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Month: September 2009

Microposting(s) for September 17th through September 29th

These my micropostings and bookmarks – September 17th through September 29th:

Speaking at a BIMA/Netimperative dinner

Last night I spoke at a BIMA dinner, since I’d been asked by Justin Cooke, the new Chair of BIMA and CEO of Fortune Cookie.

The format was a nice, intimate one: a couple of dozen digital and ecommerce folk, cosy restaurant on Piccadily and, er, me.

It was only after I’d accepted (and the first Netimperative email landed) that it dawned on me that I’d never done a ‘speech’ before. Much as I hate powerpoint, all of my public speaking to date had involved a projector, a script and some pictures. I suddenly felt very nervous indeed!

Turned out OK though – the time passed very quickly and the questions were lively. I spoke on some themes I’m keen on:

  • the role of ecommerce – taking some of the points from my musings on the Chief Electricity Officer (blog post)
  • data (trying to cover the notions of epiphenomenology without pictures…) (see my presentation at the Future of Digital Marketing conference)
  • the Obama-Preedy Pricing Principle – yes, there’s a well-overdue editorial on this that’s notable by its absence… 😉

Thanks to Justin, Davina, Danny and all of the guests for breaking me in gently!

Danny took notes, but I’m not sure what’ll be left after he’s edited for language, career-limiting comments, confidential asides etc. Maybe a photo? 🙂

Microposting(s) for September 8th through September 15th

These my micropostings and bookmarks – September 8th through September 15th:

  • ToyCamera – Art&Mobile – Wonderful add-in app that turns the crap camera of iPhones up to the 3g into a fun, creative thing – with lo-fi simulations of various cameras and styles. Instant Lomo? Lolo? 1974 colour? All here 🙂 I love it.
  • Lomography Store… – Woo. Lomo store. Not _that_ far from the new Leica Store (“experience”) off Bond Street. Film photography seems renascent – provided your name begins with “L”. Lodak? Lolaroid? anyone?
  • Garden Offices, Garden studios, Therapy, Sound-proofed music rooms – Woo – shed envy. I’d love a shed. Mind you, first of all I’d love a garden that’s sufficiently large to have a shed. A large shed. A shed with room to dream. Ah, a shed.
  • Google – Internet Stats – Cool – and really pleased to see that InternetRetailing is one of the sources 🙂
  • Merlin Mann

Google’s Retail Summit

I was really pleased to be invited to moderate a discussion at the Google Retail Summit – on “eCommerce Excellent – winning this Christmas”.

The event brought the great and good together to hear from Google and each other and followed the successful and enjoyable inaugural event last year (Google’s site, my blog post).

On my panel I was joined – with great humour and good will – by Steve Robinson, CEO, M&M Direct, Nick Lansley, Head of Innovation and R&D, Tesco and John Hinchcliffe, CMO, N Brown Group. We’d decided beforehand that we’d avoid the blander approaches one sometimes gets at industry events and try to deal head on with some of the hard choices and real differences this Christmas. I was really pleased that they entered into this and can’t remember chuckling so much during a panel before 😉 Hats off to Steve, Nick and John.

Here’s the eminent Peter Fitzgerald of Google opening proceedings: note the Lolo colours, courtesy of ToyCamera iPhone app

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The next panel was on KPIs and featured Michael Ross of eCommera (@manross) in fine form on his pet topic – KPIs. I won’t quote some of his excellent one-liners since not only would that be ‘goal-poaching’, but because Michael’s doing an article for November’s Internet Retailing magazine and I don’t want to scoop ourselves. Watch this space.

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Finally on the photo front, here’s the lab squad (or some other name) of Google engineers around to answer questions. All good fun.

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I understand that the event was filmed and so – if our panel session makes it past the censor’s cuts for language, sarcasm and career-limited comments – I’ll post the link.

Microposting(s) for August 30th through September 5th

These my micropostings and bookmarks – August 30th through September 5th: