NEW MEDIA GURU NEWS:
NEW MEDIA GURU (NMG) is now Online partner for NASSCOM Product conclave India www.productconclave.nasscom.in. NASSCOM 10k Project is aimed at helping 10,000 startups to germinate & grow in India. NASSCOM joined hands with Nw Media Guru (NMG) to make the event website and handle online marketing after interaction in the orbit shift program. NASSCOM Product Conclave 2014 is an event spread over a couple of days, filled with activities involving thousands of Healthcare, Retail, Education and Fintech industry men and practitioners interacting, learning and sharing.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN ECOMMERCE?
In a May 2014, Gartner described Amazon Web Services (AWS) as “a cloud-focused service provider with a very pure vision of highly automated, cost-effective IT capabilities, delivered in a flexible, on-demand manner,” and placed AWS in the upper right of its Magic Quadrant analysis, meaning that AWS was a complete and effective solution for online businesses. From the perspective of an eCommerce business, AWS, like other cloud IaaS providers, can offer the flexibility and scalability required to improve site performance and manage peak shopping periods like Cyber Monday. Read full analysis here!
Bitcoin, the best known of several virtual payment currencies, has made inroads into mainstream commerce, including brick-and-mortar retailers. Those ecommerce merchants that accept Bitcoin are selling products that attract younger millennial consumers who are comfortable with cutting edge technology. In a recent survey by SurveyMonkey, it is found that while 64 percent of respondents have heard of Bitcoin, only 11 percent have used it. Fifty-four percent stated that they were not likely to use Bitcoin in the future. Read about the disadvantages and Benefits of Accepting Digital Currencies!
Grocery retailers need to catch up to consumer expectations on mobile! Savvy Marketing has recently published a report on the digital shopper landscape. 71% of UK shoppers currently own a Smartphone and 78% say that they will own one by the end of 2014. Consumers believe they should be able to perform all basic shopping tasks with their Smartphones, including collecting and storing vouchers to searching for product information.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN .NET DEVELOPMENT?
Microsoft announces a preview release of ASP.NET Session State Provider for Redis. Redis is an open source, BSD licensed, advanced key-value store. It is often referred to as a data structure server since keys can contain strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets. Read in detail…
The .NET languages team recently announced the availability and open sourcing of a public preview of “Roslyn”, the new .NET Compiler Platform. This is the long awaited .NET “compiler as a service” that represents the future of languages and compilation for .NET. You can download a preview including new compilers and Visual Studio tooling that enable you to explore upcoming features in the languages and Visual Studio editor. Check out how to use these new features.
Visual Studio team added new features to the recently launched RTM version of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2. New features in the RTM release since RC release-
- The JSON editor now supports the format command, better intelliSense filtering, auto structure completion, and has beautified the default colorization
- All the localized languages supported by VS2013 RTM have been updated for this release.
- Knockout IntelliSense is re-enabled in this release.
- Additional CSS selector IntelliSense in the CSS/LESS/SASS editors. These were rolled up from Web Essentials (the Web Essentials 2.0 RC version removed them when released for VS2013 Update 2 RC).
- HTML element names
- Class names
- IDs
- Attribute names
- Attribute values
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN CREATIVE?
Many exciting conferences have already featured some of the industry’s most illustrious speakers in the first half of 2014, however, there are quite a few more to come! Take a look at the round-up of conferences taking place this year from June onwards in the design world. Keep in mind that there’s always a benefit to attending any event, and a strong chance that you’ll be exposed to a large amount of new information, so be prepared to absorb the latest techniques brought to you by distinguished authors and speakers!
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SEARCH?
Now, Call-to-Action overlays on promoted YouTube videos will have a new look and feel across both desktop and mobile. The two lines of accompanying text will be gone, leaving a single line call-to-action, giving more real estate to video content. Google Adwords will make this change automatically so you won’t need to make any changes to existing CTAs. Read More!
Introducing new call conversion settings. For many businesses, not all phone calls are valued the same. In the coming weeks, Google Adwords is launching new, flexible controls for mobile click-to-call ads to help drive the calls that are most valuable to your business. These new call conversion settings are available in countries where Google forwarding numbers are available. You can learn more about these new call conversion settings here.
Google Adwords announces the Google Analytics and AdWords account linking process is becoming even more streamlined, making it easier for advertisers to quickly gain rich insights. The new linking process allows you to link multiple AdWords accounts all at once. This enables more tightly controlled linking access to each Google Analytics property. This will enable…
- Enable Bulk AdWords Account Linking
- Discover Unlinked Accounts
- Gain More Granular Control
Read the official announcement!
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN MOBILE?
Mobile data traffic is rocketing up 81%, mostly thanks to so many people gluing their eyes to video. As a result, mobile use of the Internet now stands at 25% of the total, up from 14% last year. Mobile is a trend that is reshaping communication. Know how!
Report: Mobile Video Ad Consumption Rises, Native Ads Yielding Higher Engagement Rates. As per the latest study by Celtra – video play rates on standard ads have held steady just above 12 percent. Play rates were highest on standard ads at 12.2 percent compared to 9.4 percent for native ads. However, native ads performed better on video completion with 77.3 percent completion rates versus 52.4 percent for standard ads. Across both ad formats, video play and completion rates were higher when they were shown in-app versus on mobile web. Not surprising, video ads were more likely to be played and completed on tablets than on smartphones.
Microsoft recently announced its all-important mobile offerings:
- Office mobile app management with Windows Intune – Later this year, Intune and Office 365 will deliver protected mobile productivity across Office for iPad, iPhone and Android phones including Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook Web App
- Microsoft Azure RemoteApp – Available today in preview, Azure RemoteApp helps companies give mobile employees access to Windows applications across a range of devices.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SEO?
Google’s Matt Cutts announced on Twitter that they have released version 4.0 of the Google Panda algorithm. Google’s Panda algorithm is designed to prevent sites with poor quality content from working their way into Google’s top search results. Panda 4.0 must be a major update to the actual algorithm versus just a data refresh. Meaning, Google has made changes to how Panda identifies sites and has released a new version of the algorithm in May, 2014. Some have noted that press releases may have also been hit big time. PRWeb.com, PR Newswire, BusinessWire and PRLog all seem to have lost significant rankings in Google on a large scale since Panda 4.0 hit.
Google has announced on the Google Webmaster Central blog that in the “coming days” they will be releasing a new tool to help debug your site’s JavaScript issues. Specifically, Google is going to show you if they have issues crawling and indexing your site because of JavaScript implementation mistakes. Read More.
Google decides to spare users the frustration of landing on irrelevant pages and help webmasters fix the faulty redirects. Starting this month the English search results in the US, whenever Google detects that Smartphone users are redirected to a homepage instead of the page they asked for, they may note it below the result. If users still wish to proceed to the page, they can click “Try anyway”! Read full story…
Google has published their official advice on the Google Webmaster Central blog on how to handle your home page when your web site serves multiple languages and countries. There are three ways to configure your homepage / landing page when your users access it:
- Show everyone the same content
- Let users choose
- Serve content depending on users’ localization and language
Google supports all these options, but gives guidance in this post on how to handle it in all these cases.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN WEB DEVELOPMENT (PHP / OPEN SOURCE)?
The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.28, PHP 5.6.0 beta2, PHP 5.5.13, PHP 5.4.29 and PHP 5.6.0 beta3 (source: http://www.php.net/). These releases add new features and encouraged PHP users to use upgraded versions. PHP 5.6.0 beta3 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.
Another threat to your corporate website discovered! Your website can fall victim to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. DDoS attacks sabotage corporate websites to make them unavailable to legitimate visitors. And here’s the really scary part: The very DDoS protection service you contracted to guard your website just might be responsible for destroying your site — or someone else’s site. Read about this threat in detail Here.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SOCIAL?
Twitter-
Twitter introduces a new account feature called mute to people who use our iPhone and Android apps and twitter.com. Mute gives you even more control over the content you see on Twitter by letting you remove a user’s content from key parts of your Twitter experience.
Pinterest-
Pinterest announced two updates to get a little friendlier with brands. Soon, all brands will have access to a brand new analytics dashboard and the ability to use Promoted Pins. This update could help you amplify your efforts and actually know if those efforts are paying off. The main takeaway you need to know is that both of these features are only available to those of us with business accounts on Pinterest. Read More!
Facebook-
Facebook on officially launched Business Manager, a tool that lets marketers and agencies manage multiple campaigns via one interface. The tool, which Facebook has been rolling out over the last month, lets you assign roles to people working on various campaigns. Facebook also promises that Business Manager will let agencies and clients securely share campaign materials. The tool also promises to provide workflows that make it easier to separate personal and business experiences on Facebook.. Read more!
When writing a status update – if you choose to turn the feature on – you’ll have the option to use your phone’s microphone to identify what song is playing or what show or movie is on TV. That means if you want to share that you’re listening to your favorite Beyoncé track or watching the season premiere of Game of Thrones, you can do it quickly and easily, without typing. Check out!
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN ANALYTICS?
For all who find it difficult to identify traffic patterns from Behavior Flows that include a large number of pages, Google Analytics has announced added support for Content Groupings in the Behavior Flow. Content Groupings let you group pages and content into a logical structure that reflects how you think about your site. The Behavior Flow view provides a graphical representation of how visitors flow through your site by traffic source (or any other dimension) so you can see their journeys, as well as where they dropped off. Check the official announcement!
Google Analytics already helps you gather deep insights into one website or app at a time. But what if you want to understand the overall performance and interactions of all your company’s digital properties? Google Analytics launches Roll-Up Reporting in Google Analytics Premium to help address this need. Roll-Up Reporting is a single interface that moves your aggregate business data much closer to your high-level business decisions. Know more!
Enterprise customers, service providers, or developers that manage many accounts, so Google Analytics announces to offer 4 new APIs to help you save you time and increase productivity: the new Provisioning API to create new GA accounts (invite only), the AdWords and Filters API to manage configurations, and the Embed API to surface key reports and dashboards. The Analytics team also re-launched the App Gallery as the Partner Gallery, the new destination to find services by Google Analytics Certified Partners and apps by Google Analytics Technology Partners. Check out other Updates from Google Analytics Summit 2014
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN CONTENT?
Buffer, the social media scheduling and analytics tool, is introducing a useful new feature today — the ability to pull RSS feeds into its dashboard. It will allow users of Buffer’s paid product to have an automatically populated queue of content to share on their connected social media accounts. Read more.
How Long Should Your Content Be? Based on research by blog publishing platform Medium, the ideal length of a blog post takes visitors 7 minutes to read. That works out to be between 1,400 and 1,750 words, as the average person reads 200-250 words per minute. Medium found that after 7 minutes, readership started to drop off. Based on this, Moz found that longer posts garner more links.
Some more recent updates and studies on Content Industry-
Get ready to say hello to the next big thing in content marketing technology: the content marketing stack. In the next couple of years, we’ll see offerings from the big enterprise players: Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce.com. There are many factors driving this latest phase in content marketing evolution, not the least of which is a tangled and complex content marketing vendor landscape. There are well in excess of 110 content marketing tools on the market today, with more appearing all the time. Content stacks are necessary to consolidate the eight content marketing use cases identified in the latest research on the content vendor landscape… Know more!
As 58 percent of B2B marketers plan to increase their content marketing spend over the next 12 months, the amount of content created and published will continue to grow. Here is what 9 experts weigh in on their number-one tip for content optimization, as well as the top optimization mistake they see publishers make. Read on!
Upcoming – Industry Roundup, June, 2014
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