A true e-commerce fairy tale: Diamonds online from Blue Nile

Gary Rivlin tells a wonderful e-commerce fairy tale in today's New York Times. The story with the title "When buying diamonds starts with a mouse" is about Mark Vadon's "Blue Nile" company which sells diamonds on the Web.
Here are some key points of the story but don't miss to read the real thing.
1) Doug Williams, a Seattle jeweler, spends in 1995 $2,000 on a Web site for selling diamonds; he calls it "Internet Diamonds";
2) in 1998 Mark Vadon, a management consultant with Bain & Co, walks out of Tiffany's where he was willing to spend up to $17,000 on a engagement ring; service was unsatisfactory;
3) Vadon finds Internet Diamonds, is satisfied with the advice he gets online and he buys a $5,800 diamond ring;
4) later Vadon visits Williams in Seattle and offers him $ 5 M for a 85% stake in the company; this was the boom time of the dot.com bubble and Vadon manages to raise $ 6 M venture capital within 8 weeks and another $ 40 M within the following 12 months;
5) Vadon renames the company "Blue Nile" and in 2000 has annual revenues of $ 44 M but loses $ 30 M because of a $ 40 M television advertising bill; Vadon raises another $ 7 M venture capital in 2001 to stay afloat;
6) "Blue Nile" now is the third largest diamond retailer in the USA after Tiffany & Co and Zale Corp.; in 2006 Blue Nile buys diamonds worth $ 170 M;
7) Blue Nile's mark-up is 20% compared to the industry's ~ 50%; it sells diamonds for 35% less than its competitors.

RAEM

Malign bots from the Internet underworld

In the mid 90s of the last millenium some people from MIT, in particular Pattie Maes, talked about bots as the new friendly helpers for Internet-citizens. The vision was that bots would help people to find information on the Internet, to search for best bargains, to negotiate deals, etc. Only few people at the time worried about how to control the bots once they had been set free to roam the Internet.
On Sunday, 07/01/01 the New York Times warns that "Attack of the zombie computers is a growing threat". Apparently, a scary underworld of bots has been created where bots that have been programmed to create mischief infest PCs in increasing numbers.

RAEM

Statistics on the blogosphere

I finally found a useful source with statistics on the blogosphere. David Sifry, CEO of Technorati publishes quartely "vital" statistics on the blogoshpere in his blog "Sifry's Alerts". The last statistics I have seen there were from October 2006.

RAEM

Digg.com Beginner's Guide

As a Web 2.0 beginner I wondered what digg.com was about and how it worked. I found a useful "beginner's guide" at the blog of Pronet Advertising.

Looking for more advice on digg.com I found this: "How to use digg, the unofficial strategy guide"

RAEM

A 10/20/30-rule for PPT-presentations

When I prepare a powerpoint-presentation, I regularly end up doing it wrongly: nearly always I am preparing a set of notes for me but which are for everyone in the audience to see. I know this is bad design - like two functions for one button on your remote control. I should present what the audience should see and put into the notes what I should not forget to say. But I don't think it is possible with PowerPoint to show you audience the presentation pages while the presentation pages and the notes are to be seen only on the computer display.

Now I happened to come across Guy Kawasaki's blog. GK recommends the 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint: 10 pages for 20 minutes of presentation, all text with 30 point font. 30 pt fonts are huge for me - I usually use 20 or 18 pt for text. Perhaps switiching to the larger font will break the bad habit of misusing presentation pages for notes.

RAEM

Micro-lending on the Web

R/WW reports about Kiva, a Web site that acts as an intermediary for small amounts of money lent from private people to small businesses in developing countries. Kiva seems to use a fairly sizable collection Web 2.0 techniques.

RAEM

Long Tail Blog: 2006: The worst year for hit albums since 1983

Chris Anderson, author of "The Long Tail" (see my critique at Amazon.de) reports on the nose-diving sales of hit albums. Not much forecasting ability needed to predict the development of this time series.

RAEM