Play on Facebook!

Try out our free online game on Facebook!

Play with all your friends and compete to see who knows them best!

Games Magazine Best Party Game of the year 2007/2008

GiftTRAP wins GAMES Magazine’s “Best Party Game of the year 2007/2008”

What's the idea?

Click here to find out how we’ve turned gift giving into a hilarious social experience

Discover the fun!

Click to unwrap the fun.

Puts your gifts to the test!

GiftTRAP is the hilarious new game that’s taking the gaming world by storm and putting the social back into board games.

The goal is to really get to know your friends and family.

You win by knowing your friends and choosing the right gifts, but most of all it’s just fun to play and gets you talking about things that matter.

• 3-8 Players, 5+
• Playtime 45-75 mins
• Learn in 10 mins

• 1 full size game board
• 640 Gift Ideas
• Rules
• 8 Organza Gift Bags containing; scoring markers, gift & choice tokens plus advanced strategy cards

Love to play Trivial Pursuit, Cranium or Apples to Apples - You will love this family party game.

GiftTRAP is all the fun of Secret Santa without needing to shop or wrap.

Sign-up; Offers & updates!

Syndicate

What kind of Gift Giver are you?

Evolving Web 2.0 thinking: Is there a new business model "Product as a Service" or "PAAS"?

I have been thinking for a while now about a new trend that I’ve noticed in the Web 2.0 world, but I have not really seen it written about directly (or not that I have found)

So I’m sure you’ve heard the term SAAS meaning “Software as a Service”. Well to follow in this vein, I’m using the term “Product as a Service” or PAAS (credit for the term actually goes to Vahe Katros)

I define this as when a real world product gets a Web 2.0 service or when a Web 2.0 spawns a physical product.

Like the chicken and the egg, I’m not sure it’s important which comes first, what’s interesting to me is combining Web 2.0 with a physical space on a retailer’s shelf. At this point different people begin to “care” and the dynamics of getting your product into the marketplace change dramatically. It’s “push” meets “pull” working together.

So how about an example?  Webkinz and Club Penguin must be the two best known companies to be operating in this mode. They are both in the same domain (selling entertainment to children), but what’s interesting is they began to build their solutions from opposite ends of the spectrum.

I don’t believe either of these organization began with this end goal in mind, its just how it came about over time

Webkinz was a soft toy company (Ganz) that created a new online service element to their product (PAAS).

In contrast, Club Penguin began as a flash online game company that later created physical product to sell stuff in real stores - the merchandise existed pre-disney (You might call this Software as a Product)

Another example, that some may view a little differently, but fits my model is iPod & iTunes clearly a knockout success.

I suspect few people think of iTunes as classic Web 2.0, but it is a service closely integrated with a product.

In all these cases, its now hard to imagine one without the other.

My thinking on the rationale/benefits of this model are simple;

• To get beyond the current level of Web 2.0 adoption this stuff needs to hit the masses
• The ability to gain mass adoption for new apps in a Web 2.0 world is very limited (7,000+applications and rising makes it hard to cut through the noise)
• There are many retail products fighting for retail space and consumer attention (so physical products are just as, if not even more competitive)
• The benefit of combining these two modes/models could be (for a while) a source of competitive advantage. Partnering your physical product with a Web 2.0 style service could become table-stakes in a few years time, but for now it offers great potential to those who adopt this model

It seems interesting to me that the cost of entry for Web 2.0 has dropped significantly and this had been written about a lot. Equally the barrier to entry to launch a new physical products has dropped too(China). In contrast both Software and Products have become harder to market simply because of the extreme choice.

Clearly not everyone is struggling to break through the noise. Facebook for example is doing a pretty amazing job on their own, but they are a rare case, and who’s to say they wouldn’t do even better if they created a real world product to go with their service. What would that be? Any ideas? I have a few.

So let’s take some other fictitious examples;

• Imagine Nike runners combined with an online tracking application
• Imagine Ford cars coupled with an online maintenance app (that even works from inside some of their models)
• Imagine a Book accompanied with a matching Book Club
• A ‘learn language’ CD with an online class & community service
• An online “Case-Study” based business community focussed entrepreneurship with a supporting DVD of Case Studies

Now perhaps some of these ideas aren’t revolutionary. Perhaps they already exist and are perhaps owned by different companies. For sure there is potential for partnership/acquisition either by the product company or the service company.

I certainly haven’t worked too hard on building this list of examples, but I think they serve to prove the point. I’d love to hear your point of view and to hear of other examples, real and imaginary that fit this model.

I’m also suggesting that companies think about how to create the perfect “Product+Service” combo, either through partnership, acquisition or development in order to give themselves a competitive advantage. Perhaps the advantage is only temporary if this becomes “expected”, but for the interim it offers the opportunity to displace the existing market leader.

I’ve read of other examples e.g. there’s a company the has a photo book printing service (they allow you to build a gallery online then print it as a real book), but its sold in-store packaged in a cardboard board box in gift stores to real consumers just like any other gift (The box simply includes an activation code).

It’s fun to watch this space evolve and I’ve been meaning to write this blog post for nearly a year. Thanks to Bob Stumpel of result.com / Everything 2.0 fame for encouraging me to post.

We certainly see GiftTRAP as a forerunner in this space as a product who’s content is “crowdsourced” via our website and from other sites like Flickr.com that offer images available under a Creative Commons attribution license.  We sell GiftTRAP in physical stores, but now offer an online game to help us spread the word and communicate the idea of a gift-giving or gift-exchange game.

This product and service combo was always our goal, it just took a little while to get to that position and to complete the service.

We focus on getting our website to support our physical product/sales and and vice versa and it’s certainly working in terms of generating worldwide awareness.

Another great example of a PAAS offering is is Moo a company that prints business cards (and other bits of cool stationery) from user generated content on the web, although I’m not quite sure if they are available for sale in physical stores quite yet. I’d love to know their thoughts on this. It would be easy to imaging Moo gift certificate sold in stores. If Alexa ranking is any judge they seem to be quite successful, it’s certainly a very savvy way of branding your printing company.

I’d love to hear of other examples and will happily add them to the article. Feel free to email me at nick at gift trap dot com

References
Gartner Prediction - Operate All Revenue Generating Channels in a Web 2.0 Architecture by 2008.

I found this link in a blog post by Dion Hinchcliffe on ZD Net

Web 2.0 heads offline: Fabrik acquires much larger SimpleTech group in $43m cash deal

I found this on Silicon Valley Watcher as an example of early acquisition activity in this area.

Mobile Advertising..The Physical World Hyperlink

This seemed like an interesting post connecting real world entities back to online activity.

China VCs double web 2.0 investment

This made me think. If there is one place that can really drive/change the creation of physical product then it has to be China. If China connects web 2.0 with their ability to make physical product then lots of possibilities open up.

Web 2.0 Needs to Get Physical

Postful is great example which supports the general trend of blurring the boundaries of virtual and physical services.. With Postful you can send emails via email or via snail mail where they print and mail the item for you. They are neatly blurring the boundaries of physical and virtual services. They already cater for printing your letter/photo etc directly in 50 countries. It’s a very neat idea and innovative use of the Web.

PS I’m managed so far not to mention the term Web 3.0 as I don’t think from what I’ve read that these are the same issues.