Since 1 November to 2 December, Americans spent online $ 14 billion, a 17% increase over the same period last year, reported comScore Inc.
So far, most crop for online purchases Day season remains cyber-sunday 26 November, when consumers are left in the Internet $ 733 million Then three more days of online spending more than $ 700 million a day, said the statement, chairman of comScore Gian Fulgoni. "But by the end of the week sales declined as a result led to a 17% growth mu compared with the same period in the previous year - a figure that coincides with the growth that we are seeing over the entire season to date," he adds.
As usual, the most popular categories of online holiday shopping season remained video games, consoles and accessories: in this sector increased by 145% to the previous year's level. At furniture, appliances and equipment, consumers spent 45% more than last year, while the sports and fitness-for 30% more. Toys, consumer electronics products, books and magazines bought for 17% more that coincides with the overall growth rate of consumer spending online, said comScore.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Online Shopping beats record
Microsoft offers beta Office Live Workspace
Office Live Workspace, attacked another Microsoft in the world of business tools, begin their lives.
The company will open the system to exchange documents gradually, starting on Monday with a pre-registered users. Office Live Workspace to store Word documents, PowerPoint and Excel online, share and work together on these instruments. Related SharedView annex to share desktop settings and work together on Office documents in real time.
While Microsoft belatedly entered the market means teamwork-based Web, the company is the dominant force in the business market instruments, while online competitors, such as Google, have not demonstrated any notable success in attracting a wide audience of users. Nevertheless Office Live Workspace is a good beginning for the development of online functionality, which will probably prove to himself embedded Office. This is not a full set of online business applications, and a set of tools teamwork, "confined" by custom Office applications.
Office Live Workspace is one of the best examples that demonstrate where it focuses its strategy of Microsoft software "plus" services, which is designed to connect local and veb-functionality in Microsoft applications. In custom applications integrated Office toolbar that lets you save in Office Live Workspace, such as Word documents, and uses the web to store and review, leaving most of the actual work on the editing of a client.
In October, Microsoft Office Live Workspace tests in several universities, including the University of Pennsylvania, University of Washington and Vanderbelt. Send feedback prompted the company to make some changes in the user interface Live Workspace and work on productivity improvement. Although the beta test will be open, the timing of release final product until Microsoft calls.
Friday, December 07, 2007
Nokia will develop internet-services
On Tuesday Nokia introduced an ambitious plan of moving beyond market cellular phones and deeper into the world of Internet-services, where the company intends to compete directly with Google, Apple and Microsoft.
The plan is Ovi.com websites (Ovi evokes means "door"), which Nokia will deliver both personalized "dashboard" where users can share photos, music recordings and buy turn to a third-party services such as site for Yahoo Flickr photo. As explained at a conference in Amsterdam Nokia World general manager of Nokia Multimedia division Anssi Vanoki, the idea is to offer a single place where users will be able to manage content, services and contacts collected in the process web-surfing through their phones and PCs. Ovi.com become single portal for all services, so that people will not have to memorize multiple logins and passwords. Nokia is also developing a desktop ON Ovi for content offline.
Nokia speak on Ovi in August, and a portion of the service, the updated version of mobile games platform Nokia N-Gage Arena and spends so far this month, reported Vanoki. So far, it has worked only with mobile gaming platform Nokia N-Gage, but the company promises to make it compatible with other devices. But the game is only the beginning. They will be followed by an online music store and other services: mapping service, and photographic video shop to store photos from phones and link them with maps, as in Google Picasa. Ovi will also allow people to participate in social networks and communities to share content. "This is the foundation from which we will build on Nokia in new directions," said President and CEO Nokia Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo.
Nokia controls over a third of the world market for mobile phones, and hoped that in future the main way to access the Web will become vehicles with the support of the Internet, such as the N95. "We must not only become a producer of devices, but also the Internet, and connect the two peace," said Kallasvuo. "This is a very difficult task, but it opens up tremendous business opportunities." In the assessment of Nokia, mobile phones have three billion people across the world, but only 300 million are using multimedia machines, of which about 200 million from Nokia. These devices must be made simpler to administer. "Need" a lot of improvements, "acknowledged Vanoki.
Ovi.com passes internal testing starting next year as a publicly beta simultaneously with the release of desktop software. The company demonstrated this catch on with the interface elements such as files, if navigating in three-dimensional space. Perhaps the service will include an online component of a data warehouse to facilitate the exchange of files. "We have not yet announced file sharing service, but it will be part of the commercial proposals Ovi.com" says Kari Tutti Nokia representative. According to him, access to Ovi.com and will be free for the desktop. ON will be distributed on CD along with Nokia phones and offered for downloading through the Web.
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
The market for servers shows good results
In the third quarter of the world market for servers has improved markedly as revenue, and the volume of supply-thanks to the growing demand in developing countries and the need for additional resources data storage.
According to a report released on Monday Gartner, for the third quarter has sold 2.2 million servers by 8.7% more than during the corresponding period last year. Revenue producers to 2.6% rose to $ 13.4 billion The engine of growth serve servers both the x86, while revenues from UNIX- RISC-Itanium servers grew by 8%.
"The growth in developing markets, combined with the continuing demand for additional capacity exceeds any overwhelming factors, such as virtualization of servers the statement says Gartner analyst Errola Reyzita. - No impact of the instability of financial markets servers on the market in the third quarter is not noticeable. "
The income market IBM servers continues to lead, despite their decline by 8%. Deliveries of IBM servers in kind declined by almost 4%, with a total market share of the company fell slightly less than 2%. Revenues from sales of servers IBM System p and System x rose, but revenue from System z and the System i declined.
The maximum number of servers still sells HP, which has placed customers at 20.2% more devices than a year ago, and completed the quarter with a market share 26.5%.
Dell continues to show steady progress after months of setbacks. Sales of the company are growing second consecutive quarter and increased by 5.4%. Market share volume for Dell shipments grew by 0.7%.
Sun Microsystems demonstrated income jumped to 11.4% because of the successful sales of its Sparc Enterprise servers. However, total deliveries in kind declined by 4.5%.
The engine of growth remained blade-server market, where sales increased by 13.8%. In the third quarter of the share blade-server had 10% of the market. In this segment still leads HP, which has increased the supply over the same period the previous year starter at 91%.
Five leaders of proceeds from sales of servers looks like this: IBM with 30.1% market share, HP with 28.1%, Dell with 11.8%; Sun with 11% and Fujitsu / FSC with 4.9%. For the first five volumes of supplies seats are: HP with 29.3%, Dell with 21.8%, IBM with 14.4%, with 3.6% Sun and Fujitsu / FSC with a 3.4% market share of servers.
What about mobile Internet?
New project to study mobile Internet market measures the parameters of web sites, trying to determine how well they work in terms of mobile users.
Index quality mobile web analysis firm Keynote Competitive Research planned to make a permanent showcase weekly indicators of the quality of mobile websites. He appreciates the ten top mobile services on the three parameters, demonstrating a wide variation in their standard of quality. These parameters are:
• Response time in seconds is the average time to download a mobile site in smartphone.
• speed downloads-average speed downloads site in bytes per second.
• The level of success is the percentage of successful downloads of the entire site to a mobile phone.
At the rank of popular mobile sites claimed nine very different type and content: CNN, ESPN, Facebook, Fandango, Google, MapQuest, MSN, Schwab (online brokerage firm), The Weather Channel and Yahoo. The first data cover the period from 19 to 26 November.
Results
Response time varies from less than 7 seconds for Google and Facebook to over 15 seconds for ESPN. Some of this disparity is due to the size of downloadable homepage: Google has found to be 6684 bytes, and the ESPN-26635 bytes.
But speed also varies widely. In many cases, sites with the largest number of bytes downloaded, and also demonstrated the lowest rate. Most proved slow Facebook with an average speed of 693 bytes / sec, with the amount of downloads 4663 bytes. However, the first site took place at the speed of CNN downloads 2368 bytes / s at the amount of 24211 bytes. Google showed the average result in 1009 bytes / sec. Based on the level of success of sites vary much less. Foremost on this parameter shared Facebook and Google with the level of success of 99.23%. There MSN, takes last place, this option, however, was 97%.
Keynote uses its own testing Mobile Application Perspective, which is to monitor, measure and assess the quality of mobile content library uses of 1000 simulated devices. Targeted sites downloaded from the networks for operators in emulated cellular modem connected to the real wireless networks.
In this case, Keynote emulates smartphone Motorola RAZR, which the company considers the most popular in the United States. Each modem hourly produces one dimension each site to all addresses within a week. At the end of the week the results of hours, and operators are assigned the index for each of the three benchmarks. Keynote maintains a similar index for European mobile sites.
Keynote The statement says that during the week, all three parameters that are constantly changing for the better, the worse: "It is clear that the company is still not able to offer services to mobile users ideal."
Russian company buys LiveJournal
On Monday, Moscow media "SUP" has acquired a company Six Apart site LiveJournal online community, seized most popular in the world blogging-resource.
In October 2006, "PAF" and Six Apart collaborated on the issuance of a Russian-language version of LiveJournal, which accounts for 28% audience "The Living" magazine. LiveJournal competes with blog hosting services such as Blogger, which in 2003 acquired the Google Wordpress and TypePad, also owned by Six Apart.
LiveJournal changed the hosts for the second time: in 2005, Six Apart bought it from founder Brad Fitspatrika. The company claims that during her government service number of accounts has increased from 5 million to 14 million
While this is not such a big deal, as the acquisition of News Corp MySpace corporation., It indicates the continued interest of media services based on social networks and users generated material. For example, in May 2007, "acquired" Yandex site social MoiKrug.ru network.
Financial terms will not be disclosed. "To manage Living magazine" "SUP" has established a new company in San Francisco LiveJournal Inc. As part of the agreement team who worked on LiveJournal in Six Apart, moving to a new company. "" EMS plans to hire a new general manager and manager of marketing and sales. The new company announced the Education Advisory Council LiveJournal, to be composed of industry experts and members of the community "The Living" magazine. One of them will be Brad Fitzpatrick himself and the other two seats on the board, set for members of the community, will be filled in the online election.
Six Apart at least another 12 months will represent LiveJournal as advertising and sponsorship. In the future, Six Apart focus on its core products Moveable Type, TypePad and Vox. The company will also continue to work on open-source technologies, such as platform Memcached, Mogile, Perlbal OpenID and on the basis of which is designed LiveJournal and other sites now being developed, including Craigslist and Facebook.
The company is creating the open-source code directory
The new company created Cloudsmith site, which provides developers access to a "virtual" distributions, or specialized software configuration of open source, as well as the possibility of sharing.
Service, which is currently in beta, does not keep any code, but only information about where are the various components of a certain distribution. It also offers tools for collecting and assemblirovaniya individual components. The purpose Cloudsmith significantly accelerate and facilitate the process of creating open-source distributions.
One of the first users became Cloudsmith Eteration located in the Turkish and German company, which creates Lomboz, applications development tool Java- open source. Lomboz Customers often request the company to prepare a special distribution optimized for their infrastructure. "Many of our customers to combine with other technologies open-source to write their own applications, they can select servers Apache, use the portal OW2 etc.," explains Chief Eteration Nachi Dai (Naci Dai). - The site Cloudsmith allowed us to collect configuration preferred by our users in the form of virtual distributions. To update all configuration, enough virtual distro update ... We hope that, over time, this approach will be the only way to build and spread of our software, it will depend on customer feedback. "
Cloudsmith Business model is under development. As long as the services are provided free of charge, but at the end of the beta period Cloudsmith will offer subscription model for those customers who wish to share information only with certain other users.
Services Cloudsmith not targeted at Tech, and the programmers. The biggest concern at the moment they are the developers Eclipse. "We love this community," said Director General Cloudsmith Mitch Souniz (Mitch Sonies). "But in the very near future, we will take measures to demonstrate that we are not committed to any one technology."
Google will offer online storage service?
As reported on Tuesday newspaper Wall Street Journal, with reference to anonymous sources, Google plans to offer an online data storage and backup, giving users accessible via the web storage space, where you can move information from their home computers and to provide access to others.
The product will be an "umbrella" for service data storage services, which Google already offers in some of its web, such as e-mail and photo-sharing service. No date is not known, and there is no guarantee that in the course of further development of Google will not abandon the project.
U-rivals Google, Yahoo and Microsoft already have a similar service, respectively SkyDrive and Briefcase. In addition, there are many smaller players, such as Box.net or Mozy, which offer a broad range of services back up. Google, however, believes that it can get a competitive advantage by developing a more intuitive user interface. The only obstacle, which bypass Google fail, it is slow data transfer with many types of broadband connections, especially DSL. If a person works with large video files, then transfer them Google, as with any other online service data storage can take hours or even all day.
Communication on the project, which, according to Wall Street Journal, was named interior My Stuff, came three months after the start of Google offers fee-for-service data storage for its web. For example, users Picasa Web Albums and Gmail for $ 20 a year may receive a 6 GB of disk space, and for $ 500 a year-250 gigabytes. Free Picasa offers 1 GB, and Gmail-2.8 gigabytes.
Shortly before Google advertisement Microsoft has opened all these services online data storage SkyDrive service, which offers 500 megabytes of free disk space. And about the same time Apple upgraded its service. Mac by adding 10 gigabytes for $ 100 a year.
It is not clear how the new Google service would compete on price and functionality with the rest. However, a growing number of online disk space proposals indicates that suppliers see this commercial potential. In the case of Google knowledge that is on the hard drive, can expand opportunities for targeted advertising.