The future of (online) retail?

The digital and traditional commerce worlds have been colliding.  Look no further than Amazon’s recent offer to award retail shoppers with small discounts for walking into and out of retail stores. There has been an inherent tension between traditional retail players and eCommerce players, as eCommerce  disrupted retail and traditional retailers largely took to eCommerce as a defensive measure. Moreover the DNA of the two industries has been vastly different.

There is tremendous innovation possible at the intersection of online and offline commerce if it were driven by an innovator in alliance with B&M retailers. However, since traditional retailers perceivedly have more to lose from this in the short term and have large stores to run, this innovation is currently driven outside-in by eCommerce companies and startups.

What if we were to design commerce from the grounds up, ignoring the above market pressures, and design instead for optimal economics and consumer experience? Today’s technologies could enable a very different and much more efficient system than the one we have today. Consider this scenario: Large traditional stores in expensive locations get replaced by smaller ‘showrooms’ that display sample merchandise or their holograms using the latest technology. You browse through lots of merchandise without having to hike through a maze of aisles. You scan  merchandise you like with your smartphone, compare product features and read online reviews. Perhaps you even ask a few friends on social networks and chat with them. You decide on a product you like. Finally after selecting everything you need,  you ‘checkout’ at the spot by just tapping your phone at a counter and head back home. Just after you reach home, the products you ordered are delivered at your doorstep from a nearby warehouse.

For many consumers, this solution is a better experience than traditional retail (don’t have to hunt through aisles or carry back large bags; better product information) or eCommerce (can see/touch/try products, shorter lag to product delivery). It is also economically more efficient than traditional retail since it requires lesser use of expensive commerce space. The cost base for such an offering should be more comparable to that of eCommerce. This would imply lower prices for consumers than traditional retail.

The exciting part is that all the technologies for this setup are available today, and we are seeking some early steps in this direction. Walmart and Amazon are clearly fighting towards a piece of this opportunity. So when do we actually see the world move towards a showroom and warehouse model?

eCommerce in India

Recently started answering a question on Quora about the future eCommerce in India, and realized that it was turning into an article. So I thought I’d share it here.

Question: What is the future of eCommerce in India? And who’s going to lead the pack in terms of profitability by 2012?

My Answer:

Very broad question, but I’ll take a stab. Let’s divide eCommerce into three categories:
1) eCommerce for physical services
Already taking off in a big way – e.g. travel ticketing, jobs, matrimony, events etc. Some leaders already visible in various categories. Larger number of consumers are becoming comfortable paying online (or are finding someone to do it for them). This category was helped by the fact that fulfillment of digital orders is not a logistical nightmare, and the alternative (standing in line) is a royal pain. This category has opened the path for the following two categories by generating consumer awareness and creating the enabling layer (payments, analytics, support/logistics software). This category appears set for continued success and perhaps accelerating growth rates as the whole ecosystem grows, payment mechanism bottlenecks are reduced, and consumer awareness increases. The market is really betting on this category with MMYT trading at 30X real revenues.

2) eCommerce for physical goods
This is the category that is currently riding way up the hype cycle, with new startups/stores launched every day. First avatar of this category was a relative non-starter with players like Indiaplaza and even eBay India remaining at limited scale. However, v2.0 disrupted here in true Clayton Christensen fashion.
Apart from early leaders such as Flipkart, Infibeam, Homeshop18, Indiatimes etc, expect to see slew of additional horizontal and vertical retailers over next couple of years selling everything from mobile phones to pet food. Expect price wars, shakeouts, extensive warehouse buildouts, monster fund-raises in this space, but not profits. Great for consumers, but I’d personally stay away from investing here at the current point. Remember, it took Amazon a decade to turn its first profit – in a much larger market.
I’d expect there to be some successful smaller players in this space that come from the left field with innovative models around delivery, or niche product sales, or as providers of enabling services.

3) eCommerce for virtual goods (Music, Software, Movies, In-game etc)
Has been a relative non-starter in India so far, largely due to piracy issues and perhaps social mindset (“who pays for virtual stuff”)?. The only green shoot in paid digital content is the anachronistic operator MVAS model. Expect significant changes in that equation over the next few years. Looking for someone to disrupt this space, by getting some Category 1 customers above to start paying for virtual goods as well. Let me know if you find such a company

So to answer your second question, I expect a company from the first category to lead in profits (or be closest to profitability) in a couple of years. A few large player from category 2 might have respectable revenues, but are likely to be far from profitability. Also likely to be some smaller interesting players from category 3.

Note: I have not touched upon the local commerce (couponing, LBS, checkins, yellow pages, classifieds etc) space in this answer, which is starting to have significant overlaps with eCommerce. The local commerce space can be a topic for a PhD thesis in itself!

Internet and the art of world domination

Over the last 15 years, the most dominant Internet company has been the one that has managed to act as the leading entry point to information on the web. As information has grown exponentially, entry points haven’t kept pace, and have eventually been disrupted by newer ways to organize information. And thus new contenders to the top spot have arisen:

Pre-1995: The web is a potpourri of gopher, ftp and then http sites, with no easy way to search through or organize them. The average user’s entry point was the address of the site that the user wanted to visit.

1995 – 2000: There are now way too many websites for every user to remember. Yahoo, with its directory approach organizes the websites neatly by category, becomes the primary entry point for Internet users, and thus becomes the dominant Internet company. As of late nineties, it’s unclear what or who will unseat this powerhouse.

2001 – 2006: By now, the Internet has way too much information to be organized and accessed using directories and portals. Google, with its keyword search approach, and ability to index billions of pages, becomes the de-facto entry point to the web. As of early 2000′s, Google appears set for world domination, and it’s not clear what or who could match Google’s strength.

2007 – Present: There are so many information sources and forms of media that keyword search by itself is inadequate for information discovery. Users want to visit information sources that are relevant to *them*. They want to consume information that they didn’t even know existed – how could keyword search do that? In comes facebook, along with other social networks, which provide ways to not only stay connected with your social circle, but also a more personalized way to discover and consume news, photos, videos and other media that have proliferated over the past few years.  It appears that Facebook will dominate the world and Zuckerberg shall be king.

2013 and beyond: ??

History tells us that change is, indeed, the only constant at the top of the Internet world. Although facebook’s and twitter’s reign at the throne appears uncontested as of 2010, please rest assured that forces of innovation, disruption and exponential growth are hard at work, and the 5-6 year cycle of Internet domination should only get shorter over time.

A couple of years back, I wrote about prevailing themes and trends in consumer Internet. Those themes are as true today, and trends of long tail content, convergence, mobility, social media and user-generated content have only accentuated with time. The result continues to be increasing information overload. The next generation Internet companies would be the ones that can address this.

My conjecture is that the next dominant Internet company would come with an angle of intelligent personalization and context-aware services, and would build upon the current generation social networks. What’s your take?

Areas of Mobile VC Investment

I recently conducted a deep-dive into VC investment trends in the mobile and smartphone space. There has clearly been a marked increase in investment activity in this sector since the smartphone revolution led by the iPhone started off in 2H 2007.

To understand which mobile subsectors these VC investment dollars have been going, I looked through VentureXpert data of all available VC investment transactions in the US since Jan 2008. I first filtered down that long list to all mobile transactions using some key words on the company description. I then filtered down to select only early to mid stage investments, giving a total of 87 startup companies meeting these criteria. I then manually classified each funded company’s line of business into one of few areas (such as content, infrastructure, enterprise etc). The final results are below:

The resulting breakdown is not unexpected (and aligns with recent analyses of iPhone investments), but here are some interesting highlights:

• The largest bucket was that of content-focused startups. This includes content production companies such as Booyah, location focused companies such as Buzzd and interactive TV providers such as kyte
• There’s an uncomfortably large crowd in the venture funded mobile payment/mCommerce space. The hope here is to disrupt the $60B credit card space, and more investments continue to be announced as we speak
• Lot of activity in other consumer focussed or related areas such as gaming, social media, advertising.
• Hardware and network infrastructure continue to be bellweathers of VC mobile investments, as the need for both larger pipes and better device components continues to explode.
• There has been an uncanny lull in spaces such as enterprise-focused mobile companies and those focused on areas such as smart homes/ sensor networks. There are both potentially large markets, but VCs have shied away from these areas – which in my experience is largely due to adoption challenges, lack of precedents in these areas.

My view is that these enterprise focused mobile plays should see a lot more activity shortly – as other spaces continue to get overcrowded, and the smartphone value proposition (beyond email) percolates deeper into the enterprise. The Smart home and sensos network space also appears close to its inflexion point (finally).

How does this align with what you have seen?

PS: Classifying companies into narrow functional areas is highly subjective. First of all, it’s hard to even classify startups as ‘mobile focussed’ or otherwise, as many digital media and internet startups have a sub-focus on mobile. Second, the functional buckets I have chosen are arbitrary. The goal was to have a broad picture of the space, for which this should suffice.

Evolution of Online Video offerings

The Digital Media space in general, and Online Video space in particular, is a sector that has perhaps seen the maximum amount of startup activity over the past couple of years. It is an industry undergoing massive disruption, as traditional content moves online, new business models are experimented with, and viewer habits evolve. Given the numerous venture-funded players that entered the online video market over the last year, there could be a shakeout in the near term. However, the long-term fundamentals of the space are strong. I believe that new players that are able to innovate ahead or along with the consumer preference curve will be able to build sustainable businesses. The rapid changes that the space is undergoing still provides for a window of opportunity for new entrants that offer clear value to their consumers.

I’ll apply my consumer themes framework to the Online Video space to look at where the key opportunities for innovation and investment lie moving forward. I will focus on user-generated and semi user-generated content arenas (as opposed to professional content). Also, monetization of online videos is a space in and of itself, and I’ll look at the monetization aspect in another post. I’ll focus on the online video product offerings in this post. Using our list of consumer themes, here are some current consumer new product opportunities and areas that are seeing a lot of action:

• Hyperdiffentiation and Long Tail: Online video started as (and still is to a large extent) a phenomenon that appealed to a narrow segment. Quantcast shows that audiences of most online user-generated video sites are still dominated by male youth, while sites that offer TV content are frequented more by slightly older females. However, this is quickly changing, and in the near future, online video sites will succeed more by catering to a an increasingly wider variety of tastes. The rise of MetaCafe, (which does a better job of categorizing its videos using wisdom of the masses), even on entering the scene long after YouTube, is a case in point. In the future, we’ll see more and more successful sites that offer tailored content that resonates with more and more narrowly-defined communities and tastes. Example successes include CollegeHumor, which provides a platform of UGC for college students, and BarelyPolitical, which creates videos combining politics and humor. Sites will come up that cater to narrow behavioral preferences, regional choices (e.g. South Asian video sites e.g. Saavn), fine arts, independent films etc.

• Personalization: Video content is perhaps the ultimate arena for personalization. People’s tastes are inherently and increasingly different, and consumers today are constrained by content discovery in the types of content they consume. Offering personalized front pages and page trees will become increasingly important. Pages and listings can be customized based on viewing habits, past history, the user’s friends, and even time of day and mood. One example is the recently launched Fancast.com, which personalizes what’s on TV. Another related area is improved recommender systems for online video. This would be like an advanced form of StumbleUpon applied to online videos. Currently, according to Forrester research, web search is the most common way of finding online videos, ahead of specialized video sites such as YouTube. This can change if users can go to a site which will let them discover content that they are more likely to like.

• Convergence: In line with the trend of increasing convergence between access types, we’ll see more consumers taking to consuming video on other devices besides the PC – including mobile phones, Television, specialized devices, and advertising signage. Apple TV was one of the early attempts to bring online videos to TV. However, there is a long ways to go in making the viewing experience seamless. An upcoming stealth-mode startup is Zillion.tv, which will offer a software/hardware combination that makes viewing online videos more seamless. The instant success of Hulu.com, which represents the other side of this trend (i.e. bringing TV content online) is another case study. Cellware is a startup which offers users the chance to participate in a social network, and gives mobile users the opportunity to download videos, ringtones, wallpapers and more.We should also see more specialized devices being used to consume videos – e.g. future versions of portable DVD players could download customized online content for viewing in offline mode on airplanes, hotel lobbies etc.There is also potential for new desktop applications that can automatically download video content for offline viewing, or enable the consumption of higher quality videos that cannot be streamed effectively.

• New Communication Mechanisms: The most popular current video content types in UGC are short-form humor and news content (source: Forrester). Other forms being experimented with include ‘video Twitter’. There is certainly scope for a variety of other innovative forms of expressions that startups may bring to market.

• Consumers want to be Producers: This goes beyond the current form of User-generated content. New services could give users increasingly interesting ways to interact, produce and collaborate in ways beyond the current YouTube model. One example is BigThink.com, which lets users post video responses to interviews with major celebrities and politicians. Future applications could enable better interactivity and collaboration between multiple contributors.

• Community: Surprisingly enough, social networks are not yet fully integrated with videos. Facebook’s video sharing and video mail feature is popular, but YouTube and other UGC sites still don’t have dominant social networking features. Imagine a site that recommends videos for you to watch, “based on videos that your friends have watched/liked”. One interesting new offering is Election2008TV, which gives users a place to put their political videos supporting candidates, to see candidates in the news, to see the videos put up by others about candidates, and more.  There is a host of upcoming general UGC sites that offers some good community features, e.g. ClipShack. But this may only be the beginning. We’ll likely see a lot of action in the video-meets-social-network arena.

• Information Organization: This is another area that will keep seeing a lot more innovation and new products. Advances will include increasingly better ways of searching (including vertical video search, semantic search), more intuitive categorization, social discovery and recommender engines. There are currently loads of players in the video search space, and all are experimenting with a variety of new features. Blinkx has an interesting approach that combines video search and aggregation (though I believe they don’t host any of the videos).

• Ease of Use/Better User experience: Online videos today are predominantly low quality. Applications such as Joost and other online TV content sites that aim to provide higher quality content are still not entirely reliable. Any application that enables content creators and owners to deliver higher quality video more reliably to consumers (either by using new compression technologies, or by smart caching or by using desktop applications etc) will certainly make space for itself.  On another note, the average duration of online videos being watched today is about 2.8 minutes. The type of content that is watched by users is highly correlated with this short length. It will be interesting to see where the average video length evolves towards.

Needless to say, there will continue to be a lot of opportunities around the entire online video ecosystem. There are a large number of plays in the video infrastructure/hosting/storage space – players that enable all the video sharing sites to exist. The 800 pound gorilla, however, is the monetization of online videos – an area where we are seeing a lot of action and experimentation, but where no one seems to have good answers as yet.