7 Steps to Adding Ecommerce to Your Business

As a business owner, you likely already have a website. You promote your business there, provide information, probably even have a contact us form. But if you sell products and don’t have an eCommerce presence, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity as well as some serious revenue.

Earlier this year, Forrester Research reported that online sales will increase from $335 billion in 2015 to $523 billion by 2020, with 270 million shoppers browsing and buying online. Without an online shopping experience for your business you’ll miss out on the opportunity eCommerce presents.

In this first post in a series of three, we’ll outline at a high level the 7 things you need to do to add eCommerce to your existing business. In the next two posts, we’ll talk about integrating eCommerce with your existing legacy systems and finally we’ll detail the importance of having a mobile shopping experience available to your customers.

 

Your Roadmap to Adding Ecommerce

Obviously, if adding eCommerce to your business was as easy as flipping a switch, everyone, including your competitors, would have already done it. But that doesn’t mean it needs to be overwhelming. With the right plan, some up front work and the right help, you can be up and running, successfully and in very little time.

1) Check out your competition

Whether you are a small mom & pop store or a large B2B retailer, your first step is to check out your competition online. Start by seeing if any of your known competitors have online stores. What do they sell? Do they list all of their products online, or just a portion of them? What is their web experience like? If you search for them, where do they rank?

Once you understand where your direct competition sits in the online world, expand your search to include online stores in your space. Take note of how well they present their products. Check out their design, how they categorize their products and so forth. Make notes of the sites you like best, and exactly why, so you can share that with your design and development partner later on.

2) Decide what you’ll sell online and when

You might want to start by offering all of your products online, or maybe you want to start with a smaller set of items that are most suited to your online audience. If you’re already offering all of your items by catalog, then moving those items online is an easy transition. If, on the other hand, you only offer products in brick and mortar locations, you might want to review your inventory to see if there are items you only sell to your local customers. Those products could still do well online, but you might want to wait until you’ve got the bulk of your stock available to your online audience before you add these long tail items.

3) Find the right solution for you

There is a good chance that this is the step that will be the most outside of your experience and comfort zone. But it is also one of the most critical. Choosing the right platform to display your products and provide your customer’s with the best shopping experience can be daunting. If you have software systems already in place – inventory, shipping, payment processing, etc. – you’ll want to choose a platform that plays well with them. Many shopping cart packages make it sound like it’s easy to add eCommerce to your site, and that might be true if you’re a smaller shop. But if you’re a larger company or you have many products, you’ll want a solution that can handle your business without adding more work than is needed. This may seem overwhelming, but finding a good partner to understand your needs and help you choose the right solution can make this step infinitely easier.

4) Prepare your inventory

The web is a visual place. Customers are significantly less likely to purchase items from you that don’t have a picture along with the description. You’ll need photos of all of your items that you plan to sell online. But more than that, you’ll also need descriptions of each of your products. You might be tempted, if you already have a catalog, to just use those. But you’ll want to optimize your descriptions for your online audience and, more importantly, for SEO. In addition to using keywords, your product descriptions should be persuasive. You won’t be there in person to sell the item, so your copy will have to do it for you. Hiring a photographer and a copy writer with experience in eCommerce is a good idea, as they will know how to best present your items for an online audience.

5) Check your usability

You may not know why a site doesn’t work well for you – why you find the navigation cumbersome, why the layout seems to keep you from finding what you’re looking for and so forth. But you know it when it doesn’t. Don’t drive away customers just because they don’t enjoy using your website. Make your site user friendly, not user hostile. Web and application usability is an entire discipline within IT, but you can start by using the list you made from the first item in this post to get an understanding of what doesn’t work and what does. Remember, the site isn’t about making it easy for you to find products. It’s about making it easier for your customers to do that.

6) Make sure you have the usual suspects in place

These may not seem important when you’re in the middle of building out your eCommerce division, but don’t forget to take the time to create pages for your site’s Terms of Service, Return Policies, Shipping Policies, Sizes (if applicable) and so forth. These pages may get a low number of visits but they will answer many questions that you and your customer support team won’t have to, and will keep your customers from being confused or frustrated when it comes to returns or knowing when their items will arrive.

7) Be ready to support all your customers

Your customers will come to you from all over once you are online. They will also come to you using different browsers, from different screen sizes and on different operating systems. While you don’t need to support every browser ever built, you should be sure your eCommerce site works on the top three or four (as of the writing of this article they are, in order, Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari). We’ll talk about it more in our third post in this series, but you’ll also want to make sure your eCommerce site supports mobile users, including tablets and phones.

In our next post, we’ll talk about integrating your eCommerce solution with your existing legacy systems, so you don’t have to rework everything before you start down the path to online sales.

The post 7 Steps to Adding Ecommerce to Your Business originally appeared on the Curotec Blog

Your iPhone is at Risk – Apple Releases Critical Update

Apple released a critical update on Thursday, August 26th, to address a series of flaws in the iPhone 6. The flaws, while individually of little concern, combined to allow hackers to remotely jailbreak the iPhone.

The vulnerability was discovered and reported to Apple about a week and a half ago, after a United Arab Emirates human rights activist was targeted by the attack. Ahmed Mansoor reported the issue to researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, who in turn found and reported the issues to Apple.

Mansoor received a text message containing a link. Following the link would have installed a program that would have allowed remote access to his phone, thanks to three previously unknown flaws in the iOS operating system. Once installed, the hackers would have had access to a number of iPhone services, including being able to control the camera and listen in on conversations using the microphone.

The spying goes beyond those services, however. Once the exploit is installed, hackers have access to the location of the phone and can listen in and record conversations. Even apps using end-to-end encryption, like Whatsapp and Viber, would be subject to access. Additional assets at risk include stored photos, files, and messages in mobile chat apps.

As the number of features available on smartphones increase, so do the number of potential risks. Each of the flaws in iOS flew under the radar – Citizen Lab stated they believed these flaws to have been part of the OS since 9.3.3 or before. (iOS 9.3.3 was released on July 18^th, 2016.)

It was the combination of several flaws that enabled the creation of the larger – and far more dangerous – exploit.

At this time the reported cases are limited to Mansoor, a Mexican journalist and a minority party politician from Kenya. But now that the flaws are known, it is only a matter of time before the larger community attempts to use the security hole on a larger scale.

This is why it is critical that iPhone users ensure they update to the new patch, version 9.3.5. With the smartphone becoming the holder of our credit card information and other personal data, anything providing unfettered access to your phone is a major concern and an opening for identity theft, credit card fraud, and even, with this current issue, corporate espionage.

In 2015, there were over 94 million iPhones in the hands of users. Many of these are in use, on a daily basis, by executives and leaders in enterprises across the country, and the globe. With an unpatched iPhone company files and messages could be harvested from your phone. Even meetings could be eavesdropped on with a compromised phone using the device’s mic.

And this goes beyond executives, to all levels of the organization. It is critical for your IT security teams to encourage all iPhone users, whether issued by the company or not, to update their phones.

Consider having your security teams send an organization-wide message alerting users to the threat and including simple instructions on how to apply the update to their phone. Also, remind your users about good security practices. Reinforcing messages should be an important part of your enterprise security training, especially when the opportunity to do it in the context of a real world example presents itself.

One last note. As of the time of this writing, the vulnerability has not been found in iOS 10 beta. So an alternative is to upgrade to the new OS. But because it is still in beta, the usual caveats and cautions for early adopters apply.

The post Your iPhone is at Risk – Apple Releases Critical Update originally appeared on the Curotec Blog

The Basics of Domain Driven Design

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

A developer walks into a requirements review and after a few minutes says “But this is just like part of the application we wrote 6 months ago.”

The lead says “Can we reuse that code?”

The dev says “It would take longer for us to abstract it than to just rewrite it. It’s in there with other functionality specific to that app.”

And no one laughs. We’ve all been in this meeting, felt the frustration bubble up. The business doesn’t understand why it will take so long to build. The IT leadership is shaking their heads because we’re not able to leverage what’s already been built. And the developer is grinding their teeth at having to solve the same problem, again.

For those of us with experience and background in software development, we know this isn’t how it’s supposed to work. What happened to breaking problems down, building re-usable objects, abstracting functional layers?

There are lots of reasons good development practices fall to the wayside. Lack of understanding of the business problem, crunched timeline, and budgets are all excuses for setting aside properly engineering a solution.

Domain-driven Design would like to change that. It’s not a methodology, like Agile, or a process like RUP (Rational Unified Process). Instead it “provides a structure of practices and terminology for making design decisions that focus and accelerate software projects dealing with complicated domains.”

Like all tools, DDD has a time and a place. But when used in the right context, at the right time, and applied correctly it can bridge the gap between the business and developers and lead to efficiency in enterprise development.

What is Domain-Driven Design?

DDD was introduced by Eric Evans in 2003 in his book of the same name. In it, Evans outlines a systematic approach to understanding complex business problems and applying domain models to those problems to create organized and focused solutions.

The intent, of course, is to build better, more re-usable, more cost effective software, especially in the face of highly complex business systems. Evan’s approach enables developers to better understand the business problem and communicate more effectively with their business counterparts.

It is also intended to help developers to better size down problems and fence in what they are building. As the old saying goes, you eat an elephant one bite at a time. But thanks to the evolution of software solutions and network computing, those bites speak to modern software architecture.

As enterprises continue to adopt and adapt to software services, having an approach that maps out how to break a business need down into service, and even microservice components that become useful and re-usable. But starting with services encourages a bottom-up design.

DDD, on the other hand, starts at the top. It directs teams to create a common language with the business before solving the business problem. To understand how it does this, let’s look at the basics of DDD.

 

DDD 101

Clearly, the first thing to understand with Domain-Driven Design is to define what we mean by a domain.

The domain is, basically, the business area we’re talking about. It’s the area of the business relevant to the solution needed, and to help you define and find your domain experts.

Are you talking about a new CRM? You’ll want someone from sales. New call center software? You’ll want a call center manager. A new CAD system? Bring in an engineer.

What you want is someone with a business understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve with a software implementation. That’s your domain expert.

But a common problem with humans in general, and in business to IT communications, is making sure you are all speaking the same language. That’s where the next step of DDD comes in – creating what Evans calls a Ubiquitous Language.

This will be the cornerstone of communication for everyone who works on the project. It will define the language the team will use to talk about the project. And it will evolve and grow over time, through trial and error.

For instance, if you were asked to build a car, you might think “sports car” while the product manager means “family sedan”. So you define that, for the purposes of this project and this domain, “car” means “family sedan”.

It’s a bit of a contrived example, but you can see where not having that definition in place would lead to some costly trouble.

Once everyone is speaking the same language, developers can break down the domain into smaller sub-domains and bounded contexts. A bounded context is like a miniature application, and has its own domain.

Think of an eCommerce system. By itself, it is a context – one where people use the application to shop. But, within that context lie smaller domains, like customer information, payment processing and inventory. Each of these is a bounded context, with one domain.

There is more detail within Domain-Driven Design, much of which is outside of the scope of this article and begins to dive into more technical nitty-gritty.

But the above describes how DDD begins to handle the parts of a project with the greatest potential for complexity – what the business needs are and how to build an understanding across the team.

Breaking the project down, bit by bit, allows the teams to develop highly modular pieces of code. Code that can be re-used. Code that can be refactored without upending an entire system.

 

Benefits to the Enterprise

The greatest gains to the business for DDD come from highly complex applications and domains.

First, the organization as a whole has a greater understanding of the domain, thanks to the need to model it for the ubiquitous language and bounded context.

The enterprise also creates a common language that can be used within the context of building out the solution, but can also be carried throughout the domain and the organization.

Better code can be created because the domain experts are an integral part of understanding the problem, and the solution.

The solution is better organized and focused thanks to the defined contexts.

The enterprise gains re-usable services that can be iteratively improved and changed without taking down entire business systems.

 

Not a Silver Bullet

But DDD is not a silver bullet that will solve every issue in your enterprise.

First, it can be overkill on smaller and less complex projects, or projects with a limited life span or usefulness to the organization.

And while building a domain model can be helpful in and of itself, it isn’t DDD, but only a part of it.
Domain models are time consuming to build and require resources from IT and the business. Likely from multiple business units.

There is much effort at the start required to define the domain, subdomain, contexts and ubiquitous language. And that means greater cost to the organization, up front. With the possibility of the return on that investment being months or years down the road.

Domain-Driven Design is an effective set of techniques for complex, enterprise level software projects that will have years of life within the organization. And principles of DDD, individually, have merit for the organization that is willing to commit resources early on. But just like holding a daily stand up meeting is not the same as implementing Agile, creating a domain map isn’t the same as following DDD.

And yet, for those projects that fit the mold, DDD is worth deeper investigation as a means of bringing greater understanding and more modular development.

The post The Basics of Domain Driven Design originally appeared on the Curotec Blog

HTTPS Exploit Can Steal Your Secure Data – Black Hat 2016

IT security is top of mind for many enterprises these days. And with the announcements coming out of the Black Hat Conference that won’t be changing anytime soon.

On Wednesday, August 3rd at the Black Hat 2016 conference in Las Vegas there was an eye opening demonstration on the need for updated Internet security protocols. At a briefing entitled “HEIST: HTTP Encrypted Information Can be Stolen Through TCP-Windows”, researchers Mathy Vanhoef and Tom Van Goethem demonstrated a set of techniques that would allow hackers to listen in on secured traffic directly, without the need for an intervening network.

Used to transfer information over
the Internet, HTTP is the foundational protocol that enables communication over the Web. HTTPS uses this protocol combined with Transport Layer Security (TLS), or its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), to provide secure communication over the Internet. Using HTTPS authenticates the connection between a user’s browser and a web server to protect private information that is passed between the two.

One of the purposes of using HTTPS is to prevent a man-in-the-middle atttack – an attack in which a hacker impersonates each of the end points in the communication. The user’s web browser thinks it is speaking directly to the web server, and visa versa, while the messages are actually being passed through a third party. Because of the end to end authentication with HTTPS it is difficult to impersonate or even eavesdrop on the data being passed back and forth.

With the newly discovered HEIST technique, a man-in-the-middle attack is no longer needed. In fact, as described in detail in this article on Ars Technica, the user only needs to “encounter an innocuous-looking JavaScript file hidden in an Web advertisement or hosted directly on a webpage”. This code can then be used to find out information about the file sizes transmitted from TLS or SSL secured pages and use that information, combined with another attack, to tease your information out of the HTTPS encrypted responses. These could even be small pieces of data with a big impact – like your email address or social security number.

Once HEIST has the files size, it partners with other exploits to use HTTPS’s security measures against itself. You see, most websites use compression in their responses by not repeating text strings within the data. Exploits like BREACH, being discussed on Thursday at the Black Hat conference, use this information to play an intelligent game of true or false. The exploit guesses part of the string, and if it’s right, the response doesn’t grow in size. Instead, the repeated strings are removed by the compression. If it’s wrong, the compression can’t eliminate the string, and the response grows. And now, thanks to HEIST, the exploit knows the file size of the data.

The good news is that a number of tools are being released this week to help teams assess their vulnerability to BREACH. The bad news is that the only way known, at the moment, to mitigate HEIST is to turn off 3rd party cookies. These are on by default in most browsers and will cause a number of online services not to work.

Expect to see recommended changes to your applications to reduce the potential risk associated with these issues and even changes to best practices on how sensitive data is exchanged in Web response messages. With no blanket fixes, these exploits will take time and resources to mitigate and new policies outlining how you’ll handle data going forward. But ignoring the changes could be devastating for businesses and their customers.

The post HTTPS Exploit Can Steal Your Secure Data – Black Hat 2016 originally appeared on the Curotec Blog

The New Definition of Success: RJMetrics Sells to Magento, Spins off Stitch

Building a successful business and then selling it to a big fish in the industry is The Brass Ring for many startups. Yesterday’s announcement from RJMetrics shows they have a firm grasp on that ring with the sale of the company to eCommerce platform giant Magento. But it’s less of a buyout and more of an evolution for the Philly-based company. In fact, the deal is part of a growing trend with tech companies and startups, enabling them to downsize with a purpose – to focus on new initiatives.

RJMetrics, Magento and Stitch

Founded in 2008, RJMetrics couldn’t have launched at a better time. Coming just as words like “data insights” and “big data” were passing the lips of every CIO, RJMetrics grew into a multi-product offering. Their suite gives businesses the intelligence they need to acquire customers, get them to buy and get them to stay.

With those kinds insights, it’s no wonder that RJMetrics caught the attention of California-based Magento. The acquisition, for an undisclosed sum, was announced yesterday and brings a solid competitive advantage to both Magento and their customers. Marketed as Magento Analytics, the solution will put the power of business intelligence and data insights into the hands of B2B and B2C merchants using the Magento platform. This will bring enterprise level analytics and actionable data to non-technical users of the platform.

The deal also acquires half of the current RJMetrics staff and allows Magento to set up a presence in Philadelphia. But what about the other half? This is where the story goes beyond a mere acquisition.

The other half of the RJMetrics staff, including RJMetrics co-founders Jake Stein and Robert J. Moore, have spun off into a new company, Stitch. As Stein points out in his blog post announcing the new company, data has “created a headache for developers”, and Stitch is looking to be the cure.

Taking the Pain Out of Data

An enterprise’s data can live in a myriad of places in today’s connected world. You’ve got CRM data in Salesforce, email databases in Marketo, web and mobile analytics in Google Analytics, and marketing data in Facebook and AdWords, among others. There are multiple teams wanting to look at this data from every angle, and you’ve got a data warehouse ready for it.

The estimate to get all of that data into your warehouse is staggering. The estimate to maintain it is worse.

It’s an all too common complaint from developers on up – connecting data sources and getting that data to look the same for your apps and warehouse is tedious, grinding, and time consuming work. It’s not the kind of work that makes developers happy. And it takes them away from the critical user-centric application work that companies need to focus on.

But data is king, and without it many business critical applications are meaningless.

This is the problem that Stitch was created to solve by offering a managed ETL solution.

When it was initially launched as RJMetrics Pipeline application, the team did a little digging into how much time creating a proper ETL system takes. What they found was staggering, but unsurprising. Building out a solid system for data transformation and loading takes “between 8,000 and 15,000 development hours to get off the ground and then 1–2 developers to maintain on an ongoing basis”.

RJMetrics effectively removed this pain point for hundreds of developers in beta, and now, as part of Stitch, they have the chance to help even more.

Downsizing to Focus – A Growing Trend

The one-two punch of acquisition and spin-off lets the established portions of RJMetrics live on while providing the team with the chance to go heads down on their ETL solution. The new Chairman of the Board and co-founder of Stitch, Moore described the situation as creating “a future that’s exciting without disrupting the universe you’re in”. And with this move, Stitch follows in the footsteps of other tech companies who have re-focused their efforts on fewer products.

Notable in this group is the 37Signals shift that occurred in early 2014. At that time the creators of Ruby on Rails announced the decision to re-focus the company on their core product offering, Basecamp.

The company not only dropped the 37Signals branding, but also decided to divest themselves of their other products including Highrise, Campfire and more. The reason? In an Inc. article at the time, 37Signals co-founder Jason Fried said the change would “allow us to do more things with fewer people”.

Dropping everything but Basecamp allowed the company to focus on doing more with a single product – better features, more access and a more mature platform. Instead of growing their team, they kept it the same size, allowing them to maintain the family-style culture while doubling-down on a product known both inside and outside the tech industry.

Doing Good and Doing Well

The change at 37Signals was accomplished while still holding everything together, customers and employees alike. And despite a strategic layoff earlier in the year, RJMetrics was able to achieve a similar outcome.

In fact, the acquisition/spin-off of RJMetrics isn’t a case of line-your-pockets-and-run. Instead it brings a number of benefits with it

• It brings fresh funding to the Philly startup scene
• It has the potential to create new jobs by establishing a new Magento office
• It has the potential to create new jobs as Stitch grows
• It creates a dedicated, proven team to work on a new product
• It leaves a dedicated, proven team to support existing clients

This isn’t just another acquisition of a startup. It’s part of a new breed of re-structuring that fosters better products with solid, proven teams.

The post The New Definition of Success: RJMetrics Sells to Magento, Spins off Stitch originally appeared on the Curotec Blog

How To Do It All: Meeting the Mobile Needs of Clients and the Enterprise

Mobile has rocketed past many other initiatives in the enterprise. And looking at the data, that’s no surprise.

• Pew Research reports that 68% of Americans have smartphones, with the percentage for ages 30-49 being closer to 83%
• According to a recent KPCB Internet Trends report, mobile search (at 51%) has superseded web searches from the desktop
• One-third of respondents on a Vanson Bourne survey indicated they would completely abandon a brand after a single poor mobile experience
• A recent report by Computerworld cited mobile in the top 5 initiatives that CIOs would give more dollars to in their budgets in 2016

And the stakes are too high for an enterprise to fall short in this critical area. In fact, in a recent Forrester post, Mobile was identified as a key success imperative for CIOs. They go so far as to identify not just company revenue, but even a CIO’s job security, as potential risks to ignoring the enterprise’s mobile needs.

 

Challenges for Mobile in the Enterprise

The needs of mobile audiences have evolved as quickly as the number of devices. Making your site responsive or replicating an entire application are not options in a mobile first world.

The smart company recognizes that not only do their customers demand a solid mobile solution, but that their workforce needs the flexibility of mobile access. An enterprise’s internal mobile solutions increase productivity and create consistency in the information accessed and shared. Moreover, younger and tech savvy employees will judge the company on the quality of its mobile access and applications. Your internal apps can make or break your place as an employer of choice.

The challenge, of course, is the multiple demands on both your teams and your budget. Building apps for customers, porting internal tools for mobile use, and addressing the inevitable concerns regarding management, support and security can be a drain on your available resources. But with planning and some strategic choices, you can execute a successful mobile strategy.

 

Planning for the Differences

It’s true that the needs of your customer will be different than the needs of the organization’s internal teams. Even your different business units will have needs that may drive you to the creation of multiple internal apps. But where there is divergence, there is also commonality.

All of your apps will have some functionality that can be shared across your mobile landscape. Identity management, access control and even similarity of look and feel can be common elements that can be developed once and extended to each application.

Understanding the common elements and the differences aren’t enough, though. To make sure you’re getting the most out of your development dollars, you need to make sure you understand what the end user needs. It’s important to take the time to understand the user experience for your apps before you build to prevent missteps and costly directional changes down the line.

 

Options for Balance

Once you understand the user’s needs, it’s time to balance the development work. The traditional path of iterative releases with added functionality, though, is only one tool in your cost savings tool chest.

Your customers are looking for a great mobile experience. Bringing in a partner to create a custom mobile experience can create the app your customers demand without derailing your development projects or taxing your development resources.

But what about internal users? They are looking for apps that are quick and easy to use, that let them get their jobs done efficiently. Rapid Mobile App Development (RMAD) tools, like those in the Salesforce Lightning App Builder, can quickly get your internal resources up and running, saving you time and money.

 

Doing it All

The importance of your mobile strategy cannot be understated. The demand for mobile apps will only increase from within your organization and from without, and each quarter without mobile solutions can put your organization further behind in profits and in the competitive landscape. But you can get it all done once you understand your user’s needs and marry the build outs to the right tools for the job.

Think about your mobile strategy as it stands today. What really needs to be custom? Do you have tools that can be built quickly using an RMAD? And how much value can the right partner bring to your mobile strategy?

The post How To Do It All: Meeting the Mobile Needs of Clients and the Enterprise originally appeared on the Curotec Blog

Pokémon Go users, gotta catch em all

We see them in the streets and in our shopping malls. Frantically swiping their phones and battling each another’s Pokémon for points and bragging rights. These are the app users of Pokémon Go, a new augmented reality(AR) or virtual reality(VR) mobile app which has seen over ten million downloads in less than one week.

Like it or not, there are some major learning lessons we can take away from the Pokémon Go epidemic. I am calling it an epidemic because it is by far one of the most viral apps we have seen in quite a while. Let’s examine what Niantic, makers of Pokémon Go, did so well in their development and execution of the app.

The game takes place in the real world

When most people think of playing video games, they think of sitting on the couch and staring at a screen while exerting the minimum amount of physical energy possible. Nintendo Wii changed that way of thinking to a certain degree by introducing games that required physical movement to interact, however, they still took place from the comfort of your own living room.

With games using AR technology, the entire physical world is now the playing arena. This means users must walk, run, bike and move around the physical world in order to complete tasks required to advance in the game.

This guy now has people pulling up in front of his house like stalkers tapping on their smartphones all hours of the day and night because his house is a Pokémon gym. By looking at his Twitter feed he seems to be mostly a good sport about it though.

This is what I’m a little leery of. People pulled up, blocking my drive way as they sit on their phones. pic.twitter.com/WpRbilk6g6

— Boon Sheridan (@boonerang) July 10, 2016

The game blurs the lines between what is real and what is virtual. A major feature of the application includes the virtual creatures showing up in your camera view embedded into the real world around you. This taps into a fantasy many of the app users have to experience what it would be like to live in a world where the creatures actually exist among us. AR makes it easier than ever to be fully immersed in the game’s plot and live the true role of your character.

It taps into our competitive nature

Pokémon Go requires you to spend time hunting down creatures and then powering them up at virtual gyms found in real life locations. Users can then challenge other users by taking over a rival team’s gym or battling their Pokémon for points. If a user neglects to defend their gym it can be lost. This is what makes the game so addicting. Users feel that if they don’t keep playing, they will miss out on potential Pokémon, lose their gym or simply fall behind in the game while their friends continue to advance beyond them.

What is more interesting is that the demographic is not limited to the younger crowd like the other traditional Pokémon games were. Instead, this new application is attracting people of all age demographics including people in their 30’s, 40’s and 50’s. This shows the makers not only understood how to tap into viral sharing aspects of human psychology, but they also understood how to touch our competitive nature. In fact, Pokémon Go currently has more daily active users than Twitter! Users are also spending more time using the app than many major social networks.

Users are getting all the exercise

One reason many gamers use to finally pull themselves away from a video game is the realization that they need to get outside and do some physical activity. It can feel bad to sit on a couch all day and do nothing productive with your time. With Pokémon Go, users are already doing that while they play and it gives the users a really good feeling of accomplishment. The game takes place throughout the course of their day as they navigate their way through the physical world. There have been social posts of users complaining their feet are sore and their legs hurt, but they can’t stop walking around hunting Pokémon.

Pokemon GO might be the most exercise we’ve gotten as a nation since those Harlem Shake videos.

— Ian Simkins (@iansimkins) July 11, 2016

In addition to this, there really are gyms and Pokémon that can be found in all sorts of locations all over the world. By using the app you may find new places of interest right in your own town that you never even knew existed.

The social response and PR was very strong

Immediately after the game launched, people took to social networks and posted about it. Major publications wrote articles about it. And people talked about it with their friends. Whether or not you have an interest in playing the game or care to know how it works, you probably already have heard quite a bit about it unless you live under a rock.

One of the more interesting sharable components of the game and likely the reason it caught on so quick is largely due to the fact the game does take place in the real world. So users can snap pictures of a recognizable place with a friendly little creature hanging out. Many users would even go as far to stage the image with a person or object in the background interacting with Pokémon creature.

All this viral exposure took the internet by storm and it’s the reason the app is now the number 1 app on the app market and has tens of millions of downloads. Whats even more interesting is the numbers behind the app itself. Nintendo and Niantic spent roughly $30 million building the application. The app currently is making $1.6 million per day and growing. In less than 3 weeks the developers will fully recoup their investment and start to profit. Not to mention, Nintendo stock is going through the roof and Wall Street has been eating it up!

What we learned

Many times we think of old trends as a thing of the past, but using the right combination of technology and human psychology we can literally transform a business overnight and make a massive revolution that overtakes existing dominant social platforms in less than one week time. The world is so dynamic and trends evolve very quickly with technology, but AR is just getting started and does not appear to be going anywhere for a while. This is one of the rare cases where building a fully fleshed out application instead of a minimum viable product turned into a huge hit overnight.

The post Pokémon Go users, gotta catch em all originally appeared on the Curotec Blog