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Social commerce, sometimes abbreviated as “s-ecommerce,” is a term often used to describe new online retail models or marketing strategies that incorporate established social networks and/or peer-to-peer communication to drive sales. Or, as marketing consultant Heidi Cohen more succinctly defines it, it’s “social media meets shopping.”

But several well-known social commerce sites predate the popular rise of social networks by more than half a decade. eBay, a peer-to-peer selling platform founded in 1995, is one of them.

Today, social commerce denotes a wide range of shopping, recommending and selling behaviors. We’ve done our best to group them into seven categories below.

Seven Types of Social Commerce

1. Peer-to-peer sales platforms (eBay, Etsy, Amazon Marketplace): Community-based marketplaces, or bazaars, where individuals communicate and sell directly to other individuals.

2. Social network-driven sales (Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter): Sales driven by referrals from established social networks, or take place on the networks themselves (i.e., through a “shop” tab on Facebook).

3. Group buying (Groupon, LivingSocial). Products and services offered at a reduced rate if enough buyers agree to make the purchase.

4. Peer recommendations (Amazon, Yelp, JustBoughtIt): Sites that aggregate product or service reviews, recommend products based on others’ purchasing history (i.e. “Others who bought item x also bought item y,” as seen on Amazon), and/or reward individuals for sharing products and purchases with friends through social networks.

5. User-curated shopping (The Fancy, Lyst, Svpply): Shopping-focused sites where users create and share lists of products and services for others to shop from.

6. Participatory commerce (Threadless, Kickstarter, CutOnYourBias): Consumers become involved directly in the production process through voting, funding and collaboratively designing products.

7. Social shopping (Motilo, Fashism, GoTryItOn). Sites that attempt to replicate shopping offline with friends by including chat and forum features for exchanging advice and opinions.

The Future of Social Commerce

Social commerce is still in its infancy. None of the major social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest — have yet figured out how to bring transactions directly to their platforms, instead directing retailers to use earned and paid media to bring customers to their online storefronts.

Online retailers, too, are continually experimenting with new models and marketing methods to allow for greater peer-to-peer and group-based interactions, aware that recommendations from friends (and to a lesser degree, strangers) can play a powerful role in shopping. According to Gartner, 74% of consumers rely on social networks to guide their purchases. We will wait and watch to what extent the Social Commerce gains momentum in this digital century.

credits: mashable

Samsung Galaxy S 4 vs. iPhone 5 vs. HTC One vs. Nokia Lumia 920

	Galaxy S 4	iPhone 5	HTC One	Lumia 920
Screen Size	5 inches	4 inches	4.65 inches	4.5 inches
Resolution	1920×1080	1136×640	1920×1080	1280×768
Screen Type/DPI	Super AMOLED, 441 ppi	LCD, 326 ppi	S-LCD 3, 468 ppi	AMOLED, 332 ppi
Weight	4.6 oz	3.9 oz	5 oz	6.5 oz
Chipset	Quad-core 1.9GHz Snapdragon 600 in the U.S. (8-core 1.8GHz Exnyos 5 Octa elsewhere)	Dual-core Apple A6	Quad-core 1.7GHz Snapdragon 600	Dual-core 1.5 GHz Snapdragon S4
Storage	16GB, 32GB or 64GB +microSD slot	16GB, 32GB or 64GB, no card slot	32GB or 64GB, no card slot	32GB, no card slot
Connectors	microUSB	Apple Lightning	microUSB	microUSB
Operating System	Android 4.2.2 (Jelly Bean)	iOS 6	Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean)	Microsoft Windows Phone 8
Battery (in milliamperes/hour)	2,600 mAh	1,434 mAh	2,300 mAh	2,000 mAh
Camera	13MP autofocus, LED flash & zero shutter lag	8MP, autofocus, LED flash	4MP (“ultrapixels”)	8MP, autofocus, optical image stabilization, dual-LED flash
Networking	Wi-Fi, 2G, 3G, 4G LTE	Wi-Fi, 2G, 3G, 4G LTE	Wi-Fi, 2G, 3G, 4G LTE	Wi-Fi, 2G, 3G, 4G LTE
U.S. Price (with 2-year contract)	Not announced	$199 for 16GB, $299 for 32GB, $399 for 64GB	$199.99	$99.99

Source: mashable

Today we probably cannot even imagine our lives without ‘Emails’. Slowly it became a part of our daily life – be it personal or work/business related. Lets see the evolution of this ‘Email’ :

1971: U.S. programmer Raymond Tomlinson allegedly sent “QWERTYUIOP” as the first network email, and he was the first to connect his computer to his mailbox by using an “@” symbol.

1977: Tomlinson’s emailing method worked for networked computers using the same software, but many people began using the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPA) to connect outside networks.

1981: The American Standard Code for Information Interchange adopted a process of letters, punctuation and symbols to digitally store information.

1985: Government and military employees, students and academic professionals were common email users in the mid-1980s.

1991: ISPs allow widespread Internet access, but there were limited options for use until Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web in 1991.

1991: Astronauts Shannon Lucid and James C. Adamson sent the first email from space on a Macintosh Portable: “Hello Earth! Greetings from the STS-43 Crew. This is the first AppleLink from space. Having a GREAT time, wish you were here,…send cryo and RCS! Hasta la vista, baby,…we’ll be back!”

1993: IDM and BellSouth marketed the first PDA-functioning 20-ounce cellphone, which sold for $900 and served as a phone, calculator, fax, email device and pager.

1997: Microsoft purchased Hotmail for approximately $400 million.

1998: The romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail, starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, hit theaters (and the website’s still live).

1998: “Spam” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary after its growth in the mid-1990s — not to be confused with the 3.8 cans of Spam consumed every second in the U.S.

2003: The RIM 850 and 857 original BlackBerry smartphones were released, revolutionizing the mobile platform by concentrating on email.

2004: President George W. Bush signed the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 into law, which gained criticism for its lack of action against spammers.

2008: President Barack Obama became the first president to use mobile email and admit his addiction to his BlackBerry, and despite security concerns, he currently uses it in office.

2011: A study finds the worst email passwords are password and 123456. Others worthy of note: QWERTY, monkey and letmein. The password 123456 was also found to be the most common password during a 2012 email hack.

2012: There are more than 3 billion email accounts across the globe, and approximately 144 billion emails are sent per day. Roughly 78% of them are spam.

Checkout the Interesting facts on Email:

Sources: Macworld.com, CNET.com, PCworld.com, Tidbits.com, SendMail.com, Time.com, LivingInternet.com, AntaraNews.com, TheMarketingBit.com, History.com.

Samsung is known for smartphones with trendy designs and user-friendly features, but this time they have spared no expense and are bent on beating their own record. Be prepared to enjoy an amazing blend of style, performance and features on the Samsung Galaxy S3. Powered by a 1.4 GHz Quad Core processor, the S3 is based on the Android v4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) operating system. The refined OS promises simplicity and sensibility and you can enjoy easy multitasking, rich notifications, customizable home screens, resizable widgets and easy interactivity.

The Samsung S3 comes with a 4.8-inch HD, capacitive touchscreen that supports 720 x 1280 pixel resolution with 16 M colours and Mali-400 megapixel graphics. The TouchWiz user interface is custom built for the Android OS, making this smartphone versatile and easy to use.

Credit: Samsung

The user-friendliness of the smartphone is taken up a notch with the S Voice feature that allows you to simply talk to your phone to give instructions. You can ask the S3 to turn off the alarm, reject or answer a call, turn the music up or down, or even tell the camera when to shoot.

No matter where you go you are always prepared to capture some unforgettable moments in sharp and vivid colors on the Galaxy S3’s 8 megapixel camera with LED flash. Taking pictures is made even more enjoyable with useful camera features like Geo-tagging, face and smile detection, auto focus and image editor. The S3 comes with a secondary camera that is located on the front of the camera. You can enjoy HD video recording on the Galaxy S3 and shoot videos at 30 fps with 1280 x 720 pixel resolution.

“India is one of the top three strategic markets in the world for Samsung,” a company release quoted H.C. Ryu, Samsung’s vice president of sales and marketing, as saying at the phone’s launch in India.

The Korean giant expects to capture 60 percent of the Indian smartphone market with the release of its latest flagship phone.Apart from the already known gesture-based features and a bunch of other unique specifications, Galaxy S3 also understands Indian English.

The phone also boasts Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, apart from a high-end 8 mega-pixel camera with zero-lag shutter speed, burst shot and backlit sensor.

Galaxy S3 comes with a bigger 4.8 screen, along with 2,100m Ah battery, WiFi, 3G and is expected to be even more successful than its ancestor Galaxy S-II and other competitors in the smartphone market. key features:

• Android v4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) OS
• 8 MP Primary Camera
• 1.9 MP Secondary Camera
• 4.8-inch Super AMOLED Capacitive Touchscreen
• 1.4 GHz Quad Core Processor
• Wi-Fi Enabled
• Expandable Storage Capacity of 64 GB

Enjoy…

The Infographic shows nicely:

credit: mashable

Google Fiber is a project to build an experimental broadband internet network infrastructure using fiber-optic communication in Kansas City, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri, following a selection process.

Over 1,100 communities applied to be the first recipient of the technology. On March 30, 2011, Google announced that Kansas City, Kansas will be the first community where the experimental network would be deployed.On May 17, 2011, Google announced that the service would be expanded to include the Kansas City, Missouri metropolitan area.

On July 24, 2012, Google announced that Fiber would become available that day. Neither pricing nor initial availability were mentioned. Google Fiber will focus to become an alternative to Verizon’s FiOS and AT&T’s U-verse services among other major cable companies.

On July 26, 2012, Google announced that it would roll out a companion fiber optic television service in the Kansas City area that September called Google Fiber TV, which will be offered as a conventional pay television service and will also stream live program content on iPad and Android tablet computers. Neighborhoods that initially receive both the TV and internet services are to be selected through demand from Kansas City area residents.The initial channel lineup for the service does not currently include cable television networks owned by Time Warner, The Walt Disney Company, AMC Networks, and News Corporation, which may eventually be added pending carriage agreements with those companies.

56% of LinkedIn’s users are outside of the United States. LinkedIn is experiencing its fastest growth internationally.
 
LinkedIn’s fastest-growing country is Brazil, with 428% growth year-over-year. Brazil is followed by Mexico, India and France.
 
The height of LinkedIn activity happens during the workday, peaking at around noon. Mobile usage, on the other hand, typically peaks around 8:00 p.m.
 
There are almost 1 million teachers on LinkedIn; 20% of the site’s users work in the service sector, while 9% work in finance and another 9% are in the high-tech industry.
 
For most of its 7-plus years of existence, LinkedIn has dominated its niche of social business users. The result is a valuation nearing $3 billion and 5.5 billion monthly pageviews.  LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman’s has a reason to smile !

Interesting Infographic:

Courtesy: Linkedin

The Samsung Galaxy Tab is an Android-based compact tablet computer produced by Samsung that debuted on the 2nd of September at the 2010 IFA in Berlin.

It features a 7-inch (180 mm) TFT-LCD touchscreen, Wi-Fi capability, a 1.0 GHz ARM Cortex-A8 (“Hummingbird”) processor, and the Swype input system. It is equipped with a 3.2 MP rear-facing camera and a 1.3 MP front facing camera for video calls.

Lets see how it looks while comparing to its rival ‘Apple iPad‘

courtesy: PCWorld

The Galaxy Tab, at release, was equipped with Android 2.2.  Let the fight begin… in the Tab arena. Wait and watch before you buy…

In our jet-set daily life, Fastfood is always there as part of our daily life. May be we are not always aware of the side effects and other alarming facts of these fastfoods. We sometimes term them as Junk foods in the sense of the effect that they cause to us. Read on for some quick facts and figures on Fast Foods:

credit: onlineschools.org

enjoy… remember before you order your next burger and french fries !!

Research In Motion (RIM) announced its Tablet PC, called the BlackBerry Playbook. the device is a a “Flash-loving,” “device-pairing,” “enterprise-ready” tablet with an “uncompromised browsing experience” on a 7-inch screen. It is 9.7 millimeters thick and features a high-res wide screen display that supports 1080p with HDMI and USB ports.

The technical details from the release:

• 7″ LCD, 1024 x 600, WSVGA, capacitive touch screen with full multi-touch and gesture support
• BlackBerry Tablet OS with support for symmetric multiprocessing
• 1 GHz dual-core processor
• 1 GB RAM
• Video playback: 1080p HD Video, H.264, MPEG, DivX, WMV
• Audio playback: MP3, AAC, WMA
• HDMI video output
• Wi-Fi – 802.11 a/b/g/n
• Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
• Connectors: microHDMI, microUSB, charging contacts
• Open, flexible application platform with support for WebKit/HTML-5, Adobe Flash Player 10.1, Adobe Mobile AIR, Adobe Reader, POSIX, OpenGL, Java
• Ultra thin and portable:
• Measures 5.1″x7.6″x0.4″ (130mm x 193mm x 10mm)
• Weighs less than a pound (approximately 0.9 lb or 400g)
• Additional features and specifications of the BlackBerry PlayBook will be shared on or before the date this product is launched in retail outlets.
• RIM intends to also offer 3G and 4G models in the future.

Can it give a challenge to Apple iPad ………… stay tuned !

Check out the cool Infographic, that displays the colour-ful brand presence under the WWW. You will notice how some colours are dominating the arena with their specific branding with corporate houses.

credit: compete.com

Enjoy !

Neuro Productions’ Flash-based Twitter browser is a cool way to view your connections on Twitter, something that is nearly impossible on the site itself. Start with any Twitter user’s name and the app will load up a circle of contacts, their thumbnail pic and latest tweet. You can click on a contact in that circle and it will do the same, endlessly creating visual connections that people have made across the social networking site as long as you keep clicking. Have fun !

The result is like this …

http://www.neuroproductions.be/twitter_friends_network_browser/

Try it and have fun !

Another one is also quite funny,  from a Japanese firm @  http://isparade.jp/

The Parade sound is kind of disturbing though…

Have fun !

As the world moving very fast towards the Cloud Computing and SaaS areas, it’s worth just to have an idea how we can summarize it in a very high level way, as below: