Nordstrom and other large retailers may not know what the term “omni-channel” means, but it is a real trend that’s happening. Jamie Nordstrom was quoted in a recent article saying he doesn’t get the term, but Nordstrom does strive to be where its customers are whether it’s online or offline.

In case you’re not familiar with the term either, “omni-channel” refers to the integration of a variety of channels into a customer acquisition strategy. Basically, you have to go where your customers are. It’s not a new concept, so I can understand the reluctance to give it a new label. But serial entrepreneur Alexandra Mysoor, who just launched a new company, Shanth, disagrees.

Shanth is part studio, part agency, and part incubator to help companies catapult brands into the mainstream using the ‘omni-channel’ approach. Mysoor believes it’s different than the cross-channel and multi-channel approaches, which others claim are similar, in that cross-channel and multi-channel don’t fully integrate or leverage the full shopping and brand experience for the customer.

Mysoor says, “We are moving from individual channels to touch points where customers can interact and transact. When you are in a brick and mortar store but instagraming your mobile shopping moment and bookmarking your future purchase, that is a touch point that only Omni-Channel Retail approach can track and leverage. Technology is allowing us to create a digital layer that encompasses all channels and creates an experience where the customer is truly at the center and can be delivered a personal experience.”

In my chat with her at the TIE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) event at Runway in San Francisco, Mysoor explains the omni-channel approach and how it can help just about any brand reach their customers anywhere. She also offers some critical advice for anyone launching a brand in today’s marketplace.

[Image Courtesy: GenesyLabs.com]

Kym McNicholas

Kym McNicholas is an Emmy Award winning reporter (3x Emmy nominated), with 18 years experience in broadcasting. She has spent most of her career in finance and technology, most recently at Forbes.

At the Launch Festival a new social network emerged. Your reaction to that first sentence had to be just like mine: Argh! Not another one! But it wasn’t until I just spent the weekend with my new God Daughters at a birthday party, that I realized this one in particular is much needed: SocialParent. It’s a social network just for families to connect with their kids’ friends and families.

My best friend and her fellow moms were talking about how they could better connect and make plans.

“What I wouldn’t give for an easy way to find out if anyone wanted to go to the nearby park for an hour and let the kids play on the swings,” exclaimed one mom. “I just want to put an announcement to just my kids friends’ families asking who was free in an hour to join me.”

Turns out, with SocialParent, she can. Yes, she can always do an email blast if she has a group created in her contact list. But email isn’t really conducive to real-time social conversations. Ultimately a chain would be created if everyone replied all. And that’s just messy. It gets even messier when more than one person makes a request each day, and it clogs up your inbox.

What about simply starting a Facebook Group instead? That seemed simple to me. But SocialParent CEO Reza Raji is vehemently opposed to that when comes to family-to-family interactions. He explains why Facebook does not work for families in my interview below:

Kym McNicholas

Kym McNicholas is an Emmy Award winning reporter (3x Emmy nominated), with 18 years experience in broadcasting. She has spent most of her career in finance and technology, most recently at Forbes.

I grew up in a family of football fans. How could you not be a football fan though, growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 90s with the five-time Super Bowl Champion 49ers and their high-scoring West Coast offense? It was an exciting time, and I feel fortunate that, as a kid, my dad turned down the announcer chatter and explain the action to me.

But not everyone has a dad with that much patience, though. The announcers of today, although they’re entertaining, don’t do much for the sport in terms of attracting and retaining new viewers. That’s because they expect those who tune in to have a moderately deep knowledge of the game. It’d be great if you could customize announcers’ content so  their commentary was commensurate to the football knowledge level of each and every viewer.

But while we probably shouldn’t hold our breath for that to happen, YouCommentate offers the next best thing. YouCommentate democratizes the role of the announcer, allowing anyone to provide his or her own commentary to almost any game. Users can turn down the volume on your TV and turn up the volume online to an announcer that fits their style. It’s sure to attract armchair quarterbacks, or even aspiring sports broadcasters, who can get an early start and practice calling the big plays.

The platform won’t scale, however, if it only attracts  a bunch of wannabe sportscasters who  immitate what they hear on television. It must reach markets not being served, such as the aspiring sports fan, while not alienating the deeply knowledgable viewer.

I talked to YouCommentate CEO Steve Bealing when his company launched at the Launch Festival. But don’t turn down the sound. There’s no replacement broadcaster for what he has to say.

[Image Courtesy: http://www.djsymphony.com

Kym McNicholas

Kym McNicholas is an Emmy Award winning reporter (3x Emmy nominated), with 18 years experience in broadcasting. She has spent most of her career in finance and technology, most recently at Forbes.

Well, here’s another one: Brainpickin, which I came across at this year’s Launch Festival in San Francisco. It’s an out-of-the-box solution for people who want to create a learning website, whether you want to monetize the classes or offer them  free. You could be a high school teacher who wants to create a video series for your students, an employer looking to provide training videos for your employees, or an author who seeks to create videos to complement an upcoming book.

In the video below, I talked with Daniel Sztutwojner, CEO of Brainpickin, about why he started the site and how it’s helping to commoditize education.

Kym McNicholas

Kym McNicholas is an Emmy Award winning reporter (3x Emmy nominated), with 18 years experience in broadcasting. She has spent most of her career in finance and technology, most recently at Forbes.

Face it: Facebook isn’t cool anymore. Like anyone and anything that’s grown up – and in Internet years Facebook is a veritable grandpa – it has responsibilities. It can’t just grow its user base anymore; it has to get out of the house, chart its own path, and earn a living. By doing so it’s lost touch with its childhood friends, the younger generation that put the social network on the map. If you’re young and your mom, dad and your skeevy uncle Mort are on Facebook and trying to friend you, you’re probably looking for a new hangout.

You wouldn’t be the only one. A recent study by Piper Jaffray found that Facebook use among teens is declining while the king of pith, Twitter, is quickly gaining. Thirty-three percent of the 5,200 teens surveyed named Facebook as their No. 1 go-to social network, while Twitter wasn’t far behind with 30 percent. Twenty-two percent reported that Youtube is their favorite social network, and 17 percent prefer Instagram. Suddenly social networks have gone from winner-take-all to a wide open competition, and that means opportunity for new upstarts – like the newly launched Povio (it stands for “point of view”), a mobile communications app that has users play “photo Ping-Pong.” Twitter used to ask “What are you doing” then switched to “What’s happening,” and now dropped both in favor of he rather drab “compose tweet.” Povio on the other hand wants you to shoot a photo from your point of view and share it.

Doesn’t make sense? That’s okay, it will. Just watch the video below of my interview with the company’s CEO, Jugoslav Petkovic, which I recorded at Jason Calacanis’ Launch Festival. He’ll explain everything.

Kym McNicholas

Kym McNicholas is an Emmy Award winning reporter (3x Emmy nominated), with 18 years experience in broadcasting. She has spent most of her career in finance and technology, most recently at Forbes.

The first time I sat down and talked with the CEO of what’s arguably the largest art community in the world DeviantArt, he immediately handed me a pen and a paintbrush. I told him, “I can’t draw.” My sixth grade art teacher told me it would be a waste of time for me to pursue it, although I truly loved to draw. Angelo Sotira, in the two hours I spent with him, inspired me to explore my artistic side again. He told me, “True art is about you truly expressing yourself, not about others.” It’s why, as he explains in the video above, he keeps an art journal with him at all times, and uses it even before meetings, to not only draw what’s on his mind, but to paint notes (in the form of pictures) for his meetings.

The talk about that journal has now evolved into the implementation of a publishing platform on DeviantArt.com, which combines the art of the word and picture. The 80^th most popular web site overall in the US announced today that it’s teamed up with Madefire, which makes a publishing platform for comic books, to allow the DeviantArt community to create digital Motion Books™. So, they’re allowing their community to turn their art into money. It’s the latest effort by the site to allow its members to make money on its community of more than 26 million members. A couple of weeks ago, DeviantArt created a platform like 99Designs, which allows its community to bid on paid projects on the site called, Dreamup.

Allowing people to make comic books online is nothing new. I’ve seen a lot of opportunities from many sites, such as Pixton.com and Readwritethink.com, to even Marvel Comics. But it’s not just a matter of creating the opportunity for making the comic books, which artists are looking for, it’s also the opportunity to sell them, view them in a high quality format online, and have a large community to sell them to which are the real issues for artists. That’s why DeviantArt’s partnership with Madefire was so important to its community. Artists will be able to monetize their content. They’ll have the seventh largest social network in the US to share them with in DeviantArt. Plus, they’ll have access to a mobile viewer through Madefire, which allows anyone to take the books from the DeviantArt.com platform, and transfer them to the tablet or phone for easy viewing on the go.

Facebook could certainly learn something from DeviantArt on this front. It’s brilliant to create a partnership that allows users take their content they’re sharing with the community for free, and evolve it into something they can capitalize on with them. It’s even gotten me thinking about taking some of our top talent here at PandoDaily, and getting them on to the DeviantArt platform to create an amazing comic book that depicts Silicon Valley today. It doesn’t cost users a thing to create an online book. For the next month they’re allowing users to sell them through the platform for what comic books originally used to cost, which is 10 cents apiece.

Ultimately, there will be a higher price on books, likely there will be a price scale based on the type of book, number of pages, as well as the popularity of the author, I’m guessing. Deviant Art is still trying to determine the specifics. They haven’t even released what the revenue share will be between the authors and the platform. However, Sotira would say that it would certainly favor the author.

Kym McNicholas

Kym McNicholas is an Emmy Award winning reporter (3x Emmy nominated), with 18 years experience in broadcasting. She has spent most of her career in finance and technology, most recently at Forbes.

Watch out Lara Croft (Tomb Raider). Elizabeth Hammer is the next beautiful, intelligent, and athletic heroine to win the hearts of gamers worldwide, played by Harvard graduate Heather Gordon.

Four years in the making, and finally Irrational Games’ “BioShock: Infinite” is now available.

“BioShock: Infinite” is the latest installment of the best-selling BioShock video game franchise.

The franchise has sold nearly 10 million copies worldwide.

While the previous games had taken place in the ficticious underwater city of Rapture, the new game takes place in the pre-World War I time period of 1912 in the United States.

Two characters are in focus: Booker Dewitt, an ex-Pinkerton detective, and the heroine he must rescue from the tower she’s lived in all her life, Elizabeth Hammer.

This game was twice-delayed, leaving some video game critics concerned that this new installment would one, never happen and/or two, would be terrible.

One of the biggest problems was getting the character of Elizabeth right.

They almost canceled the character for a variety of reasons, one being that the team at first wasn’t familiar with how to incorporate a character like this, and two that none of the ladies who auditioned to play her avatar had the stylization necessary to pull off the next Lara Croft.

Then they met, Heather Gordon.

She’s a Harvard graduate (MFA), booksmart like her character, having also received the scholastic scholarship award at the Miss California competition, state qualifier for the Miss America program, while she served as Miss Marin County.

Gordon is a talented actor as well, earning multiple film festival awards for her role in independent film “Seducing Charlie Barker” and most recently being honored with a BroadwayWorld Best Actor award for her role as Billie in “Born Yesterday.”

Gordon admits she didn’t know what she was auditioning for, when Irrational Games brought her in to try out. It was a brand new experience. She’d never had a role in a video game before. She figured, as I did, that it was purely animation. Unless you’re in the know as to how a video game is configured or how animated movies are made, I would argue that the mainstream wouldn’t think that a human was used to map out the movements of these cartoon characters.

As an actor walking on to the set of a video game taping, “It felt like a meld of both worlds: film and stage,” explains Gordon.

It took place in a room the size of a basketball court in Novato, California, about 25 minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge, at 2K Games’ motion capture studio.

There was no set. There were no props. There was only a green screen.

Gordon was dressed only in a skin tight black body suit with sensors all over it that engineers would read and use for Elizabeth’s avatar.

Every move she made over the past year of taping was captured on a computer. Guiding her every move via teleconference from Irrational Games’ headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts was director Shawn Robertson. He and BioShock: Infinite creator Ken Levine did their best to describe each scenario to Gordon. But a lot was left to Gordon’s imagination.

A lot.

Yes, the descriptions of the scene in play were vivid. The big question mark was what happened before and what would happen afterwards? No one knew. They would tweak as they go. So the motion capture actress quickly learned that taping a video game scene is not like rehearsing for a play where you go through the arc of the show. Each scene is taped out of order. She would just have to keep up. Gordon, who would get the voiceover, by voice actress Courtnee Draper, the night before each taping, wouldn’t even know for example, exactly why Elizabeth was screaming, or what was happening. All she could do was trust what she knew of the character and try to act accordingly.

“I would improvise as I felt she would act or express herself,” says Gordon. “It was a great challenge, and I loved every minute of it.”

After this experience with Irrational Games, Gordon is hooked on gaming. Not necessarily the act of gaming, but acting in them.

Gordon’s next project is the voice of another big character in an upcoming game by Telltale Games. But no other details could be shared on that as of yet.

“BioShock: Infinite“ is out on now, selling for $60 to those 17 and up. (PS3, Xbox 360, and Windows PCs).

Kym McNicholas

Kym McNicholas is an Emmy Award winning reporter (3x Emmy nominated), with 18 years experience in broadcasting. She has spent most of her career in finance and technology, most recently at Forbes.

There’s a great debate raging over whether brick-and-mortar is on the way out, or waging a comeback… with the help of ecommerce 2.0. Bonobos has boosted sales and branding with the help of Nordstrom, while Warby Parker has some of the highest retail sales per square foot in the entire industry.

On the other side of the world, online customized shoe company Shoes of Prey and Australia’s largest department store chain David Jones have teamed up to marry the two experiences. David Jones carved out an area in its shoe department for Shoes of Prey, which allows its customers to fully design their shoes online from the color to the fabric.

Shoes of Prey co-founder Jodie Fox told me that in order to scale, the company needed to figure out a way to reach the audience that was resistant to shopping online, especially for customized products.

In the video above, Fox explains what other online and brick-and-mortar retailers can learn from her. I was impressed with how immersive she’s made the experience from the music, to the air, to even the seats customers sit on inside the store – they all help women to design the perfect shoe, and ultimately hope it will increase sales.

Kym McNicholas

Kym McNicholas is an Emmy Award winning reporter (3x Emmy nominated), with 18 years experience in broadcasting. She has spent most of her career in finance and technology, most recently at Forbes.

When I heard MyTime CEO Ethan Anderson speak at last week’s LAUNCH Festival in San Francisco, the first thing that popped into my mind was: “This company is the answer to the fall of Groupon.”

I had already been looking for a Groupon 2.0 since Sarah’s recent article predicting that we will see another — more sustainable — version of the flailing site in the next ten years.

From that post:

By “another Groupon,” I don’t mean a wildly irresponsible company that pockets private equity, juices the bottom line, and pushes off a stock prematurely on the public markets that can’t retain its value. We will most definitely see that, but in a tech cycle that’s infused with booms and busts and greed, that’s like saying the sun will come up tomorrow…

I mean we will see another company that seeks to become a modern Web-based customer acquisition engine for small businesses, likely relying on discounts and coupons. It may look a lot like Groupon — if it’s close, it’ll be met with wild derision. But at some point, someone doing this will succeed. And give it a few years, but people will try again. The need is just too big and Groupon’s execution was too obviously flawed.

MyTime aspires to be that very Web-based customer acquisition engine for small businesses. But it’s not relying on discounts and coupons to bring in customers — or at least it’s trying not to.

Instead, MyTime wants to be an appointment booking site for time-pressed customers of salons, yoga studios, auto shops, and personal trainers. It allows customers to search for open appointments across a wide range of small businesses, and even offers special deals for booking in hard-to-fill timeslots.

It launched in February in the Los Angeles market, nearly 10 months after a $3 million injection of capital. Some of its key backers include GRP Partners’ Mark Suster, 500 Startups’ Dave McClure, Box Group’s David Tisch, Brian Lee (co-founder of Shoedazzle, LegalZoom, and Honest Company), as well as the Launch Festival’s Jason Calacanis.

MyTime, which Michael Carney first wrote about in February, is designed to draw in new customers by easing the hassle of booking an appointment, not by offering aggressive and unsustainable discounts. Anderson is gearing MyTime towards today’s ever increasingly busy person — not a couponer.

Businesses post their schedules online free (it’s even integrated into the merchant’s own website) and customers can browse the different auto shops, for example, to find a timeslot that works for them. Let’s say you need to get your brakes checked, but you’re only available at 1:30 pm. Instead of calling every auto shop to find out what’s open, you can do a simple search on this site and find the auto shops that have availability at that time and you can book the appointment right there.

MyTime also has a dynamic pricing system connected to the merchant’s calendar, which is based on demand for any particular timeslot. So the more in-demand timeslots are priced higher, and the harder-to-filled slots are priced at a discount.

As we’ve seen with Uber’s surge pricing, people are willing to pay a premium if they need a service at a specific time. There’s a lot of power — and money to be made — in simply giving time-pressed people the option.

And as for the harder-to-fill timeslots, discounts aren’t always enough, if they’re just sitting on the site waiting for someone to find them. The system pushes out geotargeted ads to Google, Facebook, Twitter, and affiliates automatically via API, to promote open appointments.

Since MyTime is only promoting a specific date and time to be filled, it won’t create a flood of people in one Yoga class, for example. We’ve all heard stories from friends who’ve bought a daily deal only to end up in an overbooked class with a bad experience. The result can be bad Yelp reviews and negative word of mouth. Suddenly an investment that was aimed at growing a business winds up not only hurting its margins but hurting their word of mouth too. That’s hardly an ideal use of a small businesses’ precious marketing dollars.

MyTime curates the businesses featured on the site, and Yelp reviews are integrated into the feed to give customers an idea of the small businesses’ reputation. It also has a 100 percent moneyback guarantee for customers unhappy with a service, and if a merchant ends up with multiple returns, they’re kicked off the site.

The balance between having enough inventory and maintaining quality will be a tricky one as the company grows.

But the biggest struggle will be whether MyTime can deliver customers based on this ease of scheduling alone. Many of the features seem to veer into discounting to incentive users and that can be a slippery slope. If MyTime goes down it too far, it’ll just wind up a latter day, less-well-funded Groupon. In other words: Road kill.

Deals simply can’t be the main driver for booking on the site. MyTime keeps 40 percent of the revenue from each new customer who books through its system, leaving very little revenue for the merchant. MyTime also will have to deliver quality repeat customers for businesses to take the time to use it.

MyTime is wise to cater to the time-poor versus the cash-poor, because the time-poor will frequently pay a premium for convenience. But reaching that audience is far harder than reaching rabid couponers who will go out of their way for a good deal. Time-poor consumers by nature aren’t necessarily early adopters, because, well, they don’t have a lot of time.

Anderson insists MyTime has a different sales culture and a different relationship with merchants. Unlike deal sites, MyTime provides follow-through and support for its merchants offering customers incentives to rebook. ”One of our sales people came from LivingSocial, and they were told to tell their merchants ‘Our job is to bring you the customers, and your job is to make sure they come back,” he says. ”That’s outrageous.”

Unfortunately, the examples he gave were — sigh — mostly just more discounting. For instance, after the first appointment, the consumer gets an email with a $5 coupon to rebook that business, and two $20 gift cards for that business to hand out to friends.

MyTime clearly realizes the challenge and is working hard to add enough scheduling and convenience benefits that it doesn’t have to keep falling back into the realm of discounts. It just launched a reminder service to let customers know when to get any of their favorite services again, and sends them discounted timeslots and first availabilities at their favorite merchants, or offers them selections of new ones to choose from as well.

It also recently launched user profiles to keep track of customers’ favorite merchants offering quick one-click rebooking.

The question is whether they’ll get enough traction in the Los Angeles market to make it worth their while to scale. They’re optimistically vetting businesses in San Francisco, but with 700,000 appointments open in Los Angeles, they still have a lot to prove before a second city would be wise.

In the video below, Anderson explains how MyTime works and why he believes it could be a business changing tool for mom and pop shops.

Kym McNicholas

Kym McNicholas is an Emmy Award winning reporter (3x Emmy nominated), with 18 years experience in broadcasting. She has spent most of her career in finance and technology, most recently at Forbes.

In high school I had a friend whose parents promised her a new car on the day of graduation if she got straight As. My parents, in contrast, warned me that if didn’t get good grades, they wouldn’t pay for college. One is the carrot, the other the stick. Would my friend have gotten straight As without the bribe of a car? Would I have done as well without the threat of spending my life slinging no-whip mochaccinos? (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) But what I can say is that each child is driven by different incentives. For some there’s some sort of monetary or materialistic incentive. For them, there’s StudyBooster, a formal mechanism for family and friends to encourage students to do better.

Think of it as a Kickstarter for achievement. A student or family member can start a campaign on the site. Basically they set a goal the student should achieve, such as the completion of a book report or all As on a report card. Then friends and family can pledge money as an incentive for the student to achieve that goal. If the goal is met, the money goes to the student. If not, supporters have the option to release the funds to the student saying they got close enough, or they can choose to withhold the cash.

In the parlance of behavioral psychology, StudyBooster is promoting extrinsic rewards (OK, bribes). There’s a whole body of literature that indicates that extrinsic motivations – those that don’t come from within – are not as beneficial as intrinsic rewards: self-motivation, like when you are actually interested in doing something. (You can read Daniel Pink and Clay Shirky to learn more.) But that doesn’t mean there’s no room for extrinsic motivations. Our whole education system is premised on them. What are grades but extrinsic motivations (but I digress)?

StudyBooster co-founder Dominic Bressan got the idea for the company when he found himself procrastinating while finishing his MBA at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. Why, he wondered, did students like him waste time? It made no sense. He should have been screaming toward the finish line. During his research he came across this Harvard study, which showed that students respond to cash awards – not as the complete solution, but as part of an educational program. So he decided to team up with co-founders Stefan Williams, and Jorden Minos to create StudyBooster.

The idea of paying students to achieve isn’t new. In 2007 New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried paying low-income students $5 to $10 for taking a test and $25 to $50 for getting good grades. Under the plan, students could rack up a maximum of $500 and schools that participated could take in $5,000.  Alas, it didn’t work, and the program was discontinued.

I can hear the critics now. Some would argue that parents shouldn’t have to bribe a child to achieve. They would say it sets a bad precedent. A child should simply be driven by a sense of accomplishment. One Facebook friend of mine says, “I think incentivizing puts unneeded pressure which can lead to depression or worse.” Although I do agree with the critics, I think my boss Sarah Lacy has said it best, “You should make things for how people are, not how you want them to be.”

So far students seem to like it. Then again, there’s cash to be had, so why wouldn’t they? According to StudyBooster co-founder Dominic Bressan, more than 2,000 people pre-registered for the service during a two-week pre-beta rollout at Australian college campuses.

I think this could prove beneficial to students who can’t afford college, and are struggling to get loans, to create campaigns asking for help. I could also see communities rallying behind certain students. But I also see Uncle Sam ultimately monitoring these campaigns once this site takes off. So those who use it, definitely beware that the taxman will be watching…at least in the States.

Co-founder Dominic Bressan says, “It’s a sponsorship, so we believe this shouldn’t be an issue…but that’s Australia, not the US.”

StudyBooster says it will begin to make money the moment the first person achieves a goal. Six percent of the transaction is taken out for operation costs (revenue), two percent of which will go to the charity “Save the Children” to help low-income students.

StudyBooster could be valuable asset for a company like Chegg, one of the largest education portals in America, which allows students to buy or rent books, manage their class schedules, and find tutors. Or if Chegg opened up its platform for others to offer services, StudyBooster would be an ideal choice. 

And no one paid me to say that. I was driven by intrinsic motivations.

Kym McNicholas

Kym McNicholas is an Emmy Award winning reporter (3x Emmy nominated), with 18 years experience in broadcasting. She has spent most of her career in finance and technology, most recently at Forbes.