Tide Clock - This is a chrome extension that displays the current ocean tide level and direction at a given geographical location via an icon in the top right hand corner of a chrome browser.
Surf Watch - This is a chrome extension that displays the current surf wave height information at a given geographical location via an icon in the top right hand corner of a chrome browser. Intended for surfers and fisherpeople.
Browser Beam - This is an opensource tool that creates a purely html/javascript screencast of a client browsing experience. If the browser beam is directed through a web socket to an external server, then (i) it may be reflected to a public url to provide a real-time screen cast, or (ii) a trace of that beam can be recorded for future play-back in a web browser. Browser Beam may be potentially useful for (i) giving live or web-based presentations, (ii) customer or technical support, (iii) conducting user experience studies, (iv) generating webpage activity heat maps, or (v) measuring customer browsing, learning, or shopping behavior. Several marketing tools detect customer behavior including shopping cart & page abandonment via specific javascript on a vendor's website. A browser beam of a customer's browsing experience could be used to detect shopping cart and page abandonment as well as other behavioral traits including, but not limited to, browsing speed, haste, urgency, discernment, need, and willingness-to-pay which could be used to employ price discrimination via just-in-time couponing and upselling.
Shop Alliance - Huge one-stop online retailers like Amazon, Alibaba, Walmart, and Target have a huge advantage over smaller niche vendors due to their access to customer interests, needs, and behavior. Modern browsers block browsing history from websites, but 1-stop shops like Amazon have their own database of a customer's shopping history. Their breadth of products combined with a rich customer shopping history allows them to seize future sales by suggesting useful items from a nearly inexhaustible array.
Third-party digital marketing companies have an opportunity to help niche vendors combat these data- & product-rich megastores in the following ways:
(1) Customer data can be aggregated among clients to provide a more comprehensive customer-specific behavior model for use in propelling future sales
(2) Following an online purchase, one client (in the Shop Alliance) could suggest a product being sold by a different vendor in the Shop Alliance (and vice versa for mutual benefit).
(3) Web browser plugins/extensions could be provided to customers with the ultimate purpose of reading their browsing history and analyzing their online behavior in order to provide them with maximally desirable product suggestions and offers. As some customers would see this as an invasion of privacy, vendors would probably need to provide regular and valuable discounts to users of the browser plugin. This vendor cost would be offset by the complete knowledge of a customer's web usage. For example, a vendor in the Shop Alliance would know if someone is considering purchasing one of the items, and also what other items that customer is checking out, including their prices. This knowledge would be very useful for competing against competitors' products with real-time offers and discounts. Shop Alliance is a chrome plugin that provides this real-time data by sending browser beams of a user's complete browsing experience to the digital marketer for dissemination among member vendors.
