The consumer electronics show in vegas is in full swing. The new buzz word is ultrabooks which is the new term for thin powerful laptops akin to the mac book air. Ran across an interesting gadget for 360 video that you can attach to your iphone for a cool 360 video recorder effect to impress your friends with. Sprint announces their first few new LTE devices which include the new nexus with ice cream sandwhich. yum.
Cool products alert. Att seems to be getting the glaxay tablet errrr phone. or tablet phone. 5.3 inch screen will be sure to capture attention. They also announced the HTC titan 2 which is a windows phone with 16 megapixel camera really? I bet it still sucks. Visio is getting into the laptop market with a series of HIGH end laptops which actually look pretty cool. There were some new OLED TV’s which are brand new from Samsung and LG. For 6500 bucks you can score an 80 inch tv from sharp. Also there were a handful of Android Tablets but nothing to get excited about.
There you have it. Its not over yet but that is the main stuff. Just saved you 3000 bucks , you don’t really need to go to vegas for this convention, do you?
You see it as you go down the aisles of Walmart, Costco or any department store or supermarket: Customers with one hand on their cart and the other on their smartphone, price-comparison shopping and looking for deals. Such customers spend an average of 16.9 hours a week on their phones, a new study shows. CheckPoints, which shared the results, calls this customer “Shopper 2.0,” and says this person spends more time using their smartphone than they do “traditional computers” (16.2 hours a week), a kind of tipping point in favor of smartphones. The gap will only continue to widen in favor of smartphones as more people buy them.
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Source: By Suzanne Choney, msnbc.com, Read Article
695 MILLION – Number of Facebook users.
148+ MILLION – Number of Linkedin users.
140 MILLION – Number of tweets created each day.
2.5 BILLION – Number of visits Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn together received in one month alone.
164 MILLION – Number of active blogs.
An article on jeffbullas.com takes a stab at this questions…A recent study by Hitwise in the UK has revealed that a Facebook fan is worth 20 additional visits per year to an on-line stores. All good on-line retailers know their ratios and will know how many sales they will achieve for every 100 or 1,000 visitors to the web site. From there it is easy to calculate the direct cash benefit in cold hard sales. It will vary from store to store depending on conversion rates, average sale values and industry benchmarks. If your ratio was an average sale of $20 for every 100 visits then each new Facebook fan would be worth $4 in additional revenue per year. That starts to put some perspective on the cold hard cash you may be missing out on by not having a Facebook presence or active marketing campaign to increase your Facebook likes. Eventbrite (an on-line ticketing company) calculated that for them a Facebook like is worth $1.34.
Full article from jeffbullas.com
I keep hearing this buzz word in relation to giving out awards on the web for participation like farmville or badges on foursquare etc. But what is it really and does it hold any merit in my Web world. To me, it goes way beyond just awards but the concept of gamification to me really is about incorporating the idea behind games into everyday web concepts and designs. It seems like the idea is to make your applications and online interfaces fun and exciting , like a game… that make sense to me.
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Wikipedia defines it as = In behavioral economics, gamification is the use of game play mechanics[1] for non-game applications (also known as “funware”),[2] particularly consumer-oriented web and mobile sites, in order to encourage people to adopt the applications. It also strives to encourage users to engage in desired behaviors in connection with the applications.[3] Gamification works by making technology more engaging,[4] and by encouraging desired behaviors, taking advantage of humans’ psychological predisposition to engage in gaming.[5] The technique can encourage people to perform chores that they ordinarily consider boring, such as completing surveys, shopping, or reading web sites.
Google+ is finally live and working well. Google+ has been dubbed Google’s last chance to break into the social media scene. While early attempts Buzz / Wave / etc did not lead to success for Google , this new roll out has seemed to hit the mark. I’ve been using it and it seems to be focused on doing social done right. Many of the concepts are a refreshing adjustment to the Facebook and Twitter concepts and they have been instrumental in introducing a new way to segregate or categorize “Friends.” This feature enables what’s coming to be known as “friend management,” which simply means it allows you to create separate networks, or circles, for the people you interact with on various levels. For instance, you can create a circle just for family, which can include aunts and uncles, while having a separate, private circle for your drinking and poker-playing buddies. And, as Google notes, you can even put your boss in a circle all by himself.
Circles are the perfect companion to a feature that Google has dubbed “Huddle.” It’s a group messaging service that sends notes only to those people who are part of a circle. So, you can use this feature to arrange a night out with your friends without worrying about your crazy cousin — or even worse your crazy boss — asking to tag along.
Suffice it to say that Google+ is designed to make the Google platform more than a mere information hub. Its purpose is to close that gap in the amount of time people spend on Google’s sites versus Facebook. From my initial analysis of the product, it has a chance to do that, Although the system needs some work on how to search for and connect with people or friends.
Web 2.0 expo finished up a couple of weeks ago and was working on catching up on videos and presentations of this years event. I couldn’t go this year but seeing what I missed here:
