Threadless for Travel: "Tourless"

Threadless is a t-shirt company that has figured out a way to eliminate the biggest risk in fashion-- that customers won't accept your latest offerings. They do this by using the community to decide what they make-- designers can submit t-shirt designs, and the community rates, reviews, and comments what is submitted. The highest rating is "I'd buy this." Threadless prints the designs with the best ratings-- they get great innovative designs for cheap, and always have list of waiting buyers for their newest products. And most of all, customers feel like participants in the process and have tremendous loyalty.

It's a fantastic model, and I think it applies to markets other than t-shirts. The question is what other business can adopt a "threadless-like" business model to overcome the risk of customer acceptance as they design their offerings?

Here's one idea, I'll try to post more in the future:

I think that small group tour operations could be one of those markets. The traditional group travel business is broken. Lots of sub-scale tour operators research and put together trips to offer not knowing which ones will generate no interest and which ones will be over-subscribed. So they play to the lowest common denominator with big bus and cruise ship type tours. Consumers would love to have a say in how these offerings are designed-- demand for travel has a very "long tail" due to the diversity of travel interests and styles, and there's lots of latent demand for the convenience of group travel without the "one-size fits all" offerings of the big operators.

What would a group travel without the traditional tour operator look like? Call it "Tour-less". Amateur "trip designers" would put together trip proposals and post them to Tourless. Travelers would rate, review, and comment on what is submitted, and the designers could respond to this feedback. The highest customer rating would be "I'd go on this trip." When you sign up, people can see kind of traveler you are and whether they also want to come alone (eliminating another huge issue with traditional group travel!). When enough people sign up, only then does the trip becomes a reality (the trip designer would get a commission or a free trip). Tourless gets to book all the flights, the hotels, the tours, sell them supplies, services etc…. All the things that a traditional tour operator does, but without any of the expense or risk of putting together your own trips.

It's a tour model that scales to serve the latent demand in the long tail of demand for travel. And best of all, these would be the sort of group trips that I'd go on!

GOOG buys jotspot

I view this as Google's shot across the bow for enterprise software-- while JotSpot is today focused on the providing wiki technology to small businesses and consumers, their CEO Joe Kraus has a vision for using wiki technology to enable the "long tail of enterprise applications." They already have a powerful extension concept that allows you to add more structured objects (e.g. calendar widgets, to-do lists, etc) to your wiki… the same concept we had in Torrent. More structured businesses data wouldn't be far behind.

See below for more on Joe's vision-- just think, he know has the resources of Google to put this into action!

Ryan

Other links on the deal:
http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?guid=%7bBDB694DF-5E1E-454A-AC35-2C631EE3B241%7d&siteid=yhoo&dist=yhoo
http://www.jotspot.com/google/faq.html
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=google+jotspot&btnG=Search+Blogs
______________________________________________
From: Nichols, Ryan
Sent: Wednesday, Dec 21, 2005 14:06 PM

Joe Kraus, one of the founders of Excite, now CEO of JotSpot...

The Long Tail of Software
http://bnoopy.typepad.com/bnoopy/2005/03/the_long_tail_o.html

The long tail doesn’t just apply to music and movies. There’s a long tail for software as well. Here’s why.

The purpose of software in business is to support the way a business does business – from the way a business runs it’s hiring and firing to the way it orders materials to the way it tracks sales. In the market-speak that surrounds the technology business, the purpose of software in business is to support these “business processes”.

Let’s do some simple math. First, every business has multiple processes. Things like hiring, firing, selling, ordering, etc. Second, while some of these are pretty common in name from business to business (recruiting, for example), in practice, they are usually highly customized. Finally, there are simply a large number of processes that are either unique or that are common to millions of very small markets and therefore not traditionally worth the effort to buy software for (for example, the process by which an architecture firm communicates between it’s clients and the city planning office).

These three facts

1. every business has multiple processes
2. processes that are similar in name between businesses are actually often highly customized
3. there exist a large number of processes unique to millions of small clusters of industries.

means that there is a combinatorial explosion of process problems to solve and, it turns out, little software to actually support them.

Said another way, there is a long tail of very custom process problems that software is supposed to help businesses solve.

Inaccessible Tail

In the past, software’s long tail has been generally inaccessible because software has been

Too difficult to write
Too expensive to write and distribute
Too brittle or expensive to customize once deployed.

It just hasn’t been economical for someone to create a custom software company to help architecture firms.

That’s why, in the software business, the traditional focus has been on dozens of markets of millions instead of millions of markets of dozens. The traditional software model is to make software have enough features and address enough of a homogeneous market that you can sell millions of copies of the same software. In the past, that’s been the only way to make money.

How the software tail gets address today

The market doesn’t like a vacuum and people do solve their software needs in the long tail. They do it using two basic tools: Microsoft Excel and email. I’ve seen so many business that run on Excel+email. People build structured lists in Excel and then send them out over email for comments and updates – a list of people to hire, a list of deals they want to do with action items included, a list of features for the next product

While normal users don’t think of it this way, what they’re really building is an long-tail application – a custom application, built by the end user and networked over email.

Doing better (warning, personal plug for JotSpot coming…)

Excel and email are the wrong tools for software in the tail and we all know it. It’s really easy to start with, which is fantastic, but it suffers from.

Versionitis. We all know what happens with spreadsheets like these. You create it, you mail it to 10 people. One of them changes and mails it back out. Rinse, lather, repeat until everyone’s inbox is full of this thing and no one knows who has the latest version.

Updates. You only know the sheet has changed is when someone emails it to you.
No integration. What about the stuff that doesn’t fit in the grid? – the email and documents that go along with these spreadsheets?

That’s where JotSpot comes in. JotSpot is a company that is building a platform to make it easy and affordable to build long-tail software applications. To take those Excel spreadsheets and turn them into real web-based applications where you don’t have versionitis, where updates find you instead of you looking for them and where you can integrate data in your hard drive with data from the web, email and other applications.

Gates on "Enterprise Information Management"

Interesting memo from Gates on today's MSFT "Enterprise Information Management" Initiative. Significant announcements include:

• Enterprise Search: "our goal is to deliver enterprise information access solutions that present information workers with a single, unified way to get at the information they need no matter where it resides"
• Closed loop BI : " ...supports advanced visualization and modeling of information will be used every day by information workers. This software will also help employees use the insight they gain to trigger processes that enable organizations to respond quickly as business conditions change."
• Workfow management: "Smarter workflow software … will automate the movement of approvals, alerts and exceptions. They will also have the intelligence to recognize inefficiencies in existing processes and make improvements."
• Knowledge Network for SharePoint . This add-on will track expertise and relationships in an organization so information workers can quickly connect to people with the right skills and knowledge.

More info http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20060517/bs_nf/43365