CHAPTER 1    
THE KILLER APP

The world now runs on Internet time.
-Andy Grove


    Christopher Brennan wasn't trying to start a revolution. The regional manager for British Petroleum's (BP) sixteen hundred gas stations in Germany, Chris was looking for new sources of revenue in a saturated, largely commodity-priced business dominated by a few brands. Then he got an idea. Gas stations were exempt from Germany's rigid shopping laws that required stores of all kinds to close by 6 p.m. during the week and by 2 p.m. on Saturday. Small convenience stores attached to the stations already sold basic staples and impulse food purchases 24 hours a day. Why not really exploit this regulatory loophole? Chris had heard about the future of electronic shopping from his colleague Matthias Richly. Why wait for the future? Why not invent it now?

    Working with discretionary marketing funds (and largely on personal time), Chris and a small team created the BP multimedia shopping kiosk, a brilliant combination of digital technology and strategic partnerships with name-brand merchants and credit card companies eager to try a new marketing channel. At the kiosk, consumers use a touch-sensitive screen to view short videos, select merchandise, and get advice on everything from party planning to the latest fashions. All goods ordered at the kiosk could be picked up the next day at the gas station or in some cases even delivered to the customer's home.

    Early reception to the kiosk was enthusiastic. German shoppers, assumed to be hostile both to technology and to new services, embraced the kiosk at once. They seemed delighted to be able to order everything for a birthday party or a brunch, based on the recommendations of two-dimensional images. They confounded traditional marketing dogma by using the kiosk to purchase precisely the kind of goods that no one expected anyone would want to buy off a computer screen in a smelly gas station-fruits, vegetables, and even meats. Shoppers began to use the kiosk to replace, rather than supplement, their regular grocery shopping. German consumers, it turned out, were fed up not only with the inconvenient shopping hours but with the quality of their shopping experience. Now they could avoid the crowds, the dirty stores, and the generally unhelpful attitude of the merchants. The kiosk tapped into a channel that conventional wisdom had told Chris didn't exist.

    A month into a pilot deployment in Munich, Chris and his team had redesigned the interface several times and increased the number of participating stations. They began making long-term plans to exploit the stations' prime locations as staging and distribution centers, and to deliver the system itself directly to home computers using public networks. Chris and his team were beginning to see that their project had the potential not just to improve gas station revenues but to re-create the very notion of the "station" and the role it played in the consumer's life.

    Then they did something really radical. They told the folks at BP headquarters what they'd been up to.