Month: October 2000

Smile of the day: Email address of the month awards. Thanks to Chris Pepper for this one.

The banner ad for BlueLight.com says Shop Martha Stewart Everyday. Are they insane? There’s a point at which a hard sell is too hard.

After following the link I learn they have a section called Martha Stewart Everyday. I actually like that name, but putting the word “shop” in front of it changes everything.

I just read through two wireless articles last night. The first from Creative Good is a good introduction, albeit with the usual reactionist position on the customer experience (I whole-heatedly agree with most of the findings, but there’s no acknowledgement that things will change. In a 6 months we will have technology that will obsolete some of their statements). They did nail, IMHO, the criteria for successful wireless e-commerce: limited choice, predictable availability, and low data entry requirements.

Much more useful I think is Ray Valdes’s article in the new Web Techniques mag (not online yet). He covers some of the same WAP-bashing ground but provides some technical insight. A particularly astute observation is that WAP binds the user interface with the data transport, so UI improvements can not advance more quickly, as is usually the case. Another key criticism is how all phones have a different size limit for WML decks and each WAP gateway does as well, so the only way to correctly develop for a broad audience of devices is to default to the lowest size. Yuck.