WHAT’S HAPPENING IN E-COMMERCE?
Mobile commerce is very much here and now. A fifth of all online spend now is now on mobile, accounting for around £8bn. That’s a huge figure, and it’s only going to increase. EPiServer research has shown that among the UK smartphone and tablet owning population, those aged 25 to 34 are most likely to have made a purchase on their device in the last six months. Those aged 18 to 24 are not far behind. Research has shown that millennials have very particular expectations and meeting these will be essential. People of this generation have grown up with the internet, are at home with technology may have a short attention span and are often adept at filtering out marketing messages and low quality content. Read the full story here.
For UK companies international export, a £13bn opportunity now, is set to grow to £45bn by 2020. Brand use of media agency trading desks has declined from 81% of advertisers in 2013 to 69% in 2014, according to a WFA poll of marketers from 43 of the biggest global brands (with $35bn annual advertising spend). According to a new forecast from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Smart Connected Device Tracker, worldwide phablet shipments (5.5-7 inch screen size) will reach 175m units worldwide in 2014. For a detailed statistical analysis read more.
According to reports, Facebook is currently experimenting with a “Buy” button that will be added to status updates from selected brands.This feature will enable brands and retailers to post updates about products and, instead of directing customers to the online store to complete the purchase, they will be able to make purchases by simply clicking the “Buy” button. Credit card details will be kept on file with Facebook’s servers, making transactions easier than ever. Meanwhile, Twitter has just announced its acquisition of CardSpring to enable “in the moment” commerce from within user’s Twitter feeds. This has the potential to turn social recommendations into purchasing opportunities. Read the complete story.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN .NET DEVELOPMENT
The .NET Micro Framework SDK now supports Visual Studio 2013. That’s welcome news, since we’ve heard many requests for this support. In the process of integrating the SDK into Visual Studio 2013, we adopted a new architectural approach that decouples the .NET Framework SDK from Visual Studio. You can now use the Visual Studio version that works best for you, or multiple versions at once. .NET Micro Framework Visual Studio integration is delivered via a Visual Studio VSIX package, which is independent of a particular Visual Studio version. The .NET Micro Framework is an open source project from Microsoft, licensed as Apache 2. It is developed by Microsoft engineers assigned to Microsoft Open Technologies and by others in the maker community. Hardware makers are able to use the .NET Micro Framework code from the Codeplex project without any additional license or paying any fee to Microsoft. Read more of this story for a detailed technical insight.
.NET Micro Framework team is releasing a beta update of the .NET Micro Framework SDK that adds support for Visual Studio 2013. The release also contains other improvements that will benefit developers and hardware partners, making the install and update experience better. The .NET Micro Framework team is looking ahead and has already started to enable support for Visual Studio “14”. There still is more work to do to fully support Visual Studio “14” but you can already give it a try if you are an early adopter. Know more.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN CREATIVE
The concept of MVP is making waves. Many of today’s hottest technology companies, both large and small, are increasingly using the concept of the minimum viable product (MVP) as way to iteratively learn about their customers and develop their product ideas. Read more on this at http://bit.ly/1wiYVoI.
With Halloween just around the corner, there are some interesting freebies for you to download. In a few short weeks All Hallow’s Eve will roll around again and kids of all ages will be dressing up, pranking each other, and overdosing on sugar.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SEARCH
Google analytics launched a new set of tools for Tag Manager users, including new APIs, third-party templates and a refreshed user interface. According to Google, the new Tag Manager API lets users customize their infrastructure and better manage bulk user access. Other updates include the addition of third-party templates from providers like AdRoll, Marin, ComScore and Criteo, and a newly updated user interface designed to be more like Adwords and Google Analytics. Continue reading here.
Advertisers using call forwarding numbers for their AdWords call extensions in the U.S. began receiving notices this week that local numbers are now available in many areas.Local forwarding numbers use the same same area code as the businesses’ phone number or an area code within the same region. For complete story read more.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN MOBILE
A recent U.S. Mobile App Report shows that a staggering 42 percent of all app time spent on smartphones occurs on the individual’s single most used app. And nearly three out of every four minutes of app usage occurs on one of the individual’s top four apps. That said, more than a third of all U.S. smartphone owners download at least one app per month, and the average smartphone user within this segment downloads three apps per month. Read More. Mobile has swiftly risen to become the leading digital platform, with total activity on smartphones and tablets accounting for an astounding 60 percent of digital media time spent in the U.S. The fuel driving mobile’s relentless growth is primarily app usage, which alone makes up a majority of total digital media engagement at 52 percent. In this report we let the numbers and charts do most of the talking, as the story of today’s app landscape is told through the visualization of comScore’s mobile data.
In the backdrop of the digital media revolution facing the South Asian news publishing industry as well as the challenge of managing the growth of print media business, Kedar Gavane covers digital trends that are shaping the Indian online space.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SEO
Back in May, Google announced it is able to fully render your web pages both in desktop mode and Google mode. Webmasters are indeed noticing GoogleBot fully crawling and rendered the final page, the page the user sees, not just the code behind the page. So GoogleBot sees what users see when they visit your web page. Google has been making a strong point about this for months. Right now, Google does penalize sites that generate errors for mobile visitors. It began this in July 2013, so that sites which may redirect all mobile users to homepages will have less chance of appearing in Google’s mobile search results. Similar errors might also have an impact. With many things Google has hinted at in the past, such as HTTPS, page speed, ad-heavy pages, quality content and so on, these warnings have come months before, and Google has released new algorithms that incorporate them into the ranking algorithm. What Google is considering with the mobile user experience is a step beyond this. It would mean that if people are correctly delivered to the right pages, even pages meant for mobile visitors, Google would still assess how effective it deems the pages to be and reward or penalize accordingly. Get more information.
Google’s John Mueller said in a Google Webmaster Hangout video that there will probably not be another Toolbar PageRank update ever. John said:We will probably not going to be updating it [PageRank] going forward, at least in the Toolbar PageRank. Read more on this topic.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN PHP / OPEN SOURCE
The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.6.1. Several bugs were fixed in this release. All PHP 5.6 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version.
ConFoo is looking for PHP experts to share their skills and experience at the next ConFoo. ConFoo 2015 will be hosted on February 18th-20th in Montreal, at the Hilton Bonaventure Hotel. Read More.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SOCIAL
Recently, Twitter began tinkering with the feed by featuring content that users didn’t sign up for, and, according to reports, reactions were mixed. For the uninitiated, this new function would surface favorite tweets from accounts a user follows; in other words, if a user you follow “favorited” a tweet, it would end up in your Twitter feed. Twitter has been, and continues to be, the platform of choice for reporters covering breaking-news stories. Twitter’s influence in this sense cannot be understated: Conversations on Twitter about Michael Brown’s death and the subsequent unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, pushed the story to the national forefront. This was in stark contrast to Facebook, where much of the conversation two weeks ago revolved around the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. Twitter declined to say how an algorithm will affect how publishers’ stories are distributed. Here is more to read.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN ANALYTICS
Good news for mobile app developers: Audience Demographics and Interests Reporting and Remarketing are now available for apps in Google Analytics. Just one of the improvements for audience segmentation and remarketing we’re announcing today, these changes should make it even easier for all our advertisers to reach their high-value customer segments. Analysts and developers can blend audience demographic and behavior data into detailed audience lists to be targeted with in app remarketing campaigns. In short, all the great remarketing capabilities for Google Analytics users on the web are now available for apps as well. Complete news here.
Analytics users can now compare their results to peers in their industry, choosing from 1600 industry categories, 1250 markets and 7 size buckets. Benchmarking leverages the footprint of Google Analytics and can help you set meaningful targets, spot trends occurring across industries and answer a whole array of questions: Which channels should you be investing more in? How does your mobile engagement compare to your peers? How unique is your audience? Twiddy.com, a vacation rentals company in the Outer Banks– a popular summer getaway destination– has been using Benchmarking reports to help focus its marketing resources. A look at their peer benchmarks by channel showed that Twiddy was doing many things well during its peak summer booking season. Complete Story.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN CONTENT
LinkedIn, the second largest network according to a recent study by Pew Research Institute, had the fewest shares with only 2.2%. But the smallest network, Twitter, saw nearly four times as many shares with 8.6% of the total share count. The differences between the networks didn’t stop with their size and propensity to provoke sharing. In addition to the volume of content spread by each audience, we also found some compelling data on content types that are more popular on each network. Read more.
BuzzFeed has built a thriving business valued at an estimated $850 million upon the foundations of that basic tenet — 75% of BuzzFeed traffic comes from social referrals, including email and instant messages — but Peretti showed there’s much more to it than that during the keynote conversation with Search Engine Land founding editor Danny Sullivan at SMX East Wednesday night in New York. Check More.
Upcoming – Industry Roundup, October, 2014
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