Author: Barry Parr

The NY Times reports that Land’s End is selling a lot of custom-made pants. They’re now about 40% of their pants sales.
Mass customization was one of the big promises of ecommerce’s glory days.
Dell is another company that has used the net to create the necessary volume to make build-to-order a reality. Back in the dot-com bubble, I really liked Chipshot, a company that built golf clubs to order. We may never know if the problem was with the business model or simply bad management, but I’m betting on the latter.
This may signal a return to a more realistic view of ecommerce. We should probably be taking another look at customized news pages as well.

Hoover’s Guide nearly wrecked its subscription business, moving from selling individual subs to the in-depth profiles for $195, to requiring a five-seat license for $1995, to selling individual subs at twice the price and with fewer tools for $395. Thanks to ContentBiz for the case study.
Hoover’s came close to letting their lack of software for user authentication keep them from serving their core customers (individual users) in the way they wanted to be served at a price they could afford. Only by recognizing the resistance of their prospects to the new plan and by adapting their plan were they able to save their subscription business from disaster and get away with doubling their price.

The Yankee Group says that there will be 23 million wireless data subscribers by the end of 2003, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 83% to a 2006 total of 129 million. Wireless data revenue will grow from $70 million this year to $5.8 billion in that period.
I don’t know what is meant by “subscribers” in this number, but the revenue per subscriber will be $.25/sub/mo in 2002 and $3.75/sub/mo in 2006. This is a far cry from what SrintPCS and AT&T Mobile are charging for these services right now.
Clearly, a lot of this usage is incidental. I’m sure it includes the $.78 that I spent on SprintPCS Wireless Web access last month in a fit of bored curiousity.
Meanwhile, TMobile is set to release the staggeringly cool Danger Labs’ Hiptop (as the TMobile Sidekick) October 1, for $200 after rebate, and $40 per month for 200 anytime minutes and unlimited web and email. The outstanding design of this gadget and its elegant pricing plan makes this the first mobile Internet service that has a prayer in the market.
I wouldn’t rush to release a wireless-specific application right now, but I would be working hard to make sure my content management system and site design used XML and CSS so that I could deliver one on quick notice once it made sense.

Management consultants KPMG finds that big media companies are spending too much time defending themselves from piracy to make money from digital content. This report is based on interviews with 50 of the biggest.
While two-thirds were optimistic about the prospects for digital media, fifty-seven percent do not even have a process for transforming online intellectual property.
Most of these companies are trying to sell their content in expensive, crippled, proprietary formats that consumers are simply not interested in.
This is costing these companies eight or nine billion dollars per year.
[Warning: KPMG’s site doesn’t work with Mozilla because of the (invisible) proprietary interface junk they’ve added to it. Something to think about when you’re considering hiring a systems integrator.]

Jupiter reports that broadband users have higher incomes than dial-up users. It’s important to remember that the differences are small, and because the group considering broadband has a lower income that those who already have it, the income difference will get smaller over time.