Creative Idea Powerhouse

When you start to pickup latest news, the is only one headline that never goes away, the global recession, and ecomonic crisis. Somehow, something that is conflicting with this big headline, is the e-Retailing and online shopping industry is keep releasing the exciting news about the growing sales and revenue during this coming Christmas. Perhaps online shopping and e-commerce is one of the industry that is ‘Yet’ to be impacted peaceful heaven.

Market Research firm comScore figure shows that United States’ Cyber Monday sales has rising for 15% compare to Y2007, reaching US$846mil in revenue. For United States, the overall spending on e-Retailing (online shopping) has topping $887million in Dec 9th, making it the highest record in the history for a single day transaction. Compare to any other industry in US currently, the e-Retailing empire is the holy grail for the retailing industry.

According to Karin von Abrams, analyst from online research firm eMarketer also pointed out from the research conducted by Deloitte 14th Annual Christmas Retailing report, the e-retailing in UK is still a profitable business compare in the overall retailing industry. Deloitte also predicted that the total spending for online purchasing gifts, foods and presents will reaching $8.65billion, a 10% growth compare to last year.

Even the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt also announced during his recent interview that, from the trending of the keyword search, it can foresee that the consumers nowsday are relying on the search engine to search for promotions and best price.

All these happen in US and UK, where e-Retailing business is matured. What about in Malaysia? or South East Asia? My question to Malaysian is, can anyone help me to name the top 3 e-Retailing site in Malaysia beside Lelong.com? I’ve been abit upset to read from recent e-Retailing report on Asia and Malaysia, where the Top 3 most visited e-commerce website is 1.Ebay, 2. Amazon, 3. Apple.

For all Malaysian Technopreneurs out there who inventing, reinventing, manipulating, or changing the DNA of Amazon.com to become your killer online store, lets have some talks. I know you guys are good in developing tools, and you can build the next Amazon, Facebook, Youtube or Alibaba with helps of open sources network, the bottom line, are you able to market it, which I means seriously, doing it big enough to match the scale of Amazon, Rakuten, Zlio, Alibaba? Lets have some talks folks!

The Toronto Police Service has recently launched a website for Homicide Squad. The police force will publish the unsolved case on the internet and seek for public’s input to help to solve the case. The information contain the details of the case, picture of the victim, all the evidents photo, and also the photo of the location of the murder took place. The page also publish the Criminal Statistics, Most Wanted list, and unsolved cold cases back since Year 1973.

So, pull up your sleeves, and get involve and experience the real case of CSI if you would like to help, but it is currently limited to Canada only. It will be good if local police forces willing seek help from public in solving the case, this may be a good and effective channel and use of Web 2.0 (read/write web) .

The video above shows twenty two minutes of Michael Arrington and Loic Le Meur’s half hour interview with Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience Marissa Mayer at the Le Web conference in Paris on Wednesday afternoon. Mayer announced that their Chrome browser would shortly be leaving beta and that Google Search Wiki would soon have a toggle button to allow people to turn it off. She also gave some very simple employee hiring advice.

Enough for email as new social environment. Inbox 2.0 should not focus on getting more stuffs into your inbox, but rather to focus how to make you do less in your email and start to get productivity up. Last month, GigaOm posted an article about Email as the new social environment, which OM talks that Yahoo and Google finally realize that their biggest assets, 260million email users from Yahoo! and 100million from Gmail, can be converted into social environment. Yeah I agreed from business standpoint there is huge amount of benefits and profit dollars in making email as a social platform for you to get your friend’s RSS update, twitter message, facebook updates, which make your email client become more sticky to you. By then, not only ads, spam are all squezing into your inbox, your facebook feeds, RSS, social sites updates all are going to bomboarding your inbox too. Currently average users get around 160 emails a day from all your multiple mailboxes. Imagine if your facebook, myspace, flickr, and other many more updates are going to come in to your inbox, what is this going to happen to you in person?
We are currently under email overwork, email overload, email overspam and email overstress stage. Imagine you are half-way rushing your weekly report and inside your mailbox there’s someone just drop in and say hi on your facebook, it pop up small notifier, which lead you to get distract. Go and look back at your facebook once again, I have 400 friends on my list, and if I were to continue getting updates from my social network, what will happen next?
It is time to call for a ‘stop’ and ‘think’ stage before we further innovate the email system already. Yes I agreed young generation wants to stay connected as much as they can, and I like Gabor’s argument on this ‘the fact is that when they go in to corporate world, does the company want their employees to stay connected always?’. Email will not die, and will continue to stay as a form of communication for corporate world in next decades. So how to better help the user to ‘Manage’ their works by helping them to manage their ‘email workload’ will be a big interest for corporate market in next few years to come. After all, $300billion losses per year on email overmanage is a big figure for corporate world according to research from Radicati.
While waiting for some cutting edge tools to better manage your inbox, here is some self-help tips that you can work by yourself before the email flooding your inbox.

I remember I start to pick up interest in email reengineering party last year when I read the post from Techcrunch introducing Xobni . The company picked up a 16 years old products where most of the internet users would have at least one, and some may have more than 10 inboxes (personally I tried to reduce from 12 last year to 5 right now), and try to reengineer it; and thats the reason Xobni is the ‘Reengineering’ of Inbox when you read backwards.

Since then, the industry start to refocus back on email again, and many starts to look back on how to enhance, connect, multiplex, increase efficiency of human interacting with email, and out of sudden, there are more than 10 already known startups that doing the emails development now. Ex VP of Engineering for Xobni had also leave the company and start his own new email company too (You can check out his blog at here)

In my list, there are currently so many new faces in email startup:
1. Xobni.com
2. WrapMail
3. unison.com
4. Zenbe.com
5. Inbox 2
6. Zimbra.com (acquired by Yahoo)
7. Xoopit

Lately, even Yahoo has unofficially announced that they are launching Inbox 2.0 but I’m not sure if it is same as Inbox2.com. You can check out the full post from GigaOM here.

In term of business model, Zimbra used subscription base, which pretty close to Gmail Pro version, while many others embebed the advertising engine (same old way as Hotmail started back in 90s, can’t we have some new business model for email please?!?!). Bottom line, I think email has reached a pretty simple milestone as Gabor has mentioned long ago, to improve users’ efficiency to handle ‘Urgent’ and ‘Important’ email, less attention to less important email rather than continue to ‘PUMP’ ads, information to users which at the end of the day, who border to read the ads in an email? Moreover, we all hate spam, same as we hate ads. Time to change, I love Inbox ZERO idea presented previously in Google Tech Talk, do less email, have more fun, life is simple. Don’t complicate users inbox with more ‘storage’ for email, instead, leave inbox to Zero email everyday as a best practices for all email users as the Mantra for email business that any new startups want to jump in. I will talk more on Inbox Zero practice later.

Below is the Elevator picth would like to share with you from Inbox 2.0.