PROMOTED TRENDS

Advertisers pay up to $120,000 to list a “trend,” or topic, of their choosing on the Twitter.com home page and alongside all Twitter users’ accounts, for 24 hours. Promoted trends are intended to encourage users to tweet about the chosen topic.

PROMOTED TWEETS FOR FOLLOWERS

The newest offering, introduced today, lets advertisers such as HBO target ads to people who “follow” one of their Twitter accounts, such as @HBOTrueBlood.

Twitter users will only see a promoted tweet in their account if a brand they follow is part of the ad program. A promoted tweet will appear only once in the person’s account. People who dislike the promoted tweet in their account can make it disappear with a mouse click.

PROMOTED ACCOUNTS

HBO can also try to obtain new followers by promoting its “True Blood” Twitter account to Twitter users who may have an interest in “vampires,” for instance. By examining the content in users’ accounts, among other “signals,” Twitter determines which users have that specific interest.

PROMOTED TWEETS FOR SEARCH

Advertisers can also target ads to people who use the popular search feature of the Twitter.com home page. The advertisers can bid on specific keywords that Twitter users might search for, similar to Google’s AdWords system.

THE AUCTION

The amount of money that advertisers pay for promoted tweets and promoted accounts – and whether or not their ad appears in front of users – depends on an automated auction similar to Google’s AdWords system.

The auction factors in how well Twitter users responded to the advertiser’s past ads and how much Twitter users are engaging with ads from the current campaign, similar to what’s called “click through rate” on Google’s system, according to Twitter.

If the prior or current campaigns aren’t well received by Twitter users, the advertisers would need to raise their bid to increase their chances of winning the auction, according to Twitter.

Advertisers pay every time a Twitter user “engages” with their ad, including “retweeting” it or clicking on a link in the ad.

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The Silicon Valley inventor, who has recently been delivering videogames online with a startup called OnLive, has also been quietly working for more than ten years on the problem of radio interference–the phenomenon that, among other things, slows down data speeds when too many users of mobile devices log on at the same time.

Limits to sending data because of interference are considered so fundamental that they have a law–Shannon’s Law, named after mathematician Claude Shannon. But Perlman claims to have broken Shannon’s Law, or at least side-stepped it, in a profound way with a technology that goes by the acronym DIDO.

“We tend to think of wireless as convenient but not so reliable or consistent as wired communications,” says Perlman, who operates a San Francisco-based development organization Rearden that has worked on the new technology. “DIDO makes wireless completely reliable and completely consistent.”

The hurdles? DIDO requires new radios for mobile devices to use the technology, new transmitters for the signals, an allotment of radio spectrum and servers to prepare data for transmission.

Here’s some ways DIDO is different. Most wireless networks today rely on coverage zones–think of cell sites or Wi-Fi hotspots–that serve up radio signals to users from a transmission tower or access device.

As each zone gets crowded, each user contends for a share of that signal and the speed experienced by each slows down. Such congestion problems can be mitigated by setting up new coverage zones, but traffic problems tend to recur as users are added.

DIDO, which stands for “distributed input-distributed output,” is instead designed to send individually formatted data to each user from multiple access points over longer distances. When users call up a Web page, for example, a DIDO server operated by a communications carrier analyzes their locations and determines how to tailor the signals so that the data can be delivered by multiple access points and create a complete package when users receive it.

It’s all pretty complex, and Mr. Perlman acknowledges that popularizing the approach will require years of persuasion and negotiations with various hardware and service partners. He released a white paper Thursday to provide details for the first time.

Skepticism is expected. Michael Thelander, who tracks the wireless market for Signals Research, believes that existing wireless technologies are already being enhanced in some similar ways that don’t disrupt existing relationships between communications players.

“I am struggling to understand how a large network of DIDO access points and devices are going to achieve commercial reality and be logistically feasible,” Thelander says, after reading the DIDO white paper.

But Perlman has successfully blazed trails before, and says he has received receptive responses from unnamed partners about DIDO. The onetime Apple engineer sold WebTV Networks to Microsoft in 1997 $425 million, and his OnLive is serving up gaming and other content over a network that could be enhanced with DIDO, Perlman says.

OnLive, he points out, managed to find investors that include AT&T, Warner Bros., Autodesk, British Telecommunications and HTC. Only the latter has quantified its infusion, of $40 million.

“That is one of our smaller investors,” Perlman says. OnLive is “one of the largest-funded companies in Silicon Valley.”

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Among the 70,000 people who started using Trover during a spring trial of the free service, graffiti spotters became energetic users of the service, especially in Los Angeles and Seattle, says Jason Karas, CEO of Trover. Trover members can snap photos with their iPhones of anything they want to post on the service, adding a short description of the item.

The service uses the iPhone to tag the location of the photo. When Trover users want to browse nearby attractions, they can scroll through a mosaic of photos in the iPhone app, arranged by the proximity of the attractions to the Trover user.

It isn’t always clear when the graffiti recorded in Trover is of the illegal variety or when it has been done, say, as part of a public art project or with the permission of a property owner. Most of the graffiti on Trover falls into the category commonly referred to as “street art,” rather than the crude spray-painting often associated with the term.

Karas says graffiti spotters seem to like using Trover because it gives them a way to locate their photos in a city, where the graffiti is often tucked away in difficult-to-find spots. “They’ve never had a way to leave a bread crumb for somebody to find it,” he says. “This interface makes it possible for you to leave something in that landscape.”

Trover users are also using the app to capture a wide array of other discoveries, like an especially impressive ham-and-eggs breakfast or place to spot starfish on a beach.

On Thursday, Trover, which was co-founded by the serial entrepreneur and Expedia founder Rich Barton, said it plans to introduce an version of the app for Android mobile phones in the fall.

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Not bad for a product that has repeatedly been written off as dead or outdated, as most computing chores shift to lower-priced servers that descended from personal computers.

IBM’s big iron has been showing faster revenue growth than those machines, which are powered by so-called x86 chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices and are the technology of choice for Web-based applications known as cloud computing. Intel last week said its cloud-based business is up 50% in the first two quarters, while the broader data center business that includes all x86 server chips was up 15% in the second period.

Nor is IBM only milking its installed base, selling additional systems to longtime users that can’t easily move their software to alternative hardware. “We’ve added 68 new mainframe customers,” says Rod Adkins, who oversees IBM hardware sales as senior vice president of its systems and technology group.

Who would start from scratch with mainframes in this day and age? In large part, Adkins says, the new users are banks and other businesses in countries like Senegal, Namibia, Brazil and other emerging economies.

While x86 servers usually cost less to buy, he says, mainframes wind up having lower operating costs for some kinds of applications, along with advantages in security and reliability. “They pretty much run with zero downtime,” Adkins says.

And pricing is coming down. IBM has a new model, the zEnterprise 114, that starts at $75,000–the lowest entry price ever for an IBM mainframe, down from $100,000 for a machine announced in October 2008.

To be sure, there have long been boom and bust cycles in mainframe sales–and another upswing was likely for multiple reasons. Jean Bozman, an analyst at IDC, notes that mainframe sales were badly hurt after the recession hit in late 2008. Then some customers continued to hold off purchases while waiting for a new refresh of the hardware that began in mid-2010, she says.

When they resumed buying, the slow sales in the last two quarters of 2009 and the first two quarters of 2010 created an easy comparison that would tend to boost percentage growth rates.

Still, Bozman characterizes the recent demand for the technology remarkable. “How many time have there been stories in the newspaper saying the mainframe is dead?” she asks. “Not only is it not dead, we are seeing growth in new places.”

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Scott Olson/Getty Images

Some Interesting Accounting From Groupon: An accounting metric used by Groupon has attracted the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Appearing in the regulatory filings as “adjusted consolidated segment operating income,” or adjusted CSOI, the figure ignores Groupon’s massive marketing expenses.

Columbia University law professor John Coffee tells The Wall Street Journal that bubbling company valuations call for extra caution on the part of the SEC. “The more we get into a bubble, the more we have analysts wanting to use numbers giving a sense of momentum.”

Groupon is expected to go public in the fall. [WSJ, CNBC]

Spokesman for Lulz Security Arrested? British police arrested a 19-year-old man that they claim to be the spokesman for Lulz Security, the hacker group, responsible for a number of high profile security breaches, such as those at PBS and the Arizona Department of Public Safety. Police claim that the man used the online alias Topiary. The Gawker blog calls Topiary a LulzSec founder and the group’s “aesthetic center.”

Gawker also says Topiary is a favorite source of interviews for journalists because of his willingness to go “on voice.” In February, Topiary hacked into the website for the controversial Westboro Baptist Church while engaged in a live webcast debate with a church spokeswoman.

The arrest occurred in the Shetland Islands, off Scotland’s northeastern coast. [New York Times, Gawker]

Motorola’ Cellphone Business Struggles: Motorola Mobility found success last year thanks to its Droid cellphone lineup and a three-way partnership with Verizon Wireless and Google. This year, with its new phone and tablet earning so-so reviews, the news is not so good. The company is also facing increased competition from Samsung, LG Electronics and HTC. The company reports second-quarter results today. [WSJ]

Google’s Growth Worries Small City: Quaint Mountain View, population 75,000, has benefited from being the home base for the search giant. Last year, the Wall Street Journal reports, Google pledged $1 million to fund local schools. But Google plans to expand its campus outward and upward, have upset city planners and residents proud of the city’s nearby wildlife area. [WSJ]

Customer from Hell Threatens Airbnb Trust Network: Days after room swap company Airbnb announced a big injection of venture capital, TechCrunch reported of an incident where one home owner using the service found his house gutted by a guest. In a blog post, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said that his company was helping the home owner find temporary lodging. Chesky said that the company was also planning on doubling the size of its customer support staff. [TechCrunch]

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“The government has some authority to collect cell phone mobility data under appropriate circumstances,” but the amount of evidence that can be collected and the procedures required to get it haven’t been settled yet, said Kathleen Turner, the director of legislative affairs for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, in the letter.

Turner wrote that the government is still defining its “view of the full contours of this authority and will get back to you.”

Her comments came in response to questions presented by Sens. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) and Mark Udall (D., Colo.), who wrote to the Office of National Intelligence two weeks ago. The senators asked whether the intelligence community has the authority to collect geolocation information on American citizens, and just where such authority might come from.

Earlier this week, Sen. Wyden also asked similar questions of a lawyer for the National Security Agency and received a very similar answer. The intelligence community is working on a better response, and senators have asked that it be ready in time for the first meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee in September.

In addition to their questions on geolocation, Wyden and Udall have asked how the government is interpreting parts of the Patriot Act and other laws. In their letter, they also asked how many people in the U.S. have had their communications reviewed under authority granted by 2008 legislation amending Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Turner, in her response, said “it is not reasonably possible to identify the number of people located in the United States whose communications may have been reviewed.”

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This morning the hacker collective posted an “official communique” asking supporters to stop using PayPal, the online payment system: “Join us in our latest operation against PayPal – tweet pictures of your account closure … spread the word.”

Last December PayPal was the target of distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) after the online payment company cut its ties with the secret documents website WikiLeaks. Further review revealed that the attacks were a coordinated effort involving thousands of computers using Low Orbit Ion Cannon, open source software that turns a computer into a firehose of Internet requests. Anonymous claimed responsibility for the attacks.

Last week the FBI arrested 14 people on charges related to the attacks. This morning Wired’s Threat Level blog reported that authorities are working from a list of 1,000 Internet IP addresses collected by a security device on PayPal’s servers during the DDoS attacks.

An affidavit associated with the arrest last week of a person in Dallas sheds light on how PayPal and the FBI identified the suspect’s IP address before asking a federal grand jury to subpoena AT&T for subscriber information.

Anonymous says that its actions should be viewed as a form of civic protest, not criminality. “What the FBI needs to learn is that there is a vast difference between adding one’s voice to a chorus and digital sit-in with Low Orbit Ion Cannon, and controlling a large botnet of infected computers. And yet both of these are punishable with exactly the same fine and sentence,” today’s statement read.

In the PayPal boycott, the people on board the battleship Anonymous have temporarily ditched hacking and the Low Orbit Ion Cannon in favor of old-school organizing—“You can still help #OpPayPal by closing your account: Call +1.888…”

But will this new tactic be as powerful?

Anonymous seems to believe so, tweeting: “Our most dangerous weapons is neither ddos nor hacks. It’s angry citizens who feel naturally allied with us.”

But a PayPal spokeswoman told Digits that the company hasn’t seen changes to normal operations, including “account opening and closing.”

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Rick Wilking/Reuters

Amazon’s Revenue, Spending Jump: At yesterday’s earnings meeting, Amazon refused, yet again, to reveal the numbers behind its best-selling Kindle e-reader. The company also declined to comment on the rumored tablet computer that the Wall Street Journal reported on earlier this month.

But Amazon did have other big items to share such as a 51% jump in second-quarter revenue—the best growth rate in 10 years according to the company’s finance chief. The Journal reports that the sales came at a cost. Profit fell 8% as operating expenses rose 54%.

The Journal has the full numbers round-up with a look into what Amazon is investing in—more warehouses, Web services, people—and a comment by Amazon about its ongoing tax battle with California, Texas and other states. [WSJ, New York Times]

Miss the Latest “Glee”? It Could Cost You: Fox Broadcasting announced that it will make recently aired TV episodes available online only to paying subscribers. Fans of such shows as “Glee” will have to wait eight days after broadcast debut to watch the programs for free on Fox.com or video site Hulu..

Subscribers to Hulu’s paid subscription service, Hulu Plus, or satellite operator Dish Network who visit dishonline.com will get immediate access, however. Fox executives told the Wall Street Journal that they are in talks with other pay-TV distributors to include access to Fox shows as part of their TV subscription plan.

The Journal says that Fox’s action marks a big shift in free availability as media companies worry that free Internet versions of shows are eating into ratings and, ultimately, TV ad rates. They also cited cord-cutting, where TV watchers forgo paying for cable in favor of Internet TV watching, as another threat.

Fox and The Wall Street Journal are owned by News Corp. which is also a part owner of Hulu LLC. [WSJ, paidContent]

NSA Lawyer Questioned on Cellphone Tracking of Americans: At a Senate intelligence meeting on Capitol Hill, an NSA lawyer acknowledged that the National Security Agency may have the authority to use cellular data to track the locations of Americans. “There are certain circumstances where that authority may exist,” said Matthew Olsen, the NSA’s general counsel. [Digits Blog/WSJ]

Why Microsoft Won’t Dump Bing: The world may see Bing as a runner up in the search engine department, but Microsoft execs see it as key to its Windows Phone 7 platform and Windows Live TV. Redmondmag.com has the scoop. [Redmondmag.com]

Gather ‘Round the Server: It may be too hot to be even thinking about this, but researchers at Microsoft have proposed a novel idea over what to do with both energy-hog servers and chilly homes: Place servers for cloud computing inside homes and office buildings. [Gizmag]

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Square, Jack Dorsey’s mobile-payments startup, has a new top lawyer. And his better-known venture, Twitter, is also filling out its executive ranks.

The two-year-old Square, which recently raised funds at a valuation of more than $1 billion, has hired Dana Wagner, Google’s senior competition counsel, to be its general counsel.

Twitter, looking to widen its appeal among consumers and advertisers, has hired a new vice president of consumer marketing, Pam Kramer, as well as a director of global brand strategy, Joel Lunenfeld.

Tuesday will be Wagner’s first day at Square, the San Francisco start-up that lets users accept credit card payments with their smartphones and tablets. Square has 145 employees and will process $100 million in payments this month, according to Chief Operating Officer Keith Rabois.

“General counsel is a strategic hire who would translate the complex federal laws and financial regulations to our marketing and product teams,” Rabois said.

Wagner, who joined Google in 2007, leaves just as the Web-search giant is being thrust into a broad investigation of its business practices by the Federal Trade Commission.

The 35-year-old has been one of Google’s public faces amid increasing regulatory scrutiny and governmental challenges to its business, and he helped shuttle the company through reviews of its acquisitions and partnerships. He is known for giving presentations to industry groups, reporters, politicians that argue that Google is good for competition on the Web.

Prior to Google he worked as a trial attorney at the Justice Department’s antitrust division, among other roles in the agency.

The new hires at Twitter, where Dorsey is chairman and a chief product executive, show how the company is serious about telling the world what, exactly, it does.

Kramer, a former E*Trade executive, has the herculean task of explaining the service to mainstream consumers, many of whom still don’t understand it.

Lunenfeld will “guide our efforts to develop custom ad and partnership programs for Twitter’s most valuable advertisers,” the company said in a statement. Lunenfeld had been head of Moxie Interactive, part of the Publicis Groupe, a large advertising company.

The San Francisco-based Twitter, which lets people broadcast online messages of up to 140 characters in length, is currently raising a financing round that would value the company at as high as $8 billion, said a person familiar with the matter.

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Step 1: Note the controversy du jour Here we go again. Google+ is in the midst of another spat with a core of dedicated users.

Over the past week, the unhappy mutterings that initially greeted Google’s social network’s requirement that members use their real names escalated into a roar after the Google+ team removed a number of high profile members, such as William Shatner.

Step 2: Note that, once again, Google has managed to offend the wrong people Among the victims, according to ZD Net and other sources were A.V. Flox of the Los Angeles Times, open source hardware expert Limor Fried, iPhone hacker MuscleNerd and Kirrly “Skud” Robert, a former Google employee. Robert was quick to create a Suspended Google+ Accounts database, inviting banned members to share the who, what and why relating to their banishment – thus increasing the outrage.

Step 3: Record the multitude of reactions by said offended Compounding the controversy has been the the usual mish-mash of digital action that accompanies this sort of thing: Tweets with the hashtag #GoogleFail and blog posts vowing to radical actions such as a desire to “disconnect permanently” from Google+ services.

Step 4: Note that a high profile tech blogger has taken Google to task on his (or her) Google+ profile Meanwhile Robert Scoble, author of the Scobleizer blog, and a budding Google+ powerhouse whose presence appears in over 92 thousand Google+ member circles, reported yesterday that he had talked with Google+ director Vic Gundotra about the issue. Scoble writes that Gundotra told him that the issue is not with legal names, but about “removing people who spell their names in weird ways, like using upside-down characters, or who are using obviously fake names, like ‘god’ or worse.”

Step 5: Include admission that Google+ is not infallible Scoble says that Gundotra admitted to making some mistakes and “they are still learning.”

Step 6: Facebook does it too Any discussion of Google + would be incomplete without a Facebook comparison. For the record, Facebook also requires users to sign in with their real names.

Step 7: Explain that part of the problem may be in how Google communicated and executed plan A Google spokesperson told Digits that profiles are used to “find real people in the real world” and pointed to a Google + page entitled ‘Your name and Google Profiles.’ The page asks that members “use the name that you commonly go by in daily life.”

This answer has not been enough for some. Wagner James Au, a reporter for the virtual world Second Life noted that there are some people for whom a pseudonym really is what they go by in ‘daily life.’  Others noted that targets of stalking, for example, may also want to use a pseudonym. Nor would dissidents in countries in the Middle East.

Exceptions aside, what really irked critics was the random nature of enforcement—actions that mirrored last week’s business profile controversy. Just like last week’s purge, some profiles were bumped while others remained for all to view (and quietly steam over).

Such random deletions have exposed Google to be at best, clumsy, and at worst, a little creepy.

Google told Digits that violation of its real name policy only resulted in the suspension of the Google+ profile. Access to Gmail and other Google products were left untouched.

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The deal marks a dramatic step for both parties with Flipboard supporting advertising for the first time and Conde Nast selling advertising outside its own platform. Josh Stinchcomb, Conde Nast Media Group’s VP digital sales, explained the partnership as part of the publisher’s bigger strategy of reaching out to customers wherever they congregate.

Flipboard is one of several social magazines that assemble content for the iPad from a user’s Twitter and Facebook feeds. Last December Flipboard partnered with Conde Nast and several other publishing partners including ABC News and Dow Jones’s own All Things Digital to create FlipBoard Pages, an HTML-5 based framework that brings a more magazine-like experience with content owners curating the feeds available to Flipboard users and designing the look and feel of the content. Conde Nast advertising will run on the pages associated with this partnership.

Flipboard’s Christel van der Boom called the partnership with Conde Nast “just a start,” noting that the the company has content partnerships with 30 publications.

Going forward Conde Nast’s Stinchcomb says that the company has plans to rope in more advertisers.  Participation will be limited to a maximum number of four advertisers per month per brand per issue.

Flipboard and Conde Nast will share adverting revenue, with the majority going to Conde Nast according to Stinchcomb. Neither party would provide more details about the revenue split.

The struggles of Conde Nast, a company noted equally for its glossy advertising as for its glossy editorial, have been well documented. Between 2007 and 2009, it lost $500 million in revenue. The company endured layoffs and shut down several magazines, most noticeably Gourmet in October 2009. Last May the company struck a deal with Apple to sell iPad subscriptions for several of its magazines. In a Wall Street Journal interview from earlier this year, Conde Nast CEO Chuck Townsend said the company was on target to recover 35% of the lost revenue.

Stinchcomb says that the days of Conde Nast as a digital dinosaur are over, telling Digits that recent hires have “brought in a lot of new thinking in how we can embrace digital media.”

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Jeff Lam

A missing page from Harry Potter? No, it’s just an example of an email transcribed by Snail Mail My Email.

To Ivan Cash, snail mail is a lost art.

“Snail mail fascinates me,” he said. “There’s something warm and fuzzy about coming home and checking the mail and getting a letter from a friend. It’s such an intimate for of communication, especially in today’s world.”

But when he noticed his letter correspondence was dwindling as text and Facebook messages were growing, he decided something needed to change. The 25 year old, who was working a face-paced life in advertising, quit his job and embarked on a new project, Snail Mail My Email.

The premise was simple: To give life to this dying form of communication, he would transcribe an email by hand and send it to the intended recipient, a service he was offering free of charge. But as the project grew at an exponential scale, Mr. Cash realized he couldn’t do it alone, recruiting volunteers who donated their time to write letters as well as money for postage. Still, the Snail Mail crew is playing catch up. On a recent day, the site had more than 1,000 requests, prompting Cash to halt requests for a couple days.

We talked to Mr. Cash about the project’s inspiration, how a volunteer spent hours crafting an authentic Hogwarts acceptance letter and insights he’s gained since embarking on Snail Mail My Email.

What was the inspiration for this project? At some point in college, I started doing snail mail, and it felt like an awesome way to keep in touch. I studied abroad in Cape Town, South Africa and stayed in touch with postcards. I made a point of sending lots of postcards. It felt like a lot more meaningful to send physical letters. It’s a lot more deliberate. You have to think about it. You can’t just do it and it be over. It’s not going to be an instant response or instant receiving of mail.

Why the fascination with snail mail? I have an older brother who lives in San Francisco, and I lived with him for a year. He has sent things in the mail from two-feet-in-diameter beach balls to plastic dinosaur toys, a bunch of those. We’d have painting parties and decorate and send them off, write the address with paint markers and put the sticker [stamp] attached to them. It’s a miracle the post office sent them. He has a magical way of sending things in the mail and getting away with it. I’m talking huge beach balls. It would not be fair to not give him credit as someone who inspires me to this lost art.

Why is this service free? I actually originally thought of making it paid. I thought of charging people $5 or $10 to send a letter, a nice way to make money. But I realized as soon as commerce is involved, the feel-good nature of the project kind of suffers and dies a little. By keeping it free, I thought selfishly this project would get more attention that way, the fact someone would dedicate that much time and money. We’re not looking to make money. We’re people who appreciate the lost art of writing.

Is there a word limit? At first, I said 200 words and realized it was too time consuming, and now it’s 100 words, which we found still is able to capture the essence of thoughtful message without being too redundant and elongated. People can also do a custom option, adding a kiss, flower petal, doodle, spray of perfume or cologne, or request their own. It plays into the physical part of mail.

So you’ve quit your job. How much of your own money are you putting in this project? I originally looked at it as worst-case scenario, $1,000 to $2,000. It launched on the 15th, but a couple days later, I started sending it to different websites and seeding it. By lunchtime, I had a couple hundred requests, so I put an ad on Craiglist for an intern. Toward the end of the day, I was getting emails every 10 minutes — that’s crazy. When Gizmodo mentioned it, it kind of blew up even more to five to 10 emails per minute which was insane. At that point, I started freaking out.

I got an email from this girl Lucy in China, and she expressed a lot of interest and said she was a snail-mail enthusiast. She and I started Skyping, and I told her the problem of how many messages I was getting. That night, she wrote 10 letters.

What’s happening to the project now? Lucy [now a project manager] and I realized the only way to make this project viable is to try to get volunteers to write letters. We put that element on the site. We also put it in the autoreply to those who email in. Within 24 hours, we got 220 volunteers, people willing to write 25 letters per week minimum until the end of August. I thought I’ll reimburse the cost but soon realized I would be spending $100,000 plus. These volunteers are spending time and money to send mail all around the world. In the last couple of days, we got an admin from Oklahoma City and three volunteers in the core group.

Our admin Terry is married and lives with his wife. In the last couple years, he and his wife have started to send each other snail mail. They don’t talk about it. They just do it. I thought that was such a delightful story. Who better to be a part of this project?

You also recently started accepting donations. How much have you raised? In two or three days, about $200. We’re still figuring out how we’re going to be using them, possibly divvy them up among head volunteers. The admin is working five hours a day, six days a week. Lucy works 14 to 16 hours a day. I haven’t been away from a computer since waking up this morning. It’s a curse and a blessing. The response is so overwhelming. And there are costs as far as the server, actual coding and programming, which I’m paying out of pocket.

What are these letters like? They’re all really boring — it’s awful. No, there has been a ton of really interesting ones. My mom was helping write one. This guy was writing to his eight-month-old child. He talked about how when his child is a teenager, he doesn’t know if snail mail will still be around, this archaic form of communication. It was cleverly done. “I hope while you’re reading this you’re no longer drooling or pooping in your pants.” And in the future, he said they’ll go through tough times but no matter what, he’ll still love his son.

Someone also spent a really long time on a well-thought-out, structured acceptance letter to Hogwarts. Someone in San Francisco spent a couple hours, printed out an emblem. If it wasn’t a quill penn, it sure looked like one.

What insight have you gained from doing this project? I feel like emails I write and receive are not as emotional, maybe because there’s a novelty factor. The letters we’ve received are very much emotional based — a lot of love letters, letters that offer encouragement. Email is like wishing someone happy birthday on Facebook. There’s dryness and superficiality. When people know their writing will be transcribed, that does effect what they write about.

It’s also amazing that total strangers around the world — Malaysia, Australia, the Netherlands, both coasts, New York, California and everywhere in between — all these people are emailing saying they want to help out. To me, that’s been the most amazing part.

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Nelson Ching/Bloomberg

The Apple Inc. logo is covered up at a store in Kunming, Yunnan Province, China, on Monday, July 25, 2011.

World Famous Fake Apple Store Gets Government Review: Authorities in the Chinese city of Kunming are investigating electronics stores following the revelation of a fake Apple store in the city.

The Wall Street Journal reports that outside of the four legal Apple Stores in China, Apple relies on authorized resellers to sell its products. But thousands of unauthorized resellers also sell Apple merchandise purchased from Apple Stores or authorized resellers and then resold at a markup.

According to a The Wall Street Journal interview with the Kunming store’s manager, the fake Apple Store was an unauthorized reseller. “We never claim to be [authorized],” the manager told WSJ, “but we have a business license and we are running our business by law.”

The WSJ says that it is unclear whether the crackdown was prompted by complaints from Apple. The company is on a roll in the country, as it closes in on partnership with China’s largest mobile carrier. The New York Times wraps up coverage with a look at the country’s Apple Mania. [WSJ, New York Times]

Nathan Myhrvold: Patent Troll or the Protector of the Small Inventor? NPR’s This American Life looks into the work of Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer at Microsoft, who went on to create the Intellectual Ventures, an intellectual property site that has made its numbers buying patent portfolios and then demanding that technology companies license these patents.

NPR gets statements from both sides. The company can “literally obliterate startups,” a venture capitalist and early inverstor in Twitter claims. No we don’t, says Myhrvold, who sees the company as standing up for “patent rights” and protecting small inventors from being railroaded by big companies with expensive lawyers.

But when reporters try to track down some of the smaller inventors, they find….a slightly different story.

Taking a cue from the report, Reuters looks into the “cost of patent trolls,” and finds smaller companies at risk. The country, it concludes, is in need of a complete patent overhaul.  [NPR, NPR/Audio Clips, Reuters]

Hacking: On the Upswing or Just a Press Freak-Out? The guys at Freakonomics pose the question to several cyber-security and I.T. experts. Their answer: a little of both. [Freakonomics]

Apple Cracks Down on iOS Apps: Kobe, the Canadian e-book retailer, and the Wall Street Journal have removed links from their iOS apps that allowed users to purchase content from their respective web sites. In February Apple required that all iOS app publishers selling digital media needed to make the content for sale via an app, rather than through a link to an outside website. Both Kobe and the WSJ were seen as trying to circumvent that requirement. [WSJ]

A Tech Rip Van Winkle Mulls Over IE: A Firefox developer doing user testing in a San Francisco mall came across a 60-year-old man who had never used a computer. The encounter was beneficial to both parties. The developer learned that one can never assume anything about user interfaces and the old newbie got an email address. [Boriss' Blog Gizmodo]

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The company, called Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition, or PittPatt, is run by three “image analysis” and “pattern recognition” specialists with PhD’s from Carnegie Mellon University, according to its site. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

A statement on PittPatt’s site said on Friday that “computer vision technology is already at the core of many existing products” at Google, including Image Search, YouTube and Picasa, “so it’s a natural fit to join Google and bring the benefits of our research and technology to a wider audience. We will continue to tap the potential of computer vision in applications that range from simple photo organization to complex video and mobile applications.”

A Google spokesman said PittPatt developed “innovative technology” in the area of computer vision and that its research “can benefit our users in many ways,” without elaborating.

Regarding face recognition, the spokesman said, “We’ve said that we won’t add face recognition to our apps or product features unless we have strong privacy protections in place, and that’s still the case.”

Google has said it built facial recognition technology for smartphones into a product known as Google Goggles, but withheld it. “As far as I know, it’s the only technology that Google built and after looking at it, we decided to stop,” said Google Chairman Eric Schmidt last month at a conference. “People could use this stuff in a very, very bad way as well as in a good way.”

During its annual developer conference in May, Google showed off something called “Virtual Camera Operator,” which uses computer-vision technology to stabilize mobile video chats by following a person’s head movements and to determine who is speaking during a multi-person video conference so that the camera would automatically focus on the speaker.

It also recently launched Google+, a social network that lets people share and store photos, among other things. Rival Facebook has face-recognition technology to identify people in photos, which has raised concerns from privacy advocates. The technology, first introduced last year, was designed to help Facebook users easily identify and mark, or “tag,” friends in photos as they upload them to the social-networking site.

“If for any reason someone doesn’t want their name to be suggested” for tagging, “they can disable the feature in their Privacy Settings,” Facebook has said.

PittPatt’s software “accurately counts the number of people viewed by a video camera” and “it can automatically generate reports measuring the presence and movement of people over extended periods of time,” according to a cached version of its website.

Some of the “practical applications” of the technology include measuring “the effectiveness of digital signage, advertising, kiosks and narrowcasting”; “customer traffic flow,” or gathering “insight into customer behavior and shopping patterns; “security-related matters” such as being able to send alerts when the PittPatt software detects a face that isn’t in its database.

PittPatt offered a tool for people to “integrate face finding and tracking into your own product,” and in 2007 it partnered with General Electric to develop an “intelligent security camera system,” the site said. The GE system “will obtain high resolution facial imagery using a motorized pan-tilt-zoom camera that will track and zoom in on faces that enter the field of view,” according to the site.

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On Friday, a U.S. District Court judge in Massachusetts dismissed and terminated the brothers’ original 2004 case against Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a legal proceeding that was required as part of a 2008 settlement between the Winklevosses and Facebook. The brothers, who are Olympic rowers, had alleged that Zuckerberg stole their idea for a Harvard social network.

Judge Douglas P. Woodlock also went on to dismiss two motions by the Winklevoss brothers made in June that would have given them access to confidential Facebook documents. Those documents could have served as a basis for a challenge to an April judgment that the twins had to live with their 2008 settlement with Facebook.

“We expected that the Court would enter a judgment,” said Tyler Meade, an attorney for the brothers. He added that the next step is a special motion, known as 60(b), which is filed once a case has been dismissed and which alleges some sort of fraud took place that would allow a judge to overturn that judgment.

It’s unclear what basis the Winklevosses would have to claim that fraud took place. In June, the brothers seemed to indicate that they had come to the end of the road in their claims against Zuckerberg. The Winklevosses filed a motion saying that after “careful consideration,” they wouldn’t file a petition to take their battle to the Supreme Court after a judge in April ruled that they had to live with a 2008 settlement they struck with Facebook.

But a day later, the brothers, along with their business partner Divya Narendra, told the court that they would push for discovery in a claim that Facebook “intentionally or inadvertently suppressed evidence” during 2008 settlement proceedings over whether Zuckerberg stole their idea for a Harvard student social network.

Last year, instant messages from Zuckerberg emerged online and in media reports that purport to shed new light on the relationship between Zuckerberg and the Winklevosses at the time when Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004. The claim in the Massachusetts court was that Facebook should have disclosed those communications.

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For many people, headphones are as much a part of daily wear as sunglasses and handbags. So it’s not surprising that companies are introducing headphones that aim to appeal to people’s sense of fashion as well as their sense of hearing.

For the past few years Stockholm-based Urbanears has been plying the public with several lines of diversely hued headphones. I tried out their Plattan model ($60), a large, “on ear” style that comes in sixteen colors and is sold at fashionable retailers like Urban Outfitters and Nordstrom.

For those seeking flair in their audio equipment, the Plattan headphones are a winner. With evocatively named shades like “pool,” “cerise” and “grass,” Urbanears seems to have taken a page out of a J.Crew catalogue. And new hues are swapped in seasonally, so the lineup of available colors changes throughout the year.

The Plattans have a simple form. Both the thick headband and the cord are wrapped in fabric, giving the headphones a soft, clothing-like look. (The company says the fabric components can be cleaned with soap and water.)

The “on ear” style means the earcups fit flat against the ears, rather than encasing them or fitting inside.

The Plattans were comfortable to wear for long periods and felt largely unnoticeable, unlike bulkier over-ear models. The headband is flexible so I could manipulate it to better fit my noggin, and the earcups are cushy.

The company recently updated the design to improve the comfort of the earcups by adding more padding. The updated earcup design is currently available on the Plattan Plus model, sold in Apple stores and on urbanears.com.

But what about the sound?

The audio delivered by the Plattans was satisfying, but not thrillingly nuanced. Rock music had bass that was deep but not overpowering; a Beethoven symphony lacked clarity.

When it comes to noise reduction, the Plattans appear to be a case of style over substance. I tried out the headphones in a noisy New York environment: the subway system. When I was waiting in the station or riding on the trains, no matter how closely I pressed the Plattans to my head, my ears were invaded by ambient noise. I didn’t expect to enjoy total silence on a crowded, noisy subway car, but even relatively soft sounds—like the conversation of two people sitting several seats away from me—were audible when I used the headphones. I had to raise the volume on my iPod to a level similar to that I must use with Apple’s standard-issue earbuds. I had a similar experience when sitting near an air-conditioner and walking out in the streets; ambient noise competed with the music.

The company says the headphones aren’t noise-cancelling, which requires batteries, microphones and other circuitry to actively drown out noise. The company says the design of the headphones, with the earcups fitting against the ears rather than surrounding them, does limit the extent to which they can reduce ambient noise.

The Plattans have a microphone attached to the cord coming from the left earcup. The microphone conveyed sound well, but I usually had to pull the cord a little nearer to my mouth to be heard clearly.

They also feature a jack that allows you to plug in an additional set of headphones to share your music with a partner.

Are Urbanears’ Plattan headphones worth it? Though I’m not coordinated enough to match my headphones to my cardigan, it’s hard not to be enticed by the array of colors and monochromatic, clothing-like design of the Plattans.

But looks aren’t everything, and the disappointing noise reducing capabilities detract from the headphones’ undeniable chic. At $60 a pair, they cost about twice as much as basic earbuds, but they didn’t perform twice as well.

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David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Google, Shareholders  “Super Excited” About Everything: The search engine giant showed all young Silicon Valley upstarts how it’s done yesterday, shaking off accusations of being a mere “value” stock and announcing a 36% jump in revenue for the second quarter. The growth was driven by Google’s core search engine advertising. Company shares went up more than 10% in after-hours trading.

Almost as big for some Google followers was that CEO Larry Page, not one for the spotlight, delivered the opening statement at the earnings presser. He stayed around for the Q&A and likely would have remained for cocktails—-if they were any–because it was quite obvious that Page was reveling in the news.

Other takeaways: The two-week old Google+ network has more than 10 million users and these users share more than 1 billion items per day. About 550,000 devices powered by Android are activated daily. Google is a toothbrush.

And this was just the beginning, according to Page who said that there are “more opportunities for Google today than ever before, because, believe it or not, we are still in the very early stages of what we want to do.”

The Wall Street Journal wraps up the numbers, reporting that Google posted a quarterly profit of $2.51 billion, or $7.68 a share, up from $1.84 billion, or $5.71 a share, a year earlier. Total revenue was $9.03, up from $6.82 billion a year ago. [WSJ, Business Insider, Digits/WSJ, LiveBlog/WSJ, TechCrunch, Google]

Cyberwar Plan Has Focus on Deterrence: A Pentagon official said that a “foreign intelligence service” stole 24,000 files from the Department of Defense last March and that a weapons system may need to be partly redesigned as a result of the breach. The admission came as the Pentagon announced a cyberwar strategy, calling for the Defense Department to “treat cyberspace as an operational domain to organize, train and equip.”

Marine Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the strategy will shift cyber efforts from primarily defensive to one based on deterrence that could involve anything from diplomatic efforts to an attack with real-world weapons. [Washington Post, WSJ]

Now, Even Granny’s Fuzzy Slippers are Texting You: The Wall Street Journal has a hilarious, scary story on how start-ups are installing wireless technology into everything from slippers, where you are pinged if the sensors in grandma’s shoes detect some unsteady walking, to diapers, where….you get the picture. [WSJ]

Internet Use Affects Memory: There is a new report out there that measures the impact that search engines have on memory. A collaboration between scientists at Harvard, Columbia and..um…the New York Times has the details. [New York Times, Science]

A Real-Life Android: A Taiwanese hacker has assembled a robot resembling Google’s almost-iconic green Android logo. He used a trash can for the body. [Gizmodo]

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With the backdrop of solid growth from Google’s search-engine advertising, Page looked to make waves by discussing the progress of Google’s well-received social network, Google+, which launched two weeks ago. He said the service already had more than 10 million users, despite the fact that it’s still invite-only.

“Not surprisingly,” Page said, the service has been “very well received, because in real life we share different things with different people.”

The remark was directed at Facebook, which has received some past criticism for the difficulty some users had with sharing their thoughts or article links with only a subset of their “friends.” Facebook has more than 750 million users worldwide, and Google has a mountain to climb if it hopes to steal away the attention of its users.

Page, who took control of Google in April, said that more than one billion “items,” such as photos, links or written musings, are shared daily on Google+, and that the +1 button, which is similar to Facebook’s “Like” button, is being shown to Internet users about 2.3 billion times a day. In the future, the +1 button could influence the search results rankings, based on what their friends have recommended, or +1’ed, he said.

Page took pains to argue that Google’s success in distributing its free Android mobile-device software, as well as its free Chrome Web browser, can become large businesses for the company.

“Now, people rightly ask, how will we monetize these businesses?” he said. Google has “tons of experience monetizing successful products over time,” such as its search engine, which had no advertising for years. “Well-run technology businesses with tremendous consumer usage make a lot of money over the long term,” he said.

Google is “only at 1% of what is possible,” and “that is why I am here working hard to lead the company into the next level,” Page said.

On Android, Page said that 550,000 new devices powered by Android software were activated daily, and Google’s ad chief Susan Wojcicki said more than 135 million Android devices in total had been activated. The proliferation of Android devices ensures that Google’s search engine is used on smartphones and tablets (though the revenue generated from mobile clicks is much lower than on PC clicks), and the company wants to use the devices to sell local-business advertising and digital goods such as e-books and online-movie rentals.

Page, who used the words “really excited” or “super excited” about a dozen times during the conference call, said Google had a growing emphasis on the design, or look, of its services in order to please users. Google is rolling out a redesign of its Gmail email service, for instance, he said.

Lastly, Page said Google’s recently 10% across-the-board salary raise “had even more positive effect on hiring and retention than when we expected,” though he implied that the company may have to slow down the pace of its hiring, as it’s currently on pace to add well over the 6,000 new employees it had planned to add in 2011.

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AllThingsD.com’s Peter Kafka looks at Spotify’s new online music service, including what it will need to succeed among users.

News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch will go before UK’s Parliament to answer questions on the News of the World hacking scandal. News Corp. is the parent company of The Wall Street Journal.

WSJ Personal Technology Senior Editor Walt Mossberg reviews the Toshiba Thrive, the latest entry in the tablet market.

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“We had a great quarter,” said Google CEO Larry Page in a statement. Page added that he was “super excited” about the response so far to Google’s latest social-networking effort, Google+.

Google talked much more about that initiative in its call with analysts, telling them that Google+ has more than 10 million users despite being launched only a couple of weeks ago. Analysts asked about Google’s plans, Page’s new role, and the company’s views on operating expenses, which have been growing rapidly as Google adds more employees and makes other investments.

A recap of the call is below.

4:37 pm | Getting Started | by Jennifer Valentino-DeVries

Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and new(ish) CEO, is on the call, along with Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora, Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette and Susan Wojcicki, the company’s vice president of ads.

4:41 pm | Page Approves of His Performance

Page wastes no time in touting his performance in the first full quarter since he took over as CEO. “We’ve substantially increased our velocity of execution,” he says. He adds that the company “had a great quarter” and that he’s intent on on making Google more nimble.

4:45 pm | The Pluses of Google+

Well, it sounds like Google+ is going gangbusters. More than 10 million people have joined Google+ since it launched in limited, invitation-only trial earlier this month. Page says there are more than 1 billion items shared and received in a single day through Google+, which is Google’s latest effort to take on Facebook in social networking.

4:46 pm

Not to be confused with Google+, Google +1 is a button that lets people recommend things like websites. This +1 button is proving successful as well, Page says, being served 2.3 billion times a day.

4:47 pm | A Simplified Google

Google is trying to simplify in more ways than one. Page sounds almost Steve Jobs-like in his description of the new redesign of the site. (You might have noticed that little black bar on Google, which is a big part of this.) He says it’s “beautiful, consistent and simpler.”

4:49 pm

And it’s not just the site’s look that is being simplified. Page says he’s having Google streamline its product line as well, and making internal operations more efficient. This hasn’t been “visible externally” yet, he said, but he promises us we’ll see it. He is really making it clear that he’s running the show now and making changes.

4:52 pm | A Shot at the Haters

Page waxes nostalgic about the early days of Google, when people questioned how anyone could make money on search. The same questions are being raised about people making money on current technologies, and it’s like “watching the same movie again in slow motion,” he says. (He’s talking about stuff like Android and Chrome, but it applies to things outside Google too — like Twitter.)

4:53 pm

And to wrap up, Page kind of addresses concerns about how Google is spending its money. “We spend the vast majority of our resources on the core products,” he says. So it’s not all self-driving cars. Good to know.

4:55 pm | Like a Toothbrush

Google wants to make products that people use “twice a day, just like a toothbrush,” Page says. (Shouldn’t it actually be more than that? Or is your Digits blogger abnormally addicted to search, email and social networking? That seems unlikely.)

4:58 pm | The Financials

Patrick Pichette has good news. It must be a relief to beat Wall Street.  Gross revenue was $9 billion, up 32% from a year ago.  This is “driven by core desktop search ads,” but increasingly by things like YouTube as well, he says.

5:02 pm

Google websites saw revenue increase 39%, while revenue from sites that show Google display ads grew 20% from the same time a year ago. Pichette says the company saw growth pretty much in all regions around the world.

5:04 pm

Those operating expenses: They were $2.97 billion, or 33% of revenues, compared with $1.99 billion a year ago, which was 29% of revenues at the time. That’s a jump, but we’ll see if Wall Street analysts are OK with it now that Google is beating estimates as far as earnings go.

5:08 pm

Nikesh Arora talks about spending on ads and says large customers are spending more, and Google sales teams are getting better. Mobile advertising is a big deal, he says, and he touts Android performance along with that. There are 550,000 phones a day activated on Android. That’s a lot of phones, there.

5:12 pm | Improvements to Search

Susan Wojcicki talks about improvements to search, specifically voice search and searching by image on the desktop. She says voice search is good for looking up things you might not know how to spell, like, Schednectady, New York. But your Digits blogger just looked up Skenectidy NY, and Google handily gave her the proper spelling, so she’s not too sure about that.

5:13 pm

She talks about a few other initiatives, like skippable YouTube ads and improvements to the Android Market, which now has 250,000 different apps.

5:15 pm | Q&A: International Growth

The first question is about Google’s international growth. What’s driving it? Apparently everything, depending on what region you’re talking about. Mobile advertising is big in Japan.

5:16 pm

The next question basically amounts to: “Larry Page, tell us why you’re better at making decisions than Eric Schmidt.” But Page doesn’t bite on that. He just says he’s very excited about improving “velocity” and execution and that he sees this as a “noble goal.”

5:20 pm | Page’s Philosophy

Page says Schmidt “continues to play a big part” in the company and is a great partner. And Page outlines how he sees Google’s different products. Basically, he breaks them into three groups. First is the “core driver” of the company — search and ads. Second, you have what he calls “high consumer success” projects — YouTube, Android and Chrome — which Google wants to optimize for the long term. And third, there’s “early stage” stuff — things like Google+ and local search. (That makes it seem so simple!)

5:24 pm | More on Google+

There are a few mentions of Google+, and Page talks about how it integrates into the Google redesign. “We are focused on improving the identity and sharing across all of Google,” he says. Just earlier, Wojcicki said Google is really focusing on making the experience good for users, and Page echoes that.

5:25 pm

Page says the company is very excited about how many people are using Google+ in just the first two weeks, but he reminds everyone that it’s actually really tough to sign up. You have to be invited. (Based on the number of notifications we’re seeing about people adding us to Plus, we’re not too sure how tough it is. But our friends aren’t exactly a random sample.)

5:27 pm | Do Executives Care About Stock Price?

Justin Post wants to know just how focused senior management is on stock price. “Unfortunately one of the things we don’t get to decide is the stock price,” Page says. He says they’re focused on long-term success. (What else is he going to say?)

5:33 pm

Page uses that toothbrush analogy again. So that wasn’t a fluke. We’re still confused, but then again can’t think of a better analogy offhand. What does one use more than a toothbrush? Shoes? Accepting nominations.

5:36 pm | Page on Social Networking

Man, Google is happy about Google+. Page again channels Steve Jobs in describing it, saying there is a “lot of magic built into the product.” He then takes some shots at Facebook, saying Google+ is meant to be “more like you’d share in real life,” which is a “different product than is out there now.”

5:37 pm

Page says Google “believes in users owning their own data and being able to move it out of Google.” Interesting. Wonder how easy they’d eventually make that.

5:39 pm | The Googlers

Last question is about infrastructure costs and hiring. Google says hiring is going as expected. (Headcount increased to 28,768 employees, compared with 26,316 three months ago.) And Page says Google’s pay increases have helped it retain engineers in a competitive market.

5:39 pm | The End

As always, there’s a shout-out to the Googlers, but this time in particular Pichette calls out the Google+ folks for praise, telling them “two thumbs up.” And that’s a wrap, folks.

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Details remain few. According to the Journal the new Amazon tablet reportedly will have a nine-inch screen. It will run on the Android platform. And it is expected to launch somewhere around October. On the surface, this is not much to base any buying decision. But if Amazon’s past success in e-commerce and e-readers mean something, then the tablet’s launch date could give pause to those already planning to buy an iPad.

Here are some things to look for:

The first real alternative to the app store: Long before Apple’s App Store appeared, Amazon took a risk on e-commerce in the 1990s and over the years has defined how Americans shop. When the Amazon tablet launches this Fall, it will have something no iPad competitor has had: A built-in online store of digitized books and music, plus streaming and downloadable movies courtesy of its Amazon Prime service.

Amazon also has its own App Store for selling Android apps. Apple filed a preliminary injunction against Amazon to prevent its use of the term “app store.” It was denied by a federal judge last week.

Combine this wealth of digital content with Amazon’s trademark user interface and the thought of substituting the iPad (and its App Store experience) for an Android-based tablet may not seem as daunting as before.

Shopping: Forrester’s Sarah Rotman Epps says that online shopping has proven to be one of tablet owners’ favorite activities. “Tablet commerce could be bigger than mobile commerce,” she said, but the retail aspects of the iPad experience have been underdeveloped. “When you think about how much better Amazon could make it for shopping, including apps, it gives you an idea of what their tablet could offer,” she said.

The cloud: Apple may have made a splash with its recent cloud launch, but Amazon’s experience in storing content online is deeper, said Epps. Amazon could couple its tablet announcement with its cloud service and “paint a picture of how Amazon can allow you to have more music, and more music and more books than what you ever had on one device,“ she said.

Kindle’s success: The company has already proven its ability to move hardware. Amazon was not the first to sell an e-reader, but since  Kindle’s 2007 release, the company has used its devices, software and digital content to shape the e-reading experience (and change publishing).  Two weeks ago, the Pew Internet and American Life Project published findings that e-reader ownership reached double digits in May 2011.

Pricing: Analysts at Robert W. Baird are predicting that Amazon will extend its ‘razor and blade’ from its Kindles to tablets, keeping its pricing of its hardware (the razors) slightly below cost, in order to guarantee sales of its digital content (the blades).

In this case, they predict that Amazon will price the tablet to stay competitive with the Nook Color e-reader from Barnes and Noble. The Nook Color runs on Android and has built-in tablet-like functionality. It is priced at $249.  That’s 50% less than the cheapest new iPad, the analysts note.

Price is going to be a huge factor, said Epps, who said that Amazon should sell the tablet at a loss and, “do what they did with the Kindle which destroyed Sony’s e-reader.”

On the other hand…If the Amazon tablet comes at a $250 price tag, this brings into question what additional functionality it can offer.  Unlike the iPad, Amazon’s tablet will not have a camera, according to the Journal’s story. MG Siegler of TechCrunch had more doubts, asking, “Can Amazon really make a 9-inch multi-touch screen color tablet for that cheap?  Unless it’s an absolute piece of cr–, that seems unlikely.”

Of course, everything surrounding the Amazon tablet is speculation right now. Not so for the iPad with its user base of 19.5 million (as of the end of March),  its 90,000  iPad-only apps and its $499 price tag for the starting model.

But those on the fence may still want to wait and see what Amazon’s expected lower-price (and lower-tech) tablet has to offer.

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Where many computer installations boast of high security, few put on such a show about it. Guards at the big building dubbed SuperNAP, for example, are not your typical rent-a-cops. These are Switch employees recruited from the Marines and other military services–buff, dark-uniformed hunks who sport side arms inside the building and automatic weapons outside. They never smile.

Entering is a rigorous process. A tour bus pulling up to the facility is temporarily imprisoned between two large gates while, presumably, it is studied through video cameras.

Once inside the building, similarly, visitors are kept in a fortified holding room–sometimes called a man-trap–while their identification is scrutinized. (The identity papers are held until visitors leave the premises). Then each visitor is individually buzzed through a spinning metal gate by one of the guards, who monitor pretty much every step a guest takes in the building.

Anyone who tries to shoot a picture will find their camera or cellphone confiscated, the guards warn repeatedly. Not that attempts would come out well; the vast computer rooms are kept dark, lit only atmospherically to highlight the striking red and blue color scheme that extends to the building’s corridors, conference rooms and restroom sinks.

The tour, organized by Cisco Systems, left visitors with the impression that Switch sweats the details–particularly protecting the servers that customers set up in hundreds of locked cages in the data center. The company does not name them, but makes clear that SuperNAP users include government agencies, casinos and others that don’t want their systems to go offline.

Switch, a closely held company founded by entrepreneur Rob Roy in 2000, promises such customers 100% uptime. The pledge rests partly on geography.

Las Vegas has the least disruptive calamities–floods, earthquakes, tornados–of major U.S. metropolitan areas, said Jason Mendenhall, Switch’s executive vice president. Enron, before it crashed, had chosen the city as a hub to create an exchange to buy and sell broadband communications, and Switch wound up buying some of its assets in bankruptcy proceedings, he said. Consequently, SuperNAP has more connections to carriers than most data centers, and can offer 25% to 40% savings on Internet connections, Mendenhall said.

Even bigger innovations, the company says, relate to the way electricity is guaranteed. Each bank of servers has three separate power supplies–each with its own color–to offer “tri-redundant” capability in case one or even two go down.

What if the power from the utility grid is interrupted? SuperNAP’s 50-odd diesel generators can generate 140 megawatts of power. About 7,000 gallons of fuel is stored for each generator, which could keep the facility going for “a significant amount of time,” Mendenhall says.

What if that fuel runs out? Designated by the government as a “Tier 2″ facility–the only Tier 1 facility in Nevada is Hoover Dam–SuperNAP has priority to stay in operation that is higher than hospitals, Mendenhall said. Its security personnel, he said, are authorized in an emergency “to confiscate fuel if they have to.”

Perhaps SuperNAP’s most distinctive feature is how servers are cooled. Instead of putting most air-handling hardware on the roof, the outside of the building is attached to large structures–each shaped roughly like a large semi trailer–that each have four separate kinds of cooling technologies and the equivalent of what Mendenhall calls a weather station.

They are designed to constantly adjust to exterior temperature, or conditions like dust or smoke, to use the appropriate combinations of natural air and ventilation to save energy, the company says. And, instead of mixing hot air and cold air in the computer room, Switch has a patented design it calls “t-scif”–thermal separate compartment in facility–that keeps them apart and vents the hot air out of the building.

Because of the sophisticated cooling, Switch says SuperNAP can pack more servers closer together than competing data centers. There’s an animated video showing some of the concepts here.

SuperNAP, at 407,000 square feet, may not be the largest single data center in the world, but it is in an elite class and is getting company–Switch says it is about to break ground on another nearby facility, taking its total square footage to 2.2 million square feet.

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It might sound outlandish, but Sens. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) and Mark Udall (D., Colo.) are raising questions about whether the government might be doing just that, according to an early copy of a letter written by the senators and expected to be released later today.

In a letter to the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, the senators demand information on whether the agencies he leads, including the NSA and the CIA, “have the authority to collect the geolocation information of American citizens for intelligence purposes.”

“If yes, please explain the specific statutory basis for this authority,” the letter states. Wired’s Danger Room blog reported on the planned letter earlier Thursday.

The letter also asks how many Americans have had their communications monitored under authority granted by 2008 legislation amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. “Have any apparently law-abiding Americans had their communications collected by the government?” they write.

Wyden and Udall both sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee and have expressed concern about interpretation of laws related to surveillance — the Patriot Act specifically. In May, Wyden said “the law is being secretly interpreted by the executive branch.”

Geolocation tracking in particular has become a hot-button issue in Washington D.C. recently. Congress has held hearings on how Apple and Google collect location from cellphones, and a bill from Democratic Sens. Al Franken of Minnesota and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut would require companies to get a user’s consent before sharing cellphone location information.

Last month, Sen. Wyden and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah) introduced a joint bill that would require law enforcement officials to get a search warrant and show probable cause before tracking someone’s location. And the Supreme Court agreed this summer to hear the case of a man whose truck was tracked by police for a month using a GPS device before they got warrants to search for drugs in places he had visited.

But this earlier attention on location data has focused on law enforcement and private companies, not intelligence agencies. And the senators say “Congress needs to also understand how intelligence authorities are being interpreted” when it comes to geolocation tracking.

Full text of the early version of the letter follows:

July 14, 2011

The Honorable James R. Clapper, Jr. Director of National Intelligence Washington, DC 20511

Dear Director Clapper:

In the coming months Congress is likely to consider various legislative initiatives that would modify different aspects of domestic surveillance law. We believe that the debate over these initiatives will be better informed if Congress and the public are provided with more unclassified information about how these initiatives will affect current intelligence authorities and activities.

The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 significantly modified the US government’s surveillance authorities with regard to individuals believed to be located outside the United States. These new authorities are currently scheduled to expire in late 2012, and Congress could begin considering possible extensions or revisions to these authorities later this year. Since any thorough consideration will require an understanding of how the FISA Amendments Act has been interpreted and implemented, we ask that you provide unclassified answers to the following questions:

• In a December 2007 Statement of Administration Policy on the FISA Amendments Act, the Office of Management and Budget said that it would “likely be impossible” to count the number of people located in the United States whose communications were reviewed by the government pursuant to the FISA Amendments Act. Is this still the case? If so, is it possible to estimate this number with any accuracy?

• Official documents released in 2010 noted that there have been multiple incidents in which intelligence agency personnel have failed to comply with the FISA Amendments Act, and that “Certain types of compliance incidents continue[d] to occur.” Please elaborate on these compliance incidents to the extent possible, and explain why you believe that they have continued to recur.

• Have any apparently law-abiding Americans had their communications collected by the government pursuant to the FISA Amendments Act?

• Are any significant interpretations of the FISA Amendments Act currently classified?

Turning to another area of surveillance law, recent advances in geolocation technology have made it increasingly easy to secretly track the movements and whereabouts of individual Americans on an ongoing, 24/7 basis. Law enforcement agencies have relied on a variety of different methods to conduct this sort of electronic surveillance, including the acquisition of cell phone mobility data from communications companies as well as the use of tracking devices covertly installed by the law enforcement agencies themselves.

Unfortunately, the law has not kept up with these advances in technology. As a result, courts in different jurisdictions have issued diverse, conflicting rulings about the evidence and procedures required for the government to surreptitiously track an individual’s movements using a mobile electronic device. Congress is now considering multiple legislative proposals that would attempt to establish clear rules for this sort of surveillance and will need to determine at some point whether it is necessary to update the laws that apply to intelligence investigations as well as the laws that apply to law enforcement investigations.

While there is a substantial amount of public information available regarding different interpretations of this area of the law (including the executive branch’s interpretation and the interpretations of various courts) all of these interpretations apply to law enforcement authorities, not intelligence authorities. Clearly Congress needs to also understand how intelligence authorities are being interpreted as it begins to consider legislation on this issue. For this reason, we request that you also provide unclassified answers to the following questions:

• Do government agencies have the authority to collect the geolocation information of American citizens for intelligence purposes?

• If yes, please explain the specific statutory basis for this authority. And to the extent that this statutory basis imposes any procedural requirements, such as judicial review or approval by particular officials, please describe these requirements.

• If no, please explain the statutory basis for this prohibition.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. We look forward to your prompt response.

Sincerely,

Ron Wyden Mark Udall United States Senator United States Senator

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Rick Wilking/Reuters

Amazon to Offer Tablet Computer: Amazon is expected to launch a tablet computer by this October, the Wall Street Journal reports. The tablet will feature a nine-inch screen and run on a version of the Android operating system. The Journal writes that the “potentially vast markets” of digital goods are leading many companies, such as Amazon, to leave the cozy confines of one particular segment for other fronts.

The Journal says that Amazon faces a tough road against Apple in the tablet market. Apple has sold 19.5 million iPads since introducing the device last year, as of the end of March.

Tech Crunch says that it is Google, not Apple,  that should worry. Google is planning its own tablet for later in the year, but the “consumer ease-of-use” that Amazon is expected to offer–particularly in the app and media buying experience–could beat anything built by Google. [WSJ, TechCrunch]

This Time for Real: Spotify to Launch U.S. Music Service: London-based Spotify will launch in the U.S. on Thursday. The music streaming service has been popular in Europe for some time, but two years of negotiations with record labels slowed Spotify’s debut in the U.S.

The service will offer a three-tier membership plan ranging from a free, ad-supported version to a $10 a month premium service that offers both computer and mobile phone access and higher quality audio.

The New York Times reports that Spotify faces a number of challenges from companies like Rhapsody, Rdio and MOG as well as new cloud services from Apple, Google, and Amazon. The Times also reports that the company lost $26.5 million in 2009 and has yet to report financial performance for last year. [WSJ, New York Times]

Amazon vs. California: Amazon is going to push a California voter initiative to eliminate sales tax for sellers with a small physical footprint in the state. The New York Times reports that big players are already lining up, setting the stage for the first big tax battle of the Internet era. [New York Times]

Is Facebook Worth $100 Billion? Some believe that Facebook will trade at $100 billion valuation if the company goes public next year. The Wall Street Journal talks to a cross section of people, from Main Street to Wall Street, to get their take on what Facebook is worth. [WSJ, Digits/WSJ]

Google to Announce Earnings: Google will share its second quarter 2001 financial results today at 4:30 ET/1:30 PT.  Barron’s reports that a couple analysts are predicting that the company may miss estimates. [Google, Barron's]

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An important but often-overlooked part of the argument: Most of Facebook’s users are outside the U.S., and that appears to be where the social network’s growth is as well.

Last week Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the social network was at 750 million active users. With the number of active users in the U.S. hovering at 150 million, that means that 80% of the users are outside the country.

The folks at Facebook know this, and they’re increasingly directing efforts toward international growth – for example with a mobile app released yesterday called Facebook for Every Phone.

Built to work on any Java-enabled phone—more than 2,500 different phones according to the official announcement—the app aims to improve the experience for people with older or less powerful cellphones and pricey data plans. That’s just the sort of mobile user found commonly in developing countries, where many people have bypassed PCs and use mainly cellphones to connect online.

Underscoring the motives behind Facebook for Every Phone, the company said that it had signed agreements with 20 different carriers to provide free data access to customers using the app for the first 90 days of its availability. The carriers involved service the U.K. and Germany, countries that host a massive and mature user base, but also Egypt, Brazil, and the Philippines, countries where Facebook usage, while high, is still showing double-digit growth.

Meanwhile, the U.S., with 48.95% Facebook penetration, has shown signs of slowing.

The blog “Inside Facebook” reports that the mobile app, which allows for popular Facebook features such as News Feed and Photos, was designed to be less data intensive, keeping costs lower for mobile phone customers. The blog also mentions that the app was made possible by Facebook’s acquisition of Israel-based Snaptu in March.

The app also could allow Facebook to expand to more users. Users can import their phone contacts into Facebook’s Friend Finder, allowing the social network to suggest friends and prompt app owners to send invites to people not yet a part of Facebook.

It can be easy to ignore Facebook’s latest announcement because it ignores the power-user with the kitted-out smartphone and a 1GB data plan. But as ReadWriteWeb reminded its readers, a “principal of business is ‘go where the people are.’ When it comes to world wide mobile use, feature phones are where the people are.”

You think 750 million is a lot of people? If efforts like this succeed, we soon could be talking 1 billion.

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LivingSocial flew in staff to help launch LivingSocial Instant Deals here. The service lets small businesses offer discounts on the fly to boost traffic. For example, if a sandwich shop is having a slow afternoon, the store can offer a 30%-off-a-BLT deal that lasts from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. People with LivingSocial’s mobile app can use their smartphone’s location-sensing abilities to find Instant Deals near them.

LivingSocial hoped to plug Instant Deals, which launched in San Francisco Wednesday after starting earlier this year in Washington D.C. and New York City, in two big ways. The first involved selling $1 lunch vouchers – the company said Wednesday afternoon it sold close to 15,000 overall – for local restaurants. The second depended on the weather.

The prospects were cloudy Wednesday morning. Gray sky again. But by the afternoon, it had given way to sun – and to a plane that sent San Franciscans along the waterfront a couple of messages.
“#dollarlunchday was a win,” said one message. Said another: “Use Instant Deals.”

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LivingSocial flew in staff to help launch LivingSocial Instant Deals here. The service lets small businesses offer discounts on the fly to boost traffic. For example, if a sandwich shop is having a slow afternoon, the store can offer a 30%-off-a-BLT deal that lasts from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. People with LivingSocial’s mobile app can use their smartphone’s location-sensing abilities to find Instant Deals near them.

LivingSocial hoped to plug Instant Deals, which launched in San Francisco Wednesday after starting earlier this year in Washington D.C. and New York City, in two big ways. The first involved selling $1 lunch vouchers – the company said Wednesday afternoon it sold close to 15,000 overall – for local restaurants. The second depended on the weather.

The prospects were cloudy Wednesday morning. Gray sky again. But by the afternoon, it had given way to sun – and to a plane that sent San Franciscans along the waterfront a couple of messages.
“#dollarlunchday was a win,” said one message. Said another: “Use Instant Deals.”

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We’ve all been the victim of this: you look at a pair of pink, fluffy handcuffs on BondageMaster.com and for the next three months, the very same handcuffs appear on almost every other site you visit. Spooky.

I’m the victim of exactly this kind of cyber-stalking right now, at the hands of Fuze Meeting, the nothing-if-not-tireless web meeting service. Here’s what’s happening and how you can avoid it:

We were looking for a new web conferencing service for Velocity and came across Fuze. Looked interesting so we checked it out. In fact, we signed up for a year. Big mistake.

Even though we’ve bought the damn service, we’re now all being followed all over the web with Fuze Meeting banners and boxes and MPUs. Not just on a few sites: everywhere. It’s banner bullying.

And not just for a few weeks. Seemingly forever.

Worse than this: the clients we invite to our Fuze-hosted meetings are also subjected to the Stasi treatment. So essentially we’ve become a recuriting arm for this Hydra-headed marketing beast.

That’s more than embarrassing, it’s unethical, who gave Fuze permission to look in on our meetings and drop a cookie on our guests?

I’ve actually complained to Fuze, via customer support and direct to the marketing department. No reply. Just hundreds more ad impressions. (Yes, I can opt out of the Google targeting service — but I actually don’t want to. I LIKE relevant, targeted ads. I just don’t like Hannibal bloody Lecter following me everywhere I click).

It’s more than annoying, it’s stupid. Not only is Fuze wasting money throwing impressions at someone who has already bought, it’s also serving far, far too many impressions to a single prospect.

The concept that the Fuze team (and any other marketer considering retargeting) needs to discover is: Frequency Capping, simply putting a ceiling on the number of impressions you serve to any one prospect in a given time. Makes sense. And, according to Robin Davies of Mediaplex, implementing this simple rule in your ad server can dramatically increase the ROI of your display ad campaign.

The entire display ad market depends on the consumer’s willingness to accept our cookies. If marketers abuse the privilege, the industry risks breaking this pact. Retargeting is already a bit off-putting to many online shoppers. It feels intrusive. But pushed to its limits, retargeting could easily trigger an anti-cookie law that would set online marketing back to the dial-up days. And we’d deserve it.

Lesson for the day: Don’t retarget people who have already bought. If you’re a hosted app, don’t cookie people your customers invited in to your domain. And if you’re a high-volume advertiser, put a frequency cap on it.

Despite the fact that online group buying is now generating billions of dollars per year in sales globally, some believe that market is overhyped and, more importantly, unsustainable.

Skeptics commonly cite to the fact that group buying websites often do far more for consumers than they do for the businesses which have flocked to them. At some point, they argue, merchants will realize that they’re getting the short end of the stick, and eventually inventory of deals will dry up.

There’s also the problem of commoditization. Group buying deals are everywhere these days, and the number of online properties through which they’re being offered is still growing rapidly.

The latest evidence of that: Mercury Radio Arts, the media company owned by radio and television personality Glenn Beck, has launched Markdown.com. As the name suggests, it’s a group buying site with a slight Glenn Beck twist. According to a statement issued by Beck:

Markdown is a place where I will be able to connect you directly with the
products and retailers that I love. From the best ice cream in America that
you’ve never heard of, to a great summer beach read, to exclusive discounts at
the name brand retailers you already know by heart-Markdown will offer all of
that and more. But, best of all, Markdown is a place where my personal
slogan-value and values-will be brought to life.

Beyond the ‘values‘ marketing spiel, Markdown.com is pretty much indistinguishable from the dozens upon dozens of other group buying websites that are trying to bask in Groupon’s glory. This, of course, doesn’t mean that it won’t be a profitable endeavor; thanks to the audience Beck commands, it probably will.

But therein lies the problem with the market: if every individual or company with an audience jumps on the group buying bandwagon, the commoditization of the group buying model will only accelerate. Already, we’ve seen newspapers and popular blogs entering the space, but the market may be close to a tipping point.

For consumers, there’s a ‘daily deal‘ at every turn. Will fatigue soon set in? Which kinds of deals will consumers continue to go for, and which will see increasingly diminished returns? For merchants, the number of providers offering to run deals is exploding, and in most instances, there’s little differentiation between them. How do you choose?

As I wrote nearly a year ago:

…publishers will inevitably face a catch-22: although these models are
wildly popular right now, growing competition and commoditization will
increasingly strain their sustainability.

There’s also the risk that competition and commoditization will kill the goose that laid the golden egg. If every publisher is hawking 50% off deals on a daily basis, the deals lose their value, and the urgency that drives sales today will probably be reduced. After all, if you can always find similar deals, chances are you’ll eventually become ‘numb‘ to them since you know you can always find them.

Love him or hate him, he has proven himself to be a shrewd media businessman. But when somebody like Beck starts hawking daily deals, it should send a powerful warning to others that the group buying market’s best days may be behind it.

When it comes to patent trolls, however, some of the world’s largest companies can’t find enough food. When faced with demands from companies that do little more than buy and license patents, tech stalwarts prefer feeding to fighting.

And for good reason: patent litigation is expensive, and a lost lawsuit can be even more expensive.

But Apple is learning the hard way that feeding the trolls isn’t a painless path. Recently, independent developers with iPhone and iPad apps making use of Apple’s in-app purchasing capabilities were contacted by Lodsys, a patent troll, alleging that their use of in-app purchases constitutes infringement of a patent it owns.

Not surprisingly, Lodsys, whose patent bears the lovely name “methods
and systems for gathering information from units of a commodity across a
network“, was more than willing to resolve the matter with the targeted developers, for a fee.

Yesterday, Apple responded: developers building for its platform aren’t guilty of infringement because…Apple has already licensed the Lodsys patent and that covers its developers. In a letter to Lodsys, Apple states:

The technology that is targeted in your notice letters is technology that Apple
is expressly licensed under the Lodsys patents to offer to Apple’s App Makers…These licensed products and services enable Apple’s App Makers to communicate
with end users through the use of Apple’s own licensed hardware, software, APIs, memory,
servers, and interfaces, including Apple’s App Store. Because Apple is
licensed under Lodsys’ patents to offer such technology to its App Makers, the
App Makers are entitled to use this technology free from any infringement claims
by Lodsys.

Will Lodsys back off now? Time will tell. But even if it does, the drama highlights the tangled web that has been weaved between the world’s top technology companies and the patent holding companies that exist solely to extract money from them.

Under normal circumstances, Apple developers would never know that there might be a patent covering in-app purchasing functionality licensed from a patent troll. But thanks to Lodsys’ aggressive behavior, we have a glimpse of the dirty dancing that goes on around patents.

What’s interesting here is that so many seem resigned to participate in the dancing. When Lodsys’ letters first emerged, Marco Arment of Tumblr and Instapaper fame suggested that developers were better off feeding the patent troll than fighting it.

Patrick Igoe, an intellectual property attorney, took issue with that stance. He noted that Lodsys’ claims against independent developers may not be valid, but more importantly, he observed:

A Lodsys-like business model seems to depend heavily on developers holding beliefs like Arment’s. Making money by collecting small amounts from large numbers of developers requires a low transaction cost for each collection. Developers who roll over based on these beliefs keep transaction costs low.

…If no one stands up and says “we’re not infringing” in this round…what do you think Lodsys will do once it collects its first round of checks? Those who settle in early rounds will likely be funding the actions against other developers.

He’s right, of course, and given the number of patents that have been issues that could conceivably cover all sorts of functionality, developers likely wouldn’t just be dealing with Lodsys. You can be sure that patent trolls, like wild animals, will quickly flock to the nearest source of easy food.

So what’s the solution? Without reform that restores the patent to its intended purpose, there is no way small and mid-sized businesses can fight the Lodsys’ of the world. So it starts with companies like Apple. If they feed instead of fight, you can be sure that this won’t be the last time patent trolls come to developers seeking every last crumb.

Hopefully, the disruption to flights won’t be as widespread as last year, but concerned holiday makers and business travellers will still be looking to online channels for up to date information. 

I’ve been looking at the websites and social media channels for some of the airlines with disrupted services… 

What should airlines be doing to keep people informed online? 

People are looking for up to date information, and airlines are faced with the problem of adapting to a rapidly changing situation. At the moment, the ash cloud is mainly affecting Scotland, but it’s predicted to move south later today, though changing wind patterns mean that accurate predictions are difficult to make. 

Airlines have the opportunity to keep customers informed by using their websites and social media channels to provide accurate and up to date information. 

This can take pressure off call centres, saving customers the pain of waiting in call queues and, if flights are cancelled or delayed, customers need not sit in airport terminals for hours on end. Information has to be up to date though, or customers will simply turn to offline channels. 

Information on airline websites

At the very least, I would expect to see prominent notices on websites, informing customers of the current situation. 

As reported by the BBC earlier today, BA is one of the airlines which has announced cancellations of flights between London and Scotland today, yet its homepage offers no information on this. 

(UPDATE: As pointed out by @jharrower on Twitter, there is some information about the ash cloud under the ‘travel news’ section on the right. I missed this initially, though that does suggest that it should be more prominent.)

KLM provides a great example, with clear messaging on its homepage that links to detailed info about cancelled flights, refunds, rebookings etc: 

The notice on Ryanair’s homepage could perhaps be more prominent, but it’s still there, linking to a page which provides information on its cancelled flights, as well as a dig at the ’misguided invention by the UK Met Office and the CAA’.

How are airlines using social media? 

In the aftermath of the volcanic ash crisis last year, I spoke to Icelandair’s eMarketing manager Kjartan Sverrisson about how the airline used social media, and especially Twitter, to keep customers informed.

According to Kjarten, while Facebook can be used for this sort of information, he found Twitter to be a more appropriate channel for providing updates. 

This is because the nature of such travel disruption and a rapidly changing situation calls for frequent updates, which could flood users’ newsfeeds on Facebook, something which is less of a problem on Twitter. 

The airline is still providing updates and responding to queries on Facebook though. It may be less suitable than Twitter, but if that’s where your customers are…

Naturally, Icelandair is using Twitter again this year, along with frequent updates to its website. Note that the airline asks customers to DM details so they can follow up individual queries.

A number of other affected airlines are using Twitter for ash cloud updates. While the British Airways homepage didn’t provide much information, it is providing regular updates and answering customer queries via Twitter.

So is KLM, which has also been updating regularly on Twitter, and responding to customer questions. It also has an account which publishes automated flight status updates: 

Lessons learned from last year’s crisis

So far, the Twitter and social media accounts I’ve mentioned here are doing these three things well: 

Keep it simple

Messages on the KLM and Icelandair Twitter accounts are simple and clear, linking to further information where appropriate.

While individual queries about a particular flight can perhaps be answered via Twitter, more detailed information is better presented on the main website. 

Present a human face

People don’t want to see seemingly automated information being pumped out regularly via social media, anymore than they want to listen to recorded updates when they phone customer services. 

If people can see that there is someone there, answering direct questions and empathising with customers, then the information provided is more likely to be seen as up to date and reliable. 

Monitor and respond regularly

While the Twitter account may not need as much attention normally, in the case of a crisis like this, it will need constant monitoring and effective management to ensure that questions are answered and people are provided with regular updates. 

Last year, Icelandair used CoTweet to keep a track of the situation, ensure that questions were answered and avoid any duplication. This or similar management tools can help in such a crisis. 

Nichola Stott is founder and director of SEO and social media agency the media flow, and previously worked as head of UK commercial search partners at Yahoo! 

We’ve been asking Nichola about the role of the PR in SEO, the merging of search and social media, and mobile and local search…

Nichola will also be looking into the future of search in her presentation at Econsultancy’s Future of Digital Marketing event in London on June 15. 

What will you be speaking about at The Future of Digital Marketing event?

It’s a very brief high-level presentation so I probably can’t say much more than the focus, which will be how technology developments facilitate greater personal relevance.

What do you see as the key trends in search at the moment?

Again trends are technology-led, so we’re seeing clear and obvious growth in search visits on mobile, coupled with an increasing contribution to the query mix from local.

How do you see mobile search developing over the next couple of years? How much of an impact will mobile have on SEO?

Search on mobile devices will of course continue to grow, though SEO concerns from a technical perspective are becoming in some ways simpler as smart devices like iPhone, Android etc. offer such a good quality browsing experience that there’s no need to duplicate or replicate your site on a mobile domain or sub-domain.

One site, with different external style sheets is a growing and efficient solution. Focus therefore should be on understanding the motive, intent and personal nature of search on mobile and making sure your content and experience caters to this.

How will the coming together of search and social change the job of the SEO?

It’s a job that continually evolves and SEO professionals are well-used to constant learning.

As always, the search engine goal is to retrieve and rank by machine algorithms, a set of results most relevant to humans but now we’re seeing identity, authority, personal connection and preference data incorporated.

It makes the job more varied and interesting and seems to be leading to a merging of skills and disciplines as there are fewer hard lines between say, an SEO and a social media professional.

How significant are developments such as Google’s +1 button?

Hugely significant for so many reasons. Firstly, this mechanism provides for a peer and personal recommendation element which can cross all other data types and components. Imagining how that data could look engine-side, it could almost be considered another dimension or texture.

Secondly (and along with social circle) it’s the first time we’ve seen an open attempt to deliver resonance, not just relevance or preference.

Currently Google is pretty much dependent on the Twitter fire hose for authority data and the existence of a Google profile for connectivity. As +1 rolls out at page level we should see a sharp increase in Google Profile uptake and therefore more data, more meaning and more development potential.

How useful is social media for SEO?

Prior to Google, search engines used on-page elements and keywords on the page to rank websites. Google provided an infinitely more relevant experience by incorporating link-data as a popularity model (in the PageRank algorithm).

Today we have additional enormous sources of data about person-to-person connections and interactions. It would be ludicrous to imagine this data is ignored.

We have had a few discussions on this blog about the role of the PR in SEO (and linkbuilding in particular), what is your take on this?

It’s a topic that is extremely important to me as I have a strong PR background (prior to working for Yahoo! I spent five years at PR Newswire), and am a real advocate of PR-led link-building campaigns and techniques.

I honestly believe that working in collaborative teams will drive the overall quality of work that both parties provide to mutual clients; not to mention the benefits to end users that can be seen from quality marketing techniques.

I feel so strongly about this that in partnership with Claire Thompson; (an extremely experienced and widely respected PR consultant and founder of WavesPR) we launched SEO PR Training in February of this year.

We offer training to teach SEO professionals about the industry; skills and techniques of PR professionals (and vice versa) but we feel it is important to point out that we’re not suggesting SEOs “have a go” at PR, or PRs “have a go” at SEO but that by understanding more about a closely-related profession we can work together and smarter.

One thing I think that’s really interesting and significant to point out about SEO PR Training is that a lot of our requests for training and consultation have come from extremely large blue-chip organisations who understand and can see the potential synergies between their marketing agencies.

However need external assistance and consultation to help inform, mediate  and define process between them.

Our most recent Search Engine Benchmarking report found a growing interest in local search, (though local search budgets are still low compared to the US). Have you noticed more interest in this from clients?

Absolutely, though I’d say a lot of this is market and device driven. We’re very likely to find many local and independent outlets with a web presence, via social media even if not their own site; which will continue to grow.

I wonder if that might go some way to explaining the non-correlative impact on local search budget? Perhaps local marketing spend is going more towards social media presence which might often be self-managed?

Google is continuing its interest in vertical search, as shown most recently by the launch of Google Advisor – how does this affect SEO, and how can brands respond to the challenge?

I think this is a concern to many affiliate- model websites as Google seeks to deliver more comparative data in-SERP.

Although the impact to brand might not be such of a threat providing your site is well built, informative and marked-up to allow Google to efficiently interpret your rich data. What we might imagine is some impact to search visits on terms at the start of the purchase decision.  

What do data patterns in search tell us about human nature, and how can SEOs adapt to this?

There is something about the intensely private nature of search that reveals a lot about human nature, or perhaps it’s that we perceive the search process to be isolated and private, so there’s very little to no self-censorship.

We might expect that global events and tragic disasters may trigger the largest search spikes, but in fact it is when popular celebrities die.

Whatever we may think about ourselves, our product or our cause; understanding popular culture, desire and motivation is extremely valuable to any marketer.

How has working search-engine side affected your role in SEO? 

I know I’m very fortunate to have had the experience of working for a search engine and I loved every minute of working for Yahoo! On a practical note, in my capacity as head of UK commercial search partnerships I was naturally very close to the business and had high-level access to business metrics and revenues.

That level of insight gives you the insider perspective on the goals of a search engine business and the interplay between the different goal-performance metrics, which shapes an instinct for understanding quickly how and why each algorithmic change may impact those it impacts.

Viruses and malware are a fact of life for Windows owners, and as a
result, there is a sizable ecosystem of security software vendors whose
mission in life is to protect PC owners from the constantly growing
number of threats.

But Mac owners may be getting a taste of the hassles PC
owners have become accustomed to…

According to reports, a growing number of Mac owners have fallen victim to malware software called Mac Defender, which tricks its victims into believing that it is legitimate security software.

Such attacks are common on the PC, so it’s not exactly surprising to see malware authors applying the same approach on a different platform.

The Mac is no longer a niche luxury for creatives; it’s now penetrating even the corporate market. Last quarter, corporate Mac sales grew an impressive 66%. That’s good news for Apple, but it also provides hackers and fraudsters an increasingly attractive target.

Obviously, the possibility that Macs would eventually be more aggressively targeted by ‘bad guys‘ isn’t in itself surprising. If anything, it’s surprising that it has taken this long for sophisticated and polished Mac malware to emerge and gain some traction.

Unfortunately, Apple isn’t taking a proactive approach to nip the problem in the bud. It has essentially instructed its support staff to deny that a problem exists, and unlike Microsoft, isn’t yet willing to get its hands dirty helping Mac owners clean up their malware messes.

At some point, that will likely have to change. That’s because Apple is facing an economics challenge, not a technology challenge. With Macs playing such an important role in the computing ecosystem, the profit potential of targeting them will increasingly give criminals the incentive to create more sophisticated Mac attacks.

No matter how good Apple is, it will realistically need to acknowledge this and treat its customers to the truth.

The Cloud changes all this. By pooling and sharing resources, the Cloud makes it possible for us to treat servers as if they are abundant. This in turn means we must change our management style.

When resources are abundant, you only take what you need right now. You allocate and free up resources in response to demand. You pay only for what you use. You compete not through ownership of scarce resources, but through intelligent use of abundant resources. 

This is what the Cloud does, it makes cheap, commoditised resources available in abundance, for you to allocate and free up in response to demand.

That has big implications for the way you specify infrastructure. Specifications are no longer about technology; they’re about creating a framework that lets you match capacity to demand.  So the core of your specification needs to address three factors:

Demand

How much computational capacity do you need, and when do you need it? How does this demand shift over time? Are there daily, monthly or annual patterns? Are there underlying trends? How much uncertainty is associated with those patterns?

To get at these factors, your specification will probably draw scenarios illustrating what your demand might look like across different timescales.

These scenarios will also show the range of likely demand at any point – minimum, most likely and maximum. (And note that a large range isn’t necessarily bad: the Cloud might help you exploit such variation. For traditional systems, a large range is definitely bad: it means you need to grab more resources, even though you won’t use them most of the time.)

Availabilty

How critical is it that this capacity is there when you need it? High availability costs more, so you need to be rigorous here. Look at each piece of functionality in your systems and think about the consequences of an outage.

Will customers be affected, or is it only seen by internal staff? Does it drive revenue? Are other functions dependent on it?

Classify your functionality against the level of availability it really needs, then map this back to your demand scenarios to draw out what proportion of your capacity needs the highest level of availability, and what proportion can live with lower levels. This is the second key factor in any specification.

Manageability

You will need the capability to match available capacity to demand as the situation changes. How will you monitor resource utilisation? How will you identify unexpected events – demand peaks or resource failures, for example? How will you respond to these events?

How will you reallocate capacity in response to predictable trends, say due to seasonal variations? What aspects of this can be automated, and what aspects need human oversight? What will you manage yourself, and what will the service provider manage for you?

Manageability is the Achilles heel of the Cloud: tools for managing cloud resources are only just beginning to emerge. So you need to be very clear about just what you need. You may also need to be prepared to spend some time developing the necessary tools.

A good specification is therefore going to identify the classes of demand that your systems must satisfy. It will define a set of scenarios illustrating how much computational capacity you are likely to need in each demand class, and the level of availability you need against that capacity. And it will identify what facilities must be available to allocate, monitor and manage this capacity. Simple really.

The problem is standards. The market for cloud services lacks consistent standards. This means that each vendor measures and prices for capacity in different ways. It means they all define availability differently. It means that management tools are generally patchy and weakly integrated. Finally, it means that application licensing models may constrain the infrastructure options which are available to you.

In the absence of well-defined and accepted standards, it takes a lot more work to set out your requirements. You’ll need to define your own measures for capacity and availability. You’ll almost certainly need to find ways to compare one vendor’s apples with another vendor’s oranges when it comes to pricing and service levels. Allocate plenty of time for such work if you want to run a successful procurement.

This work is worth doing. It will help you build a clear picture in your own mind of just what you need. That’s invaluable while the hype is strong and the standards are weak.

Why is this? How does it impact marketers? And what can they do about it?

Think about the online customer journey through many large informational sites as a kind of train voyage. Digital marketers are editing the wine list in the dining car, when their attention should probably be on staying on the rails.

Four out of ten passengers don’t even find the station because of bad signage (poor SEO practice). Two buy tickets to the wrong destination (unclear categories). One gets motion sickness (random use of colors and fonts). Another changes trains accidentally (inconsistent link text). Two simply fall off the train (broken links).

How many customer journeys fulfill any reasonable expectation of predictability? One in four marketers told Forrester that improved customer experiences would be the primary business driver for their web content management investments in 2011.

They’d be wise to start by looking at how their site performs on basic usability issues. The worst-case examples above have some statistical accuracy.

An examination of 900 top websites from the KWD web ranking list showed:

• Almost 18% of the companies had five or more average errors of accessibility, usability or compliance per page.

• The 100 largest companies averaged more than six errors per page.

• Of 88,000 web pages scanned, one-third lacked any basic meta descriptions.

• Ironically, Google ranked 310th in terms of SEO, accessibility and usability.

• Only three of the 920 websites averaged less than one error per page.

Why this dysfunction? A recent paper from Accenture describes the web as a place untouched yet by traditional business disciplines (Total Quality Management, design for maintainability, etc.).

At the same time, broadband and mobile connectivity have led to an explosion in the volume of content needing management.

As with many things, the problems seem to boil down to people and culture. As the needs of large sites,  and large, multi-site web estates, grow and the teams that manage them grow proportionally, the structures and tools to ensure the site experience stays on the rails haven’t kept up.

The remedies for large website dysfunction seem to fall into two groups, symptomatic and systematic. Symptomatic remedies fix specific issues, such as broken links. Systematic remedies address the disease behind these issues.

Here are five ways, some systematic and some symptomatic, that marketers can assess and fix these basic website quality issues:

Web governance

As Econsultancy guest blogger Graham Oakes recently described in his post “Why should I care about governance” and others have eloquently defined, web governance is the way organisations make decisions and create accountability for websites.

It has a bottom-line impact on sites’ usability. The gold standard in governance today: A recent document from BSI called PAS 124 (there’s also a free guide to PAS 124 and web governance from Magus).

Global content studies

The Gilbane Group has published a series of white papers, case studies and best practice reports that describe how organisations can get the most out of their content management systems.  

Communities like Econsultancy

J. Boye has also established a number of communities for web operations professionals that provide an excellent venue to share knowledge and experience. They are invitation-only and selective, but worth it.

SEOMoz

This SEO marketing stalwart provides a handful of beautiful tools for managing the symptomatic faults of website usability. Note that it has recently updated their on-page keyword optimisation tool and crawl test.

Web Quality Platforms

A hybrid between systematic and symptomatic approaches, ActiveStandards is a popular piece of cloudware that helps dozens of large organisations track the compliance and performance of their site content.

The dashboard and reports cross the divide from symptoms to systems. (Yeah, this is a shameless plug for a client, but they’re honestly alone in the market, and there’s real merit to the tool. Promise.)

For the first two decades of the web, it seems like sites have simply trundled along the rails of quality, usability and operability, with ad hoc fixes and teams to guide them.

With the explosion of devices and content, bigger sites and multinational web estates are struggling to keep up. Expect to see the web governance and compliance space to blossom in the coming years.

We’d love to hear marketers’ experience with website compliance and operations issues in the comments.

Perhaps more interesting is the fact that people are as likely to return to social media after they have visited the site. Travel sites are part of a social media experience online and brands should do more to capitalise on this behaviour.

The latest L2 Digital IQ Index for travel report evaluates the ‘digital competency’ of brands in the travel industry, from their own site, to their digital marketing, mobile experience and use of social media.

Airlines lead the pack (with Delta, Southwest and American Airlines taking the top three spots) and hotels chains follow. This is no surprise given that nearly half of airline bookings are made online and big efforts have been made to use Twitter and Facebook for customer service in some parts of the airline industry.

The Cruise category lags behind, although is the source of many great case studies such as the way Norwegian Cruise Line uses reviews and communities on its own site to help in the sales process and once a passenger is booked on a trip.

However, the main message coming out of this report is the role of social media in the travel booking process, and the work that those in the industry could still do to get greater value from this.

The analysis of traffic to and from the main sites for the travel brands in the study shows clearly the role social media plays in the users journeys online:

• For 78% of sites, social media was a top eight source of referral traffic, and overall 7% of traffic to travel sites came from social media.
• For 90% of sites, social media was a top destination site after visiting their site (accounting for 11% of downstream traffic overall).

This reinforces what we see from the way people use social media when researching, choosing booking travel online. Social is a key part of how customers experience travel online and social media sites are contributing significantly to the success travel brands are seeing online.

Airlines have recognised this and are typically using Twitter, shown by the fact that nine of the top 10 travel brands on Twitter are airlines. Many have been working actively to grow the engagement they are getting on this channel.

A notable example would be Air New Zealand’s 12 Days of Valentines Twitter campaign earlier in 2011, where followers were encouraged to respond to the question “What is your favorite cuddle position?” every day for two weeks.

The response judged the most creative each day won a return flight to Auckland or London in their new Skycouch seat (designed to allow you to cuddle!) In two weeks they grew their followers on Twitter by 76% in two weeks and also grew the engagement and interaction they were having with these.

Facebook is also well used across the industry. From Delta fully integrating its booking engine into Facebook (a great example of F-Commerce) to Walt Disney World Resorts capturing experiences and offering travel advice and planning tools on its Facebook page.

However, perhaps the most surprising finding from the report, given this central role social plays in the customer’s journey online, is the lack of true social tools on many travel sites:

• 40% of travel brands don’t incorporate video on their websites.
• 72% of brands don’t use any social sharing.
• 80% of brands don’t include Facebook Like.
• 91% of brands don’t allow reviews on site. 

Whilst we can see the strong role of social media sites before and after visiting the brand site, there is a real need for more social tools and a more social experience on the travel site itself.

If 7% of traffic is coming from social media, then greater use of social sharing (including Facebook Like) would only increase this as links are shared more widely as people find, book and enjoy a travel experience.

Where sites allow user reviews, there was a reported increase in traffic of 24%. They bring more authenticity to the site and can bring a significant hike in traffic to boot.

Travel brands are getting huge benefits from social media and could make it work much harder for them. They are typically using Twitter and Facebook well, but the real benefit long term will come from adding a social layer to their own sites.

Whilst the cruise category is lagging behind airlines and hotels overall, it is the source of many great case studies of adding a social layer like this.

One notable example is Norwegian Cruise Line’s ‘Freestyle Voices‘, an online community on its own site which incorporates reviews from past cruisers, questions from future passengers and the ability to find and talk to people who will be on the same cruise as you.

This kind of social layer adds more value to the brand’s main site. And if used alongside the great work and real results we see from good use of Twitter, Facebook and other such external sites, it will see the travel continue to grow its use of and the benefits it is getting from social media.

Most of us will have experience of meeting people who are apathetic or downright resistant to digital. This is just a fact of life, but it can be problematic when that person is your boss.

In some companies I believe that generational change will be required before they’ll properly adapt to a multichannel world that includes lots of digital, mobile and social networking activity. Worryingly, I think some of the biggest, most established companies have serious issues in this area. 

It needs to be explained that ‘digital’ does not mean ‘tech’. The internet is largely driven by people and the content they produce. That said, the detail is very important when it comes to optimising the customer experience. Digital is a key part of the overall experience and it requires investment and time. Unless the boss and all other stakeholders buy into the idea of doing it properly – and until they truly believe in it – you’re always going to be up against it. 

Earlier today I gave some thought to the things you can do to persuade a boss with a Luddite mindset to embrace digital, rather than to fear it. I also asked the question to our Twitter followers: “What can you do to make the boss more digitally savvy?” 

Below are a bunch of ideas that will help you to make the boss see the light. For it is very bright and shiny, and will not dim anytime soon.

[PS – I’m going to use the word ‘him’ rather than ‘him or her’ for 'boss' on general editorial principles, and not because I’m sexist]

Prove the business case

This is the first thing to try to do. It should be focused on the financial aspects, i.e. how to generate more money or spend less. It can be about driving efficiency within the organisation too. Show how digital adds value. 

Take the boss to a good conference / event

And not one where you are going to be constantly pitched to by feverish suppliers. Learning-based events are the best. 

Connect him with his peers

You can do this both online and offline. Econsultancy runs roundtable-based events such as Digital Cream (in the UK, Dubai and Singapore) and Peer Summit in the US, which allow client-side people to get their heads together for knowledge-sharing in a relatively informal setting. It works very well.

Show him the business data to prove effectiveness

Ideally yours, or otherwise a competitor’s (which you can glean from annual reports, interviews and case studies). 

Present a case study

You can look at the big picture, or you can go niche and focus on one particular topic. Remember to bring it back to the numbers wherever possible.

Explain that we live in a multichannel world

More than 40% of Boots customers buy online and collect in store. 58% of UK shoppers check products out in store, then buy online. Around 19% of shoppers use their mobiles while out shopping to look up product information, reviews and pricing. 39% of shoppers always research products online before heading to the high street to buy. I have so many more… the point is that consumers don’t think in terms of ‘channels’, and perceive brands as single entities (which they are). Businesses need to wake up to this, and fast.

Overload him with stats

If statistics and trends are his game then download our Internet Stats Compendium and allow him to fill his boots.

Benchmark and evaluate the competition

Numbers aside, you can demonstrate what your competitors are doing. Show the boss websites, apps, Facebook pages, Twitter profiles, Google placements, blogs, and so on. Some of these things will be great (make the boss jealous). Others will suck (tell him that you can crush your competitors like a bug). Find opportunities and mine the gaps. 

Set the boss a challenge to find something they know nothing about

Sit back and watch as he turns to digital channels for the answers. If he finds the answer via some other non-digital process then show how him how digital offers a quicker, easier route to knowledge. 

Demonstrate scale

Show realtime results on Google. Show Twitter trends (choose carefully!). Watch them quickly stream down his monitor screen. If scale doesn’t get him excited then he may be a lost cause.

Talk in a common language

Using the above example, and if your boss runs an old school retail business, then why not describe all this realtime user activity as ‘footfall’? 

Avoid jargon at all costs

Don’t do it. You’ll alienate him, and you won’t sound big and clever.

Identify potential clients via keyword research

Find prospective clients / leads on Google, on Twitter, in forums. Then demonstrate how easy it is to start talking to them. Have a conversation with somebody you don’t know on Twitter by responding to a tweet or searching for a relevant question to answer. Prove how straightforward it can be to interact and influence people. 

Show him the Google data

The actual numbers. Use Google’s keyword tool to highlight how many people search on keyphrases relevant to your business. Make the boss aware of Google’s mindblowing reach. Scale normally raises the excitement levels of senior management.

Now show him your Google Analytics data

Assuming you have a website, that is. In my experience, allowing newbies to play around with your visitor data is one of the more engaging things you can do. Show them what kind of things can be measured, and explain why these things matter. Then you’ll be able to talk about how to improve those numbers.

Talk about best practice

This follows on from the analytics data. How do you reduce bounce rates? How can you convince more people to convert? You might need to make some contextual real world analogies that make sense to the boss. Don’t blind him with science. 

Set the boss a task and empathise, e.g. ‘buy something online’

Watch as he gets frustrated (as we all do). Feel his pain. Explain that these are the barriers that need to be smashed in order to create a great customer experience. Identify the parts of your website that need attention. Websites don’t have to suck. 

Prove the concept first

There are low barriers to entry for digital. Start small, start cheap. Launch a blog. Set up a Twitter account. Plug in Google Analytics if you haven’t already. And then give the boss a presentation on your progress. 

Show the human side to digital

Many digital aliens believe that the internet is a place for techies, or the tech-savvy, when in fact this isn’t really the case at all. There’s also an animal side to digital, in the event your boss is a cat fanatic. 

Bring in an evangelist

You might need a wingman. If you go down this route be sure to opt for a personable, charming, straight-talking type, rather than a hellfire mile-a-minute fearmonger.

Send him great web links on his favourite topics

Vintage cars. Cigars. Golf. Money. You know, the things a boss likes. Whatever floats his boat. Usage is an essential component in attitudinal change.

Send the boss to an Econsultancy training session

This wasn’t even my idea but our Fast Track Digital Marketing Training is about the best thing any beginner can do (we send all of our new non-digital hires onto it). We also provide in-company training if you have a platoon of digital dodgers. And we run training courses all over the world.

Put together a daily digest of web trends / hot stories

“Even if one link a day is clicked on it cumulatively changes culture,” says @neilmajor.

Play the BMW augmented reality ad

“Get him to love it first, and then talk about implementation,” suggests @MagdaFrankowska. 

Show him the ropes

The actual ropes. @David_Abreu suggests that you can “help him learn by doing”. For example, demonstrating how Twitter might work within the organisation by using an internal microblogging service like Yammer. Or perhaps you can publish something onto a blog (“it’s easier than using Microsoft Word…”). Be careful though as some people’s eyes might glaze over if you push too hard, too soon (despite how ridiculously easy it is to use these tools). Theory first, practical stuff later.

Buy your boss an iPad

It is a great interface for consuming the web and there’s a lot to be said for gestural user interfaces: they can make the user more at ease. Point and click using your finger is much more intuitive than by using a mouse.

Explain the Zappos story

This is about proving how important the customer experience is, and showing how customer satisfaction leads to loyalty, advocacy and a much more profitable business. The key number is that 75% of Zappos business is generated by repeat customers. And remember that once upon a time they said you could never sell shoes online!

“Get him an Econsultancy membership…”

We think you’re great, @peweedesign. If you go down this route then point him at our beginner’s guides and business cases, rather than the best practice guide to technical SEO.

Multiple tips of the hat to all who responded to the call for ideas on Twitter, notably @jonnychallenger, @WebgainsUK, @Koozai_Mike, @KamPullar, @akronsound, @iancreek, @ryanpaultaylor, @zacklinyoung and @katefairhurst, as well as those named above.

Do you have any other ideas? What worked for you? Please leave a comment below…

Yesterday, LinkedIn, the popular social network for professionals went public. And boy did investors party like it was 1999.

The company’s shares were priced at $45 on Wednesday, and debuted on the New York Stock Exchange at a whopping $83 per share. By the market’s close, LNKD sat at $94, giving the company an $8.9bn valuation.

Given that LinkedIn earned just $15.4m on $243m in revenue last year, it’s no surprise that those who still remember 1999 are scratching their heads and asking the question, “Haven’t we been here before?”

The answer to that: yes, and no. By any reasonable measure, LinkedIn’s valuation cannot be supported by the company’s fundamentals alone.

But past isn’t always prologue, and it would be a bit presumptuous to assume that just because LinkedIn’s valuation seems to significantly outpace its financials we’re at the beginning of a new bubble in the public markets that will see overhyped internet companies eventually leaving retail investors, like grandma, bankrupt.

The reality is that LinkedIn’s valuation is more a reflection of the thirst investors in the public markets have for hot internet issues than it is of collective insanity 2.0.

There haven’t been a whole lot of sexy consumer internet IPOs in the past decade, which explains why companies like LinkedIn and OpenTable attract so much demand. That demand, of course, outstrips supply, so LinkedIn and OpenTable trade at significant premiums.

The good news is that unlike so many of the companies that went public in the late 1990s, today’s internet hotshots have real revenue and most are either close to profitability or already profitable.

The public markets may overvalue them, but nobody can say that they aren’t viable businesses right now. The bad news, of course, is that even though markets can remain irrational longer than men can stay solvent, insane valuations are eventually corrected.

Ironically, the key to ensuring that valuations don’t get too insane, almost certainly leading to more painful corrections down the road, is for more technology companies to go public. Few are asking for a repeat of Boom 1.0, but LinkedIn hints that the public markets still believe that internet’s best days are ahead of it. And that’s probably a good thing for all of us.

The user interface was designed in-house, while the site was developed by Usablenet, which has also worked on mobile sites for John Lewis and M&S. 

Site search and navigation

Mothercare has opted for a simple mobile site design, and one which has been optimised for smartphones. Visitors to the site from other devices will see a more basic version. 

As well as a prominent search box, the site has very clear navigational options, represented by 12 ‘buttons’:

This is a good approach for a site which will be accessed by people on touchscreen phones, as it avoid the problem of clicking on the wrong link. 

As users navigate through the various sections of the site, filtering options allow them to narrow the available product range, and make the remaining results more relevant: 

Product pages

Research suggests that people want the user experience on mobile commerce sites to match that of desktop sites, meaning the same level of detail, product information and functionality that helps them decide on and make a purchase. 

Mothercare achieves this with its product pages. There is a good amount of detail (product specs, suitable ages, dimensions etc) for items such as prams and car seats, as well as multiple product photos: 

Any product reviews from the main website are shown on mobile, and calls to action are nice and clear: 

Checkout process

The checkout has been optimised for mobile users, and also avoids making new customers go through a registration process before checkout, only asking for an email. 

The checkout is well-designed and works well, but it is split over several pages, which means more page loads for users who may be on less than perfect 3G connections. 

The more page loads, the slower the process is for users, so having things like selecting delivery options on a separate page should perhaps be avoided. 

Conclusion

Mobile commerce is growing, with 10m UK consumers conducting a transaction by mobile last year, but unfortunately, 83% experienced some kind of problem when making a purchase.

This means that retailers need to ensure that mobile commerce sites are usable and designed to make payments as easy as possible, and Mothercare’s site fits the bill. 

But are these top exporting companies holding themselves back by not going multilingual?

Despite the UK being the world’s sixth largest exporter of goods and services, nearly 70% of British SMEs aren’t exporting, nor are they likely to, according to a recent survey by the British Chamber of Commerce. So it’s encouraging to see that every entry on the International Track 100 has seen its foreign sales double.

The release of the Fast Track 100 list coincides with a new report from the European Commission which found that 9 out of 10 EU internet users agreed that given a choice, they would prefer to visit a website in their own native language. 

I was curious to find after a quick Google trawl that only 24 of the 100 International Fast Track companies had a version of their main website in a language other than English. And how many in the top ten had translated sites? A baffling zero.

While their success and appearance alone in such a list is to be applauded, it raises the important question of exactly why these companies are not choosing to reach out to consumers in their own tongue and localise their e-commerce websites.

Indeed, the European Commission’s report found that 42% of all respondents would never buy anything online that they couldn’t read about in their native language. These are all potential customers that over three-quarters of the 100 fastest-growing UK companies are missing out on.

And the more you look at the facts, the more obvious it is that businesses—especially those looking to grow overseas—should be getting involved with the foreign language internet.

For starters, you’re sure to see a higher ROI for online marketing campaigns in language other than English simply because there is less foreign language content overall, and therefore less competition. It makes reaching the top of the search engine rankings much easier, much more cost-effective and paves the way for those all-important click-throughs and conversions. 

Of those businesses on the list that have already taken advantage of the foreign language internet, we must surmise that these efforts have bolstered their success in an otherwise fragile market.

Online betting powerhouse, PKR (at number 41), for example, tailors its user experience according to what language the consumer speaks, while number 14, Chain Reaction Cycles, benefits from the simple business formula of selling its goods in seven different languages across the world.

It makes perfect sense – the spending power of non-English speaking online consumers is growing dramatically, but you need to speak their language. If your web presence is English-only, you’re missing out on your share of the market.

With British politicians talking about plans to regenerate and grow the economy, exports are high on the agenda right now in the UK, particularly in Scotland where recent election victors, the Scottish National Party, vowed to increase exports from the country by 50% over the next six years.

The trick that many pundits are missing, though, when they talk about increasing exports, is that it can be done easily and affordably via multilingual ecommerce. The problem, as a quick scan of the Fast Track list shows, is that British business is still scared of trying its hand at foreign languages.

This is something we’ll need to get over if the UK economy is ever going to get back on its feet. Who knows, with a clever multilingual online strategy, soon your business could be ranking on the Sunday Times’ Fast Track list for fastest growing exporters.

To coincide with the recent release of Econsultancy’s Multivariate Testing Buyer’s Guide, we’ve been talking to some companies about best practice and useful advice for those thinking about investing in this area and looking for an MVT vendor. Below, we’ve included tips from client-side practitioners at Belron, the FT, Lovehoney, Telegraph and Tesco. 

Whether you are just beginning to realise the importance of investing in good testing technology or you are already carrying out a comprehensive conversion rate optimisation programme, these tips will help you get the most out of your tests and stay on top of your game.

What do you see as the greatest benefits of multivariate testing?

Craig Sullivan, Customer Experience Manager (eBusiness Group), Belron

With MVT, no idea is a bad idea. Remember that really annoying person who always brings dumb ideas to your meetings or won’t compromise? Let’s call this person Dick. If he has one of his great ideas, include it in your test plans and show the results. It’s hard to argue your idea is the best one, if it takes less money. Dick will also stop making stupid suggestions when he realises he isn’t having much luck in the tests.

If you have problems with three hour meetings discussing button colours or arguing with time wasting morons about how to design a page, you should do MVT. This has removed endless useless and life sapping meetings from my calendar. We no longer have to agree one design, only for the senior exec to change it yet again. Every idea is considered, added to the test and measured. The results speak far more clearly than any opinion or ego within my company.

What advice would you give to companies looking for an MVT vendor?

Craig Sullivan

When the salmon return from the sea to the river, they stop feeding until they spawn. If they’re not interested in feeding, how do people catch them? It may take all day, with a salmon sitting behind a rock, to find the right lure and the perfect place to drop it. You might catch a fish the first time or spend all day with nothing to take home. You’ll try endless combinations of lure, bait and placement to get any reaction and just when you are ready to give up – bang – a flash of line tells you that you’ve finally got some attention.

MVT is like having a thousand lines in the water, to find the lure that will catch the most fish. You’re welcome to patiently try everything in your repertoire but those that experiment, they get their fish quicker and more easily than everyone else. If you have less budget, a competitive market or both – make sure you have the edge when you’re out fishing.

Sandra White, Head of Optimization, The Financial Times

Think about what you want from MVT. In our case, MVT doesn’t really cover what we do. It is more about having a testing platform that allows us to optimise our site, which is an ongoing process. Having control over whole pages is therefore preferable to being limited to ‘test areas’.

I would also recommend looking at how much account management is included, and whether this covers help with testing strategy or any consultancy. Also, what are the workflow limits in terms of getting tests up? Can simple tests be set up by anyone in-house with some basic technical knowledge? Bear in mind that testing also requires design resource, which most vendors don’t supply.

Matthew Curry, Head of Ecommerce, Lovehoney

If you’re able, conduct tests that optimise on a monetary figure, such as revenue or even better, profit. That way you can make an easier judgement on how much the tool is worth to you. MVT isn’t a magic bullet, it will require a lot of effort to get results. Don’t budget on how much extra revenue you could theoretically make, remember to be pragmatic.

Depesh Mandalia, Senior Marketing Manager – Personalisation & MVT, Tesco

This depends on the level of expertise within the business and the level of access to your backend code. Some vendors offer a managed service, taking away the complexities involved in setting up tests and many also minimise the level of change required in your backend code for each MVT you run. These can have a huge impact on the decision points. I would also stress that it is worth looking at the right vendor for where your business is and if choosing a more basic solution, you always have the opportunity to move up to one of the more advanced (and usually more costly) platforms once you’ve operationalised MVT within your business.

Emilija Vilkyte, Head of Digital Revenue Optimization, The Telegraph

Before choosing an MVT vendor you need to be very clear about the type of tests you are looking to run, how often, how much internal resource you have got and how quickly you expect to see the results, as there are a lot of different products and propositions in the market. Also be clear where the tests will run (same domain vs. subdomains and third parties).

From your experience, what kind of approach has been successful and what has been unsuccessful?

Depesh Mandalia

Start simple and don’t expect business changing uplifts early on. The beauty of MVT is the last letter of the acronym – Testing. MVT allows you to test many ideas within a relatively short space of time, speeding up the learning process and development time. From experience, MVT never ends. In addition, you won’t always create improvements – learn and improve. There is always something to improve, something to tweak, new ideas to try out and with any business, as the business dynamics change, as do the opportunities MVT can leverage. The key for any business is to involve the right stakeholders. MVT can make those less involved feel like they’re losing control. Instead highlight the reduction in guesswork, in wasted development time trialling ideas and money saved in sifting out the bad ideas from the good as quickly as possible. Keep the key stakeholders engaged and involved and the whole process becomes easier.

Emilija Vilkyte

As long as you don’t change your mind and test spec in the middle of the process everything will be fine. Document all possible user journeys and scenarios – this will help you understand main problem areas. Be very clear ‘where you are’ and ‘where you want to be’ when providing instructions to your MVT partner. Create a test roadmap to manage internal expectations. Make sure you test variants before test goes live on all browsers and platforms.

Craig Sullivan

Don’t try to test too many variables, especially if your traffic isn’t huge to your site. For example, does testing a different shade of blue on your button really drive behavioural change? You’re much more likely to understand what resonates with customers if you are bolder and try new things. Avoid testing subtleties or small changes that will eat into your testing time. There isn’t much point in taking eight months to test your homepage, as during that time you’ve not had the final uplift. Like Agile, do your testing in smaller batches and learn from the results to drive your next test. Small, fast and likely to sway outcomes is best.

Sandra White

Testing and optimisation for the FT is about taking the guesswork out of everything to do with our site, whether it’s to do with conversion, engagement, usability, personalisation. Eighty per cent of the work of testing is about identifying worthwhile opportunities, otherwise you end up testing for the sake of it. It isn’t about changing button colours – the important thing is keeping business objectives in mind when planning testing.

Matthew Curry

There’s a lot of MVT press releases about how companies exponentially increased their revenue through a single small change. This doesn’t often happen, so don’t expect to recreate those successes, especially if you’ve already followed a lot of best practice. Instead, look to transformational testing: your message, your layout, photography, checkout. Change big things first, then when you think you’ve got those all working, you can concentrate on smaller changes.

Are there any other tips you would give to companies who are thinking about investing in MVT technology and related internal infrastructure?

Craig Sullivan

Don’t forget segmentation. If you can’t use your testing tool to segment, you should set up your web analytics to track this. Although you can find one design that converts best for everyone, this isn’t the optimal way to get a lift – look at which creatives most appeal to different audience segments. More companies now offer you the ability to then serve these to visitors – it means you are always showing the best converting creative to visitors, based on historical data.

Depesh Mandalia

Finding the right MVT tool for your business is something only you can define, by thinking about your current resource, current understanding, the time you are prepared to commit to MVT and where MVT sits in your order of priority against other web improvement projects.

Sandra White

The technology is only as smart as the information it can be given. To use it to its full potential, it needs to be integrated with other systems and across site, so that this can be fed into the decision-making layer. This can take some leg work. But once you start a proper programme of testing and optimisation, though, the potential is almost endless, assuming you have decent traffic volumes.

Emilija Vilkyte

Negotiate on the price as much as possible – there are ways to save money by limiting the number of tests a month, doing some data or design work yourself, removing some feature from your account e.g. there is no point to go straight to personalization if your site’s usability is fundamentally wrong.

Yesterday, the online retail giant announced a major expansion of its trade-in program that will make it easier for consumers to unload their used and unwanted electronics.

Using Amazon’s trade-in website, a consumer can find out what her electronics equipment is worth based on its condition. Once she’s decided to sell, Amazon provides a pre-paid shipping label so that she can send her items in.

Within 48 hours after shipment is received, Amazon issues an Amazon Gift Card.

Trade-ins and buy-backs aren’t new, of course. Mobile carriers like T-Mobile, retailers like Best Buy and standalone businesses like Gazelle all use these models in some fashion, and will compete with Amazon in the electronics space. But Amazon has some obvious competitive advantages.

For one, as the world’s most prominent online retailer, it may be able to move more of its used inventory, potentially allowing the company to offer higher trade-in values.

It can also look to tap into its customer base to solicit trade-ins. For instance, an Amazon customer who bought an iPod several years ago could be encouraged to trade that in to buy a newer model. Conceivably, this type of solicitation could even be combined with promotions to lure more consumers into a two-sided transaction where gift card payments due are spent immediately.

Despite the potential, Amazon’s expansion of its trade-in program really isn’t all that interesting in and of itself. But it does highlight the fact that there is still huge opportunity to create new markets in online retail.

Smaller online retailers should take note and consider that there are plenty of untapped opportunities available to them as well. Buy-backs and trade-ins present an obvious arbitrage opportunity for retailers who sell products made by multiple suppliers. For retailers who sell products they manufacture, buy-backs and trade-ins can be used to seize greater control over supply and demand.

Consequently, I’ve compiled a rather large list of companies who are using Facebook to sell products… 

Some were pop-up stores, PR stunts or specific campaigns and not all of them involve direct transactions through Facebook. Some use the API to pull through stock inventories on their Brand Pages, with others taking this further by allowing sign-ins to their checkout, following this.  

I imagine that some people will argue that this isn’t pure f-commerce, but it should be acknowledged that these examples were actively trying to make commercial sales using Facebook’s platform… which in my opinion, falls firmly into the commerce-through-Facebook camp.

Notably though, as a general rule, the examples I’ve selected don’t have static pages which redirects the user to a separate e-commerce website.

To also lend weight to the argument that f-commerce isn’t wholly about direct sales onsite, Janice Diner’s recent ecosphere graphic demonstrates the complexity of this growing area. 

I’ll be the first to say that I’ve yet to see large amounts of data surrounding the success rates of having an f-commerce presence. Examples do exist, but given that the channel is still very much in its infancy, there seems to be a combination of reluctance on the part of the retailers to share this information, alongside poor tracking and analysis.

That said, in the coming months, I fully expect to see solid evidence of the value in ensuring a retail presence on Facebook exists. 

But onto the examples! Who says Facebook hasn’t got a place in online shopping? 

1-800 flowers

This was one of the first on-page f-commerce stores. And it’s still going strong. 

Alton Towers

The UK theme park has an app that allows you to book tickets in advance. 

American Eagle Outfitters

The online fashion retailer allows users to buy personalised mobile gift cards for friends and family for use online or offline. 

Apple 

Apple also offers its app store via Facebook. 

ASOS 

The online fashion retailer’s Facebook store is widely cited as an f-commerce case study.

Baby & me 

An f-commerce store that’s found its niche in the baby and infant market.

Barcelona

The Spanish football club has a world class application for their club shop.

Barneys 

The New York department store can be found trialling Facebook.

Best Buy

Best Buy’s shop and share is often cited as another f-commerce example.

Boston Market 

E-gifts from the US restaurant. 

Boston Tea Company

Boston’s ahead of the curve! This American company have found their niche in trading tea. 

Brooks Brothers

For a company established in the 19th Century, Brooks Brothers proves it’s now very much a 21st Century retailer. 

Bulgari

The luxury retailer reaches out to its audience on Facebook.

Carnival Cruises

This cruise company proves that its not just small transactions that can be made using f-commerce.

Chanel

Another luxury brand, Chanel recently created a pop-up store for their lipstick range, although building it in Flash led to issues. 

Chompon

The white-label service reported that Facebook shares generated $14 in sales on average, that Facebook Likes were worth $8.

Coca-Cola

Coke actually has a dedicated fan store on Facebook. 

Coleman Co.

I’ve listed this site before now – and its still going strong.

Delta 

You can easily book a flight through Delta Airlines’ Facebook page.

Dexter (CBS)

The TV programme taps into its fanbase on Facebook.

Diesel 

Diesel’s done a few things with Facebook – the most recent being their in-store DieselCam.

Disney

Again, another often-cited example, Disney built in movie-ticket sales into their Facebook page.

Drugstore.com

This company makes buying everyday products quick and easy. 

eBags

As the name suggests, buying all kinds of bags through Facebook is now a reality.

eBay

Not quite a direct transaction, but eBay marketplace allows users to share what they’re buying, selling and watching. 

Ettitude

Homeware, everywhere from this Facebook store. 

Eventbrite

In a wider sense, Eventbrite has managed to put a value on their social commerce revenue gained through allowing Facebook login access. 

Express

Express clothing has a slick f-commerce store. 

Fishing Emporium

Proof that any sport can sell equipment through Facebook.

GAP 

Another often-used example: GAP used check-in deals to offer promotions to consumers when the service first launched.

Gibson Les Paul 

Yes, the guitar shop has an online store.

Groupon

The now-household name has a Facebook app for its deals.

Hallmark

Buy and send cards online. 

Hastings Entertainment

A large f-commerce offering from this online retailer.

Heels 

The online shoe shop is still going strong.

Heinz

Heinz is running a limited edition promotion through Facebook.

Hilton Hotels 

Check rooms and availability before booking.

Incipio Technologies 

Specialising in Apple accessories, this company reported that Facebook is the second highest referral of their e-commerce site traffic and that of those customers, the average conversion rate twice as high than normal.

JCP

JCPenney has a large catalogued store on Facebook. 

JD sports 

The UK sports retailer has set up an f-commerce store.

Justin Bieber

With 27m Facebook fans, it made sense for JB to have a shop ‘n share store.

Kembrel

The clothing shop has an interesting little app.

Kiabi

The French clothing store proves that Europe can do f-commerce too. 

Kiddicare

Kiddicare have a great f-commerce store-front offering.

Kmart 

Although not yet set up with a full f-commerce offering, the retail giant is currently offering e-gifts. 

La Redoute

The European fashion retailer recently set up a store on Facebook, but for reasons unknown took it down.

Lady Gaga

The crazy lady of pop challenges Bieber’s online store.

Lands End

More clothes on offer through Facebook from this fashion retailer. 

Levi’s

Lots of coverage has been given to the Levi’s Friends Store…

Livescribe 

Small electronics on offer.

Macy’s

The US department store followed in Diesel’s footsteps with their own Facebook fitting room.

Malaysia Airlines

Another airline company that allows booking (and more) through Facebook.

mark.

Makeup galore from mark.girl.

Max Factor (P&G)

The UK Facebook page for Max Factor offers even more makeup purchasing opportunities.

Maxim

The mens magazine offers a subscription service through Facebook. 

Mazda

As part of a Facebook Deals promotion, Mazda offered 20% off the price of their MX-5 model when users checked-in to a dealership.

Molly Sims

The US model offers her own range of jewelry on her Facebook page. 

MyBag

More bags and luggage available to shoppers.

MyLabel

MyLabel offers a wide range of clothing through its f-commerce store.

MyMemory 

Technology and computing products on offer from this smaller player.

National Express

Book a journey with National Express through their Facebook page.

Nine West

The clothing shop offers a crisp, clean Facebook store. 

Old Spice

Not content with his YouTube campaign, Mustafa is operating on Facebook.

Otto

The German fashion company jumps into f-commerce.

Oxfam

Oxfam’s UK page makes it easier for users to donate.

Pampers

The nappy manufacturer is another regularly cited example of f-commerce, although the store is currently down.

Pantene

Once again, Pantene is an example that’s used a lot, despite the original page not existing anymore. 

PC Mall

Computers through Facebook.

Penguin Books 

Nicely cornering the book market, Penguin seems to be the only publisher operating on Facebook this way.

Pizza Hut (UK)

Lots of different offers for Pizza Hut. Although this ultimately loops to their website, users can login using Facebook access.

Realgifts

Buy small gifts for friends and family through Facebook.

Schuh 

The shoe shop giant has a Facebook store for its customers.

Sears

Following the lead of a number of large retailers experimenting with f-commerce, Sears gives users the ability to buy gift vouchers.

Shop Now USA

The small Australian shop is offering American brands.

Starbucks UK

Acting as a trigger for purchases offline, Stabucks sends users an SMS message to remind them about coffee happy hour.

Summit Brands

Lots of household goods on offer.

Superdry

Superdry has a nice little interactive product feed of their new products.

Surropa

The Latin fashion store seems to have realised the popularity of Facebook amongst its demographic. 

Taylor Swift

Social shopping from the TSwift Store.

Ted Baker

The UK fashion brand has a slick-looking Facebook shop.

The Beatles UK

The fab four are still selling strong.

The Beatles USA

The Beatles also prove their popularity in the USA.

The Hut

Games, clothes and more. The Hut has it all.

TheNerds.net

Electronics from the nerds.

Thorntons

The established UK chocolatier also sells its wares online.

Threadless

It’s no surprise that the awesome Threadless has a Facebook shop.

Ticketfly 

Ticketfly found that Facebook refers roughly 9% of their customers and the company has seen huge jumps in profit since their activity began. 

Tiger Direct

The computer and electronics superstore also has an f-commerce offering.

Trump Hotels

Check availability and reserve or book online with the Trump Hotel Collection.

Urban Outfitters

The US fashion company appears to be finding its f-commerce feet.

Vann’s

The audio and video store also ensure that stock is available through Facebook.

Vans

The sports brand ensures that fans can purchase shoes through its f-commerce shop.

Victoria’s Secret

The lingerie company offers gift cards through its Facebook brand page.

Virgin Trains

Book tickets in advance through Virgin’s Facebook store.

Volkswagen

Volkswagen ran a smart PR campaign, where the more “likes” received, saw the price of a car get lower.

W Hotels

The luxury hotel brand recently ran a group-buy campaign exclusively on Facebook. 

Walmart

Hot on the heels of W Hotels, Walmart has also run group-purchasing campaigns over the past few months through it’s CrowdSaver app.

Warehouse Skateboards

Skateboard f-commerce store.

Warner Brothers

Warner has experimented a lot with Facebook, but notably is their setup which allows you to purchase and download the Dark Knight directly through the platform. 

Wet Seal

The teen clothing store reported that 20% of their e-commerce sales come from Facebook-referred traffic. 

Zavvi

Zavvi might now be off the high street, but it’s still very much online.

In many cases these companies aren’t remotely geared up to deal with questions, and they would much rather communicate with customers in private. 

But here’s why customers do their complaining in public: it’s easier. It’s really that simple. People don’t mind bitching out loud, and sometimes they take a little comfort from it, but if customer service wasn’t so broken in the first place I think customers wouldn’t be so quick to resort to the likes of Twitter and Facebook.

Here are 20 reasons why customer service is broken…

1. Charging customers premium rates to call your service team.

File under ‘shakedown’, rather than ‘service’.

2. Making customers navigate through a series of automated menus.

Sometimes it takes two minutes before you’re even placed on hold. Ridiculous.

3. Leaving customers on hold forever.

This is especially shocking for high value customers. I pay Virgin Media more than most for a 50MB internet connection at home, yet once had to wait for 55 minutes before somebody (the fourth person I was transferred to) fixed my problem. It took them about 90 seconds, once I was finally put through to the 50MB team. Why not provide me with a specific number to contact them directly? 

4. Forcing customers to listen to crappy ‘have you tried using our website’ or other sales messages.

I only ever pick up the telephone as an absolute last resort, and normally because I can’t do the thing I need to do via the website. If I could, I would. Playing these messages to a customer rather than picking up the telephone is entirely wrong-headed.

5. Interrupting hold music with ten-second ‘Sorry, all of our advisors are busy. We are experiencing high call volumes. Please continue to hold…’ messages every seven seconds.

That’s you I’m talking about, Bloomsbury Bowl.

6. No ‘email us’ option.

Word to the wise: it is in fact 2011. As such there is no excuse for dodging email. It is cheaper to process an email than it is to employ somebody to speak to a customer. Email customer service is really important… so much so that it’s actually a legal requirement.

7. No acknowledgement of email.

If a customer takes the trouble to write then it’s worth immediately firing back an automated email, as a kind of receipt. The customer can be advised of the time it will take before they’ll receive a proper reply (and just for the record, 25 business days is not acceptable). 

8. ‘Donotreply@’ email addresses.

How rubbish is that? This is a total palm off.

9. Failure to communicate by email.

I asked Ladbrokes for my account history recently and received an email that instructed me to write a letter to The Compliance Officer at head office. This is downright avoidance, considering that I asked the question while logged into my supposedly secure online account. I will write a letter the next time I receive a minor flesh injury.

10. Contact forms that don’t work on certain devices / browsers.

Those little things that people speak into can also access the internet. Amazing, isn’t it? This is about accessibility, and about understanding user behaviour (and their preferences).

11. No live online chat.

For high volume businesses this is a really good idea. It provides customers with the immediacy of the telephone while using the website. CSRs can run several chats concurrently (unlike when they’re speaking to a customer on the telephone). We have experimented with live chat in the past and will do so again.

12. Shoddy returns policies.

No shopper wants to jump through hoops in order to return a product. Why make it difficult? Also, if you are charging for returns then you’re doing it wrong. 

13. No visible contact number on a website.

Beleaguered customers do not want to play hide and seek with your phone number.

14. Low rent FAQs.

Improving the FAQ section of a website is one of the best ways of reducing inbound call volumes. 

15. Ignoring people on Twitter / Facebook.

A study recently proved that only a quarter of UK retailers bother to answer questions asked of them on Twitter. Shocking.

16. Delivery timescale fail.

“We will deliver your item between 8am and 6pm. You will need to sign for it.” 

17. Lame delivery tracking.

Providing the customer with a long alphanumeric code and a link to a courier’s website isn’t particularly joined up.

18. Poor response times.

The average time it takes UK retailers to respond to an email is 10 hours (often it can be significantly longer than that). On Twitter it is around 94 minutes (when retailers bother to reply). On Facebook it is 78 minutes. I think these are all ok, until I start to really think about it… there is scope for vast improvement.

19. The lack of a single customer view.

Yes, it’s difficult to achieve this: it requires a commitment to a joined-up, multichannel customer experience. Econsultancy research found that 90% of businesses think this is ‘important’, yet only 4% have managed to achieve it. Until it happens customers will continue to be frustrated by the fact that a company’s left hand is unaware of the right hand.

20. The blind focus on customer acquisition.

This, for me, is the key reason why customer service remains broken. Too many firms are too focused on acquiring new customers, when they should be trying to retain existing ones. It is a cultural issue, for many businesses. It reflects the fact that sales and marketing have acquisition-based targets on which their bonuses are based. Many CSRs do not receive any kind of bonus. Customer service is perceived by the boardroom to be a horrendous cost to the business. This is all wrong… it’s myopic and it needs to change before customer satisfaction scores will rise across the board. If that happens, the rewards on offer are fantastic: increased loyalty and customer advocacy, a higher average customer lifetime value, and far healthier profits. What’s not to like?

I daren’t think about how many things I’ve missed. What frustrates you the most? Which areas of service need to be improved the most?

The iPhone app allows users to search for activities wherever they are and book them through the phone, while the iPad version seems to be aimed more at the armchair user. 

I’ve been trying the app out…

The iPhone app 

The mobile app will detect you current location, unless you want to specify an alternative destination, and then you can look at what’s on today, top attractions in the area, as well as special offers. 

Things to do are listed, along with prices and average user review scores:

Activities on offer can also be viewed on a map, so that people can find something to so within their immediate area: 

The listings provide some detailed information on the various activities on offer through the app, with photos, detailed descriptions, and a good range of reviews (there are more than 260,000 reviews and user photos on there) from other users. 

For the tourist in London for a day or two, this could be very useful to help them decide what to do. 

The fact that activities can be booked through the app makes it more useful, both for the tourist looking for something to do at short notice, and for the venue or tour operator looking to sell any remaining tickets. 

The checkout process has been optimised for mobile, and as such, completing a booking is as smooth as it is possible to make it. 

The IPad app

Viator’s iPad app takes a different approach to the iPhone version, and seems to be targeting the armchair browser rather than people on the move. 

The ‘homepage’ uses Google Maps to allow users to browse through destinations, looking for ideas: 

The interface is confusing though, as it’s unclear what action users need to take to find activities. For example, having used the iPhone app, I expected to be able to zoom into the London area, and find lots of suggested activities. 

However, all you can do is click on a city to view details of tours and activities on offer. While the globe interface looks good, an alternative of searching or scrolling through a list of destinations would be more usable. 

Unlike the iPhone app, to make a booking on the tablet version, you need to leave the app and head to the main website, which may have people wondering what the point of the iPad app is, since the main website works well on the iPad. 

Conclusion

The iPad app was a bit of a disappointment, with a relatively clunky interface and limited functionality, but the iPhone version is very promising. 

The user experience on the iPhone app is excellent, it easily detects people’s locations and quickly serves up results. Information on activities is clearly presented, and the payment process is as good as any that on any other mobile app. 

According to findings from a PhoCusWright ‘Activities, Attractions, Events and Tours’ study, two out of three travellers with mobile devices say they are likely to use their mobile device to research (64%) and purchase (63%) activities in the future. 

The location element makes it a potentially valuable resource for tourists, while it may also become a very useful channel for theatres and other venues to shift unsold tickets at the last minute. 

Fonts are often sold through foundries, which are sort of like the record labels of the typography world. While many produce their own fonts for sale, they also serve as distributors for independent designers and studios, earning a royalty each time they sell a font.

One new foundry, the Lost Type Co-op, is trying to shake things up a bit. It’s billing itself as the “the first of it’s kind” to offer a “Pay-What-You-Want Type foundry.” Think a font it’s offering is worth $50? You pay $50. Don’t have any money to spare? $0 is fine too.

This pay-what-you-want model may be new to the type foundry world, but it’s not new. Radiohead created buzz around the model when it offered its In Rainbows album on a pay-what-you-want basis. The results were mixed, although given the rampant piracy that exists in the market for recorded music, the fact that nearly 40% of downloaders paid something for Radiohead’s album is somewhat encouraging, even if the average amount paid wasn’t exactly impressive. Less recognizable names have experimented with similar approaches for physical CDs at events with some success.

So can the same model be applied to a type foundry? Perhaps. Type foundries face a lot of the same challenges as musicians and record labels. After all, there are lots of typefaces offered under free licenses which designers can opt to use in their projects in lieu of expensive alternatives. Throw in knock-offs and piracy, and selling typefaces is a lot like selling CDs in many respects.

But there are differences. The biggest: fonts are usually purchased by professionals, not consumers. Here, it seems like the pay-what-you-want model might be more attractive.
Larger design shops can afford to spend big bucks buying up every font ever produced by foundries like Linotype, but smaller firms and freelancers generally can’t. So they often turn to free and low-cost alternatives (including knock-off fonts) instead. In an effort to maximize the sales of fonts for the designers they represent, why shouldn’t foundries seek better models to find out what the market thinks their fonts are worth?

That’s precisely what the Lost Type foundry is doing. Will that guarantee sales? No, but it seems quite possible that if it grows large enough, it could capture sales from the legions of professionals who are unwilling and incapable of paying hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of dollars for font collections. We’ll see if the Lost Type Co-op catches on and sparks a trend.