Thought this recent post http://www.imore.com/rdio-weight-watchers-apps-up... was relevant to this blog topic as well.

Hi Lasse,

We also have Lync and yes, it's unstable as well.

The group video chatting capability of Google Hangouts is perfect for a team collaboration meeting. It's not a one-to-many video conference setup, it's a many-to-many setup which is what's important. In realtime, anybody can start talking and the focus of the audio/video goes to them and their screen (if they're sharing a screen), so you don't have to do any "passing of presenting rights" to someone else (like you do with Webex services).

Hipchat is coming out with video chat, but it's only starting with 1-on-1 video chats. When I attended the Atlassian Summit in 2013, I asked about "Google Hangouts-like functionality" and they said that it was on the list, but first order of priority was just getting 1-on-1 video chats to work.

-Eric

Actually, this original post is FIVE years old as of 7/21/2013! Wow, time flies.

-Eric

Hi Dave,

Thanks for your reply. So the article you found is about 4 years old -- since then, we've done several other integrations based on this methodology and I can tell you that each time it's been different. So, from the perspective of information regarding the API development process, we benefited from having done the work before, but each retailer system has their own capabilities and limitations with their e-commerce platform, how they handle custom product SKUs and pricing, and how they handle sessions/cookies between the two systems.

What you need to first determine is the retailer's ability to accept product data to be added to their shopping cart by a 3rd party source. If they can support this, then you need to map product data to SKUs in their system.

Some retailer systems will literally require 1 SKU for every unique combination of your configurable product in order to display pricing correctly...which can create a bit of a nightmare based on the complexity of the products.

Other retailer systems may have no issue setting up a "dummy SKU" through which they can accept any price point that overrides the default price set on the dummy SKU.

Without knowing much of the details of your current configurator, the capabilities of your software development team, or the retailer's capabilities, the best I can do is talk in these generalities. If you'd like, you can contact me via this page http://www.digitalproductstrategy.com/about/conta... and we can get into a little more detail outside of the blog post so that I could potentially help steer you in the right direction for figuring out what the next steps need to be.

Good luck,

-Eric

I came across a helpful set of "micro personas" that would be beneficial when building out interaction designs that focus on a user persona: http://www.linowski.ca/micropersonas

Thanks John - the variants of a single user or user personas is really a recent realization within our team. In our business, we have a nice segmentation of the market with personas that sit at the market level. It's just not enough detail for our digital products though (we'll classify digital products as entire web/mobile/kiosk experiences). It was really helpful for us to start mapping out the user personas -- because these also differ from the very specific details of a use case.

This really plays out in an omni-channel strategy and/or in shopping journeys that are over a longer duration of time.

A real-world example where the consumer-facing platforms will need to be evaluated in an acquisition where a smaller player (Zipcar) is joining a much larger conglomerate (Avis): http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/01/the_zipcar_acquis...

As the HBR article points out, the technology platform is a significant consideration -- technology has been the enabler for Zipcar to be able to differentiate itself in the market.

Pricing depends on numbers of sites and traffic volume - best bet is to talk to them. It's designed for Enterprise-level businesses.

-Eric

See this post by Dave Gardner (via Fast Company) on additional challenges (and benefits) of product configurators: http://www.fastcompany.com/1794099/configurator-2...

Hi Jimmy,

I don't know if they purchased something off-the-shelf or not. For our configurator where I work (http://www.ebusinessblog.org/tag/levolor-com/), we build it all in-house. I have yet to find a solution where an off-the-shelf configurator is extendable enough for functionality and usability. My experience thus far is product configurators are extremely difficult to build generic enough to work for multiple industries. The best ones are typically done in-house by product managers, marketers, and software developers who are close to the business.

-Eric