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Study: Hispanic Smartphone Owners Want Mobile Shopping Apps To Be Social | TechCrunch
Using a smartphone while shopping to find better deals or to look up product reviews is now pretty mainstream. There are some interesting differences between how Hispanics use their phones while shopping compared to the average U.S. consumer, though. While observing 15 Hispanic smartphone owners in Los Angeles and conducting a nationwide survey of 500 Hispanic smartphone users in late 2011, White Horse and digital advertising agency Sensis noticed that Hispanic users often prefer to shop with friends and family members – a use case that most mobile shopping apps currently ignore. The study found that Hispanic users generally care less about reading product reviews while they are shopping and are more interested in the social experience of shopping with others. Indeed, 68% of Hispanic smartphone users in this survey said that they prefer to shop with at least one more person when buying expensive products.
Startup Lets You Buy and Sell Stuff on Twitter
A startup called Chirpify introduced a platform on Wednesday that lets you buy and sell things as well as donate money on Twitter. The Portland, Ore., company has linked up with PayPal to make Twitter-based transactions, a.k.a. “T-commerce” sort of like writing a check. For instance, you can buy stuff from your favorite brand just by tweeting “@favoritebrand Buy” (assuming they use Chirpify, of course.) You can also donate by typing “@politician Donate.”
'This Message Will Self-Destruct': One Shar.es Erases Data After Transmission
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: OneShar.es Quick Pitch: OneShar.es lets you send confidential data that automatically deletes after the recipient views it once. Genius Idea: Allows your sensitive data from becoming one of the many “read” emails in a recipient’s inbox, which could potentially be accessed if his or her smartphone is lost or stolen.
No nanny? No problem! Modern-day parents are increasingly employing tablets to entertain, teach, and occupy their children, according to survey data gathered by analytics firm Nielsen.
Who needs a nanny? Parents turn to tablets to rear children | VentureBeat
Is your company prepared for the next digital evolution?
There’s a gap growing between an increasingly digital society and the organizations that serves it, B. Bonin Bough , senior global director of digital and social media at PepsiCo, said during the second annual What’s Next D.C. event. As consumer consumption of technological advances increases at a breakneck pace, brands are fighting to keep up with a society that thinks in 140-character status updates. But most companies are failing to evolve, Bough said, and instead are staying stagnant, unable to keep up with the technology that has captivated their customers.
Will Reese | January 24, 2012 For retailers, especially those who just can't compete with big discounters on price, the concern is growing about new mobile shopping behaviors. The core phenomenon, often called pejoratively "scan and scram" or "showrooming" is now widespread: customers shopping at brick-and-mortar retailers examine physical merchandise at the shelf but use smartphone price-checking tools such as barcode scanners to buy the product at a better price online or at another store.
7 Ways That Retailers Can Combat 'Scan and Scram' | ClickZ
Supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA (and its Senate-sister the Protect Intellectual Property Act, PIPA) legislation — like the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) — argue that legislation is needed because online piracy puts jobs and industries at risk. While I agree that content piracy is a real problem, the language and implications of SOPA has the potential to hurt the very industries and content creators the bills purport to protect. Artists and content creators are understandably bothered by how easy it is to obtain content without payment.
Why SOPA and PIPA Won't Stop Real Piracy
Why SOPA Is Dangerous
I’m sure you’ve heard by now that SOPA is bad and would ruin the Internet, but have you actually read the bill? If not, it’s worth reading, for two reasons. First, if you are going to oppose a bill, you should know exactly what you’re opposing, not just the vague principle behind it. Second, it’ll provide you with a valuable insight: that these bills are written in an attempt to obscure the truth.
For designers, it’s easy to jump right into the design phase of a website before giving the user experience the consideration it deserves. Too often, we prematurely turn our focus to page design and information architecture, when we should focus on the user flows that need to be supported by our designs. It’s time to make the user flows a bigger priority in our design process. Design flows that are tied to clear objectives allow us to create a positive user experience and a valuable one for the business we’re working for.
Stop Designing Pages And Start Designing Flows - Smashing UX Design | Smashing UX Design
It is CES week in Las Vegas and thousands of attendees are jostling for position in the crowded show booths to get a glimpse of the latest and greatest gadgets. The representatives working in the booths are trained how to best show the toys, and answer all questions about them appropriately. After attending shows like CES for years, you hear a lot of the same buzz words and phrases. Here are the most commonly heard booth snippets, and what the representatives really mean by them.
CES 2012: Understanding what you hear on the show floor | ZDNet
Government agencies using solar power may soon be ditching their panels in favor of paint brushes. Researchers at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Nano Science and Technology (NDnano) have developed a “solar paint” that can be applied on to a conductive surface, such as transparent conducting glass or plastic, that turns the energy of the sun into electricity. The project consisted of taking nano-sized particles of titanium dioxide, coating them with either cadmium sulfide or cadmium selenide and suspending them in a water-alcohol mixture to create the paint. The semiconducting nanoparticles — called quantum dots — were mixed into a one-coat spreadable paste that can generate power, without using any special equipment.