Last tuesday I was invited to attend the “St Gallener Internettag - Die Verschmelzung zweier Handelswelten” which took place at the Gottfried Duttweiler Institute in Zürich/Rüschlikon. Very nice location with a great view over the city and the lake.

The day was organized by the Retail Management Institute of the university St Gallen. So many Retail and eCommerce guys attended. IRM also announced a new study where a friend of mine was one of the authors. This retail and eCommerce guys were a completely other audience compared to other conferences, barcamps etc. But several CEOs (Migros, former Metro, LeShop, Amazon and many more) attended.

Major parts of all presentations showed many insights and new aspects. But this none geek but business only audience triggered funny parts in some presentations: A guy from Google explained for example “how to use adsense” and that next to the search results there are ads and that is how google makes the money. or about 200 people tried to not fall asleep during a company overview of ricardo.ch (eBay competitor). It was like 5-10 years ago. At least there was no “This is Web 2.0″ presentation.

 
 
The presenters showed business models and success factors and that you could make money, although if your are not leading edge in technology. This was very interesting for me .

Google as well as the BMW Head of Digital or the founder of iTaste gave very good hints and predictions of how they see the future of the market. Frog Design (they designed a Mac, Sony WEGA etc) showed some examples of how online and offline could work together.

Ralf Kleber the German CEO of Amazon gave a very good overview about how the developed their business model and how to do it right. One of the best presentation of the day. I thought that this what he explained is already common sense (customer is king) but it is not.

The major point for me was a really strange comparison between online and offline views of the future.

Some people really are still not believing that we will have a, call it “internet of things” or “ubiouitous internet” etc in 5-10 years. Sure there are people without internet in the future too and people will still buy some newspapers but the growth of the markets are not offline or in more general: not without innovation.

My Recommendation is to check out www.itaste.com very cool word of mouth recommendation page for restaurants and places.