WHAT’S HAPPENING IN ECOMMERCE?
The next logical step for local retailers is investing in an online store. There are several reasons. First, having an online store will help local retailers optimize Google rankings for specific products and brands. Second, being able to show that an item is in stock may eliminate competitive shopping. Third, eventually local retailers could sell products to consumers outside the retailers’ immediate area, and thus expand their business. Read full analysis here!
Content marketing has been a hot topic in digital for more than a year, but many brands still struggle with the challenge of how to integrate content seamlessly into the eCommerce experience. According to a recent survey done by Econsultancy – Where Content and Commerce Collide, it is found that only 38% of in-house marketers have a defined content marketing strategy, despite 76% saying they are producing significantly more content than they were 12 months ago.
What more is revealed? Five content marketing ideas that eCommerce businesses can use to garner attention, traffic, and sales in July 2014. Check Out!
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN .NET DEVELOPMENT?
In ASP.NET 2005 (v2 timeframe) there was a web-based tool called ASP.NET Website Administration tool that folks could use the edit users and generally administer the ASP.NET Membership database. This useful tool was removed in 2012 and is still missed. Since then, ASP.NET has introduced ASP.NET Identity and community member Brock Allen created IdentityReboot with some significant improvements and extensions. Brock Allen and Dominick Baier have gone even further and created Thinktecture IdentityManager. It’s the beginnings of a nice bootstrapped replacement for the missing ASP.NET Website Administration Tool. It’s nicely factored and supports both ASP.NET Identity and their alternative called MembershipReboot.
Did you miss out on DotNetConf when it streamed LIVE just a few weeks ago? Don’t you worry, it’s all recorded and online for you to stream or download! The .NET Conf 2014 was a two-day virtual event (June 25th-26th) focused on .NET technologies, covering application development for the desktop, mobile and cloud/server. It is hosted by the MVP community and Microsoft, bringing top speakers and great topics straight to your PC. Check out the .NET Conf summary and recorded content here!
Microsoft released a preview ASP.NET Identity 2.1.0-alpha1. The main focus in this release was to fix bugs and add SignInManager to make it easier to use security features for login. You can download ASP.NET Identity from the NuGet gallery. SignInManager makes it easier to add Two-Factor authentication, account lockout and other security features when you log in. Read the official announcement!
.NET Web Development and Tools group at Microsoft, announced the release of ASP.NET MVC 5.2, Web API 2.2 and Web Pages 3.2. This release primarily includes great new features for Web API OData v4 as summarized below but has bug fixes and minor features that bring in a lot more goodness to MVC, Web API, and Web PagesThe NuGet packages for ASP.NET MVC 5.2, ASP.NET Web API 2.2 and ASP.NET Web Pages 3.2 are now live on the NuGet gallery! Read more
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN CREATIVE?
Adobe announces the biggest update to its core products since CS6! Adobe released a major update to Creative Cloud. The announcement of Creative Cloud, and more specifically the subscription model, Adobe have vowed to justify the new pricing with frequent updates. And that is something they have maintained since CC first launched. This release will informally be known as Creative Cloud 2014, and we’ll be getting annual major updates year on year for the foreseeable future. As part of the announcement, Adobe will be delivering a new Creative Cloud plan for photographers, which features Photoshop and Lightroom for $9.99 per month. Read More!
Here’s a bonus read – 6 steps to perfecting minimalism in web design
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SEARCH?
Google Adwords announced a new version of Google Content API for Shopping, giving you more insight into your data quality and new options to help you keep your data fresh. With this new version, you can, for example:
- Get item-level data quality information and see if an item was disapproved because your landing page URL isn’t working on a mobile device or if your unique product identifiers are inaccurate.
- Update price and availability for one or more items much more quickly so your customers have the latest price-point and know what’s in-stock before they click through to your site.
- Integrate more easily with Google Shopping thanks to a broader choice of programming languages and data formats supported.
Google introduces Google My Business – a free and easy way to find and connect with your people, wherever you are. In addition to new businesses getting started with Google My Business, the team also plans to upgrade current users of Places for Business and the Google+ Dashboard to this new experience. Know more.
The Google Shopping team announces an update to the Google Shopping Feed Specification to provide merchants with more flexibility when organizing product data and reach more shoppers. The update covers specifications related to Mobile landing page, Merchant-defined custom bundles, Apparel attributes, Item availability, Mandatory character limits etc. Read in detail!
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN MOBILE?
As mobile engagement continues to grow, another major milestone occurred just this past month—consumers now spend more than half of their digital consumption time on mobile apps, leaving us without any doubt that we are currently living in an app-dominated digital world. Yet, although there has been a shift from web browser to app, which coincided with the shift from desktop to mobile, certain media properties continue to attract an inordinate size of their mobile traffic via the browser. Click here to know Why Does a User Visit the App vs. the Website and which mobile strategy is best for you?
Report: there are multiple studies that have reported mobile devices drive more than 50 percent of internet time. Digital metrics firm comScore now says that mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) “accounted for 60 percent of total digital media time spent” in May. More remarkably apps represent 51 percent of all digital media time. (Per comScore, apps constitute roughly 83 percent of mobile time spent; Nielsen says it’s closer to 90 percent.)
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SEO?
Google Webmaster Trends Analysts, Pierre Far and Zineb Ait Bahajji, posted on the Google Webmaster blog that they’ve updated their official guidelines for moving your web site and having Google in mind when doing so. They broke out the process based on two ways of moving your site: Move a site with no URL change and Move a site with URL changes.
Google rolled out the 3rd version of the PayDay Loan algorithm (PayDay Loan 3.0). To catch you up, PayDay Loan 2.0 launched a few weeks ago around May 17th and 18th. That specifically targeted very spammy sites in the porn, pills and casino markets. Payday 3.0 specifically targets spammy queries, versus spammy sites.
Google is currently beta testing a new international targeting report within Google Webmaster Tools. The new International Targeting report is designed to help webmasters who have international sites and use href lang markup understand common mistakes and learn what errors they need to fix, in order to better communicate the language settings across the webmaster’s internationalized web site. The tool offers debug details on missing return links from specific language codes, to unknown language codes in general. Read more!
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN WEB DEVELOPMENT (PHP / OPEN SOURCE)?
The PHP development group has released the latest Release Candidate in the PHP 5.6.x series: PHP 5.6.0RC2. A reminder, though, this is not a production release, so only use it in testing.
“The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of the second release candidate of PHP 5.6. As we entered the feature freeze with beta1, this is a bugfix-only release. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs in the bug tracking system. “
Other releases in the month-
- PHP 5.5.14. This release fixes several bugs against PHP 5.5.13. Also, this release fixes a total of 8 CVEs, half of them concerning the FileInfo extension.
- PHP 5.4.30. Over 20 bugs were fixed in this release, including the following security issues: CVE-2014-3981, CVE-2014-0207, CVE-2014-3478, CVE-2014-3479, CVE-2014-3480, CVE-2014-3487, CVE-2014-4049, CVE-2014-3515. All PHP 5.4 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version.
Find more updates here!
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SOCIAL?
Twitter-
One of the best ways to follow events as they unfold is through real-time videos on Twitter. As Twitter continues to invest in the video, it’s important for it to provide tools that make it easy for TV broadcasters, businesses, and event producers to share high-quality videos. To that end, Twitter agreed to acquire SnappyTV. SnappyTV’s platform for live clipping, editing, and distribution is already widely used by brands and our media partners to share video clips on Twitter, both organically and via Twitter Amplify.
Facebook-
What’s Facebook’s plan for Web video advertising? That was the intriguing question being pondered in the online ad community last month as the social networking giant announced a deal to acquire LiveRail, an advertising technology firm that helps media companies make more money on Web video ads. Among the theories being bandied about is that Facebook wants to find a way to push its own social video ads out across the Web, or that Facebook could launch a video ad exchange to match Google’s recent move in that direction. Read more!
Facebook to start interest-based advertising! Starting soon in the US, Facebook will also include information from some of the websites and apps you use. Let’s say that you’re thinking about buying a new TV, and you start researching TVs on the web and in mobile apps. Facebook may show you ads for deals on a TV to help you get the best price or other brands to consider. See how ads work n Facebook?
Facebook announces an improvement to how they rank the videos people and Pages are uploading directly to Facebook. Their goal is to better understand what videos people are interested in watching, so that relevant videos appear more prominently in News Feed. The improvement made considers whether someone has watched a video and for how long they watched it. Facebook is adding that to the factors considered previously, which included likes, comments and shares. This change will affect all videos uploaded directly to Facebook. Read More!
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN ANALYTICS?
To make analysis of brand and generic performance as easy as possible, Google Analytics introduced a new feature which automatically identifies brand-aware paid search clicks tracked in Google Analytics. The team will use a combination of signals (including the clickthrough-rate, text string, domain name and others) to identify query terms which show awareness of your brand. You can review their suggested brand terms and then accept or decline each of them. It’s also easy to add additional brand terms that they missed. Check the official announcement!
To make it easier to find services and apps that are important to your business, Google Analytics re-launched the App Gallery as the Partner Gallery, the new destination to find partners and review their offerings. The Partner Gallery includes new features and improvements:
- A brand new look and layout.
- A combined view of both services and apps, so you don’t need to visit multiple sites to find a solution.
- New search capabilities and category selection making it easier to filter and find what you’re looking for.
- Google Analytics Certified Partners are sorted based on your location to find partners that have an office near you.
- Media assets like screenshots / videos / case studies that highlight customer success stories and illustrate app features.
- Comments and ratings to review user experiences and provide feedback.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN CONTENT?
Content marketing is mainstream, with 90% of marketers using content to build their brands and achieve their business goals, according to the Content Marketing Institute. While it’s now widely understood that content marketing is a critical component of any marketing strategy, the most forward-thinking content marketers are experimenting with how they create, distribute and track their content’s success. That’s leading to more long-form videos as well as more interesting trends — micro-content and interactive apps. Read more on Newly discovered benefits of Micro –Content!
Long before content marketing became an everyday term among marketers, Joe Pulizzi knew its importance. Seven years ago, he founded what is now Content Marketing Institute, a website dedicated to all things content marketing, including practical how-tos and insight from industry leaders. In a recent interview, Joe gives answers to major challenges marketers face and discusses the future of the content marketing. Get answers to questions like biggest challenges facing content marketing teams in the next twelve months, difference between ROI and ROO and more!
Upcoming – Industry Roundup, July, 2014
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