Technology & Innovation — November 29, 2011

The Clicks and Mortar of Online Sales

If your product doesn’t need to be touched or demonstrated and is relatively small, your retail footprint is going to shrink. Bad news for retail clerks but exciting for entrepreneurs. because it could become easier to sell products in places that you couldn’t previously.Retail is going to shrink and proliferate.

bigthinkeditor

What’s the Latest Development?

Ecommerce now claiims 5-10% of retail spending and isn’t just found on sites like Amazon.com. We may be in a transitional phase like when early cars looked like horse carriages. Many current ecommerce websites are just better versions of catalogs. But a new crop (such as Square, Tesco’s QR/subway experiment, Apple’s self check-out) suggests a future where ecommerce is more of of a “clicks & mortar” experience.

What’s the Big Idea?

If your product doesn’t need to be touched or demonstrated and is relatively small, your retail footprint is going to shrink big-time. That may be bad news for retail clerks, but it’s very exciting for entrepreneurs because it could become easier to sell products in places that you couldn’t previously.

a computer generated image of a human brain.

Thinking

The great free will debate featuring Michio Kaku and Steven Pinker

Who — or what — really controls your mind?

Building destroyed by the Halifax Explosion. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

The Past

The largest accidental explosion of all time

More than a century ago, Halifax suffered an accidental blast one-fifth the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

a collage of photos of a man with a hat and a book.

High Culture

6 great books with wildly unreliable narrators

Dive into the twisted truths and concealed realities told by literature’s most unreliable narrators.

a group of five matches on a pink background.

The Well

Signs you’re burned out — and how to bounce back

If you don’t feel better after the weekend, the “burnout paradox” could explain why.

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7 min

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with

Laurie Santos

Starts With A Bang

The trick to instantly identifying JWST images

If you can identify a foreground star, the spike patterns are a dead giveaway as to whether it’s a JWST image or any other observatory.

Up Next

Culture & Religion

How ‘Big Data’ will help Consumers

We’ve had the industrial revolution, and now we’re amid the data revolution. ‘Big data’ is a tectonic shift that will continue to affect many things we do for decades to come.