Yahoo Finance may not be producing ground-breaking innovation anymore, but the development mill is clearly still functioning. As anyone with a finance or investing blog can attest, getting financial data into a website is no exercise for mere mortals. Live market data, even when delayed, generally requires a contract with a data provider or the stock exchanges themselves. Yahoo appears to have resolved the legalities of sharing market data with other websites, at least for the NASDAQ, AMEX, and NYSE. International exchanges and certain indexes are still off limits, but Yahoo suggests that additional exchanges will eventually be brought into the fold. Financial blog writers should be drooling over this feature and Yahoo should benefit as influential blogs start integrating a piece of Yahoo property into their content.

Seeking Alpha has published a fascinating interactive Q&A session with Katie Stanton, Product Manager for Google Finance. Google entered the crowded online financial data space fairly recently, so it had to bring something new to the table just to differentiate itself from the forerunners of online finance, such as Yahoo Finance, Bigcharts, and the TheStreet.com. Google’s answer is an improved search for financial information (as expected from a company built around a search engine) as well as closer integration with video, news, and blogs — content has been largely ignored by the established financial sites, but are considered both hip and relevant in the web2.0 culture. The Google Finance people have done a wonderful job bringing their website out of the starting gates, but, as newcomers, are still playing catch-up with more established competitors and struggling to implement certain basic features which have been standard on other sites for years. Fundamental information, such as the dividend yield, and securities screeners, such as an equity screener, are two notable examples of this lag with the rest of the market. I suppose they still look to Yahoo Finance for occassional inspiration.

The Seeking Alpha interview prompted me to take a peak around the internet and see what the financial websites are doing these days. In a former professional life, I spent oodles of time developing online financial applications and checking out the competition, so this was an opportunity to see what has changed over the years. To my surprise, innovation continues at a strong pace, even among the older websites which would seem long past their prime. I thought it would be a challenge to find recent examples of innovation equivalent to Smartmoney’s interactive market maps or Clearstation’s technical analysis back in the 1990s, but a glance at some of the new features in the market disproves this assumption.
Smartmoney’s latest portfolio analysis tools and Motley Fool’s thriving CAPS service are two examples which come to mind.

What has not changed is the old industry pecking order. Aside from the many casualties of the dotcom crash, most of the larger providers are still present and, interestingly, still dominating the segments they ruled in the early days of the internet. Motley Fool still champions the common investor with its educational content, Smartmoney still holds sway with its brilliant online tools, Morningstar rules the investment fund roost, BigCharts still dominates interactive charting, and Yahoo, the godfather of online finance, still rules the market with its lively (and sometimes extremely vulgar) discussion boards. The continued reign of these websites in their respective areas is a testament to the enduring power of first-mover status.

I leave my tour of the online financial web with a sense of wonder at the continued innovation, but also a feeling of bewilderment as I realize one of the greatest problems from the 1990s remains unresolved. Despite the global nature of the financial markets, financial websites are anything but global. An an example: try to get a simple quote on the well-known Swiss watch company Swatch and, more often than not, you will be disappointed with the results. Tracking a diversified portfolio with international holdings or non-equity asset classes is an impossibilty with the current crop of financial websites. A number of websites simply act as if the non-US markets do not exist, an unforgiveable oversight in this age of global finance. Others have ventured beyond the US domestic markets, but seem confused about what to do with all that additional data. I am baffled at this myopic view of the financial markets, this strange case of provincialism on the net. Yahoo, with its breadth of international market data, currently comes closest to addressing the issue, but has done little in recent years to develop this area. The online finance space may be crowded, but it seems like there is still an enormous untapped opportunity for a globally-minded startup.

My indifference towards photo sharing networks and Flickr in particular probably could have continued forever, if it weren’t for my serendipitous discovery of Moo and subsequent order of personalized Moo Minicards using the convenient upload tool from Flickr. As fortunate would have it, I arrived on Flickr in time to learn about a relatively new feature which should really appeal to anyone with a passion for product marketing. Flickr has added a new “Camera Finder” service, ostensibly aimed at helping Flickr users find the most popular camera brands of fellow photography enthusiasts. Flickr collects the data from the meta data (EXIF data) on uploaded pictures, which usually reveals the make and model of the camera used to take the pictures. Why publish this information? The answer is self-evident from the convenient links to Yahoo! shopping (Yahoo! purchased Flickr in 2005).

For a product marketer, this information is a rare and fascinating glimpse into the lifecycle of consumer electronics. Products at all phases of the lifecycles are clearly visible on Flickr’s charts. Here we have Nikon cameras in the last 12 months. The venerable D50 shows clear uptake through most the year, but has probably reached maturity, while the D70 is showing its age and a steady decline. Meanwhile, a new entrant, the D80, is achieving market share, but is still in an early launch phase.

Most products have a steady and lengthly uptake and downtake, but certain cameras such as the Kodak EasyShare C330 Zoom, appear to have run through their entire lifecycle within the course of a year. Its possible that this model has not met consumer expectations or is running into strong competition from other models positioned in the same segment.

A marketer or photographer can easily spend a couple hours examining the Flickr camera data and, one would suspect, industry analysts and camera manufacturers are probably dissecting this data and cross-checking with their own market research at this very moment.

Even if you are not enthralled by electronic product lifecycles, this information is a wonderful demonstration of the hidden value of data in a business. Data, when linked to a business vision, can become information and knowledge. Its unlikely that the founders of Flickr expected to one day use photo meta data for marketing purposes, but somebody at Yahoo realized there was potential for this data and managed to create an amazing service.

Back in the 1800s, visiting cards were considered essential personal accessories for anyone with a social life. Today, visiting cards are an increasing rarity outside the business world and are considered antiquitated by the youngest generations which are more likely to exchange an SMS with buddies. Still, I find visiting cards incredibly convenient, especially for quickly exchanging addresses with new acquaintances who either lack the inclination or knowledge to use the messaging feature of their mobile phones (i.e pretty much anyone over 40).

In a recent search for a decent visiting card for the family, I came across Moo, a London-based online print service. Moo’s MiniCards, with their irregular format and individualized designs, are ill-suited around stodgy business circles, but perfect for sparking conversations at social events. I opened a Flickr account and spent a couple of hours uploading dozens of photos just to order a Moo card set. And that is what makes Moo so interesting from a business perspective: Moo sits squarely at the crossroads between the booming market in photosharing services and the growing consumer penchant for personalized merchandise (the “I made/designed/pimped/customized that” factor).

There’s no doubt that Moo offers a creative playground to its customers. I’ll leave it to others to expound on the design virtues and interesting applications of Moo cards. (I haven’t even received my cards yet, so I’ve got nothing to bring to the show-and-tell.) Instead, as an internet marketer, I find myself entranced by their fulfillment model. Moo offers worldwide shipping at a flat rate of just $4.99, regardless of whether you are in Cambridge, Calgary, or Kuala Lumpur. How incredibly customer-friendly and cosmopolitan. I’m surprised that more web2.0 businesses have not latched on to this simple, but brilliant tactic. From the get-go, Moo clearly intends to conquer the globe with their out-of-the-ordinary cards and certainly aren’t going to let the complexities of international postal rates get in the way of this mission. I suppose shipping is a loss-leader for them, but this probably is a calculated sacrifice in order to gain a global slice of the pie.

Our particular unsubscribe came with a silver lining — the customer requested that all future promotional correspondence should be sent exclusively by e-mail and, to seal the deal, he provide the e-mail address where such information should be delivered. Possibly our physician thought he was being witty, knowing full well that most suppliers in this business — including many of the big pharma companies — are far from e-marketing savvy. Fortunately, we have been preparing for this day for years and will switch our promotional messages to e-mail with the flick of a database switch. Many suppliers will not be ready and will simply drop this physician from their distribution lists. A shame really. While this is the first time I have seen an opt-out from postal mail accompanied by an opt-in for e-mail, it is certain not to be the last. In fact, we may be witnessing the birth of a new pharmaceutical communications model. I imagine that more and more physicians will turn to this solution as a way to manage their mail boxes, but still remain in touch with selected business partners. The beauty of an e-mail subscription model is that the customer can take greater control of marketing process, allowing advertising messages which are considered interesting while filtering those messages which are less relevant. For advertisers this implies dramatic change in the way things are done. Gone are the days of mass mails and one-to-many marketing programs. Instead, marketers will have to write compelling, personalized text just to have a chance of getting in the customers’ inboxes.

In my day job as a marketer, I have recently undertaken a particularly daring project. I am working on a model to predict customer actions, specifically which customers will defect in the future. However, after reading up on the science of prediction, I’m starting to wonder if I’ve gone on a fool’s errand.

Prediction, as it turns out, is an extremely elusive art and the path to accurate forecasting is strewn with broken promises, false starts, disheartened scientists, and dead hedge funds. It has been said that a person could predict with absolute certainty (i.e. knowing) what number would be rolled in a craps game, if he or she knew all every detail of the die roll, such as the size and shape of the die, the material and lay of the table, the direction and velocity of the throw, and so on. The same could be said for virtually any physical action, from predicting home run swings to forecasting traffic accidents. Unfortunately, we neither have access to the entire universe of relevant data concerning the die roll/baseball swing/vehicle motion nor a computer powerful enough to process all the information and spew out an answer. And, in case we are not disheartened already, all this just applies to physical actions, not the infinitely more complex analysis of emotionally driven human actions. Customer loyalty most definitely falls in the human action category.

All is not lost. While we cannot predict things with certainty, we can ascertain the probabilities of things happening. In fact, there is rich history of calculating probabilities and, with a little searching, one quickly finds success stories from fields as diverse as quantum mechanics and behavioral finance. In fact, good statisticians have been doing this kind of probability modeling for a long time. Its interesting that predictive analytics is absent from the traditional toolset of marketers. I can certainly imagine the reason for this oversight — marketing people are notoriously shy around numbers. Now, I believe that marketers who can’t handle spreadsheets and math equations are a dying breed, but that discussion is best left for future blog posts. The point is marketing can benefit from statistics in many ways. What marketer would not want to know which customers are likely to abandon the company’s services next month?

My simple mission of predicating customer defections doesn’t seem so impossible anymore, and, furthermore, I won’t even need access to a supercomputer to do the job. I never expected to predict outcomes with absolute certainty, just to know more about future customer behavior than I know now, which is very little. I’m looking forward to plugging in a few variables culled from my web analytics reports and seeing if there is link to specific customer behavior. I’ll be bouncing off the walls with any positive results and won’t even worry about the whole correlation versus causation issue until later.

Its not a good time to be an internet radio broadcaster. Nor a paying subscriber. Nor a music lover. Nor an unsigned musician, for that matter. The music industry is engaged in a fullscale war, with copyright law as the weapon of choice. Given that consumers have been in the crosshairs for so long, it should hardly come as a surprise that broadcasters have been forced into the frey as well. Where this latest development will lead is anyone’s guess, but the broadcasters do have one asset which the individual consumer does not have — a large base of loyal listeners that stands to lose a valued service.