Moving away from ecommerce, next stop: everywhere commerce

Starting to work at my current employer back in 2006 I was wondering why the images and product information for online presentation were technically separated from those being used for the printed catalog. There were some more things like that which let it become obvious that there is a clear differentiation between online and offline commerce. During the years the different channels were merged together more and more but somehow the barrier was kept up between the two worlds - as it is or were the case for the majority of similar companies out there. The last two years were, from my point of view, some quite exciting ones. We had a project running which had the task to define a first-class ecommerce platform for tomorrow business. Although we started with a primary focus on the (classical) ecommerce layer, it became quite clear that the specified platform had much more potential than just to enhance the existing web shop business. With the emergence of this platform the remaining barriers keeping the different channels aside are about to be removed. The deep integration of a point of sales (POS) application with a mobile app as well as a classical web shop or the call center organisation became possible. While working on the project, I came across an article published in June 2012 by Jochen Krisch on excitingecommerce.de where he wrote about the failure of multi-channel strategies. Having our project in mind, which clearly allows to fully integrate different channels in every thinkable way, I asked myself two questions:

1. Are we wrong in trying to create an integration platform for all available and future channels or
2. What do others do wrong in leveraging their availabilities?

The first question I swept away from my mind as I for myself expect the platform to be the future for commerce on different channels. That led me to the second question and a german saying: if everyone jumps from the bridge it does not necessarily mean that it is the right way to go. Reminded of my first days at work, I wondered if business isn't about selling products ... no matter how? If the latter is true:

• Why should a product description in one channel be a totally different from that on another channel (keeping aside the different presentation technologies)?
• Why should the checkout process be handled in a technically different way from that on another channel?
• Why should a customer identifying itself at the checkout (in an real world shop) not receive any special offers in another channel or be credited with money as being a steady (channel independent) customer?
• Why should the underlying software platform be a different one for all channels?
• Why not force to integrate all channels naturally by using the same technologies enabling the business to create competitive offers?

Maybe the failing companies did not have any good ideas on how to integrate their different channels. Maybe they even did not have the right software platform to do so. I believe that in order to be successful on integrating different channels it is heavily required to have both: the right software platform as well as good busines strategies. Additionally, the right devices need to be available in a critical mass. If these requirements are met, multi-channel can work and it will work.

Writing presentations with impress.js

Yap, it was not a mistake, I intentionally titled this article 'Writing presentations...' instead of 'Designing presentations...'. As impress.js let's you create CSS3 / HTML5 based presentations and there is no sophisticated editor available so far, it is more about writing the slides than designing them.

To be fair enough, there are some quite promising editors, like impressionist, arising on the horizon but it is more about showing future capabilities. But as the developers made good progress so far, I expect the tools to be practically useful in short time. And there is no need to do a pros and cons discussion about this or that tool here right now.

I came to using impress.js in somewhat like an unexpected manner. When I was about create a presentation for my submitted talk at JavaZone 2012 I had a discussion with my boss on reusing existing slides from another presentation he held about the same topic. During the creation of that set of presentation slides, he had asked me to insert some more flexible effects beside just switching from slide to slide. For example, he wanted to zoom into a particular part of a diagram and show more information on that detail. After having a short fight with Microsoft Powerpoint, I managed to give him something which came close to his wish, although I must admit that I was quite unhappy with the result.

So, when we talked about those slides, he gave me a hint on impress.js. He told me, that it looks quite promising concerning more flexible effects ... but - and here comes the drawback - it also looks as if it is much more work to accomplish desired results. Since I really dislike old-fashioned boring Powerpoint slides, I decided to give it a try and downloaded the impress.js package.

When I started the intro presentation that comes along with the framework, I was stunned as it was the first time for me to see something dynamic in the browser which is not powered by some Adobe flash plugin. It was then when I decided to write the next presentation using impress.js. As I am a quite lazy guy and tried to avoid learning some new CSS3/HTML5 features, I tried out several visual editors like impressionist. But as I wrote above, those were promising but not quite useful for a larger presentation. That was the reason why I put the impress.js framework back to its dark directory somewhere on my HDD. Again, it was my boss who brought me back to the framework as he asked me, if I made any progress so far... :-)

I reopened the text editor and Google Chrome some weeks after downloading impress.js and started to write my presentation. At first it took me quite a while just for setting up the two starting slides but as more slides were created, the faster I became in writing them :-)

I must admit that there are probably a lot more effects available and not being used in my presentation and probably my HTML/CSS is not the best seen ever, but the results are a good fit for me ... and hopefully for my audience as well :-) Beside that, writing the slides by hand helps to understand the basic ideas of this technology and leverage all possibilities available.

For trying out impress.js by yourself, simply visit the projects github page, download the project as ZIP file, extract its contents and open the index.html page with a current Chrome version. As the HTML code contains a very good inline documentation, read its content and you will be able to make the first steps quickly. Enjoy it :-)