June 21st, 2010
An Italian national newspaper has reported that Google plans to launch a service allowing publishers to hide content behind a paywall before the end of the year.
The report in La Repubblica newspaper suggests the system will be linked directly to Google’s search results and will allow consumers to buy paid content directly via Google Checkout with one click. Observes say it could provide a valuable revenue boost for cash-strapped newspapers.
Google is said to be approaching publishers to gauge their interest in its own version of a micropayment system it linked directly to Google’s search results, which would let consumers buy paid content directly via Google Checkout with one click.
According to UK marketing industry magazine Brand Republic, the launch of Newspass would certainly head off some of criticism that has been levelled at Google by the likes of Rupert Murdoch who dispute Google’s claim to send valuable traffic to newspapers.
Murdoch said last year: “We’d rather have fewer people coming to our websites but paying.” And his latest manifestation of this vision is the paid for TheTimes.co.uk website, launched in early June 2010.
La Repubblica has quoted Google’s Vice-President of global media, Henrique de Castro, as saying that his company wanted to forge partnerships with other media organisations, rather than rival them.
According to Brand Republic, it is unclear whether the system is being developed locally in Italy by Google where it already faces an investigation by the country’s Competition Authority. The investigation has been running since last year, after the Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers complained about the lack of transparency in how Google News calculates its rankings.
The Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers complained that Google was using its dominant position to stop publishers from earning their fair share of online ad revenues.
It seems likely, however, that the plan is one Google hopes to launch globally in that it sounds similar to an idea that it proposed to the Newspaper Association of America last year, which looked at how a successful micropayments model might work.
Tags: online magazines, online news, online newspapers, paid content
Posted in Advertising and Marketing, Google, Internet, News, Online, Other News, Shopping, publishing | No Comments »
June 11th, 2010
Online fashion retailer Missguided has launched its own iPhone app in a bid to expand its online retail offering.
The business, which specialises in “catwalk looks and celebrity inspired women’s fashion”, hopes to use the application to strengthen ties with customers by providing access to its online catalogue as well as fashion industry news for shoppers on the move.
Missguided’s venture is the latest sign of a growing trend among fashion retailers to connect with potential buyers through mobile and smartphone devices. And after research released last week suggested that in three years time mobile owners may be spending over £250m a year on goods bought through their phones, it’s not hard to see why the fashion sector is taking such an interest.
In an effort to widen the customer experience and make its iPhone app more than simply a sales tool, Missguided has included a host of features on top of its online catalogue. New fashions are sent to users’ phones each day, and social media fashion links to the firm’s blog, Facebook and Twitter pages are provided.
By Richard Morris
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Tags: iPhone, Missguided, online sales
Posted in Advertising and Marketing, Apple, E-commerce, Financial, Technology, Twitter | No Comments »
June 10th, 2010
A pro-privacy pressure group has said that it plans to issue a legal challenge in the UK courts to Google over the company’s interception of private data gathered by its Street View vehicles.
Privacy International has taken the action after claiming that an investigation by third party computer forensics experts into how the data interception happened suggested that the interception was deliberate – which would put the internet search company in breach of rules forbidding wire-tapping.
Last month it emerged that cars taking pictures of streets for Google’s Street View service were also collecting snippets of personal data from wireless internet connections in the homes and businesses they were passing.
Google has said this interception was an error and due to rogue code being unwittingly incorporated into the Street View cars. It has agreed to hand over the data to European law enforcement bodies, and is carrying out an internal review to discover who created the rogue code which enabled the data to be collected, and whether any action should be taken against the individual concerned.
However, Privacy International said the third party report showed that the code had been deliberately set to store private data, which is a violation of the UK’s Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA).
“The independent audit of the Google system shows that the system … intentionally separated out unencrypted content of communications and systematically wrote this data to hard drives. This is equivalent to placing a hard tap and a digital recorder onto a phone wire without consent or authorisation,” the pressure group said.
Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said last week that the data collected could contain parts of private e-mails, and personal information such as bank account details, and he publicly admitted: “We screwed up.”
But Simon Davies of Privacy International told the Financial Times in London. “Why they did this is irrelevant to the prosecution going ahead.
“There is a constant sense of Google saying they didn’t mean any harm.
“But if Google gets away with it, what will stop someone else from doing it in six months’ time?”
Data protection authorities in Hamburg are also considering whether there are grounds for a criminal prosecution over the interception.
Privacy International’s complaint is likely to be filed by early next week.
Tags: Google
Posted in Google | No Comments »
June 9th, 2010
All businesses should be considering the role social media can play within their company.
Twitter has become a significant part of the jigsaw and is now considered to be a valuable tool for online marketing specialists and digital agencies.
According to rumours in a report by Last Click News, the micro messaging site could be about to become even more valuable. It is being suggested Twitter is about to launch a new feature aimed at helping website developers to boost their site’s profile.
A new SEO-friendly tool will allow annotations to be embedded into tweets, letting developers provide users with the most up-to-date information. Currently, Twitter allows members to type up to 140 characters, but the new feature would allow people to add meta data to their Tweets such as websites, locations, reviews, and events details.
As a result this could prove to be a major bonus for companies, helping them to attract traffic and as a consequence expose more users to advertising. The changes might also benefit SEO campaigns by allowing a company to rank for targeted keywords through live search.
By Steven Connor
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Tags: Twitter
Posted in Advertising and Marketing, Twitter | No Comments »
June 9th, 2010
Spanish fashion retailer Inditex has announced it will start online sales later this year.
The company, which owns brands including Zara and Massimo Dutti, is due to open an online store on September 2 covering the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Inditex currently has more than 4,700 stores in 77 countries.
In an announcement this morning, Inditex said it would ensure the internet service is designed to be accessible not only through conventional internet access networks, but also through smartphones and tablet devices.
Firms across the world are now starting to grasp the growing importance of providing a usable web offering through mobile devices to customers. A new report has said mobile phone users purchased almost £123m worth of goods in the UK last year, and this figure is set to more than double in the next three years.
Last month, Andy Murray, head of in-store marketing agency Saatchi X, admitted he had never seen times like this before in the retail sector, saying: “Mobile is changing everything in retail”.
As part of this morning’s announcement, Inditex said net sales reached 2,67 billion euros in the first quarter of 2010, 14 per cent up year-on-year. Net income for the quarter was up 63 per cent.
Analysts and traders responded positively to the announcement, and the company’s shares jumped by 2.32 euros (5.3 per cent) to 46.2 euros during early trading in Madrid according to Bloomberg.
Karen Howland, an analyst at Barclays Capital in London, said: “Emerging-market growth and the launch of its online business this autumn will drive above-consensus top-line and earnings growth.”
By Richard Morris
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Tags: Inditex, online sales, smartphones, tablet computers, Zara
Posted in Advertising and Marketing, E-commerce, Financial, Mobile, Shopping | No Comments »
June 8th, 2010
UK internet users have visited more social networking sites than search engines in one month than ever before.
Data released by research firm Hitwise shows that visits to social networks accounted for 11.88 per cent of all UK internet visits in May, compared to search engine visits which made up 11.33 per cent.
Facebook brought in the majority of users, claiming 55 per cent of all social networking and forum visits. YouTube comes a considerable way behind, with 16.5 per cent of sector traffic during May. Twitter finishes off the top three, with 2.08 per cent of all traffic.
In terms of search sites, Google dominates the market with Google UK and Google.com accounting for over 91 per cent of all search traffic.
Despite the ever growing popularity of social networking, Google’s dominance of the search market means it retains its position as the most visited website in the UK, accounting for 9.29 per cent of all visits. Facebook takes second place with 7.04 per cent.
By Richard Morris
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Tags: Facebook, Google, search, Social networking
Posted in Google, Social Networks, searches | No Comments »
June 8th, 2010
Adobe has said it is working to fix a “critical” security flaw in its Reader, Acrobat and Flash Player software.
It warned that the vulnerability potentially enables hackers to take control of affected computer systems, and that users running Windows, Macintosh or Linux operating systems might all be vulnerable.
The company released details of the glitch in its online security bulletin, in which it said: “This vulnerability could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.
It added: “There are reports that this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild against both Adobe Flash Player, and Adobe Reader and Acrobat.
Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at security software manufacturer Sophos, told the BBC: “It doesn’t really get any worse than a ‘zero-day’ vulnerability like this.”
He said that hackers might try to gain access to a person’s computer through a booby-trapped PDF document or Flash animation, possibly with the intention of gathering personal information or using the machine to send spam messages.
In recent years, PDFs have become a popular means of sharing documents whose contents are considered largely secure and unalterable.
While it worked to fix the problem, the company suggested upgrading to a pre-release version of the Adobe Flash Player, version 10.1, which it said “does not appear to be vulnerable”.
Mr Cluley said that keeping anti-virus software up to date would also help to avoid problems.
“There has been a long history of vulnerabilities being found in Adobe’s products,” he said.
“This is probably because they are everywhere and omnipresent.”
Adobe estimates that more than 95 per cent of computers worldwide have Flash Player installed.
Tags: Adobe, online security, security alerts, software, software issues
Posted in BBC News, Document Sharing, Internet, News, Online, Photo Sharing, Security, Social Media, Technology, Uncategorized, publishing | No Comments »
June 8th, 2010
Google’s Chrome browser continued to make inroads into its rivals’ share of worldwide browser usage in May, new statistics show.
Chrome rose 0.3 percentage points to take seven per cent of the market, said Net Applications, which monitors browser usage on a network of Web sites.
The statistics reflect activity, not the number of people using a browser, as people load up about 160 million pages each month on sites Net Applications monitors. Because Web usage is increasing, the absolute number of people using a browser can increase even as its fractional share of usage drops.
Drops in market share were recorded by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which dropped 0.3 per cent to 59.75 per cent, and Mozilla’s Firefox, which slipped 0.2 percentage points to 24.3 per cent. Fourth-place Safari from Apple rose 0.1 percentage points to 4.8 per cent, and Opera rose by the same margin to 2.4 per cent.
The browser market has become highly competitive as new features are built in to support new Web standards. Even Microsoft, long considered a technology laggard despite the dominant market position enjoyed by its browser, is fighting back, with extensive development work taking place on IE9.
Microsoft has been trying to rid the world of Internet Explorer 6, introduced in 2001 and now considered outmoded, slow, and insecure. Another analytics firm, StatCounter, reported IE6 use had dropped below 5 percent in the United States and Europe and to 9.8 percent worldwide.
“At these levels, Web developers now have valid justification not to support IE6 in the future,” StatCounter Chief Executive Aodhan Cullen said in a statement. The company collected its data from 15 billion page views of web pages in May.
Net Applications also released statistics for iPad use, showing the Apple tablet’ making gradual progress. With the iPad now for sale internationally, usage peaked May 29 with 0.17 per cent.
Net Applications’ data shows the iPad is relatively popular at weekends, when browsing using it roughly doubles.
The company also tracked mobile phone browsing usage. Java ME, a mobile phone version of the technology from Sun Microsystems and now owned by Oracle, took the top spot with 40 per cent of usage share.
Next in line was iPhone OS with 32.8 per cent, Symbian at 14 per cent, Android at 6.2 per cent, and BlackBerry at 3.6 per cent.
One commenter on the story, when it appeared on technology news website CNet, said the appeal of Chrome was simple: “I like Chrome for one reason: speed. It’s so much faster than Firefox when it comes to loading web pages,” he said.
Tags: Firefox, Google, Google Chrome, Internet browser, Internet Explorer, iPad, microsoft, web browser
Posted in Apple, Browsers, Google, Internet, Mircosoft, Mobile, News, Online, Uncategorized, search, searches | No Comments »
June 8th, 2010
The majority of businesses in the UK are set to up their digital marketing spend next year according to new research.
Data compiled by Econsultancy from a survey of 500 client-side digital marketers and agencies reveals 52 per cent of companies plan to increase their paid search (PPC) budgets next year, up from 45 per cent.
The proportion of companies looking to increase their search engine optimisation (SEO) budget over the same period has increased by 10 per cent, to hit a total of 60 per cent.
According to the report, almost half of all companies (49 per cent) are now spending at least £50,000 on PPC in a year – an increase from 39 per cent in 2008. In addition, the number of firms spending less than £5,000 has decreased significantly from 25 per cent last year to 14 per cent this year.
When it comes to SEO, the report said 22 per cent of firms are now investing at least £50,000 – up from 16 per cent in 2008.
Spending on social media ventures is still small in comparison, with 57 per cent of companies putting aside less than £5,000-a-year.
However, it seems the potential benefits of implementing a sound social media strategy are starting to become clear to business owners, with 65 per cent looking to increase spend during the next 12 months. Out of those companies, 15 per cent plan to double their budget.
In terms of potential stumbling blocks with regard to PPC spending, 41 per cent of companies cited a lack of internal resources while 30 per cent pointed to poorly converting websites. In terms of SEO, companies highlighted a lack of internal resources (49 per cent) followed by budget problems (26 per cent).
By Richard Morris
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Tags: PPC, SEO, Social Media
Posted in Advertising and Marketing, Google, PPC, SEO, Social Media | No Comments »
