Zaarly Storefronts: A New Milestone In E-Commerce

If you haven’t seen the new Zaarly Storefronts, you should take a look. It legitimately might change ecommerce forever.

The team of geniuses at Zaarly has tackled a few big peeves we’ve all had with the legacy ecommerce establishment:

• Traditionally, online merchants focus on products and are horrible at selling services
• It’s hard to find local products/services which due to their proximity may be more relevant to what I’m looking for

E-commerce isn’t totally broken today, but it doesn’t really provide a good avenue to finding good local service providers (house cleaning, outsourced chores, lawn mowing, personal chefs, et cetera), and it is no good at helping you find Services (major ecommerce sites like Ebay/Amazon are much more focused on selling products). All the daily deal sites made ecommerce more local, but they only gave us deals on restaurants, spas, and some other things that we don’t really want or need. Zaarly Storefronts changes is. It is local (which makes its service offerings more relevant), it includes products (which is what most of us buy online, anyway), it makes buying services easy, it provides a clear visual introduction to the service provider or product, and does all of this in one place.

The gist of Zaarly Storefronts is that it is local products and services with with engaging descriptions and photos/visuals that give you a good idea of what you’ll get.

Here’s an example: you want someone to clean your apartment every two weeks because you don’t have time to do it yourself. Zaarly Storefronts says “Meet your new cleaning lady, Geannie Meckler!”:

See, read, click, buy. Now your house is clean. It’s intuitive and effortless. I think that Zaarly’s ecommerce innovations are going to drive its competitors to change the way they list products and services, so perhaps Zaarly Storefront will change the way commerce happens even on platforms outside Zaarly.

Here’s an example of some of the local products available on Zaarly Storefronts (which reminds me of a sort of virtual farmer’s market):

Kudos to the team over at Zaarly for building a hyper-relevant ecommerce platform!

Skateboarding in Moccasins

It is possible. Here’s proof:

Skateboarding in 1901 Maui Driving Shoes/Moccasins from Nordstrom from Cameron Newland on Vimeo.

Shoe performance while skateboarding: Acceptable.

I’m wearing the 1901 Driving Shoe in Brown available at Nordstrom.com for $89.95.

Slow Dance – Risk It All

Slow Dance is the best thing to come out of Seattle since Mad Rad. I’d categorize it as electrosynth-infused hip-hop that’s danceable, and quite reminiscent of Swedish electro-hopper Adam Tensta. Check out Slow Dance’s new album below, and stop by their album release party if you’re in Seattle this Friday (it’s at Nectar).

TouchBase for iPhone

TouchBase for iPhone is an app that is so useful and innovative, I need to share it with you.

It effectively replaces your iPhone Calendar app and does all the regular things (creating/editing calendar entries, inviting others, et cetera) that you would expect. It really shines, though, when you’re running late to meet someone or need a map of the venue to navigate to the meeting venue quickly with GPS.

Here’s an example. If I create a calendar event called “Lunch with Tony W. at Grim’s Seattle”, TouchBase will automatically go through my iPhone contacts and find Tony W. and associate him with the calendar event. The app will also run a Google search for “Grim’s Seattle” and insert the top-ranked search result’s address into the location/address field of the calendar event. Since TouchBase knows who I’m meeting with and automatically fetched his phone number from my address book, I can call or text Tony DIRECTLY from the calendar event, and because TouchBase has automatically fetched the meeting venue’s address, I can navigate to it and get driving directions–also straight from the TouchBase calendar event. If I’m stuck in traffic for our lunch meeting, I can simply hit “I’m running late by 20 minutes” and TouchBase will send Tony a text to let him know (or I can call him).

This is the kind of useful extension of the calendar that I wish Apple had built into the standard iPhone calendar. Anyways, you can now have this functionality for just $0.99 (the price is set to quadruple to $3.99, so get it soon!).

TouchBase App (iTunes)

Via GeekWire.

Seattle Art Morsel – Z. Z. Wei

I was lucky enough to meet my favorite living artist, Z. Z. Wei, last night at Seattle Asian Art Museum.

And he even gave me a copy of his book, Light and Shadow!

Check out his exhibition in San Francisco if you have the chance (it ends 4/2/11).

His gallerist‘s Artist Description:

“Z.Z. Wei’ s paintings transport us to a place where time stands still. His compositions portray quiet, yet powerful images reminiscent of a whimsical, rural America. Richly complex, they are filled with humor and loneliness, peacefulness and pain. They balance on the knife-edge of meaning, half in shadow, half in light, tempting those who choose to look beyond the mundane to experience a unique and timeless look at life.”

Macklemore – Otherside ft. Fences (Ryan Lewis Remix)

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This is undeniably good music. Surprisingly, it all came from Seattle.

Artist in the Spotlight: Winston Chmielinski

The fine folks at The Society Global highlighted an upcoming New York artist, Winston Chmielinski. Instantly, he’s one of my favorites. Culturites, you have good taste!

Artist’s Website: www.wi-ch.com

Michael Jackson: Alien vs. Predator

Purple drank, skateboarding Ewoks, and Michael Jackson as the venerable Predator (from Alien vs. Predator). Awesome.

Via Goods.

DB Longboards

No doubt inspired by Amazon.com’s famous Three Wolf Moon tee, DB Longboards has launched the Wolf Prowler for this season’s collection:

Maybe the coolest skateboard graphics I’ve seen this year.

Yesterday, I got a new Hello Kitty Skateboard. Here’s a shot of David Cantu holding it:

I’m pretty psyched about it.

Party for Haiti! – Seattle

I’m proud to announce that I’ll be hosting a benefit for Friends of the Orphans on Thursday, April 8th at BoConcept in Seattle:

(click to enlarge)

(click to enlarge)

Tickets are $10 presale or $20 at the door, and can be purchased here:

http://bit.ly/party4haiti

Get yours before they sell out!

Tigerbeat and DJ Marty Mar – HollyHood Mixtape Vol. 1

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Just released. Press play. Download. You will thank me later.

Download link:

http://bit.ly/ctDSc4

Tigerbeat on Twitter: http://twitter.com/tigerbeat206
Tigerbeat on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/TigerBeat/250204295321

T-Mobile Customers: Cancel Your Contract ETF-Free!

If you’re on T-Mobile USA, there’s something you should know. You’ve just hit the jackpot!

Well, kind of.

T-Mobile is upping their overage per-minute rate to 45¢ (on individual plans <$59.99 and family plans <$89.99), and 40¢ per minute for plans above those pricepoints. The rate increase is carrier-invoked and it constitutes a “materially adverse change of contract,” which means you can get out of your contract now, all without paying an early termination fee.

Who is this good news for:

a) People who wanted to jump ship to get an iPhone, but didn’t want to pay a hefty ETF.
b) EVERYONE!

The reason the change is good for all T-Mobile customers (even if you’re staying with Big Magenta) is that without a contract, you’re a free agent, and hence eligible for upgrade pricing. It’s like you’ve just been given $200 toward an expensive phone, or a free cheap phone (that you can promptly sell on Ebay).

If you’d like to take advantage of the free contract-out, click over to BGR for details:

T-Mobile raises overage rates; cancel your contract sans-ETF – Boy Genius Report

Meet The Ferrari 458 Italia

The engine features direct fuel injection and the best hp/cylinder output of any Ferrari; it makes a total of 562 horsepower and 398 pound-feet of torque, yet offers improved fuel consumption and lower emissions than the F430’s 483-horsepower V-8.

It’ll hit 60 in under 3.4 seconds, and sport a curb weight of around 3,200 pounds. Top speed will exceed 200 miles an hour.

Via NYTimes.

Twitter Disguised As Excel

I’ve seen games in Excel before, but this is something else:

Spreadtweet is a Twitter client that makes a person’s incoming Twitter stream look like a typical Excel spreadsheet, giving the impression that an employee is working when they really are not.

Via The Type-A Way (Thanks, Marina!)

Gist Previewed

I sat down with Gist CEO T.A. McCann last Friday and got a personalized introduction to their messaging application. I’m finally importing all my messaging, contacts, and social networking data into Gist so I can use it as my centralized messaging center day-to-day.

It’s fascinating what kinds of things Gist can tell you about your contacts:

Imagine I had a meeting scheduled with Marcelo Calbucci next week. I could look at his Gist profile and see which media organizations had mentioned him in the last week, and what they wrote about him. That way, I can be caught up on what’s going on in Marcelo’s world before even sitting down with him.

Gist functions in a very similar fashion to my BlackBerry’s Messages application, and by that I mean that it’s a centralized destination that gives a timeline of my communication with all my contacts no matter the platform (email, Facebook messaging, Twitter, et cetera). That kind of continuity and context is important in our modern, connected, busy world. And to top it off, you can reply using any and all platforms right from Gist. No need to open up Facebook or Gmail in a separate tab.

This thing is just going to blow Google Wave out of the water because it harnesses the power of context. It combines communication and contextual relationships into one, bringing a human element into messaging–something that Google could only wish they’d thought of building into Wave.

It seems like this product was purpose-built for me. If they made me pay monthly for it, I would–in a second.

I’m going to write about any new Gist features that strike my fancy each week, as I get to know the software better, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, try it out yourself: https://beta.gist.com/dashboard