Eaton PowerSource App: A Trendsetter in Appification

Although it's not exactly in "the sweet spot" for multichannel merchants, the PowerSource app from Eaton is a great example of a trend I believe will quickly overtake multichannel solutions. I call it "appification," which exposes multiple aspects of the item and order management process both inside and outside the company via mobile and tablet apps.

Take a look, and let me know what you think!

Life Is Good Selects Demandware Commerce

Demandware, Inc., a leader in on-demand eCommerce, has announced that Life is good, the iconic lifestyle brand whose mission is to spread the power of optimism and help kids in need, has selected Demandware Commerce as the central platform to support its digital growth strategy. The new Demandware-powered website, lifeisgood.com, seamlessly integrates the company’s social mission to help kids overcome poverty, violence, and illness across four key sections: Shop, Good Vibes, Playmakers, and Festival..

Life is good chose the Demandware platform because of its scalability, merchandising tools and reputation for being best-in-class. With Demandware, the brand now has a powerful and flexible platform that can easily scale to enable the realization of the Life is good vision, including achieving online business goals, delivering multichannel initiatives, and supporting its non-profit arm, The Life is good Playmakers.

“Demandware helped us to achieve a best-in-class ecommerce experience, while providing us with a flexible digital backbone that allows us to achieve our vision of blending for-profit and non-profit,” said David Oksman, head of marketing for Life is good. “With Demandware Commerce, we have been able to incorporate our social mission to help kids in need throughout the site, while creating a platform to connect the Life is good community and inspire them to become active fundraisers for the Life is good Playmakers.”

Website Enhancements
Life is good enhanced its new site with improved social sharing tools, strong visuals, and creative merchandising. One of the most significant new features is the site’s Good Vibes area, which is designed to foster the brand’s community of optimists and allow them to share inspiration by uploading optimistic user generated content. 

Lifeisgood.com will also feature a customizable fundraising functionality called Life is good Events, which allow the community to turn the activities they already like to do into fundraisers for The Life is good Playmakers. To date, Life is good has raised $8 million for kids in need.

Life is good selected Demandware’s cloud-based commerce platform because it provides the following capabilities to support its mission:

• A proven, world-class operating environment that enables the Life is good team to focus its energies on realizing the company’s vision rather than managing and supporting costly and cumbersome infrastructure
• A central platform and solutions for developing and managing sites across channels and geographies, including web, mobile and social, enabling a seamless brand experience regardless of channel
• A flexible and comprehensive set of applications that empower all users, including merchants, marketers, developers and administrators, to support the multichannel initiatives of its digital business, non-profit programs and annual fundraising Life is good Festival
• Pre-built integrations that enable the rapid and cost-effective deployment of innovative new technologies
• New capabilities made available seamlessly through automatic global releases without disrupting operations and costly upgrades.

Text Analysis and Knowledge Mining of Call Center Data

Call Centers generate "Big Data," or at least they can, but most of it goes unanalyzed.

To address this challenge, IBM has developed "Text Analysis and Knowledge Mining." According to CIO magazine, "'Companies are applying text and sentiment analysis to this unstructured data, and looking for patterns and trends,' says Deepek Advani, vice president of predictive analytics for IBM, which has implemented its Text Analysis and Knowledge Mining (TAKMI) tool at its own call centers to analyze call center agent records, identify customer concerns, highlight trends and patterns, and provides early warning capabilities.

"'Many companies are integrating this call center data with their transactional data warehouse to reduce customer churn, and drive up-sell and cross-sell [activity],' Advani says. 'Call center logs can provide invaluable insight on what customers were calling about, and can also provide insights for future product requirements.'"

Click HERE for a very interesting (and detailed!) slide presentation on TAKMI.

Digby Wins Two Awards at CTIA Wireless 2012

Digby, a leader in cross-channel mobile engagement for brands, announced today that the Digby Localpoint Mobile Platform was named as the 2012 Mobility Award winner in the “Best of Mobile Marketing  Mobile Marketing Platforms” category by Mobiletrax, as well as a finalist for best in show for “Mobile Marketing & Advertising” at the CTIA’s Emerging Technology Awards for the Enterprise and Vertical Market solutions category.

The awards, presented at International CTIA WIRELESS 2012 are highly regarded awards and represent the best in mobile and the industry’s most innovative wireless products and services.

“We are very honored to be recognized as leaders in mobile marketing in the CTIA ETech and Mobiletrax Mobility Awards,” said Dave Sikora, Founder and CEO of Digby.  “Mobile is the glue that holds all commerce channels together and through Digby Localpoint, we help brands go on the offensive against showrooming in their brick and mortar stores and take full advantage of this opportunity to attract, influence, understand and own the relationship with their customers across all channels through their own branded mobile experience.”

EquaShip Preparing for Relaunch

Seattle-based EquaShip, which first launched its delivery service in October 2011, is currently working on revamping its transportation network to utilize direct integrations with the dozens of carriers who will perform the pickups, long-hauls and final deliveries of its parcels. The strict transit time requirements of online merchants like eBay and Amazon Seller Central require complete visibility and full accountability of all parcel deliveries. EquaShip recognized the need for highly scalable technology with the capability to handle rapid integration among potentially disparate systems. In fact, the forthcoming "carrier agnostic" platform will feature a robust API portal that will connect any carrier's operating system into the EquaShip network. 

As EquaShip prepares for its upcoming re-launch, company executives announced that Datatrac Corporation has been selected to provide a customized, cloud-based platform to meet its specific technology needs. Positioned as the "4th Parcel Carrier" alongside UPS®, FedEx® and USPS®, Equship focuses primarily on the needs of eCommerce shippers. When completed, the new platform will connect millions of small-to-medium size web-based merchants to EquaShip's seamlessly interlined network of regional carriers, postal consolidators and international carrier partners to create a single-brand experience for shippers.

"After vetting virtually all of the existing shipping software platforms in the marketplace we realized that our application is so unique that the optimal solution would really be to build our own proprietary could-based platform from the ground up. No other company has ever brought together the 100-plus eCommerce and shipping software platforms that millions of online sellers use to process their shipments to all the logistics software platforms that carriers commonly use to manage the daily routing and dispatch of their deliveries, so this required an all-new approach best built in the cloud," said Ron Wiener, CEO of EquaShip.

Datatrac has been providing technology that hundreds of carriers use to manage their operations and integrate with their shipper customers for over 35 years. "We awarded this contract to oversee the development of our next-generation platform to Datatrac because we were impressed with the incredible depth and breadth of their senior management team, and wanted their know-how and experience in carrier operations to augment our own team's deep experience in the online commerce world," added Wiener.
"We're very excited to be working on this new project with EquaShip as they continue building a strong network that will effectively compete with traditional carriers who serve the small to medium-sized shipper. By leveraging Datatrac's deep knowledge of carrier operations and expertise in integrating with other technologies, we will be able to quickly create a powerful solution uniquely adapted to EquaShip's needs," said Henry Dixon, Datatrac CEO. "Ultimately, this solution will create a platform that will drive additional business to hundreds of carriers while helping them to better serve the logistics needs for a broad range of online merchants."

ABOUT EQUASHIP
Seattle-based EquaShip is scheduled to re-launch in early 2013 as the nation's "4th parcel carrier," offering small-to-medium-sized online sellers competitive shipping services for 10% to 50% less than UPS and FedEx. EquaShip will offer its Super-Economy service (2-8 business days) that will allow smaller shippers to access postal consolidation at rates far more competitive than FedEx SmartPost® and UPS SurePost. A hybrid air/ground Premium service (5 business days) will be offered to compete with FedEx Ground and UPS Ground. Overnight and same-day delivery services will also be offered regionally, as well as a variety of international delivery options. All EquaShip services will include $100 of built-in EquaSurance™ coverage and Perfect Visibility™ including automated exception management. See the company's website at EquaShip.com for further information or to subscribe to pre-launch news developments.

ABOUT DATATRAC
Datatrac delivers revolutionary solutions which empower shippers and carriers to become more efficient, provide a better customer experience, and drive superior performance from their transportation logistics through real-time business intelligence and visibility. For more information about DataTrac visit DataTrac.com.

Demandware Labs Releases Pinterest Integration for Retailers

Demandware, Inc., a leader in on-demand ecommerce, has developed a Pinterest integration through its Demandware Labs, the company’s experimental research center dedicated to applications and innovations that extend the core functionality of the Demandware Commerce platform. 

The integration between Demandware Commerce and Pinterest provides retailers with a simple way to enable consumers to share product content among the more than 12 million Pinterest users via the “Pin it” button displayed on eCommerce product pages.

For retailers, the key benefits of the Pinterest Integration include:

• Attract, engage and listen to consumers while they network with friends, family, and colleagues
• Increase brand awareness and extend the commerce platform to a destination that is attracting millions of new consumers each month
• Accelerate innovation by easily integrating popular social destinations without the burden of development costs
• Enable more targeted and concise pinning of specific items down to color and size by allowing consumers to pin and share the exact SKU of the product they want

“Pinterest has had extremely positive adoption rates and we wanted to make sure our clients could leverage this exciting new tool to drive their online revenue," said Jamus Driscoll, senior VP of marketing for Demandware. "Our Labs team was quickly able to develop this valuable integration and now it’s in the hands of our clients for adoption. This is another great example of how our commerce platform can be easily extended to meet the demands of today’s consumers.”