2009 October

Contrary to the spirited effort given by the girls of gap intelligence, the boys were miserable failures at this year’s Halloween Costume extravaganza.

Jake, Chris, Josh, and myself were all pitifully dressed for Halloween. Working Girl To my own credit, however, I stole the Storm Trooper helmet (which is a permanent resident here) and faked my Halloween costume. AH HA!

Very big “Thank You’s” go to Erin (Tired) and Laurel (Yellow) for bringing in candy treats that everyone enjoyed – especially me (two chocolates and a 100,000 bar). No official awards were given this year, though the brightest costumes were certainly adorned by the Popplewell sisters – Blue and Yellow.

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Sarina’s Cat outfit, which included whiskers, was awarded the “Surprise Costume of the Year”.

Way to go, girls!!!

Popplewells – Blue & Yellow

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Sarina The Cat & Nicole The Librarian

Erin & Katie – Tired & Tired

Gurpreet – “So Sari!”

Terrible effort, Fellas. Pathetic and terrible.

Happy Halloween!

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Occasionally there are certain public events a company reaches that serve as marks on the timeline when the company took a step from small firm to global powerhouse. In the 80’s Microsoft famously replaced every pillow case in every hotel room in Las Vegas to announce its revolutionary “Windows” operating system at the COMDEX Trade Show.

Apple’s “Big Brother” commercial famously pitted the grass roots computer company against the tyranny of IBM’s personal computer systems. In the same regards, gap intelligence experienced its own “Big Brother” moment just this week…… in a slightly smaller fashion.

If you are an avid a reader of BusinessWeek as I am, then you could not help but notice the back cover ad on this week’s edition:

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Xerox’ ColorQube, a revolutionary concept of bringing low cost color to the enterprise workplace, has used gap intelligence’s unique copier contracts data to verify its robust claims. gap intelligence has been mentioned in the *fine print* many times on Xerox’ website, but this week’s BusinessWeek is the first time we have seen our name on the back cover. Mock our fine print if you must, but I ask you: “Is Google on the back page of this week’s BusinessWeek?” I think not.

Here it is in huge print:

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Though we are small and our marketing budget is limited to the fine print found in millions of magazines across the globe, the message is still loud and clear: Nobody follows the copier industry as comprehensively as gap intelligence.*

*Our MFP / Copier Service is spearheaded by a comprehensive listing of over 13,000 copier cost-per-page service contracts. The Caretaker trailer Our pool of contracts is collected from the public, government, and education sectors as well as hundreds of active service agreements from private dealers. No other company in the world, not even Xerox, has an equal panel of competitive copier contracts.

We’re not stealing headlines. We’re happy being fine print.

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Gap Intelligence fans should fear not. This century’s longest total solar eclipse has come to a close and the sun is still shining here in San Diego. In fact, recent stats from Pingdom show that the Gap Intelligence DataCenter Untraceable movie

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has run this year at 99.99% uptime. Wow. That’s a lot of sunshine!

Call it divine intervention, call it astrophysics, call it a handshake-deal with Apollo (the Sun god, not the defunct printer company). Neither recession nor planetary alignment can slow us down.

NASA has a very cool video that shows the path of today’s umbra and penumbra shadows (umbra is the part in “total eclipse”).

Path of 2009 Solar Eclipse

And if you thought that was cool, wait until you see GapDatacenter.com v3.0 — coming soon to our valued subscribers around the world (even the parts without sun!)

As the world waits for the economy to rebound, considerable attention has shifted to forecasting how it will happen and gauging what awaits us once we’re there. One increasingly popular theory involves the emergence of New Normal The Pelican and the Snipe dvd

behavior. Under this theory, consumerism as we know it will undergo a fundamental change as people embrace necessities, spend and borrow less, and view both their home’s equity and their own 401k accounts with increased skepticism.

Although each of the booms that followed previous recessions suggests that Back to Normal is still a viable option, we are already seeing businesses position themselves for whatever kind of normal the future brings. Embracing their bellwether status, both Microsoft and Walmart have actively positioned themselves for a delayed recovery and the possibility of a long-term shift in buying behavior. Walmart has reduced inventories and assortments across categories and significantly delayed its holiday product refresh, while placing increased emphasis on its value-oriented message to consumers. Microsoft meanwhile has increasingly touted the efficiency provided by its products, highlighted by a recent open email from CEO Steve Balmer that introduced the company’s New Efficiency message in response to the possibility of a New Normal future.

Although established businesses and markets can similarly adjust their strategies, still evolving categories such as digital photo frames face a more difficult task when planning for the New Normal future. To put it simply, the digital frame market has never really experienced a period of true normalcy that it could refer to when forging a path forward. The economic downturn occurred at such a strange time for the category as the exponential growth that took place in 2006 and 2007 created a gold rush mentality for 2008 and caught many players off-guard as the recession flattened-out the market’s impressive growth rate. By most early accounts, meeting demand posed the greatest challenge in planning for the 2008 holiday season and industry players invested heavily to ensure that they would have products on shelves through the end of the year. Instead, the economic collapse that took place in late 2008 pulled the rug right out from under the digital frame industry, creating a severe glut across component supply and distribution channels and essentially eliminating most sell-in opportunities for the forthcoming Moms, Dads and Grads season.

As the 2009 holiday season approaches and remaining 2008 inventories finally subside, it appears that the digital frame market has followed the lead of other more established categories with its own version of new normal positioning. Now more than ever, digital frame manufacturers are embracing a value and benefit-based strategy that Balmer would be proud of. Meanwhile, changes that have taken place on the digital frame aisle and to the category’s product cycle come right from Walmart’s revised playbook.

Due to a combination of retailer consolidation and a channel-wide adoption of Walmart’s aforementioned assortment strategy, the number of shelf slots devoted to the category has fallen nearly 40 percent year-over year to 217 placements. However, the effects of the category’s reduced shelf space and extended inventory glut actually benefited most top tier players. Many of the relatively obscure manufacturers that once dominated the digital frame market have either been forced to exit due to inventory losses or have been unable to secure placements within retailers’ smaller and more exclusive digital frame assortments. A remarkable 74 percent of this month’s placements came from major brands, while 19 percent of new frames were supplied by retailers’ private labels, leaving tier two and three players with just 7 percent of initial holiday 2009 placements. This time last year, lower tier manufacturers claimed a 52 percent share of the retail shelf.

Meanwhile, technological advances and component price erosion have allowed vendors to offer a new level of value and innovation. Most major manufacturers have added new entry level options, while reducing pricing and significantly expanding functionality across existing lines. Resolution and panel quality continue to improve, multimedia functionality is becoming increasingly standard, and the abundance of low cost memory has propelled common capacity levels from 256MB to 1GB. Additionally, new functions and applications are beginning to emerge as manufacturers experiment with aesthetics and test the boundaries of connectivity and content.

Similar changes have occurred across countless maturing categories in the past, regardless of economic climates, and these same events would have eventually occurred within the digital frame market without a downturn. In fact, the effects of the recession and any manifestation of new normal consumerism only hastened the maturation of the digital frame market and may actually serve to benefit its manufacturers- at least those in the top tier. Although the category still faces numerous challenges and most industry players would have preferred a continuation of previous growth rates, the effects of the recent maturation will immediately benefit each of the major manufacturers’ shelf share, while improving the category’s long-term image. As vendor consolidation continues, the digital frame market will be limited to a handful of well equipped manufacturers that are devoted to driving product evolution, maintaining price stability, and ensuring the long term success of the category.

Comedian Joe Ancis once said, “The only normal people are the ones you don’t know very well.” Well the same can be said for markets, especially the digital frame market before September 2008. So welcome to being normal digital frames, not sure if it’s new or old, but at least you’re there.

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Joe Ancis on right, Lenny Bruce on left

Not to be confused with Joe Francis, Joe Ancis was a very funny comedian, who could reportedly out-drink Rodney Dangerfield and received the honor of being called the “funniest man in America” by the immortal Lenny Bruce Down in the Valley divx .

I’ve always loved baking, but since I bought my first cupcake cookbook on Amazon about two years ago I’ve been kind of cupcake-crazy. Around that time I had just moved to Colorado for school. I found myself living in a dorm (then onto an apartment) with a poor excuse for a kitchen. I was baking-starved.

Now that I’ve moved back to San Diego, reunited with the kitchen of my youth and all the lovely equipment that it contains, I’ve gone full on cuckoo for cupcakes!

Whenever it’s someone’s birthday, I make them cupcakes. I ask them what flavors they like and don’t like, and then select a recipe tailored to their birthday wishes. Or, I make cupcakes when I’m bored and have an empty three hour chunk of time to fill. Typically, I only eat one or two cupcakes per batch, which generally leads to a substant Killers Delight film ial amount of sweet delicious cupcakes to spare.

And who benefits from this surplus? gap intelligence!

I’ve only been working here in the office since June, and have supplied the gappers with a different cupcake each month. June? An airy white cupcake with sticky chocolate icing made from sweetened condensed milk. July? Banana-rum cupcakes with toffee frosting and toffee bits. August? Pistachio cupcakes with a simple white icing.

I don’t really know why I enjoy bringing in baked goods to share with the office but I did it when I was in high school, too. I’d bring plates or bags of sliced loaves of breads, cookies, brownies, bars, you name it. My friends from high school remember me handing them a bag of cookies at seven o’clock in the morning and then getting frustrat

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ed with them because they didn’t open the bag right away, eat a cookie, and tell me if they liked it or not.

With the last batch of cupcakes I brought into gap intelligence, I realized that sharing my baked creations with other people pushes me to expand my horizons. It’s like when you’re at the gym and you’re on a treadmill, and then someone gets on the treadmill next to yours and you feel that pressure to keep pace with them. Except for me, I’m the person on the other treadmill. I like to out-do myself when it comes to baking. Over the years I’ve gone from simple vanilla or chocolate cupcakes with typical cupcake liners to cupcakes filled with cream cheese and a crumb topping and cupcakes that are piped with homemade marshmallow cream and then dipped in chocolate and presented in hand-cut parch Traffic divx Home Room movie Blink dvd ment paper liners.

I’ve never considered myself a particularly creative person, but the other day someone told me that we’re all creative, just maybe not in a conventional way. I’ve realized that baking is my “craft.” I find recipes to tailor to an event or personality or to fit a feeling or an emotion of a season. I bake something just because in the end I have a tangible product that I’m proud of.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved burritos. Going to Mexican restaurants with my dad as a kid helped me appreciate the wonderful combination of meat, cheese, guacamole, and tortillas at an early age. My taste buds continued to mature throughout my childhood and into college. In fact, I ate at Chipotle so often during college that the manager made me an honorary employee and awarded me a “Master Burrito Ambassador” plaque, which I proudly hang at my desk. So when Chipotle launched an iPhone app a couple weeks ago, my mouth watered with excitement. I can order – and pay! – for my burrito with a few taps on my phone? This really makes life easy… actually, it probably makes it too easy

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Black Santa’s Revenge dvd ! Every time I check my phone, I see the icon taunting me, daring me not to order a delicious burrito.

Chipotle’s new app is one of many that have made life simpler. Finding music, checking the score of the game, banking, and now ordering burritos can be done from my phone. A large benefit of today’s smartphones is that they have the potential to improve as you hold onto them. Every week, I get free updates to my favorite apps and there’s something satisfying knowing that teams of developers are working to make my phone better while I’m at the beach or Chipotle (or work!). This trend is a complete reversal from technology products past. Previously, gadgets would diminish in value until the user had to upgrade their hardware for increased functionality. But now you can upgrade software and download apps to get more out of devices. Manufacturers will still rely on the refresh cycle for recurring sales, but software upgrades, apps, and the development of new purchasing processes could present new revenue opportunities after the hardware is purchased. The new business model can also make the purchasing process effortless for consumers, while creating power users and a fiercely loyal consumer base.

Burger King and Pizza Hut recently began allowing iPhone orders and Subway is rumored to be developing a mobile ordering app to be released in the near future. As the retail channel consolidates and end-users await the maturation of the e-commerce channel, consumers may not have to look beyond their cell phones or their favorite restaurant to find the next emerging sales channel. If I wanted to, I could have ordered a burrito right now. You know, hypothetically.

Entries from October 2009