Firefox 3 has been officially unleashed on the web.  If you’re a Firefox user, you may have noticed that Mozilla decided to establish the world record for downloads in a 24-hour period.  The Guinness Book of World Records team is still validating the results and looking for cheaters but the unofficial count is over 8 million downloads.

Of course, it works well with Trading Grid Online.  From my own experience so far with the beta and the new version, the improved javascript speed works well with our AJAX-based audit log interface.  And the web marches forward.

My family had a lovely Thanksgiving dinner with a husband and wife–choir director and friend of my wife, respectively–this past week.  The wife is a professional chef and produced a feast three times the size of what would still be overkill for the eight adults and three small children in attendance.  This included two enormous fried turkeys, about 9,000 metric tons of stuffing and some interesting experimental dishes like battered, fried cranberry glaze.  Honestly.

However,  one of the husbands in attendance left several hours earlier than everyone else.  Far from minding his caloric intake, he was heading out to line up for a huge discount sale on an HDTV at a retail store the following morning.  Plates were prepared for him and he also took a van to park on site with bottled water for all the other campers.  Sure, he might be slightly crazy, but at least he was well prepared and not as crazy as the other people who arrived even earlier.

I’m not a big shopper.  I never have been.  I tend to stay home around Black Friday to avoid the usual (probably hyped) tales of people fighting over spots in line, tension in parking lots and the other types of things that happen when excited people assemble in large masses.  I’m definitely an online shopper, with a few notable exceptions such as clothing and groceries.  The past few year’s end media sweeps have frequently discussed the competition between online shopping and physical store shopping for holiday market share.  If you look at my ilk, you might see that clearly the Internet has a big impact on physical store shopping.  But, if you look at my friend and his van full of bottled water, there are clearly reasons to hit the stores.  The shopping experience.

In this case, there are few key factors in the shopping experience:

• A deep discount on a popular piece of electronics.  This kind of promotion relies on a good supply chain, among other things, to get the word out about the discount and to have appropriate inventory levels to stores based on a specific publicized date.
• The collective “geek” or “Otaku” factor (to slightly mis-use a Japanese term) of camping out, as if one were after hot-selling concert tickets.  This is driven by digital communications: message boards, bargain hunter websites, word-of-keyboard through social networking.

So, rather than being a competitor in this case, the Internet became the engine that drove him (metaphorically) to stand in line for the sale.  Although there’s not much research in this area, I also wonder how often someone goes in to a store to check out a product in person and then goes home to buy it from the company’s website.  That’s probably far less common, due to adding shipping costs and the fact that web-only promotions are not widespread and deep enough to get over the “have it in my hands today” factor.  Perhaps there’s more we can do to use physical shops to drive online sales and online activity to drive store visits.  The relationship between brick and mortar and bits and bytes shops is still in its infancy.

Happy holidays, and let’s hope for big retail numbers and no supply chain headaches, online or offline, this season!

While I’m generally not fond of websites that function like a PowerPoint presentation, I am fond of the Knight News Challenge. I heard about it on the radio and thought I’d check it out. It’s a cash prize for ideas on using technology to further community interaction in specific geographic locations. The foundation behind this thinks that the Internet has created wonderful virtual communities, but it is under-utilized in strengthening existing physical communities.

So, I started thinking about what I would do. The first thought that popped in my head was: farmer’s markets. My wife gets a good chunk of our produce, meat and some other things at a local farmer’s market. We supplement that with cereal, pasta, diapers for the kids and other such consumables from the grocery store. Therefore, I have a decent view of the upsides and downsides to both services.

On the one hand, the grocery store (very much like fast food, in some ways) offers consistent availability of products, layout, easy navigation and also facilitates bulk shopping while being highly available. The farmer’s market excels at providing freshness, local connection, products whose organic or wholesome nature are easier to verify and understand, high quality seasonals and adding a little spontaneity to stocking up. I think the two complement each other well, as far as our routine goes.

A good farmer’s market, though, is more of a community event than a chain grocery store. That’s not a knock on the grocery store. McDonald’s doesn’t try to be a community social forum in the way that a local sandwich shop might book bands and other events. It’s a different model. But what I’m wondering is whether the farmer’s market can use technology to attract more people who have become somewhat reliant on the conveniences and predictability of the grocery store.

The infantile form of my plan involves developing a web service for facilitating pre-event interaction between farmer’s market organizers, vendors and shoppers. For example, if a vendor can indicate a day or two in advance what they intend to bring for sale at the market, consumers may be able to better plan their menus, shopping and other things. Provide a little bit, but not too much, predictability. They can also provide descriptions or information about their products which are too logistically complicated to display at the market. It might also be possible for vendors to lock in some revenue and for shoppers to lock in some reliability in advance by reserving up to a certain quantity of goods for pickup at the event.

For large events, a “floor plan” type display would also allow people to see what’s available, where it can be found in the market and also view things like hours, special parking (if applicable) and other things which are generally only learned by showing up the market a few times and figuring it out. The key would be to increase the convenience of the farmer’s market in a way that boosts attendance and creates more of an ongoing atmosphere beyond a single event. To get more of the community involved, but not to fundamentally change the market. Lower the barriers to entry and encourage the farmer’s market to be less of a vicarious thing–which works for some people, but probably keeps some people away. Securing advance sales and advertising products a little more would hopefully be enough incentive to get vendor participation and buy-in.

That’s not as fancy as the Google moon landing prize. But, there are clearly fewer barriers to entry. Now I start wrestling with myself over taking the time to enter. If you’re reading this and thinking it’s a secret GXS product initiative, it’s actually just a personal technology interest post. Since I should probably say something related to GXS, though, I’ll say that the Managed Services customer forum is going well. I always like a chance to suit-’n-tie up for a customer meeting and play “professional” briefly every quarter or so.

Greetings. I am the Global Product Manager for Trading Grid Online, the GXS web portal to the Trading Grid. For a while, I have been communicating inside GXS with a marginally work-related blog and have made this leap to the external world. I have been blogging in different contexts and businesses for 8 years now. I thought I should say a bit about myself, briefly and then try to convince you to keep reading

I am one of those funny people in Marketing who have a degree in Software Engineering and experience building web applications. My primary functions at work are gathering customer requirements, designing the Trading Grid strategy and producing plans for the engineers to carry out. At home, my wife and I raise two boys. On the first Sunday of every month, I read poetry and short stories at a little tea house in my not-so-little-anymore home town in West Virginia. Those are the highlights. I also like to debate philosophy, love learning phrases in different languages and eating new foods.

Regarding this blog, I thought I would give you a little list of the things I am likely to blog about as well as give you an example of my writing style (or lack thereof) that illustrates one of the likely topics.

• Trading Grid anecdotes - from time to time I will probably talk about projects or thoughts related to the design of the Trading Grid, although John Radko already does this better than I will.
• Reviews of good-looking web products and services - I like to stay in tune with the usability community and with new and interesting web applications to keep professionally current and to drive more improvements into the Grid.
• Thoughts on interface design and usability - I have a tendency to think about design in both likely and unlikely contexts and love to hear what other people think about building good human interaction.

To illustrate that last bullet, here’s a thought from my last flight. I am currently in Bangalore reviewing a portal upgrade project to move customers on to our new portal. I took a Lufthansa flight from Dulles International through Frankfurt. This is a rather long trip and so I had several opportunities to use the reclining seat. I found the controls for operating the chair to be clunky. They were analog, imprecise and didn’t give very good indications of what would happen when you pressed them. Frequently, I would hold down a button too long and end up in akward positions because I assumed that I could lay down flatter than the chair would let me. Maybe you’ve had similar experiences.

So I started thinking about how it could be better. That is, after all, why I’m here. So, what are the problems that could be solved?

• The buttons were mechanical and had been used long enough that they weren’t as accurate as they had been designed to be.
• Although different parts of the chair had their own controls, the whole chair would move even if I only wanted to move one part.
• There were no presets, only adjustments. I suppose if you always fly the same airline (which I don’t) you could get used to it. I was flying blind.

Step 1 - replace the buttons with a touch screen pixel display. Controls should stay precise longer and it’s possible, if the controls need to change, to change the code rather than rip and replace the whole physical unit. This is more cost-effective over the long term and stays easier for the passenger to control.

Step 2 - display on screen the parts of the chair as draggable within their range of motion. This way, it’s possible to see what the full range of motion is without having the chair push you around in uncomfortable ways and spilling your Masala Chai (which Lufthansa offers exclusively on flights to and from India, by the way). Move the parts to a comfortable looking position and then press a button to have the chair gradually adjust into shape. That way, you are not contorting yourself around like a Cirque du Soleil cast-member trying to figure out how the chair moves.

Step 3 - provide some presets for positions like “eating, reading, sleeping, snoozing while sitting.” Choose one from a menu on the screen, preview it on the display, and turn it on. You could then, supposing you wanted your head a tiny bit higher, just tweak from there. Although, it would be a bad idea to display “brace for impact” in general. You would only want that one to show in case of an emergency

What do you think?  Don’t hesitate to leave comments.  I love to read them and I am good about responding.