Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jeff Cohen, General Manager of CampusBooks (Part 3)

Jeff Cohen: Let’s say you are at the University of Denver and you wanted to open up a local online textbook price comparison and market it on campus to all the people you know—that was easy to do. But it was difficult to take that concept at an individual campus level and scale it across the country. By creating a platform and partner program, we made it even easier for people to enter our market space because we took most of the technology out of the development and put it into a single API for people to be able to program against. By doing that, we were able to enable more competition in the space at the micro level.

We were allowing college students to create their own little businesses that they would run while they were in college and generate their own local marketing effort. Typically what happens is that a college student can make some good money from doing this but it wasn’t full-blown >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jeff Cohen, General Manager of CampusBooks (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Your target audience is all college students and the price comparison of textbooks is your sweet spot.

Jeff Cohen: That is definitely our sweet spot. The technology, theoretically, can be used in the comparison of any book. It’s not specifically tied to a textbook. The actual comparison of the prices could happen for everything from Fifty Shades of Grey to your basic biology textbook.

Sramana Mitra: For the 100 partners that you have, what are they using it for?

Jeff Cohen: I would say that their sweet spot is in the collegiate space. In many instances, their websites have collegiate traffic in some way, shape, or form. Either their primary service on the site is textbook price comparison or their secondary service is textbook price comparison. >>>

Billion Dollar Unicorns: Web 3.0 and E-Commerce Investment Thesis of 3 VCs

Last fall, we had three VCs participate in our 1M/1M roundtables to discuss their Web 3.0 and e-Commerce investment thesis. These interviews cover as well as build upon the themes discussed in my two recent books, Billion Dollar Unicorns and From E-Commerce to Web 3.0. If you are looking to build a Unicorn company in the Web 3.0 / e-Commerce domains, I strongly recommend you listen to these three interviews. In each case, listening to just the first 30 minutes would be adequate.

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jeff Cohen, General Manager of CampusBooks (Part 1)

There are hundreds of thousands of people in various niches who have built followings online. Now comes the question: how can they monetize this following?

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing yourself as well as CampusBooks.

Jeff Cohen: I currently live in Chicago, Illinois. I was born and raised in St. Louis. I went to the University of Missouri and got my first job out of college doing marketing internship where I was involved in developing websites for the B2B market. They were basic websites from a communication standpoint. I went on to run the corporate website of a large distributor of college textbooks. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: You should look at WebLinc. WebLinc is a very comprehensive system with one of the best personalization capabilities on the commerce side. They’re not necessarily as focused on the content side, although they are doing some very interesting user-generated content work.

Let’s talk about open problems and opportunities out there. Based on this conversation and the WebLinc conversation that we had a few weeks ago, one of the opportunities that comes to my mind is an integrated next-generation e-commerce system that really is set-up to power a Web 3.0 user experience which fuses content, community, commerce, vertical search, and personalization but can be handled from one system. Isn’t that an accurate observation?
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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Can you give us some examples from your customer base where this kind of content–commerce fusion is happening on their website as we speak?

Gerrit Kolb: One example is Homebase. Homebase is using IBM system in the back-end. Then, we have JD Group who is using SAP in the back-end system. What usually happens is that people consume content form internal and external content editors. Then, they link it to specific offerings. They specifically create topic pages. Homebase is probably the largest retailer of home furniture and garden furniture in the UK. This is a very seasonal business. In the Fall season, you have different offerings and different stories. One thing they do is take pictures of those specific seasons. They have automatic flyover areas where they position their products directly in the story of a family that is going to picnic. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How do you do it?

Gerrit Kolb: Most traditional web content management systems typically rely on an approach where the delivery of the web page is left to the web server. This means that you basically have a static environment that you can change a little bit with a little JavaScript. Our differentiating factor is that we have a component called the content application engine (CAE). We have developed a technology where we have a very scalable infrastructure and we have our own delivery infrastructure, which is highly scalable. Whereas if you wanted to scale in an environment where you are using just a plain server to do the rendering of your web experience, you don’t have the flexibility to do the contextualization and personalization. Also, we’re not only able to generate HTML, but also any stream of data that you could envision. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia (Part 4)

Gerrit Kolb: You asked about the completeness of the e-commerce platform. How do you integrate and what is the mechanism? There are basically two ways you can integrate. It’s typically referred to as who owns the glass. Some vendors go in and they say, “We’ve got to control the glass because the experience is so important.” The shopping element of e-commerce is reduced to an API calling. You own the whole experience from an event content management and a web experience management platform. Then you’re doing the call-outs to the back end e-commerce system.

The other thing, which is actually something that is important is that whoever is big in this business, has probably been in business for more than two or three years. One of our customers is a company called Office Depot. They’re the fifth largest retailer in North America. They generate >>>