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• 3-8 Players, 5+
• Playtime 45-75 mins
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What kind of Gift Giver are you?

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As Black Friday looms and the bargain choices abound for the shopping season, the shackles of etiquette can make all of us experience “giftburn” - the fear of giving or receiving the “not so perfect” gift. According to research at gifttrap.com, giftburn costs more than personal angst. Over the course of a lifetime, each consumer will spend an estimated $8,000 or more in giving unwanted gifts.

Kelowna, BC November 21, 2007—Can you pick the perfect present from all the bargains? and will opening Grandma’s gift cause you to lie again this year?

As Black Friday looms and the bargain choices abound for the shopping season, the shackles of etiquette can make all of us experience “giftburn” - the fear of giving or receiving the “not so perfect” gift.

According to research at gifttrap.com, giftburn costs more than personal angst. Over the course of a lifetime, each consumer will spend an estimated $8,000 or more in giving unwanted gifts.

“Bad gifts cause stress, waste money and consume time and space in our busy lives,” according to Nick Kellet, CCA, Chief Conversational Architect at GiftTRAP. “Our hearts tell us giving is good, but when it comes to choosing the gift to give, especially when you are up against a deadline like Christmas, our heads should be telling us the opposite.”

Kellet suggests taking the anxiety and the expense out of shopping for gifts by practicing. He says, “Prevent giftburn this holiday by playing GiftTRAP, the new virtual gift-exchange game.”

GiftTRAP, the hilarious, new, award-winning board game that turns social etiquette upside down, is played by giving “virtual” gift ideas to your loved ones BEFORE you spend the cash on the gift for real. “It’s like taking your gift ideas for a test drive,” Kellet explains. “With GiftTRAP you can be honest, have fun and get everyone talking about things that matter in their lives. Players find out what really makes people tick and learning more about people’s interests.” After playing GiftTRAP, players will have a much better chance at matching the right gift to the right friend.

So far, the experts in the games world agree that GiftTRAP (MSRP $29.99, for 3-8 players, ages 8 and up) is a great idea for a game and a great gift idea, especially for anyone who has experienced giftburn. The new game has already been honored with six different product awards including Games Magazine’s 2008 “Best Party Game of The Year.”

About GIFTTRAP:
GiftTRAP is a tech-savvy independent board game company based in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada, that is focused on engineering great conversation and fun social experiences. The company is a talented team of experienced professionals with a track record of launching new products to meet emerging trends. The company says that “At 30,000 feet, all the trends are the same. The same trends influence gaming, fashion, high-tech and society at large.” GiftTRAP and its patent pending concepts are consistent with any number of current trends around the paradox of choice, the emergence of right brain thinking, and the rise of emotional intelligence.

The company describes its inaugural product, GiftTRAP as BoardGame 2.0; a social, collaborative experience built from user-created content; enabling friends to exchange virtual gifts either online or in the physical game. Uniquely GiftTRAP is not about winning per se, but it is about you. There are not any teams to hide behind. To win the game, it doesn’t require any specific knowledge, but rather, people skills and strong intuition. The good news is that anyone who play GiftTRAP can improve his or her overall gift giving with practice. In fact once you play the game, you really never stop. It has an effect of making people more attentive to the needs of others and to explore different preferences.

The mission of GiftTRAP is to rid the world of unwanted gifts.

Currently, the company supports charity donations directly as well as through the content of the game. GiftTRAP is a strong supporter of Creative Commons and sources appropriately licensed images from Flickr.com to continually refine and refresh its gift ideas to reflect the current choices in a consumer’s world. 

It’s been a busy week or two in GiftTRAP land, so I’ve not been quite so active on the PAAS research as I’d have liked.

I posted a question on LinkedIn seeking example of PAAS companies and got some great responses, (on a side note I’m a huge LinkedIn fan and LinkedIn user - feel free to invite me to connect.)

Here’s a quick selection from the companies I was recommended, I’ve tried to cluster them into related groups.

Companies working on getting things made/delivered to the right place for less cost/effort

1. http://www.ponoko.com - (3D Printing or production of designs around the globe)
2. http://www.postful.com - (Local printing and delivery of mail around the globe)
3. http://www.bongous.com - (Package Forwarding and Mail Forwarding Services)
4. http://www.moo.com - (Physical printing from online resources such as Flickr)

Games or gaming companies mixing up virtual life and real life

1. http://www.perplexcity.com - (Online game that was accompanied/driven by sale of in-store collectible cards - neat re-implementation of the best selling book “Masquerade” by Kit Williams)
2. http://www.monopoly.co.uk - (Hasbro has been using crowd sourcing to reinvigorate and update their classic game by getting players to vote for which city should be included in the updated game)
3. http://www.streetwars.net - Real world implementation of MMOG scenarios
4. http://www.chorewars.com - Gain virtual Kudos for tidying up the real world
5. http://www.motionbased.com - Integrating geo-coding with Google Maps - new sport or Geocaching

Several examples of the reinvention of Radio - Sirius and XM are perfect examples of PAAS. I don’t think Last.FM has any physical retail connections

1. http://www.last.fm/
2. http://www.sirius.com/
3. http://www.xmradio.com

Crowd-sourced T-Shirt printing companies. I’m not sure these qualify from a retail perspective, but that perhaps just needs more research

1. http://www.threadless.com
2. http://www.lafraise.com
3. http://www.cafepress.com

1. http://www.zlio.com - (Here’s an example of a virtual store - perhaps it qualifies)

Innovations around the connection of real world and virtual worlds

1. Google AdWords - I think you can now have your online ads appear on real world billboard and the like (more investigation required)
2. http://irent2u.com - new service to let you rent your spare physical resources

In addition to these companies I’ve been directed to a number of business to business products with complimenting online services

For now I’ve simply included the name/website and a single comment in brackets. There are many more examples than I’d expected and I suspect there are many more.

I’m not really commenting here on these, more gathering a list of potential companies. I’ve found that blogging about these companies has caused other people to contact me and to further extend my research and my conclusions.

I recently watched a great video by Jane McGonigal about Web 2.0 and how Virtual Life is more proving more satisfying for many folk than real life. People are “Checking out” of real life in favor of time spent in virtual worlds - something that can’t ultimately be good for society.

Jane suggests that we can perhaps implement many of the benefits/features of “Virtual Worlds” to improve the quality of our real lives in the real world. It got me thinking that perhaps PAAS as I’ve defined it isn’t broad enough to explain the emerging trend - perhaps the bigger trend is that virtual and reality are working to become one. Perhaps the bigger trend is “Reality 2.0” - the reinvention of our physical world augmented by integated online services to provide more instant and gratuitous feedback of real life performance.

Prior to watching this video I’d thought of PAAS as a “go to market play” by complimenting a Product with an Online Service or complimenting an Online Service with a Physical Product sold in real stores. This partnership of virtual services and real world stores, I’d been arguing, was a cost effective way to dramatically extend the reach of you combined offering simply because it takes you to new markets and it gets new players to care about your success as company.

Now in the light of Jane’s suggestion I’m trying to grasp with rethinking these ideas to seek out one master trend where perhaps PAAS is a sub feature or implementation tactic to ensure the commercial success of your venture.

If you are involved with or have experiences with the companies I mention please get in touch or if you can suggest other companies that fit with this trend that I’m trying to describe. Contact me at “nick at gift trap dot com”

I thought it was funny to see LinkedIn offering merchandise, but figured, given the magic of the long tail and the fact that every song sells on iTunes, someone will buy LinkedIn.com T-shirts. I thought the “Super Man” pose was very funny.

Given I’d been blogging about “Product as a Service” and connections between Web 2.0 and retailing products in real stores, I thought I’d suggest a couple of fun products Facebook might like to offer in response.

So what about some Facebook soft drinks based on a patent pending formula that lets you inflate your valuation and make your wildest dreams come true. Will Pepsi or Coca Cola be quaking in their boots?

And of course if you havent had enough caffeine then you’d need to buy some fine tasting Facebucks coffee to compete with Seattle’ finest!

As I was writing this post and having fun in Photoshop, I came across an article on Time.com talking about how Facebook is more popular than Porn.

I must admit the fact that the author of the article from from Hitwise did make me a little skeptical, but perhaps there’s another merchandising opportunity.

Further to my first post on “Product as a Service”, I’ve been receiving a number of comments via email, this is great so keep them coming.

The most obvious and probably one of the earliest examples of “Product as a Service” is the Skype phone. Skype was clearly very successful at grabbing attention and signing up users from around the globe.

I’d love to know where/when the Skype phone was first sold in stores, but it’s a poster child example of how getting “new” people to sell or just promote your “Service” through the sales of a physical product in store can really help to expand your market.

For me the Skype phone did three things for Skype;

• It made a whole new channel care about their product (the fact there are many Skype phone manufacturers compounded that effect many fold - it made it competitive)
• It took Skype to a whole new set of mainstream, less techy, less web-savvy users
• It established the term “Skype Phone” - who calls it a USB Headset? It made it a “Cool Fashion Accessory” everyone had to have

What you mean you don’t have a Skype phone?

I have some more posts to write to expand on the initial examples, specifically I’m looking forward to writing a full post on Postful. I hope to be able to post an interview with Justin Garten their co-founder.

Got any “Product as a Service” examples of your own (real or imaginary)?

Are you a retailer or Skype phone manufacturer or product manager who wants to comment on the Skype phone or the “Product and a Service” opportunity.

Email me at nick at gift trap dot com

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. 

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