Postcards from Perkistan

Welcome to 2010 everybody! We hope you’ve had, or are having, a great holiday. 2010 is going to be special for both Perkler and you, our Perklers. We have a number of key developments in the pipeline to expand the functionality of Perkler and increase the number of perks being made available.

- Take Perkler Shopping With You

Possibly the biggest development we’ll be bringing in 2010 is the optimization of Perkler for mobile. That isn’t to say the website will become less useful, but to say we will be developing variations of the current Perkler site for use on your phone, so you can take us with you. This could include a few different additions including applications for a number of mobile platforms and the development of a Perkler mobile site.

- Exclusive Discounts

With more and more loyalty programs becoming a part of the Perkler community, the opportunity for exclusive offers is truly beginning to present itself. We’ll be working hard with our partners throughout 2010 to bring exclusive, Perkler-only perks your way.

- Bigger, Better

All the while we’ll be increasing the number of programs and perks in our database to improve our status as the one-stop loyalty program shop. There’s no program too small, and hopefully we’ll be finding a few of those great, valuable local programs for you!

See you there!
Graham

We received some pretty negative feedback today from a new user, but ALL feedback is welcome at Perkler so we were happy to hear it.

Not impressed, boys. Not cool. Should have connections to mileage accounts off the bat. I won’t use this. Ya lost me, and everyone I know. There are better options out there. I would never use this for networking. There are far too many other places to have to chat and connect with people. That is stupid. Posted by a visitor. 

The core issues raised here revolve around mileage programs and Perkler as a network, let me address these points.

Mileage Programs. In the Australian version of the site we have actually entered quite a few frequent flyer programs, purely because there aren’t that many and they have some good brands in them. But for US and other users we are concentrating less on the high-end points based mileage programs and more on retail. Why?

Because retail perks are more immediate and offer pretty much instant benefits to a much bigger number of consumers than the mileage programs.

Don’t get me wrong - we love unlocking the great merchandise and brands in Flyer programs and will do as we build relationships with airlines, but for now our focus is on retail because that’s what people need in the current economic climate. And because there are lots of cool brands there for people to build an affinity with and discuss.

Another point about Mileage Programs - people who are into them are really into them (just ask Randy Petersen). As a result our ‘Perkler’ is right - there are lots of products out there servicing that market. But in the end, even though they are huge these programs only represent about 20% of the total loyalty membership (in the US). So not only do we love retail, travel, grocery etc - we’d be crazy not to cater to 80% of people’s real memberships. Otherwise we wouldn’t be doing a very good job of getting that virtual wallet going. Remember Perkler is about ALL your memberships in one place.

Second point - Perkler as a network. We should get this straight from the outset. We are not trying to build Facebook, or Linked-In or any other uber-network. We are trying to use the community to simplify the loyalty and rewards experience. We think one of the keys to getting better results for consumers and retailers out of loyalty programs is sharing information, rating programs and finding out about programs from people.

Eventually we will link in (yes I get it) with the larger networks and are looking already at openid and Facebook Connect to integrate our community with them.

So, we may have lost this user (and everyone he knows) but we aren’t being flippant about the feedback - we appreciate it and take it on board. Rest assured though, because we don’t have blanket coverage of mileage programs doesn’t mean we have failed the loyalty test. People are much more than their airline travel!

Having said that I’m standing by Aeroplan - call anytime

I’m Still reading the FEED compendium and its excellent. Here is an excerpt that resonates with perkler’s mobile platform application…”perk-me-baby”. Written by Andrew Milmoe:

As we move further away from stationary desktop

screens, toward laptops and mobile devices, we

can start to offer interactions that are more tightly

connected to the context of the user at a given

time and place. This creates an opportunity to

provide “just-in-time” content when and where

it is needed most.

For example, a quick glance at this Ambient

Devices umbrella with its glowing handle lets me

know if I need to take it along to work with me,

based on barometric activity and other weather

indicators. It adds value to the umbrella and puts

the information closer to the actual decision point.

The technology enhances an existing behavior,

rather than assuming I am going to visit a Web site

to check the weather and then go get my umbrella.

It’s the kind of thing Bill Gates would

have today—and we will all have tomorrow.

 

With our mobile platform we are aiming to take loyalty redemption and awareness with me to the decision point for our members: when they are out and shopping, more so the point of sale.

Heya,

I’ve just done the first lot of updates to Perkler -

New Features

• General
  • Months now show as month name in date inputs
  • Alert panel glows to grab your attention (red for error, green
    for notification)
• Wallet
  • Likes now appear in Mini Perkolator
• Programs
  • Members can now suggest a program through the ‘All Programs’ page or through the ‘Find a Program’ panel in their wallet.

Bug Fixes

• Perklers
  • “About me” text now updates properly after editing.
  • “Invite a friend” message now appears in a user’s Sent Items
  • Fixed an issue where clicking on the ‘you’ nav item would take you to the All Perklers page.
• Perkolator
  • Speed enhancements (2x-5x increase in speed)

Thanks to our ever-vigilant beta testers.

So far so good.

So the Perkolator was a little slow (everybody like molasses right?), but after a late-night extra-curricular programming session, it’s now been sped up significantly.

It’s really really cool to see the community coming to life - keep the activity coming!

p.s. Special ‘call-out’ to EzyLee - thanks for the 100 or so bug reports.

Just when I thought I could sit back and have a beer

100s of loyalty programs? Check.

100,000s of perks? Check.

40 or so cute little avatars for our users to customise? Check.

And with that we are go - the latest version of Perkler has been moved to the live server, and as soon as we have a run through in the morning, we’ll start distributing beta codes

Almost there, just keep quiet and don’t distract him…

That’s right - Adam is putting the finishing touches to perkler v 2 as we speak. We’ve built in the testing feedback from our alpha guinea pigs and are about to launch into full private beta.

Invites will go out to about 100 people who have lodged their interest and we’ll see how

 we go from there. Good to have another milestone under our belt! 

Good timing as Dan and I fly off the Sunnyvale California to sell our wears later this week - more on that later.

Justin

We here at Perkistan know it’s all about location - and not just because our building is nestled between two real estate agencies.

One of the cool things about Perkler is its ability to find relevant perks based on your location. We’re working on some pretty cool location-based stuff, and today I had a chance to play with a new Mozilla plugin called Geode. 

Geode is an extension for Firefox that figures out where in the world you are. Perkler checks if a browser has Geode installed, and if so, asks for that location info. If you (the user) allows it, Perkler will use this information when doing perk searches, and will filter the results to suit. 

Yes, so it’s exactly the same as using the location field - just a bit more hands off.

At this stage this was just an experiment to see the technology in action. Hopefully we’ll see something similar in mobile browsers soon - i.e. Opera and WebKit (Android, iPhone, Symbian) - that’s when this is going to get interesting.

An interesting afternoon yesterday! About 3pm we get an email from Adam who is ‘in session’ at the Web Directions conference in Sydney saying he got what looks like spam from our server hosts at Intervolve - asking for server usernames and passwords because of a crashed server.

I suddenly realise the inactivity around our site and email all afternoon had less to do with the latte I spilt all over my keyboard on Wednesday (seriously…) and more to do with some serious VM crashes off in the internets somewhere!

So Adam is in Sydney behind closed doors - leave it to the business team to get this baby up and running again.

What followed was a series of stressful but hilarious phone calls between us and our hosts. Nothing like the Chief Marketing Officer trying to talk to the support guy about root user names, c panels and platform migrations!

So, we got there in the end. 

What we learnt - things in boxes (even virtual boxes) break - and you need to be ready for it; the support guys at our host Chris and Rick were excellent and genuinely concerned about getting us up and running again; we don’t want this to happen when we are live!

Oh - and that coffee really messes up a white computer… I’ve gotta get me one of those Android phones that is coffee coloured brown!

Justin

Just a quick note to say thanks to our hardy band of alpha testers out there. We’ve received some excellent feedback culminating in a big powwow with the Grox boys in Cubby Central yesterday. All the positives and negatives have been thrown into a pot and stirred up…now our head chef (Adam Le Coopere) and his two minions will distil it all into a brand new Beta.

We aim to have this out soon and will keep you informed. We are very much looking forward to expanding the perkler test family to all those who have registered.

Dan