoppers can upload whole wardrobes to the app for later use, e.g., when searching for matching pieces in stores. Outfits can then be shared on Facebook – for even more approval.

Ever wonder where you can snag that must-have accessory or item? You search everywhere and come up empty-handed? Well, Where To Get It solves that problem for you.  The program employs crowd-sourcing to help site members determine the source of garments and accessories. Users take a picture of their object of desire—e.g., on the street, in a magazine, or in the closet of a stingy friend—then can post it to a community of knowledgeable shoppers who are able to identify both the brand and store.

WHAT WILL THIS MEAN?

• More companies will operate in two realms – the traditional brick-and-mortar and the virtual. Effectively marrying the two in increasingly innovative and expansive ways will be critical.
• The creation of a more holistic consumer retailing and brand experience  will prove revolutionary to existing and new businesses in the future.

• Not only are traditional marketing messages being moved to alternative media, but new technologies and sales channels are spurring wholly new businesses.

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As an Amazon-holic and frequent couch-based worker, I’m a little disappointed to hear this news. I’m not sure how many physical trips I replace by shopping online, but I doubt it averages anywhere near 3.5. I’ve never ordered 25 items at once. And I wouldn’t drive or bike more than 50 kilometers to buy anything.

I don’t shop online or work from home to decrease pollution. I do those things because I’m lazy, and they’re easy. And, sure, I develop maybe a little incidental environmentalist smugness about it, but mostly convenience draws me in.

Still, even if helping the earth hasn’t been my driving motivation, I assumed I at least wasn’t hurting anything. Didn’t you?

Despite believing myself to be a lefty environmentalist-type (I ride my bicycle everywhere, compost my banana peels, and try, with varying degrees of success to take short showers), this news is probably not going to change my behavior—or, most likely, anyone’s. Those of us who shop online regularly are probably not going to hop in our cars and drive across town to a bookstore instead of hopping onto Amazon.com. We’re not going to go into the office when we could be working on the couch, in our jammies. Well, maybe to feel a book in our hands, or to impress our bosses, but not to save the earth.

Will this study change your behavior with regards to shopping online and working from home?

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Although privacy advocates have expressed concern at this approach, there has been no major backlash so far against 24 Hour Fitness for using biometrics to identify its customers. The system has been implemented in what seems to be a reasonable and gradual way, and members may continue to use membership cards if they prefer.

Using fingerprints in place of membership cards is convenient, reduces waste, and impedes sneak-ins.

• Convenience. I dress in my exercise clothes to get to the gym, so it’s nice for me to not have to stash a membership card when I often don’t have any pockets. Plus, it’s one fewer item to lose and get charged $25 for, which I’ve done with my workplace badge twice in three years. And after all, convenience is a selling point in a gym—location, hours, parking or bike racks, and classes help us choose the right fitness center.
• Reducing waste. Biometrics are kinder to the environment, as there is no need to print membership cards or use up envelopes mailing them out. With 3 million members nationwide, 24 Hour Fitness alone can eliminate a great deal of wasted paper and plastic—and imagine how much more if other gyms and companies adopt a similar approach.
• Impeding sneak-ins. Without a membership card to beg, borrow, or steal off a friend, it’s hard for a non-member to gain access to a club. It’s awfully difficult to fake a fingerprint.

The downsides of biometrics include identity theft and privacy concerns.

• Identity theft. It is awfully hard to fake a fingerprint. It’s not impossible, however, and once someone has forged your print, it’s probably pretty tough to rectify. You can always get a new membership card. How would you get a new fingerprint?
• Privacy concerns. Officials say that the biometrics system used by 24 Hour Fitness doesn’t store fingerprints in a way that law enforcement personnel could compare to the prints left at a crime scene, but I’m not thoroughly reassured. Since I don’t have a criminal record, my fingerprints aren’t in the possession of the authorities (as far as I know). But now they might be able to track me down through my gym if I decide to pull a big jewelry heist or something.

All in all, I think there’s no reason to be too concerned about scanning in at 24 Hour Fitness. I’m glad I don’t have to tote around a membership card (or worry about losing it), and, for now, I’m not too worried about privacy. As long as we still have the option of saying no, and as long as they’re not selling our fingerprints, this approach raises no big red flags for me. Does your gym or workplace use biometrics? What do you think of it?

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When Google and Verizon issued a joint statement last week about their shared vision of an open Internet, we all had a collective mini-freakout. It wasn’t the full-throated, unequivocal support for net neutrality that Google has embraced in the past. Instead, it felt more like two companies scheming to get what they want.

Although it received some tepid support, the Google/Verizon proposal has been thoroughly panned by various parties, including the FCC, TechCrunch, and even the New York Times. The critics absolutely have a point, but I think we’ve all gone a bit overboard, possibly because of the sheer scope and reach of Google and Verizon. They’re huge, and they’re everywhere. If they really wanted to, they could probably take over the world. So when they go into cahoots to stray from the no-compromise ideals of net neutrality, we feel insecure. Nevertheless, I think there’s some good and some bad to this proposal.

The good:

1. Consumer protection. ISPs would not be allowed to block or purposefully impede traffic regardless of application or service. If this idea had been adopted and enforced years ago, Comcast would never have been able to prevent its users from accessing BitTorrent, an act that resulted in the major net neutrality lawsuit of our time.
2. Non-discrimination. ISPs could not discriminate against any traffic or content in a way that harms competition or users. High-roller companies could not pay for their sites to have higher priority.
3. Limiting FCC scope. The FCC would enforce—but not create—the laws regulating the Internet. It would take an act of Congress to modify net neutrality rules. Although the FCC has so far been the good guy in all of this, protecting consumers from discriminatory download and access policies, too much power might go to their heads. What if they decide to restrict bad words, like they do with television? I’d never get to do anything online again.

The bad:

1. Wireless is exempt. The provisions above apply only to the wired Internet. Wireless is a huge part of the online world, and exempting it undermines the whole idea of an open Internet. Like 56% of Americans, I use wireless Internet regularly, in some form or another. I’m writing this blog post on the free WiFi at my local coffee shop. Later on today, I’ll surely be checking my email on my phone, which is a capability I became addicted to almost instantly after getting my first smartphone. A mobile Internet study released in late 2009 concluded that wireless access is growing faster and will be bigger than the desktop Internet.
2. Wireless is exempt!! I just can’t get over this provision. Consider the ability of the wireless to reach folks who don’t otherwise have Internet access. African-Americans, for example, lag behind whites in home-based Internet access, but they’re the most active users of the mobile Internet, with a growth rate nearly twice the national average. If we neglect net neutrality on the wireless Internet, we reinforce the gap between the haves and the have-nots. If you can get a home computer and broadband access, you’ve got a free and open Internet. Otherwise, sorry.

The wireless exemption is huge, but it’s understandable coming from these two companies. Google’s Android marketshare is growing but nowhere near Google’s search engine penetration of 72% in the US. Verizon, meanwhile, still lags behind AT&T among wireless providers. Different rules for wireless might give them an edge. No matter how “non-evil” a company is, we cannot expect that it will operate out of anything other than self-interest. Luckily, their proposal is just a proposal. It will be up to the FCC and Congress to actually set net neutrality rules.

What do you think of the Google/Verizon net neutrality proposal?

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Because we use it as much for entertainment as for vital communication (I do, anyway), it is easy to see Internet access—especially broadband—as a luxury and not a necessity. Perhaps that used to be the case, but times have changed. Broadband is needed in all kinds of ways, just as electricity was needed when the Rural Electrification Act was passed in 1936:

• Kids need it. Much as I love Facebook and Hulu, the Internet is about far more than that, even for teenagers. Young people need broadband to study, communicate, and keep up with their connected peers. The later in life you begin to cross the digital divide, the longer the journey is.
• Farmers need it. On a farm, broadband is today what electricity was in 1936. Back then, farmers needed electricity to run new equipment such as threshers and milking machines. Now, they need the Internet to communicate with suppliers and customers, get weather updates and commodities information.
• Everyone else needs it. The way I see it, I wouldn’t have a job without my high-speed connection—I wouldn’t be able to find one! I need broadband to look for work, to keep in touch with networking contacts, and to research companies. My counterpart in a rural community, with dial-up or nothing, is at a definite disadvantage.

For all these reasons, I was glad to see this week that President Obama’s administration announced nearly $795 million in grants and loans for increasing broadband access all over the country, particularly for rural communities.

Obama has made a great start, but this funding comes from the stimulus bill—a one-time infusion of cash. Truly increasing broadband access will require a sustained effort, much like the Rural Electrification Act did. After all, it took us nearly 50 years to provide electricity and telephone service to most farms.

The focus on rural communities also narrows the scope. Broadband needs to be affordable as well as accessible. With an average monthly charge of $39, it’s not always enough to simply have the option there. A sustained effort could expand the scope to help out those families for whom broadband is too costly.

What do you think of expanding broadband access? Do you have a high-speed connection at home? Could you live without it (I couldn’t!)?

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Google’s report touts the company’s economic impact on the United States, calculating $54 billion of economic activity for American businesses, website publishers and non-profits. They focused on small business growth: entrepreneurs placing ads on Google search results to increase the size and scope of their businesses, and website owners making profits on their own sites with targeted ads.

Google’s AdSense and AdWords employ the pay-per-click concept, originally conceived by Goto.com‘s Jeffrey Brewer. Unlike traditional mass media advertising, pay-per-click displays ads that bear some relationship to a query’s words or the search results on the page. Google helped it along, but pay-per-click itself deserves partial credit for changing the online world.

The bigger economic impact, however, belongs to those who place ads with Google and those whose website use ads to generate revenue. It amazes me how business owners, no matter how small the business or remote the location, find a way to keep up with the state of the art. In Google’s report, for example, they estimate $863 million generated for the state of Minnesota, including ad revenue from curbly.com, an online community owned and run by a single employee. Even the tiny Salvadorean bakery in my San Francisco neighborhood, which has awesome pastelitos but no Web site, has a Google ad. These businesses can swing the cost, thanks to pay-per-click, and they reach the customers they’re looking for, thanks to Google. Win-win-win. And delicious.

Have you placed an ad online for your business? Do you have ads placed on your own web site?

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Digital moms of children 12 and older, versus moms with children under 12, are more likely to watch online video (40% vs. 34%), game (57% vs. 51%), read online consumer reviews (38% vs. 30%), and watch or listen to podcasts (13% vs. 9%); while moms of children younger than 12 are more likely to use social networks (67% vs. 62%).

Part 1 focuses on the online behaviors of this growing group. The article’s table of contents summarizes the key findings:

• Digital moms are active users of Web 2.0 technologies.
• Age does matter, both the mom’s age and the child’s.
• Moms’ motivations for using emerging channels change as their children grow.
• “Whom moms communicate with” is changing.
• Moms may be moms, but they are also women with interests beyond parenting.
• Digital Moms first learn about products via many channels.

Part 2 looks at how mothers use social networks to connect, find information, and express themselves online.

Read the full article: Digital Mom 2009

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According to Multichannel Merchant, if your site is a finalist, you receive:

• Inclusion of catalog and/or Website image in special MCM Awards display during the 2009 ACCM, May 4-7 in New Orleans.
• Coverage in MULTICHANNEL MERCHANT magazine and on multichannelmerchant.com

And if your site is a winner, you receive:

• Coverage in MULTICHANNEL MERCHANT’s September 2009 Awards issue, on mutlichannelmerchant.com, and in the ACCM Show Daily newsletter
• A public relations packet including a press release, a personalized quote from MULTICHANNEL MERCHANT Editor-in-Chief Melissa Dowling, and an MCM Awards logo for use in promoting your company’s win

There’s even a payoff for those who don’t win. Everyone who enters receives comprehensive feedback and scoring from the judges on areas such as design, usability, copy, and ordering.

So what are you waiting for? Fill out an entry form and get your site noticed!

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The project started out as a research project called Google Print but has since morphed into Google Book Search. As you would expect, many librarians and readers (content consumers) were for the project, but publishers and authors (content producers) were against it.

On Tuesday, Google, The Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) reached a settlement to the tune of $125 million, which allows the online giant to sell out of print books. Basically Google agreed to scare the wealth and pay royalties as they make money off the scanned content. However, the settlement did not tackle the issue of copyright. No one is yet answering “Is this legal?” They’re merely starting to answer “Who makes money and how?”

Regardless of what you think about book scanning and digitizing libraries, the fact that it is happening means that way we access and interact with books is about to radically change. Like with Napster and the music world, courts can declare digital file sharing illegal (to reiterate, this has not yet been settled for books), but once the digital copies are out there, people with use and share them and do all sorts of new and interesting things with them. Just think of all the amazing possibilities for searching, tagging, rearranging, annotating, and sharing texts that were once available only in hard copy

Google isn’t the only one trying to digitize books. My alma mater Carnegie Mellon partnered with Zhejiang University in China and the Indian Institute of Science in India for the Million Book Project. The goal was to have a million digital books by 2007, but by the end of last year they had far exceeded that goal and reached 1.5 million. That project didn’t cause the same uproar though because the organizations involved were doing it in the name of research and not commerce. This online digital library was always intended to be free. The universities want to create an enormous corpus to conduct research to improve machine translation, strengthen search algorithms, bolster machine image processing, and optimize storage formats. The libraries who partnered with them are looking for ways to distribute and preserve content.

As someone who strongly supports research in library science, I think that sounds good. But as someone who works for a big bookseller (Barnes & Noble.com), I wonder what these changes will mean for the industry. Anyone doing business in this space has to start moving now to prepare for the inevitable changes.

Sherwin Siy, a Staff Attorney and Director of the Global Knowledge Initiative at Public Knowledge, wrote a great article this week explaining what the settlement did and didn’t cover. In his article Google Book Search Lawsuit Settled, Fair Use Questions Remain, he wrote:

There’s a lot to be debated in this settlement (and it should be noted that this is the agreement that the parties in the suit have agreed to–it still needs to be approved by the court), but let’s first note what it doesn’t do: make a determination as to what is or isn’t fair use. This does mean that the financial and legal might of Google is no longer going to be aligned with libraries and archives that may wish to provide digital services that are technologically similar to Google’s efforts. This will mean that further fair use fights for digital libraries start closer to square one than they would have otherwise.

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Thank You Notes 101
Thank you notes are just as important in business as they are in your personal life. But when is it appropriate to send a thank you note? Should it be handwritten? What should you say? All these questions and more are answered in this informative post from thesimpledollar.com.

Crash Course on Photoshop
Got 5 minutes? Then you have enough time to learn 101 Photoshop tips. dekePod has produced an amazing 5 minute Photoshop tutorial video that highlights some very useful skills, from shortcuts to advice on what tools to avoid.

Firefox … Enough Said
If you haven’t downloaded Firefox 3, or heaven-forbid, never even tried Firefox, what are you waiting for? This browser is a web worker’s dream … completely customizable with tons of killer add-ons. Mashable has created a list of 30 of the best extensions that will really make your life easier. And for yet another reason to convert, check out this Small Business Trends article that lists 3 SEO tools, 2 of which are Firefox add-ons.

Who doesn’t love free software?
There are tons of programs on the market that can fulfill the same needs as their pricey counterparts. But does the old adage “you get what you pay for” hold true in this case? Not according to this USA Today article that lists 10 free alternatives to some very well known programs, including Outlook, Photoshop, Dreamweaver & Quickbooks.

Website Design Help
For those of you working with website design, you may find these 4 free tools very helpful. Each of them allows you to experiment with the blog or website’s look and feel until you find one that fits the bill.

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