/digital

Amazon.com's latest release isn't an enhancement to the world's most famous online store or a clever new software-as-a-service thingie, it's a proper physical gadget: a very light but quite large handheld that downloads and displays books.

The first batch may have sold out but the product's reception amongst its most obvious audience - the geeks and early adopters you'd expect to be rushing at it - has been mixed. To be more specific: nobody likes it (Scoble's negative reaction will probably be definitive).

A launch like this could have gone either way: it could easily have been an iPhone queue-round-the-block job but, for some reason, it wasn't. The scary thing about a vehement negative reception like this (my favourite from a twitter reviewer: "My girlfriend wants a Kindle. She's dead to me now") is that it might be impossible to get past it.

Customers might not let Amazon forget that their first hardware product was a critical flop. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos must be pretty scared too because he has direct experience of a technology product that met with the scorn of the geeks and never recovered: he was an investor in Segway.

So what actually happened? First: it's not an iPhone. A handheld device launched in the same year (in the same decade) as iPhone was always going to struggle. The iPhone halo is going to be difficult to overcome for manufacturers of pocket-candy for a while. There's only so much gadget-love to go round.

Second: it may be a gadget but it's got books in it. Books are a tricky proposition: publishers are a decade behind the music business in understanding the new modes of consumption for digital stuff. The suits have insisted the Kindle include technology for blocking piracy that reduces the value of the device (it won't read PDFs, for instance, presumably because publishers hate PDFs). There's nothing geeks hate more than tech that's been compromised by the suits: it offends them, makes them spit and swear.

Of course, all of this might not matter. Kindle might so catch the imagination of the reading public (that's who it's for, after all) that it leaps right over the tetchy early adopter crowd into mass adoption. Seems unlikely, though. Gadgets need geeks to get them into circulation. If Kindle can't persuade enough of them to fall in love (the awesome e-ink display could conceivably do this) then it's Segway all over again.

I blogged the Kindle here and here.

So it turns out you can buy a £3 supermarket rollerball and make it write like a £200 Mont Blanc writing instrument. All you need is a sharpish craft knife, the aforementioned rollerball (a Pilot G2, favourite of writers and doodlers the world over) and a refill from a Mont Blanc Classique (I think it's this one). Detailed and entertaining instructions are here.

Why do I mention this here, at shave.com? Well, there are a couple of reasons:

• First, this is an almost perfect illustration of the changed status of the brand in the networked era. Nobody has any respect for what comes in the box any more. Spotty schoolkids are trashing expensively protected IP daily: hacking the iPhone, uploading mashups, modding PCs.
• It also nicely illustrates the clever, unorthodox geek mindset: most people want a Mont Blanc so they can wave it around ostentatiously when checking in at the Travelodge (posh people don't buy them any more, you see). The geeks want a Mont Blanc because they've heard it writes well but spending £200 on a pen would be stupid.

So what happens to brands then? They're less uptight, more open-ended. The hyper-polished, perfected and protected brand of the late industrial era is probably a thing of the past: brands in the future will be provisional entities, placed in the public domain for completion by their customers. To begin with, of course, this is going to be all about attitude. Brand launches will change. Brands will be more playful, more open to experiment, less locked-down.

Here's an example of a brand launched on the old model: Antony Worrall Thompson's green cleaning products - a dreary launch in the hottest emerging category. Nothing going on here at all. Just bottles of stuff: no room for improvisation, no play at all. Now read what Russell and Matt are up to with Howies' new shop in Carnaby Street. Nuff said?

Nicky, KMI's hard working and resourceful Customer Care Manager/IT Manager (she's also responsible for shave.com) has made it into the pages of Britain's biggest selling business computing mag: she's got an entire double-page spread in Computing's prestigious monthly Computing Business supplement and a photo on the mag's home page too! Here's the article itself, from Computing's web site.

Here are some resources gathered lately, mostly about the business of green ecommerce. It has to be said that this is still a very thin area: most of the industry is still in gold rush mode, intent only on soaking up the vast annual growth we're still seeing in ecommerce everywhere (some categories are growing at over 50% per year). Real work on sustainability is happening in IT infrastructure (see IBM's £1B 'Project Big Green') and in logistics). It's a marker for how few good pages there are on sustainable ecommerce that my own blog post on the topic from last week sorts to the top of Google's search results for 'green ecommerce'.

Here's a really fascinating (and already quite influential) report from the US Government's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, snappily titled: Best Practices for Data Centers: Lessons Learned from Benchmarking 22 Data Centers (PDF). Lots of hard data here and evidence of widespread waste, even in the most modern of facilities. Paradoxically, of course, this represents an opportunity for the industry: there are obviously huge cost and efficiency savings available in our current infrastructure if we just get our act together and implement the recommendations of reports like this one.

A UK government-funded research consortium of six universities called Green Logistics. Various shippers, truckers, retailers and government agencies are involved as sponsors and will make use of the data and recommendations produced. Not much here about eCommerce yet (well, nothing, actually). The early focus has obviously been on trucking, packaging, warehousing etc. but I understand that Heriot Watt University, one of the participating institutions, has a research project on green ecommerce under way in its Logistics Research Centre (at the moment there's just some quite out-of-date consumer research).

Ian Barnes is Sustainable Development Manager at Boots. His entertaining presentation (PDF) on green logistics at Boots is on the Green Logistics site as is Alan McKinnon's very useful short history of green logistics research (PDF).

With a big fanfare in September, Tesco's announced - to a pretty sour response form the UK media, it should be said - a £25M endowment for a new Sustainable Consumption Institute at Manchester University. The project doesn't seem to have its own web site yet but keep an eye on the Manchester University web site for news.

And meanwhile, in the real world, a US business called Banyan Commerce, principally concerned with the rather old-fashioned business of EDI but also running datacentres, has announced that customers will in future be able to automatically offset their datacentre capacity via Banyan's partnership with a not-for-profit called Zero Footprint. I expect to see a lot more of this kind of initiative and it makes a lot of sense: offsetting should take place as far upstream as possible and the datacentre - a centralised, managed resource shared by hundreds of businesses - is as good a place as any to get started. Ask your own ISP/datacentre about offsetting your capacity.

Computing Magazine has a feature in this month's Computing Business supplement titled 'The benefits of green IT', which is about sustainable IT infrastructure for businesses. In Computing itself there's an article by Tom Young about the pressure from client companies on IT vendors to provide green solutions and there's now a section of the magazine devoted to green IT issues which you should probably bookmark. I'm bookmarking sustainable ecommerce pages at del.icio.us using the tag 'greenecommerce'. Feel free to do the same and subscribe to the tag's feed for updates.

We used to say that ecommerce would be greener than conventional retail. We made a big fuss about it in the early days. We said that the shift to ecommerce was part of a bigger shift away from inefficient modes of fulfillment towards optimised, just-in-time supply chains and all that.

Specifically, as an industry, we used to say:

• ecommerce will save millions of customer miles annually. Driving a tonne-and-a-half of metal to the shops for a Babyshambles CD, some milk and a bag of cat litter will be a thing of the past.
• Inefficient networks of thousands of stores - expensively heated and lit year-round - will be replaced by smaller networks of cold-and-dark regional hubs staffed by robots
• Hyper-efficient, route-optimised delivery firms will shunt groceries and hard goods into homes twice as economically as the people who actually live there ever could.

Of course, all of this still applies. Using Amazon.com's fine-tuned supply chain to get that Babyshambles CD to your house probably is greener than going and getting it yourself in the Hummer.

It's just that dozens of other slightly less convenient truths have pressed in to dent our confidence in the transformative power of that little 'e'. For instance:

• One-at-a-time distribution of items like books, bottles of wine, toiletries and clothing is unarguably inefficient. A blizzard of jiffy bags is hardly a sane replacement for older, more organised modes of delivery.
• The shift to ecommerce is almost certainly not reducing the environmental impact of retail, just displacing it to less easily monitored parts of the economy: courier firms, for instance. Bricks & mortar retailers are at least visible and can be held to account in the consumer marketplace (witness the kicking Tesco's have been getting in the media lately).
• The long tail of smaller pure-play ecommerce businesses that constitutes probably 50% of ecommerce by value in the UK is not in any sense carbon-optimised. Massive duplication (in routes, packaging, storage and administration) cancels the savings that might be expected from not running physical stores.
• ecommerce businesses don't discriminate between obviously inefficient activities and more benign ones. We've all got our favourite horror story: Water on sale at Amazon.com is mine but many products really shouldn't be shipped in the post or by courier. Some of our own products here at KMI are a worry, for instance. Although our best known products are highly concentrated and very light (shaving oils, for instance), others are dense (80% water!) and it's difficult to justify shipping a £3.99 shave gel in the post (especially by airmail).

The industry is just waking up to this and, to be fair, the data's not in yet. Research sponsored by the retail industry at places like Heriot Watt University is in its early stages. Most of retail's sustainability effort has, so far, gone into the much more obvious problem areas of trucking, energy use in stores, packaging and other supply chain issues.

It's pretty certain, though, that the greens are about to start paying attention so action will be needed soon. The ecommerce industry has begun to move but efforts are so far defensive. The IMRG, the trade body, has an awards scheme which looks dangerously like a whitewash effort, for instance.

What the industry needs to do now is to make a start on some industry-wide initiatives (it's essential that they're not confined to single firms) to identify sources of waste and environmental damage and then to neutralise them. Some measures will probably be unpalatable to large parts of the business, especially to hard-pressed pure-play online stores.

Our own plans here at KMI are quite radical but won't suit businesses dependent for 100% of revenues on the Internet. I'd like you to watch this space. I'll be sharing plans to reduce our own online carbon footprint here over the coming weeks. I'd also welcome your questions and comments, especially if you're in a similar role yourself or have any useful ideas to share.

Ikea: ubiquitous, cheap, accessible design. Here's what happens when imaginative, practical, more-than-slightly geeky people get hold of your product and start to play with it. Ikeahacker is a blog about hacked Ikea furniture: stuff bought from the big yellow box and then improved upon or adapted to a new purpose. There are some brilliant ideas here (I like the coat and hat storage thingie).

The thing is this is not a one-off: brand owners are going to have to get used to this kind of thing. In a networked world your customers will share ideas, swap adaptations and enhancements. Product hackers have no respect for the integrity of your product: your brand is fair game. They'll play with it, adapt and adulterate it - mash it up. The key is not to get on your high horse and attempt to stop it but rather to enjoy the game and watch carefully - you might learn something.

I took the opportunity of KOS.PRO's big presence at the annual hairdressers' jamboree Salon International to get down to ExCel London and soak up a bit of hairdresser culture. A quite amazing event: glitzy catwalk shows, racks of hair extensions, crazy Japanese baldness cures, live hairdressing, scissors (lots of scissors), gorgeous models, salon furniture, transsexuals and (pretty universally) great hair. I took a load of photos, which are here.

The KOS.PRO stand was awesome: looming like a hexagonal gunmetal dreadnought over the rest of the show - which was mostly pink. Will King says KOS.PRO was the only male grooming launch at the event.

Throughout, Will has been Twittering, of course. You can see his updates here - and they've also been appearing on the KOS.PRO blog.

I've been twittering for six months or so. I love Twitter. It's so simple: 140-character bulletins, life updates, notes from now, scrapbook cuttings from the world at large. No pics, no sound, no nothing. Some people can't stand it: it's like the ultimate self-indulgent me-fest. I'm eating a sandwich, I'm shaving, I'm walking home... WTF?

But, trust me, it's a remarkable thing. If you ask me, it's closer to the Cyberspace originally described by William Gibson than anything else I've seen. Following (that's the operative word) a bunch of twittering friends is like pushing your head up into a cloud of what's happening now, it's like being in many places all at once, sharing dozens of experiences, learning how strangers live.

It's another world-flattening phenomenon and doubly powerful because it builds on a set of tools that already existed. Nothing new here. Just a powerful combination of web, IM and txt.

We're planning some Twitter activity here at KMI. We think it's a place that brands can be active if they promise no bullshit, no spam and nothing boring.

By the way, Gibson is speaking about his new book in London next week. I'll be there. Let me know if you're going.

One of the peculiarities of the shave.com store is that almost all of the products we sell there are mostly water (there are some important exceptions, as Andy Hill points out in this interesting post over on his green blog). There's obviously something a bit perverse about packing any amount of water into a box and sending it in the post. Apart from the obvious green concerns (why ship water when it's already present almost everywhere on the planet's surface), water is dense. Really dense. I learn from this fascinating article in Fast Company that if you were to fill an ordinary cargo truck with water it would be too heavy to move!

So, our challenge here at shave.com is to sell and ship water (plus the King of Shaves 'secret sauce') with relatively low average order values and still make a profit. I remember reading a long time ago that Jeff Bezos settled on books for his fairly successful online store by spending some time in his kitchen weighing and measuring different products. Books were the closest to the optimal size and weight for shipping: decision made (I know there were some other factors in this decision!).

Looking for material on the tricky trade-off between product density, unit price and shipping costs, I came across this fascinating blog post from a couple of years ago about the mind-blowing economics of shipping bottled water from Fiji to the USA.

Will King, King of Shaves founder, recorded some contributions to this light-hearted Radio 4 show about shaving. Click here to listen to the show (you'll need Real Player if you don't already have it) and here's an MP3.