Spooky sound effects. L-o-o-ong pages where you can spend several minutes scrolling down before reaching bottom. Hundreds of postage stamp-sized images. Mysterious moving balls that users must click on to gain any information. If your website’s homepage has one or more of the above…well, it’s not a good sign. In case you’re unclear on this point, TechRepublic has created a slide show of what it considers the 10 worst web design tragedies, and tragic they are. READ MORE
At the beginning of the year, Forrester Research asked consumers what their favorite operating system for a tablet would be. Forty-six percent chose Windows. Forrester asked the question again in September, and that number had dropped to 25 percent. READ MORE
If you often feel the urge to tweet the same stuff that you share with your G+ circles–and if you use Google Chrome–a new extension combines the two and gives you a better Twitter experience than Twitter’s own site does (which, admittedly, is not hard to do). It works by bringing in the tweets you follow to your G+ stream–if you want it to. If you follow a lot of people you may not want it to, and you also have the option to just capture tweets that mention your Twitter handle. READ MORE
Imagine you’re a top-notch HP employee. What’s your next career move? Maybe it should be selling hot dogs on the beach. That may be the only way to avoid the company’s practice of leveling non-compete lawsuits at employees who move on to other companies. After all, since HP is in just about every corner of the tech industry: servers, personal computers, networking, software, even mobile–just about any technology company could be viewed as a competitor. Enough! says Cisco in a blog entry. READ MORE
Shoppers love Groupon. Retailers…not so much. It’s easy to see why. You offer your product or service at a deep discount to grab users’ attention. Then Groupon pays you about half that discounted price. Then a zillion Groupon shoppers come into your store so you have to sell out all your inventory at that teeny-tiny price. Then none of them ever come back to buy anything at full price. The secret to loving Groupon is, “Don’t be stupid,” according to ZDNet blogger David Gewirtz. READ MORE
When Steve Jobs died, Apple fans were so distraught that they began treating Apple Stores like shrines, leaving flowers and notes on their doorsteps. Do you think your own store could ever inspire that degree of customer loyalty? Perhaps it can–if you follow in the footsteps of Ron Johnson, who headed up retail at Apple and is now leaving to become CEO of J.C. Penney. READ MORE
Battles are heating up between online stores and bricks-and-mortar giants both aiming for holiday shopping dollars. And the best place to get a deal might be your smartphone or tablet. E-tailers are rolling out mobile-only deals that are unavailable on their websites, with the aim of luring away shoppers while they’re standing around waiting for service traditional stores. One online company that usually sends out mobile deals at noon will be sending them out at 6 a.m. instead on Black Friday, with the aim of grabbing shoppers as they while away the time waiting for big box stores to open their doors. Others are planning for a shopping spike as people digest their Turkey Thursday evening. Mobile shopping has climbed from 3 percent of online purchases in October 2010 to 10 percent in October 2011. And with 43 percent of American mobile phone users using smartphones, mobile’s potential this season appears unlimited. Read more at The New York Times.
Offering dollar-off coupons is so 20th century! Instead of simply porting over your tried-and-true newspaper strategy, try unleashing the power of Foursquare by creating incentives geared for its users. That’s the advice from Foursquare expert Carmine Gallo in a post at Harvard Business Review. READ MORE
It’s a good time to be a spy. Even better, a maker of spy technology. According to documents The Wall Street Journal obtained from a secretive surveillance conference held near Washington, D.C., the market for “off-the-shelf” spying products is booming, up from near zero before the September 11, 2001 attacks to $5 billion a year today. READ MORE
After you’ve stuffed yourself with turkey this Thursday, what will you do next? While some may nap or watch football, a huge number of Americans will get started on their holiday shopping, according to prognosticators at PayPal. READ MORE
