Tesco

Tesco
plc is one of the largest UK retail chains, competing with Sainsbury and ASDA, but it is more than that. Tesco provides a handy pack of extra services, from being cell phone operator to energy saving consultant and DIY legal advisory (!).

It all started about a century ago, when Sir Jack Cohen, a retiree of Royal Army, invested into a grocery store in East End. Soon he began expanding his presence under the brand "TESCO", originating from "TE Stockell", a tea importer, and CO from his own surname. By the end of 1930's there were over 100 stores in country, and today Tesco operates in UK, US, Ireland and Eastern Europe, claiming to be a 3rd largest retailer in the world.

During the 1980's company began to implement a number of technological advancements in an effort to gain markket share and minimize operating costs. Despite a loss oof about 4,5% of the profits, they managed to increase market share from 15 to 18% in just over 6 months.

How? They created a Club Card, which gave customers an ability to gain points on every purchase over 10 pounds, which later could be transferred to cash-back and other benefits.
Simple as that, it allowed Tesco to gain more loyalty from the clients, but also the company started to gather customer profiles, based on the purchasing pattern, frequency and amount of money spent.

By gaining such knowledge, Tesco was able to project sales volumes, optimize and minimize inventories at hand and discover potential customer needs, not yet covered by shop's portfolio.
During 1998, company sent out 80000 variations of product offer booklets to over 8M customers, creating probably the most personalised off-line marketing campaign so far.

Subsequently, during the period of 1996-2001, Tesco introduced Tesco.com, becoming UK's largest e-grocer in just 5 years. By adding a number of value services, such as mentioned earlier travel agency, or making the website accessible for people with sight problems, (not to mention a network of gas stations and a finance institution with Royal Bank of Scotland) they became almost one-stop-shop for most customer needs.

The questions that remain open, though:
- Does optimization of product portfolio according to (majority of) customer's preferences leave such porfolio too generic?
- Is the quality of value-added services worth the time one saves by not doing competitive research?

The answer is probably not that simple. Most of the customers will enjoy shopping at such places, many others will prefer to search for cheaper insurance or favourite cereal brand...

Meneame

Meneame? Ever heard of it? Think again - Digg was used as an inspiration to this Spanish on-line news digest. This is the page where many internet users are free to post the stories that they encounter while sufing the net, or even heard of somewhere and went online to check out what's going on.

Resources of this kind remind of some periodicals - like Reader's Digest, etc. However, is it the same when it comes to Internet thing? Maybe, and maybe not.

Many of current "news sites" are, in fact, a compilation of each other, sometimes even repeating the typos of peers. So, when it comes to content, it should not be a great deal if another compilation site appears. But this one is comprised of stories which are rated by people, so you are not likely to read about another wild party with Lindsay Lohan for 2 weeks in a row.

So, when it comes to difference, Meneame has its point, especially considering a part of Spanish-speaking audience that is not English-speaking. Should they worry of "clones"(did I say, it's an open-source project)? Not likely. These will appear, but as one my friend said - "If I subscribe to everything, I end up reading nothing". This place belongs to the first one - unless the owner decides to close domain.

Now, let's consider commericialization of Meneame - after all, it went straight-line from 0 to 300 000 users in less than 6 months. You could sell ads on the webpages - true, but what if propose to make a "also featured" exhibit on the news page of top-quoted newsmakers? Say, you're reading an article from El Pais posted by Jose this morning and you're able to get more headlines on their webpage...

Searches...

Speaking of relevance of Google's search results and the way the people can re-define the dictionary on the Net...

Sometimes, when you are searching for something very obvious, you'd just first type the www.(destination).com - like www.dhl.com, for example. So, without a second thought I did type the www.whitehouse.org into my web browser...

Well... the result was not exactly the one I was expected (check out for yourself).

Coming back to Google - this very page goes on the 6th place in the search results, right after the Google maps, official site(s) and Wiki!