this was passed on by a friend, it’s an interesting way to either get your homepage viral, entertain new viewers or annoy a customer on a mission. Checkout HEMA’s page … you’ll need to let it load. i don’t think backcountry.com will be ascribing to this anytime soon 
two weeks into the new gig @backccountry.com and like any new opportunity i’m getting to know new faces, a new culture and some new technology. maybe i should use the word “different” instead of “new”. is ecommerce new technology?
back a few months ago when i was first interviewing w/ backcountry and thinking seriously about a jump from mozy a friend of mine asked why i would even think about ecommerce “it’s not very bleeding edge”. at least compared to the mozy distributed file system (20+ petabytes, processing power, redundancy & protocols) or other cloud computing services an ecommerce platform lacks the blood.
but maybe my friend is wrong … first of all i’m sorry for using “cloud computing” it’s a buzz word like web 2.0 that won’t go away because no other pithy definition exists for distributed web application and storage environments exist. however, over the past few years ecommerce has been influenced by social applications like facebook, twitter & the variety of blogs out there. of course the subject of “community” and “conversation” , which are enabled by the above mentioned applications, but now the bleeding edge for ecommerce companies and the googles of the world is to create context through implicit/explicit actions and crunch models to provide rich experiences online.
a negative example: i buy a lot of things from amazon, but why do they keep recommending Nintendo Wii games to me. i’ve not bought a Wii game from them in over a year? at some point that should decay from their recommendation algorithm and move on.
backcountry.com is a great catalogue, but it’s not a great user experience. i’m excited to tackle this challenge. as of today i’ll be working product management for community projects, content surfacing and all things bike (realcyclist.com & hucknroll.com). ecommerce, not so old hat in my opinion.