Posts tagged Season
Holiday Season Countdown Kickoffs For Online Marketers
Sep 29th
Driving back from work today, my lovely wife mentioned that she can’t wait to have a pumpkin spiced latte and then proceeded with the list of holiday gifts that she would like to receive. This can only mean one thing: holiday season is around the corner. For most people, holiday musings bring to…
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Mobile Payments Are Going to Explode This Holiday Season, PayPal Says [Infographic]
Sep 26th
Payments company PayPal wants to make sure that it stays in the conversation when it comes to mobile payments. In the last couple of weeks we have heard from innovations coming out of MasterCard and Intuit. PayPal is one of the leaders in mobile payments, especially on the peer-to-peer front. With the holiday season coming, PayPal wants to position itself as the go-to resource for shoppers looking to beat the retail rush and congestion of digital deals.
PayPal is predicting that mobile payments is going to boom come time for the holiday shopping spree. In a survey conducted by PayPal and research firm Ipsos, half of mobile payments users plan on making a purchase with their device when the holiday shopping season starts after Thanksgiving. Check out the infographic below for more details.
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PayPal claims that over half of mobile buyers use the service as their payment method of choice. That is probably not too far from the truth. As we have noted before, near-field communications options are still years from widespread adoption and the dongle-based half of the industry (between Square, Intuit and others) is still in growth mode. Other mobile payments options include direct billing from Apple or Amazon for digital goods like apps and songs or carrier billing, which PayPal also provides through eBay’s acquisition of Zong.
The survey was conducted in August 2011 of consumers who had made a purchase with their mobile device. So, the results can be a little misleading for the industry as a whole. Those who have made a mobile purchase once are most likely to do so again, which should be noted when viewing the stats below. PayPal also claims that most mobile payments of retail goods (note, NOT digital like apps, songs or games) was above $100, according to the survey.
PayPal believes that most mobile purchases will be made from home. Hence, they are calling the trend “couch commerce.”
Are you going to be using your smartphone or tablet to make purchases of physical goods this holiday season? Let us know in the comments.
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Bing Adds Video Home Page To Welcome Fall Season
Sep 23rd
On Bing.com today you will find a nice smooth HTML5 enabled video background theme for the first day of fall. The video is of the Grand Teton National Park over a period of time, speed up, obviously. Here is a video screen cast of the Bing home page: We know Bing has been testing HTML5 [...]
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Roll Out The Decorations, The Holiday Etailing Season is Here
Sep 16th
Growing up, the holiday season always started early in our house. It started in April to be exact. No, we didn’t put up the tree or start decorating the house (did we even take the lights down from last year?), but my mom would always start asking that question: what do you want for Christmas? [...]
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Google: Mobile SEO key as holiday shopping season approaches – Brafton
Sep 7th
 Brafton |
Google: Mobile SEO key as holiday shopping season approaches
Brafton Developing an SEO strategy is a critical element of modern marketing initiatives, and the popularity and convenience of mobile search means businesses must understand their SEO campaign cannot exist in a vacuum. While certain search terms will remain … |
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How to Think Like a Geek & Make Tax Season Less Painful
Apr 14th
It’s fast approaching tax day and if you haven’t already filed, you may be feeling a lot of pain around the whole process. Fortunately, the Internet is here to help. Especially with next year. New innovations online, both literally and as metaphors, can substantially reduce the headaches associated with paying taxes.
Determining what you can write off as a business expense can be particularly time-intensive if you haven’t kept good track throughout the year. My wife and I have developed some helpful practices after several years of filing together to mitigate the terrible tax-time pain. And when I say we, I mean she’s come up with these ideas and then either done them or told me to do them. Here’s what we’ve found to be most helpful.
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This post is brought to you by TurboTax Home & Business Edition.
Your Finances & The Future
Your financial data will likely join your other online data like social networks, favorite sites and subscriptions and more, as one big pool of data to manage and run apps on top of.
Just when society started coming to terms with the need for financial education for young people, now there’s a clear need for all of us to learn how to manage our online data in order to protect our privacy and maximize the benefits we get from it. That distinction between financial and data management education will likely cease to be relevant in the near future.
All of our data, including online, financial, medical and more is becoming a platform for the creation of new software and services. Some people call it leveraging our data exhaust, though that might make it sound less valuable than it is.
Two great places to learn about this future are our coverage of The Locker Project, a new platform for personal data being built by Jeremie Miller (the man who invented XMPP, the world’s biggest Instant Messaging protocol), and PersonalDataEcosystem.org, lead by Kaliya Hamlin, a long-time leader in the Internet Identity world. Add in the data from your connected home and devices, your Quantified Self (tracking your behavior and health) and more and the future looks awash in quantified opportunity.
The work of organizations like these may seem super-nerdy and web-focused today, but it’s quite likely to affect our real-life finances in the future.
Track Your Expenses Online Automatically
Ever since we started using Mint to keep track of my family’s expenses and categorize our purchases throughout the year, tax season has become far, far more bearable. Paper receipts are so inefficient – the contrast is just amazing.
Just like we say about the future Internet of Things: that which is instrumented (turned into a data producer) and quantifiable, enables the creation of new innovations and practices on top of that data as a platform. That’s true for Connected Devices and the Smart Grid, but it’s also true for our travels around town and each economic transaction we enter into.
Stop Using Cash
This one is hard for me. It pains me to give taxi drivers a debit card to pay for fares. I know they want cash. But every transaction performed in cash is untraceable through automated methods. It’s like Flash content to search engines!
Train Your System Well
Like any automated system, finance tracking systems need a little time invested in them to get them trained. The time you put in at first, setting up rules to shoot typical patterns of buying into categories that can be analyzed later in bulk, pays off by saving multiple times as much time and energy that would be required to categorize expenses manually.
The value of structured data is something we write about often here at ReadWriteWeb, and creating a place-based ontology for your bank account enables you to begin work on taxes at a higher level of abstraction. That’s the same strategy that semantic web advocates say will turn raw, unstructured data into a platform for innovation.
Unfortunately the metaphor only goes so far and even with a system like Mint, there’s a lot of time required to make sure that everything is categorized correctly at the end of the year. Well trained systems are very helpful – but they don’t do all the work for you. (In our house, my wife does all that work for me. Which means that she is more wonderful than the entire world of the Semantic Web and Structured Data. I already knew that, though.)
Pay Attention When You’re Doing Strange Things
You may have learned by now that if you are taking a trip out of town, especially if you don’t travel a lot, then it’s good to call your bank ahead of time and make sure they expect to see charges in a faraway place. Otherwise they might freeze your card.
Similarly, performing some casual pattern recognition and noticing when you’re engaging in purchasing behavior unlikely to fit into the online filters you’ve set up is a good idea. The follow-through on this is to go back frequently and manually categorize things that fell outside your filters.
We write here all the time about the value of aggregate data analysis for the discovery of patterns and anomalies. That’s all well and good on a global scale – but a little bit of thinking in the same way about your own personal data stream is helpful as well if you want to stay caught up.
What geeky thinking have you found useful for tax season? Share what you’ve got in comments here and we’ll all benefit. Unlike the taxes you pay for the collective good, any knowledge you share will remain in your possession afterwords.
Photo by YM
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Seo targets rookie of year award in 2011 LPGA season – Korea Times
Dec 30th
 Korea Times |
Seo targets rookie of year award in 2011 LPGA season
Korea Times Former KLPGA champion Seo Hee-kyung said Thursday she wants to help boost Korean golf in the LPGA in 2011. Seo, who earned her card to the LPGA … |
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‘Tis the Season… For Mobile Commerce
Dec 18th
This holiday season may be offering a glimpse of things to come in 2011 and beyond, as the number of consumers who have used their mobile devices to make purchases has exploded.
As TechCrunch reported yesterday, mobile payments made between Nov. 15 and Dec. 15 increased 300% from this time last year, according to PayPal. The total mobile transactions for the period came to $13 million, according to All Things Digital.
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These trends, while interesting, are not terribly shocking, considering the explosive proliferation of smart phones and the rise of mobile payment technologies and apps designed to facilitate mobile shopping.
Naturally, PayPal is a major player in this space, having launched its first mobile payments solution four years ago. Back then, the iPhone was still under development and mobile payments were often made via SMS.
These days, there’s no shortage of smart phone apps that enable mobile shopping. In Apple’s iOS App Store alone, the top ten free Lifestyle apps is consistently home to the likes of Amazon, eBay and the Apple Store app. Further down the list, Amazon’s newer Price Check app is gaining popularity. Like the original Amazon Mobile app, Price Check lets you scan the bar code on any physical product and compare prices on Amazon. Red Laser does the same thing but searches beyond Amazon. Even consumers who physically walk into stores and malls, in many cases, ultimately check out on their phones when the price is right.
With tools like these at their fingertips, it’s no wonder more and more consumers are purchasing things from their phone. As smart phone adoption continues to grow and those phones begin to include technologies like near-field communication (NFC), we can safely expect to see these trends continue well into the new year.
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