NEW MEDIA GURU NEWS:
NEW MEDIA GURU (NMG) has been selected by NASSCOM for their Orbit Shift program for fast growing organizations. Managing Directors of New Media Guru, Mohit Maheshwari and Rohit Maheshwari lately participated in the NASSCOM’s Seminar, a part of the selection criteria for the Orbit Shift Program. NASSCOM’s The Orbit Shift Program is an endeavor to provide a platform to aid businesses either at inflection point or keen of expansion or held up in a stagnant state bring about an essential shift in their operations.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN ECOMMERCE?
Magento Community Edition 1.8.1.0 is here! This latest release includes many contributions from the Magento developer community and empowers merchants to operate their online stores more easily and efficiently by delivering significant tax calculation updates, functional improvements, and security enhancements and much more! Check out the release notes.
2013 has been a busy year for ecommerce! Here’s a compiled list of most significant trends in ecommerce this year. Also, check out if online retailers finally gotten to grips with mobile commerce?
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN .NET DEVELOPMENT?
The latest Windows Azure release allows you to schedule jobs that invoke HTTP/S endpoints or post messages to a storage queue on any schedule you define. Using the Scheduler, you can create jobs that reliably call services either inside or outside of Windows Azure and run those jobs immediately, on a regular schedule, or set them to run at a future date. Scott Guthrie (builds a few products for Microsoft) released another massive set of enhancements to Windows Azure. The capabilities include New Scheduler Service, Read-Access Geo Redundant Storage, and Monitoring Updates. All of these improvements are now available to use immediately. Learn more about the capabilities in detail at ScottGu’s blog.
Check out some recent updates-
New Features of Visual Studio 2013
POP Forums v12 posted, for MVC 5
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN CREATIVE?
Exo, an elegant, contemporary geometric sans serif typeface, created by Portuguese graphic and type designer Natanael Gama is now completely redrawn and published as Exo 2, with a more organic look that will perform much better at small text sizes and in long texts. Exo 2.0 has been released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. Read more!
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SEARCH?
ComScore reported holiday season U.S. retail e-commerce spending from desktop computers for the first 52 days of the November-December 2013 holiday season, showing that $42.8 billion has been spent online from desktop devices, an increase of 10 percent vs. year ago. The clear winner this year was Cyber Monday, according to ComScore, followed by Green Monday and Black Friday. Check the full report!
Engagement Ads on the Google Display Network let advertisers connect with consumers across the web with visually rich, immersive experiences – and advertisers only pay when someone chooses to engage with their ad.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN MOBILE?
Google has released the iOS version of My Glass, the companion app that serves as a sort of control panel for Google Glass. The app appeared briefly in the App Store earlier this week, but that was a premature release and Google removed it quickly. MyGlass for iOS offers mostly similar functionality to the Android version: Glass setup, turn-by-turn directions, contact and app management, and the ability to screen cast the Glass display on the iOS device. Read the full coverage!
ComScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world, released data from ComScore MobiLens and Mobile Metrix, reporting key trends in the U.S. Smartphone industry for October 2013. Apple remains the top individual Smartphone OEM; however Samsung has continued to gain and now controls 25.4 percent of the market. Read more!
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SEO?
Google launches improved public URL removal tool to make it easier to request updates based on changes on other people’s websites. The company says was specifically designed to improve the ability to remove third-party content from its search engine. Read the official announcement!
Matt Cutts, head of search spam at Google, has confirmed that Google has applied a 15% reduction in the amount of rich snippets displayed in the search results. Know more!
Now, you can use the expanded Crawl Errors feature in Webmaster Tools to help identify pages on your sites that show these types of problems. Google webmaster central introduces a new Smartphone errors tab where they share pages identified with errors only found with Googlebot for Smartphones. Read more!
Guest blogging abuse – Now, if you are guest blogging, Matt Cutts offered four-points on what you should not do-
- Don’t make guest blogging your only link building strategy
- Don’t send out thousands of mass emails offering to guest blog to random sites
- Don’t use the same guest article on two different sites
- Don’t take one article and spin it many times
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN VIDEO MARKETING?
As per Wall Street Journal report that Facebook will begin showing video ads in the News Feed — on both desktop and mobile devices. Although, the rumors are a year old, Facebook has officially announced the ad test that allows advertisers to purchase clips that will auto-play (without sound) directly in your feed. If you like what you see, you’ll have the option to click and view high quality videos with sound. Click for details!
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SOCIAL?
Twitter-
Twitter announces the release of a new product that enables the advertisers to reach their audiences based on their internet browsing activity. The campaign is known as ‘tailored audiences’ and Twitter has collaborated with AdRoll, BlueKai, Quantcast, ValueClick and others to achieve this. According to Twitter, early tests have shown 195% higher conversion rates with tailored audiences. Check out the official announcement!
+Post ads-
Similar to Facebook’s Promoted Posts or LinkedIn’s Sponsored Updates, Google launches its paid content amplification product called +Post ads. These posts or ads will be like regular Google plus posts, but will appear on the entire Google Display Network. There will be some key differentiators that will make +Post ads different from any Facebook or Linked In posts. And to avail this, you must have a Google AdWords account, be under an NDA with Google and sign the +Post Ads beta agreement, along with having 1000 followers on Google+. Learn More!
Instagram-
What is new? It is “Direct”, Instagram’s new Direct message feature that allows the users to interchange photos and videos one on one or to specific users or groups rather sharing publicly. Know more!
Facebook-
Facebook now to focus more on high quality content from news sites and other sources and less on memes from external sites. Check out the recent Facebook Algorithm update!
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN ANALYTICS?
Now, Google analytics are something more than just measuring the number of website visitors. Google’s Universal Analytics includes new JavaScript tracking code for websites and new mobile SDKs. But Universal Analytics is a lot more than that – it also gives the Measurement Protocol, which allows users to send data to Google Analytics without the need to use the tracking code or SDKs. Check out how a company measured the team’s movement into Google Analytics with the help of an Xbox Kinect, movement recognition software, and of course the Measurement Protocol. Watch video!
Here’s a great share, basically a case study, that has some important lessons for you if you work on an e-commerce site. Check out what is Product Page Roulette?
Google Analytics’ Behavioral Flow Report can aid you in better marketing in 2014. You can isolate pages, or sources, or even keywords, and analyze how visitors behave once they land on our website. Check out how?
Google announced the launch of a new feature called Content Grouping to help users analyze the performance of product and content categories. It will be an easier way to look at aggregated data, as claimed by Google.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN CONTENT?
Now, Blogging to be done via GOOGLE GLASS! There’s a new WordPress plugin that makes it possible to shoot photos and video on Google Glass and publish them almost immediately to a self-hosted WordPress blog. It’s called wpForGlass, and it’s an open-source project from the PR agency Weber Shandwick. Know more in detail!
Recently, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, has publicized a video that Google doesn’t treat duplicate content as spam. In fact, 25% to 30% of the content on the web is duplicative. Google takes all the duplicates and groups them into a cluster. Then Google will show the best of the results in that cluster. Check out for more!
The upcoming trends in the content industry in 2014 are no more a secret. Take a look-
- Competition to gain consumers’ attention will increase
- Determining the key metrics to measure content’s success will be more important
- Increased interest in content integration (content will be produced for multiple channels)
- Experimentation with content in new mediums
Why ignoring Google+ any longer in 2014 is to risk online irrelevance? Check out the three reasons expert Jeff Korhan has to give!
Upcoming – Industry Roundup, January, 2014
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