Senior Director, Optaros Labs
John Eckman has over a decade of experience designing and building web applications for organizations ranging from small non-profit organizations to Fortune 500 enterprises. As Sr. Director of Optaros Labs, John works with Optaros clients — including Turner Broadcasting, the Associated Press, Rodale Publishing, Walmart.com, and 20th Century Fox - to put in place strategies for leveraging the Assembled Web to drive revenue, deepen customer engagement, and increase their digital footprint. He received a BA from Boston University and a PhD from the University of Washington, Seattle, and completed an additional Master's in Information Systems from Northeastern University in 2007.
Ecommerce Trends – Content, Community, Commerce: Sears’ Shoes Experience
Posted on 27 Aug 2010
Today Sears announced the launch of a “new footwear experience” at sears.com/shoes. It’s worth checking out as yet another example of a mainstream, multichannel retailer embracing what we’ve been calling the assembled web, both in terms of the convergence of content, community and commerce and in terms of the widely decentralized and distributed nature of | View post »
Facebook Like -I Like it like that Amazon Levis and the Facebook open graph
Posted on 17 Aug 2010
At the beginning of 2010, Facebook rolled out a number of significant changes to their platform, including most notably the introduction of the Open Graph protocol and Facebook social plugins. Since then, retailers have been trying to determine the best strategies for taking advantage of these options. Two significant strategies (at least) have emerged so | View post »
Customer service on Facebook?
Posted on 12 Aug 2010
Mashable had an interesting piece yesterday about the market for applications which connect your company’s Facebook page to its customer service function (Facebook Pages Become Customer Service Centers). They note two such applications — Parature for Facebook and Get Satisfaction’s Social Engagement Hub — and ask: Do you think Facebook Pages can serve as an | View post »
Content and Commerce: Celebrity Style
Posted on 23 Feb 2010
Interesting article in yesterday’s New York Times about blogs which combine “shop the look” with celebrity photos. Specifically included are INFDaily, CelebStyle.com, and JustJared – though obviously there are many other picking up this trend, which has its origins in the celebrity stalking watching print magazine world. The technology, from vendors like gumgum and Pixazza [...]
Comcast XFinity: TV (Almost) Everywhere
Posted on 28 Dec 2009
There’s been lots of industry buzzz about Time Warner and Comcast’s TV Everywhere plan, which would allow subscribers to fixed-wire cable offerings access to premium content over internet connections, freeing content from the cable box (or cable card). Although it isn’t exactly setting content free on the web, it does seem a positive step in [...]
Comcast XFinity: TV (Almost) Everywhere
Posted on 28 Dec 2009
There’s been lots of industry buzzz about Time Warner and Comcast’s TV Everywhere plan, which would allow subscribers to fixed-wire cable offerings access to premium content over internet connections, freeing content from the cable box (or cable card). Although it isn’t exactly setting content free on the web, it does seem a positive step in | View post »
WordCamp NYC, WPBook, WordCamp Boston
Posted on 14 Nov 2009
Here’s the slides from my presentation this morning at WordCamp NYC. It was in the “beginning developer” track so I tried to focus on the overall structure of how the plugin does what it does and the hooks/actions/filters used. Hard to fit the talk into 30 minutes with time for questions and roadmap – there’s [...]

