How Mobile Will Change The Way We Shop

Last night, I found myself playing with a relatively new app I installed on my iPhone called RedLaser. I’m determined that apps like these will impact the way we shop. You ‘scan’ the barcode with RedLaser with the camera's phone and through local and online retailers it’s able to bring back a list of places selling the same product with all the prices, making it extremely easy to compare.



What does this mean for me and you?
The biggest advantage with this barcode scanning for consumers is the accuracy. You cannot go wrong with searching the product name or brand name because it's uniquely identified by a series of numbers or a Universal Price Code (UPC). Now, consumers have a walking scanner in their hands. Going down that path, apps like RedLaser enables us to bargain hunt much quicker and faster, making price comparison almost effortless. There's no more need to open a browser to search. There's no more need to type in the product you're trying to look up unless you want to type in the Universal Price Code (UPC) manually. Some people didn’t bother with comparing prices before but this might change, especially with the shift in consumer purchasing behaviour following the recent recession. (Check out this report by PwC about changing shopping behaviours.)

One of my favourite features of the app is that it helps you record down products you scan so you can spend more time looking it up later. For added convenience, you can also e-mail yourself the items you've scanned. Another favourite is its capability to search food items against allergens and returns a mini report. If you live in the US, a book scan will also tell you which library it's available at.

What a great app! I can only see it get better.

Website: http://www.redlaser.com/

Inside Facebook by ABC News

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, recently sat down with Diane Sawyer of ABC for an interview. I've always been curious about how he is like and how he thinks. Afterall, Facebook has been a huge influence on the social movement we're all currently experiencing.



Source: ABC News

At the moment, ABC's website still has a few more video clips from the interview.
http://bit.ly/9fFxnw

My Whitepaper Frustration

Like many out there, my inbox is flooded with social media whitepapers desperately waiting for me to open. To be honest, having read a lot of them over the past year or two, a lot of these whitepapers say very similar things to me. Today, I was somewhat interested in taking a look at one that talks about how to improve service through social media.

Is it just me or are these companies making it way too inconvenient to download these whitepapers? I clicked on ‘Download’ and it brought me to a page requesting for my info. “Just 3 Easy Steps” it claims. Unfortunately, I think it’s “3 Steps” too many. Don’t they already have my email? Why are they asking for it again? If another company’s whitepaper is featured, perhaps it’s time for a re-examination of the privacy policy and allow us an option to transfer our permission to third parties to access our information. I’ve gone through this process too many times and today I decided to go against it. I closed the email and deleted it. I didn’t feel it was worth my time to do it all again, to read information I most likely have read already or can get easily elsewhere.

Now they’ve lost the opportunity for me to share information with the rest of the team. I’ll tolerate signing in with existing information to view the information. I’m also willing to sign up from scratch where I haven’t before. That’s fair game. Making me sign up again and making me answer the same questions from the same place? Not acceptable.

Just Watch This. Metaweb and How It's Going to Change Searching Online.

Google recently acquired Metaweb, a semantic web and real world database company that believes it can help improve search and make for a richer web experience. For more than four years, Metaweb has built an open database called Freebase which has a collection of structured data of over 12 million "entities." Each entity can be anything that's a person, place or thing and can be connected with other entities to derive meaning.

Have you noticed that when you do a search in Google a word can have multiple meanings. What Metaweb and Google hope to do is to better distinguish between all the definitions a word may have and deliver better search results.

A very interesting, but complex topic. I find the way they are set up very similar to linguistics. Perhaps, this could be the birth of a new topic, social linguistics?

The video explains this whole idea very well.

Global Social Media Insights Tool

Trend Stream has released a lite version of its Global Web Index, a syndicated market research service of behavior on the web and social media. Although only a lite version, it is an interactive tool that will give insights to what drives the audience, their activities online, and their feelings toward brands in social media.

The data in this lite version was extracted from their "Wave 2" dataset from January 2010. A newer data set, Wave 3, from July 2010 is available but is only accessible to current clients. Still, a very neat tool. Best of all, the data is displayed in a very infographic-like manner.

Due to the width limitations with my current template, I suggest hopping on over to site to check the tool out. http://www.globalwebindex.net/widget/index.html



Source: http://globalwebindex.net/thinking/lite/

New YouTube Mobile Website

http://m.youtube.com/ is where all mobile users can now go for YouTube.

With a redesigned and friendlier user-interface, the YouTube experience on mobile devices will finally be a much better one! More importantly, high quality (HQ) video streams for mobile on YouTube has arrived. To best honest, I can't quite understand why it took so long for this to happen...