Harry Potter and e-commerce
If you are looking for a ton of information about the mobile phone market and how consumers and businesses are using mobile phones, check out this article: Get Elastic – How We Use the Mobile Web.
There is just so much information in this analysis, and we are only beginning to comprehend and unpack what it means for Evolve Systems and other businesses like us. The biggest takeaway from this chart so far is the utter need for companies to optimize their websites for mobile phones. More people are using their mobile phones to look at websites than they do on traditional computers. That’s why one of the things we’ve been talking about on the Evolve Blog is the need to make your website more mobile friendly.
Another Get Elastic article worth reading - How Harry Potter Could Influence E-Commerce. JK Rowling, the author of Harry Potter, is positioned to completely turn not only e-books but also e-commerce on its head. By owning the digital distribution rights of her fiction, she is effectively telling all the e-reader companies that in order for them to carry her incredibly popular series, they need to give up those exclusivity bonuses they have routinely enjoyed. Rowling will be selling direct to the consumer and not through companies that slap DRM on the e-books. This could inspire other companies and industries, not just books and authors, to cut out the middle man as well. And hopefully, in the long run, more standardization of the e-book market.
Because, after all, could you imagine there being multiple types of DVD players and DVD discs that only play on certain players? (Forget all that region specific stuff…)
GigaOM wonders if email is starting to have a midlife crisis. How long have you been using email? Perhaps I’m revealing my age, but my first email account was on Juno way back in the 90s. It’s hard for me to believe that email has been around for 40 years, because based on my own life experience, email didn’t exist until Juno, and then changed completely when Gmail was released, and it has been stagnant ever since.
A few weeks ago, electronic mail, or email as it’s now affectionately known, hit the respectable age of 40. When Ray Tomlinson, a young computer engineer, sent the first email in 1971, he could only have guessed how it would impact the way we communicate in both our business and personal lives.
Email has transformed the way people shop, bank, communicate with family members and do business. Now an essential tool for approximately one billion mobile workers across the globe, email continues to dominate the way in which we communicate.
Four decades since the first message – believed to be “QWERTYUIOP” – email seems to be going strong. But is it about to hit a midlife crisis? With web workers now using more sophisticated collaborative apps and social business tools to communicate and share information, are we going to see email’s reign come to an end?
Outspoken Media has another great post up about convincing important people about the importance of SEO.
Finally, if you are looking for some light entertainment, and want to support a good cause, visit Super Mario Marathon! A bunch of guys playing videogames for charity…sounds like good times!
Have a good weekend, everyone!
