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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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.

A dispute in Australia between members of the public and photographers gathering data for Google’s Street View service has been referred to the country’s police, the country’s Attorney General (senior law officer) has said.

Robert McLelland told journalists ahead of a conference on internet security in the Australian city of Melbourne, that the Federal Police were looking into complaints from members of the public that concern a possible breach of the country’s telecommunications laws.

Google said it would co-operate with the Australian police investigation, and a spokeswoman told Reuters that the company had made an error: “This was a mistake. We are talking to the appropriate authorities to answer any questions they have,” she said.

The ‘Street View’ service has recently been criticised in several countries. The company has said it inadvertently picked up personal data from some unencrypted wi-fi services over several years.

Mobile phone users bought nearly £123million of goods in the UK in 2009 using their smartphones, according to a new report, and this figure looks set to more than double in the next three years.

As total online retail spending in 2009 was £21.2bn – or a market share of 0.6 per cent – this means that by 2013, mobile internet sales could reach £275million, or the four per cent of the overall market, claim analysts Verdict and Ovum, who have released a joint study.

They claim that, in the last year, only 2.1 per cent of the UK adult population shopped using internet access on their mobile. This is less than a tenth of the 28 per cent of the population who have mobile internet access.

“Consumers are not spending significant amounts via mobiles and, for now, we believe the true potential for m-commerce is to provide consumers with a valuable tool for research, comparison shopping and retailer interaction,” said Malcolm Pinkerton, senior analyst with Verdict Research.

“However, with internet-savvy consumers now accustomed to the multichannel environment, they are beginning to embrace m-commerce,” he told Brand Republic magazine.

Christine Bardwell, senior retail technology analyst at Ovum, added: “The opportunities are there for the most proficient multichannel retailers to claim a share of the growing cross-channel expenditure by exploiting the possibilities provided by mobiles to seamlessly link the online and in-store environments.”

Apple top man Steve Jobs fears that the internet will be reduced “into a nation of bloggers” unless a sustainable way of persuading people to pay for online content is devised.

Speaking at the Wall Street Journal-organised D8 conference near Los Angeles, Jobs said that newspapers’ and magazines’ futures, along with that of quality journalism, depended on media outlets finding a way of making it worthwhile for readers to pay to look at website content.

“One of my beliefs very strongly is that any democracy depends on a free healthy press, some of these newspapers, the news gathering and editorial organisations are really important,” he said.

“I don’t want to see us descend to a nation of bloggers. I think we need editorial more than ever right now.

“Anything that we can do to help news gathering organisations find new ways of expression so they can afford to get paid so they can keep their news gathering and editorial operations intact, I’m all for it.”

He was keen, of course, to stress the possible role which his company’s latest big thing, the iPad tablet computer, could play in facilitating this shift in attitudes.

“What we have to do is figure out a way to get people to start paying for this hard earned content. And so this (the iPad) provides us with a potential opportunity to provide more value than a web page and start charging for that,” Jobs said.

However, Jobs appeared to hint that his attempts to take a hard line over charging for iPad apps had made media owners reluctant to develop their own apps, reported Gordon McMillan on MediaWeek magazine’s The Wall blog.
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“I’m trying to get these folks to take more aggressive postures than what they charge traditionally for print because they don’t have the expenses of printing, they don’t have the expenses of delivery, and to charge a reasonable price and go for volume. I think people are willing to pay for content,” Jobs concluded.

His assertion seems to have been borne out by early sales of The Times newspaper’s iPad edition, which was reported to have sold 5,000 six-day subscriptions, at GBP9.99 each (about US$16), in its first three days of availability.

Football fans heading to South Africa for the World Cup have been warned by a watchdog group to keep an eye on the cost of their mobile internet use while there.

Consumer Focus says that mobile operators levy huge charges for web browsing on their phones, with prices ranging from £1.25 to £8 per Mb.

That means that uploading 10 photos to Facebook via a mobile phone could cost up to £80, it warns.

Call charges for people travelling outside the European Union are between 80p and £1.50 per minute, and texts cost from 25p to 50p. This compares to a maximum call cost of 37p per minute and 9p per text for people travelling in Europe.

At £1.70 per minute Virgin Mobile pre-pay offers consumers the worst rates for making calls, with T-mobile the most expensive network to use to receive calls from the UK at £1.50 per minute.

Orange and Tesco have the highest data charges, with costs for customers on both networks of up to £80 to upload ten 1MB photos. They are closely followed by T-mobile where the same usage would cost £75.

According to Consumer Focus, Vodafone’s free Passport scheme offers consumers the best call rates and texts. Customers pay a 75p connection fee and then their normal UK rates, while texts cost 11p. 3 UK offers the cheapest data roaming fees of £1.25 per MB.

Nick Hutton, telecommunications expert for Consumer Focus, said: “The watchdog is calling on mobile phone firms to cut their mobile-phone roaming costs and set prices at a similar level to those in the EU.”

Here are Consumer Focus’s top five tips for using your mobile phone abroad:

- Check your rates before you go and ask what add-ons or bundles your mobile phone company offers on calls, texts and data as this could make you considerable savings - Remember that while abroad you won’t be able to use your inclusive minutes, texts and data allowance (except inclusive minutes under Vodafone’s passport service) and will pay to receive as well as to make calls which could add up

- Photos and videos can be expensive to upload on mobiles while abroad so consider other options such as uploading using a computer at an internet cafe or hotel instead

- Consider getting a local SIM card for use in South Africa if you will be making calls to numbers within the country

- If your phone is lost or stolen while abroad report it to your mobile provider as soon as possible as you will be liable for any calls made. Make a note of the emergency contact number for your network and keep this separate from your mobile.

Comedian Stephen Fry boosted the number of pledges for a UK health trust’s campaign to raise awareness of issues surrounding mental illness, after he tweeted details about it.

The 5 Boroughs Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, which covers areas in the north-west of England, including the major towns of Warrington, Wigan and St Helens, initially had 1,400 signatures until Fry, who himself has battled bipolar disorder, intervened on the social networking site and the tally shot up in days.

Fry, famed for his roles in hit TV shows Blackadder and Jeeves and Wooster, first posted a message on his profile page on May 14 urging his 1.5 million Twitter followers to get behind the campaign.

“No sooner had the tweet appeared the pledge counter went into overdrive, it was a really exciting moment,” said Joanne Waldron, the Trust’s E-Communications Assistant.

When the actor and quiz show presenter posted another tweet three days after the original, thanking his followers for their support and once again asking people to pledge, the counter rocketed for a second time.

The Times newspaper of London has launched an iPad edition on the same day as the device went on sale in the UK.

The move also came just days after the launch of the News Corporation-owned newspaper launched its revamped website, which will soon go behind a paywall.

The iPad app will allow users to download and read Times content offline. An article on the old Times website promised that the app would make more use of interactive graphics, picture galleries and video.

It has been priced at £9.99 for a 28-day subscription – a different pricing structure from the soon-to-be-launched paywall for the new Times and Sunday Times websites, and substantially lower than the £1 a day or £2 for a week which has already been announced as the cost of a subscription to the new sites.

Speaking at a pre-launch event for the new websites, Sunday Times executive editor Tristan Davies said his newspaper may also launch an iPad app.

However, no details have been given of any payment plan for using the iPad app and accessing the paywalled websites through the device.

“The Times’ iPad application is an optimised, edited edition specifically for the iPad – including most sections of the paper – which can be downloaded and read offline. It is a separate product from thetimes.co.uk, which is why it is priced differently – so readers can choose whether they want to read The Times in a print, online or iPad format,” a spokeswoman for the Times told Journalism.co.uk.

Speaking at a pre-launch event for the new websites, Sunday Times executive editor Tristan Davies said his newspaper may also launch an iPad app.

The 15 billionth Twitter post was sent over the weekend of May 29 and 30, just a few months after the social networking site passed the 10 billion message mark.

According to social media and marketing blog The Wall, it has taken about 12 weeks for the those five billion new Tweets to be posted. It suggests that the speed of the achievement is due to Twitter users becoming more active – although it does sound a note of scepticism about the proportion of spam messages.

Blog post author Gordon MacMillan said: “I’ve certainly noticed more and more people on Twitter – a lot since the election in the UK particularly.”

Twitter itself only last month claimed it had 105 milion users, although there were no statistics to show what proportion of this number was active.

And a major revamp of the site was unveiled last week, allowing Spanish, French, German and Italian speakers to access help pages in their native tongue. The site’s help pages now contain answers to every question the site claims it has ever received.

As @crystal promised in the post announcing the latest update: “This is just the first round of improvements… Stay tuned for even more improvement in the upcoming months.”

Search giant Google has officially confirmed the completion of a deal to buy mobile advertising company AdMob.

The US company announced the acquisition of AdMob for a reported $750m in November last year. However, in April it emerged that lawyers working on behalf of the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) were looking into whether to challenge the deal.

The concern was that Google would hold too much power in the mobile advertising market should no action be taken.

The investigation was closed last week, with the FTC saying it had decided Google’s purchase would not harm competition. It cited the fact that Apple had now decided to also move into the market through the purchase of Quattro Wireless, another mobile ad company.

In an official blog post, Susan Wojcicki, vice-president of product management at Google, said: “Omar Hamoui has built a great team and great products at AdMob and we’re thrilled to officially welcome them to Google.

“We’ll now begin the process of bringing our products and teams together in the best way, and building new products and features together.”

Google said it wants integration to take place as fast and as seamlessly as possible, acknowledging that mobile advertising is now becoming a much larger part of its clients’ and partners’ businesses.

Wojcicki added: “We believe that mobile advertising can play a significant role in every single marketing campaign. We’re passionate about the unlimited possibilities in this space. Today, with AdMob, our work to make them a reality begins.”

By Richard Morris

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