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  • Amazon Remembers. The future of mobile?

    Posted on April 16th, 2009 Matt Arnzen No comments

    blackberry-curve-amazon-remembersI recently downloaded the amazon mobile application for my blackberry. Part of the application is a service called “Amazon Remembers”.  The Amazon Remembers application can be used to create visual lists of things you want to remember while out and about.  Photos you take from the app are stored  on both the amazon app and the amazon.com site as reminders.  If the item you want is a product, Amazon will try to find and item for sale like the one in the photo. If they find a match, they will send you an email alert and post the result along with the original photo.

    How do they do it? At first I thought amazon had figured out how to harness their huge cloud computing infrastucture to visally intrepret images. Well… it turns out it’s not that fancy. It’s ordinary folks around the world, working for pennies, using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

    What is Mechanical Turk? Wikipedia describes it as as one of the suite of Amazon Web Services, a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do. Requesters, the human beings that write these programs, are able to pose tasks known as HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), such as choosing the best among several photographs of a storefront, writing product descriptions, or identifying performers on music CDs. Workers (called Providers in Mechanical Turk’s Terms of Service) can then browse among existing tasks and complete them for a monetary payment set by the Requester. To place HITs, the requesting programs use an open Application Programming Interface, or the somewhat limited Mturk Requester site.

    How did it do?

    I tried 2 tests to see how it works. My first test was to take a picture of the first thing on my desk; of a bottle of Mountain Dew. In no less than 2 minutes, the application returned a product of Mountain Dew flavored lip balm. Not too bad and pretty fast. The next test was to try a book; Amazon’s bread and butter. The picture I took is above.  This test again was very speedy, and 2 minutes later, I had a link to buy the  book from Amazon.

    So far I’m really impressed.  I can see myself using this at brick and mortar stores to get pricing from Amazon for comparison shopping. I also frequently use their ratings and reviews so having that data handy would be great.

    Nice work Amazon!

    Below are some screen shots of the mobile application. If you want it for your blackberry, you can download it from Amazon’s site.

    bb_home

    The Amazon App for BlackBerry homescreen

    bb_desc

    A product description within the Amazon app

    bb_reviews
    Amazon product reviews


    Marketing, Mobile, eCommerce

  • Mattress World should fire their marketing copywriter

    Posted on April 15th, 2009 Matt Arnzen No comments

    mattress-worldMattress World is staple around Portland Oregon. They advertise relentlessly on TV and on the radio.  If you live here you no doubtingly  have heard their ads over and over.  Their ads are on so much that I basically tune them out every time they come on.

    The other day I actually listened to the ad and thought to myself, their unique selling proposition is really flawed. Over the last 5 years, they have had the same USP…  “if we can’t beat the price on any comparable mattress, then the mattress is FREE!!”.  On the surface, that sounds pretty good right? I get a FREE mattress if I find one cheaper. But let’s analyze that statement. What if a shopper was looking at a mattress at Mattress World for $600.  If they found a comparable mattress at another store for $500, They might think they are in for a free mattress right? Wrong.  All Mattress World has to do is beat the price of the other retailer by a dollar. They would never give you a free mattress… ever!  They must think their customers are pretty stupid.

    The other tagline I love is “our hard to find locations will save you money!”.  Who’s writing their ad copy? Hard to find locations? That screams don’t even try to find our locations, they are too hard find.  I just don’t get this one.

    I’m not sure how much they spend in advertising, but it has to be a lot.  If you are going to spend it, make it count, make it memorable, but don’t deceive your customers.

    Advertising, Marketing, Retail, Video

  • 2009 eCommerce Events

    Posted on April 3rd, 2009 Matt Arnzen No comments
    Email Marketing, Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Web Analytics, Web Development, eCommerce

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