All About Gemz Loyalty Program

One of the most exciting projects we have undertaken during my time as a consultant with Open-First was to work with Bryan Pearson, CEO of Loyalty One, on thinking through the future of loyalty programs. For 30 years Loyalty One has run a program in Canada called Air Miles Rewards. The question we began to wrestle with was whether the coalition model that Loyalty One had pioneered could be applied to local neighborhoods.

To try and answer this question we have launched the Gemz Loyalty Program. Focusing on locally owned businesses in neighborhood shopping districts, we have designed the program to be easy for shoppers and merchants to connect in a mutually beneficial relationship that encourages people to spend more money in their own local neighborhood.

Put simply -- every neighborhood wants main street to be successful. And yet, every day we find ourselves spending money online or at a chain store where we might get a slightly better price or more convenience, but we lose the benefits inherent in supporting local merchants. What are these benefits you ask? Civic Economics is one organization that has studied this question extensively and has conclusive evidence from multiple cities that shows the enormous economic impact that locally owned businesses have on local communities.

If our local merchants are more successful, we will have more vibrant cities, with higher sales tax revenues, leading to more city services and thus higher property values. The perceived savings of buying online or at a chain comes at a huge local cost.

Gemz aims to change all this by giving local neighborhoods a tangible benefit from shopping at local merchants on their own main street. By using the Gemz Application on a mobile phone (currently only Apple's iPhone) while shopping, customers of local stores can accumulate loyalty points (or Gemz) each time they shop at participating merchants. Think of it just like the airlines where every mile you fly earns points -- in a Gemz neighborhood every dollar you spend earns points. Shoppers save up for rewards, that are also offered in the local neighborhood.

For a merchant interested in offering the Gemz Loyalty Program, signing up is very easy. Any merchant can offer points to local shoppers through a printed coupon or from a mobile device.



Merchants can also elect to offer rewards to Gemz shoppers which can be in the form of free or discounted products or services. When local merchants accept Gemz from a customer though, they can redeem the points for cash -- making this a sale for the merchant even though it may be a free offer to the shopper.

In the months ahead we expect to launch dozens of neighborhoods but we have started in the Elmwood shopping district of Berkeley CA. Our second neighborhood is Menlo Park and we are expanding every few weeks. We know there is a lot for us to learn still about the loyalty business and how to help local merchants succeed, but what started out as a small experiment is now thriving and producing exciting results for everyone involved.

The next tech boom

OK folks - here it is, the official announcement -- GAME ON! I have been saying for awhile now that the tech industry is in expansion mode again and that 2010 is gooing to be an explosive growth year leading to another long expansion, one that will surpass even the great Internet boom of the late '90s / early 00s (read on for why). Today I have validation.

Perhaps you don't think this validation is legitimate - much to your own sorrow when you miss the boom (or are just late to the party). But I am talking about man on the street validation. Here in San Francisco today I overhead not once, not twice, but three times today different conversations in which people were talking about tech companies in growth mode.

The last of these three was when I was walking to the Montgomery BART (very close to our offices at 2nd and Mission) and overhead two real estate people in their nice real estate suits talking outside a building. The one said to the other "oh yes, I think they will take the space at that price -- I am seeing a lot of action right now from tech companies, they all seem to be growing."

For me this is validation of a trend I was already seeing shape up for 2010 -- the coming year of mobile. And yes, I do think that Mary Meeker called it right in her annual address to the faithful at the Web 2.0 Summit. "Mobile Internet Usage Is and Will Be Bigger than Most Think" which will lead to a dozen NEW companies of enormous size and value over the next decade...

But that isn't the only story. There will be a dozen tech IPOs in the first half of 2010, breathing life into the whole investment supply chain and creating a huge new cohort of want-to-be tech companies. Sure, some will be life sciences and some will be cleantech and energy innovation. But my money is on the mobile Internet.

Apple, Google, Nokia, Samsung, and (go down the list) not to mention Vodafone, AT&T, (another list), and all their suppliers have realized that there is an enormous new business that is being created -- a whole new range of consumer experiences that will be enabled by the combination of (1) mobile; (2) cloud computing; (3) social technologies. Everything we do as citizens, as consumers, as businesses is about to be transformed.

Prepare for take off!

One Really Big Idea

As many of you who have been following my social network status updates know, I have been spending a lot of time in London. As of the beginning of May I will be spending half my time there (and half my time in Foster City, CA) -- Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation, has asked me to serve on his leadership team in an interim management role as head of marketing.

I have accepted because I believe in the very audacious big idea which Lee has posed as a challenge to the mobile industry and more broadly to humanity:

As information technologies become increasingly important to how we define ourselves as human beings in this time and place, to what extent should we be dependent upon a commercial entity for the definition of those technologies? The idea of the Symbian Foundation is that an independent, not-for-profit organization can serve as the hub of a community of individuals and organizations and lead this coalition to developing more innovative, more compelling, more useful products in an open, level playing field where all can compete as equals.

This hasn't been the way capitalism has addressed the problem inherent in these information technologies -- that in the implementations of systems certain control points can be inserted which, while of limited or zero usefulness to the customer, have enormous commercial implications for the creators.

The two ways in which we have addressed this problem over the past 50 years were (1) applying the idea of natural monopoly and (2) through the establishment of industry standards bodies. Both are flawed. More recently a new idea has been tried, that of open source -- Linux, Apache, Mozilla, Eclipse have all offered an open option against entrenched commercial products. These organization have often attracted competing companies as sponsors where those companies saw the open source option as a way of eroding the market share of the closed proprietary solution.

But to the best of my knowledge, Symbian is the first attempt at taking this idea to an entirely new level. Symbian already achieved the goal of the dominant closed proprietary solution in the mobile marketplace -- hundreds of million of phones 70 different handsets from a wide range of manufacturers and sold by almost every mobile network operator in the world.

And Symbian achieved this through a radical innovation for the technology industry, a commercial entity that was owned and governed by the various competing companies that it sought to serve.

But for a variety of reasons the Symbian model was showing signs that it was not fast moving enough to address new challenges in the marketplace that it had largely defined. The rise of Apple with its closed proprietary operating system and device and the introduction of Google's Android both suggested that there was a need for Symbian to change and adapt and become more fleet of foot in order to address the challenges of the next stage of evolution.

Thus the creation of Symbian Foundation -- an entirely independent and non-profit organization which is posed with two challenges -- (1) release the entire Symbian operating system as an open source project and attract tens of thousands of individuals and organizations to further develop this advanced mobile OS; (2) be the hub of a technology movement and through supporting, championing, and leading this community create a more effective and open engine for innovation than competing commercial efforts could ever produce.

We are on an exciting journey, and we have a lot to prove over the coming months and years. But I believe that our mission is a crucial one -- to prevent the kind of commercial lock-in that we have seen in the past around information technologies and insure a more open and egalitarian future, not only for the companies that chose to compete in producing these products, but for all of us that use them as well.

Apple and AT&T have this really wrong

Another lovely visit to the AT&T store, this time because a member of my family dropped her iPhone into the, err... toilet. "It was in my back pocket and I..." oh whatever. Fine I will get a new iPhone for you. But wait! What is this! I have to pay full price AND sign up for an additional 2 year contract?? Huh??

Apparently the special price is only for NEW lines being activated. But for some reason when you purchase an iPhone as a replacement you not only pay the higher full price for the device but AT&T still insists upon tacking on two more years to your contract commitment.

Surely this is not right! Timothy, the "sales consultant" at the 425 Market AT&T store assures me this is true and insists that it is all Apple's fault. And you know what? I agree with him. It is definitely Apple's fault that in the US I have no choice (if I don't jail break my phone) but to have AT&T as my service provider.

Which reminds me of another beef I have about AT&T -- how is it that I can have five bars of signal strength and the 3G symbol but absolutely no data connectivity? Why is it that from my office, also with five bars of signal strength, no one can hear me talk? Why is it that you guys can't figure out how to give me an iPhone app that lets me alert you to a problem with your network using the GPS coordinates for where I am having trouble? Why can't you become more customer centric? Oh, because you are a monopoly and you don't need to be customer centric. Right, I knew that. Hey Barack!!!