material design?

http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/phone-book-friction-unlocking-inter-connected-phone-books

could this be used to design new types of fabrics?

Online salesmen

One liner: provide an easy, low pressure mechanism for online shoppers to get assistance online.

There are many things that websites do well. But one thing that is hard to replace is the human interaction that are vital to any physical shop. Going to a car lot, few people go there to just look at cars and their brochures by themselves, they usually do that with the assistance of a car salesman, who knows the product, and can talk you though what you are looking for to find you the best match for the car. They answer questions, offer suggestions, make sales pitches, and create a pleasant atmosphere for shopping. To see how it makes a difference, go to any restaurant in Japan, where at the moment you walk in the door, they greet you with a hearty welcome, "Irashaimasae!", and knowing that the store is ready to serve you makes you want to patronize at the store even more.

Many online stores have good search functions, helpful faqs, or useful descriptions that go unused and unread. When a user doesn't find something before their patience runs out (which is really fast), they just leave the site to look for it elsewhere. Of course, this is bad for the site.

This idea is to allow instant messenging integrated with websites and the use of online salesmen to promote shopping on your site. Users coming to the site would be drawn to see an initial greeting from the salesmen, after which, the messenging window would put in an inconspicuous place that would not distract the user from normal website navigation, but still be in view and available for questions.

On the backend, each salesperson would be able to customize their own greetings, and chat windows would appear only when users reply to the greeting. Once in a chat, the salesperson would be able to see information relating to the user, such as the webpages that the user has been to, and the username along with the shopping history if the person has logged in. More likely than not, the user will ask about things that are already on the site. Therefore, it would be helpful to have a prediction system that will offer answers to the questions, where the salesperson would be able to use for their responses, such as pressing ctrl-1 to insert the first canned response suggestion. It should be made in such a way that maximizes the ability of salespeople to serve as many people as possible without compromizing quality.

One great thing about selling stuff online is the metrics that measure the activity on your site, and this would be no exception. Information about how much this system has helped your store can be clearly logged. Neat charts and pretty graphs can be made for users that have used the feature, and the additional revenue that came from the salespeople. The sales ability of the salespeople would also be measured, and commissions and bonuses can be given fairly. Depending on the measurements, the site owner would be able to fine tune any of these things, such as only offer the feature for customers that have already purchased X amount, make the chat window visible for only certain parts of the site where the margin is much higher, or assign different salespeople to different parts of the site. This feature would also help the site become more user-friendly, where the salespeople would be able to offer specific suggestions on where users gets confused or what most people are interested in.

Another great thing about web technology is that it can be done anywhere. These online sales people would be able to work at home, and probably at all kinds of different hours. This would be a position opened to anyone that would want to apply. Given a little training, it wouldn't be too hard to work in such a position.

[edit] just found out that this is currently being done (well) by olark.com