by Laurie Sullivan on Dec 31, 10:28 AM
Californians have been doing it for years -- counting down to the new year on New York time. Now parents can fake the New Year's Eve countdown on Netflix. The company created a three-minute-long New Year's Eve countdown program for kids whose parents want them to experience the countdown to 2015 without waiting until midnight.
by Laurie Sullivan on Dec 30, 2:34 PM
There's an art to giving and receiving comments that few take time to learn. An article published in the most recent edition of "Harvard Business Review" could have easily been titled "The Art of Giving and Receiving Online Comments," but the authors or editor chose to title it "The Art of Giving and Receiving Advice." One thing is certain: when the exchange goes well, both sides benefit. The person commenting provides an opinion, and the receiver gets valuable feedback. As the headline suggests, there's an art to giving and receiving. Flawed logic, limited information, background and culture can sway a …
by Laurie Sullivan on Dec 29, 2:59 PM
This holiday season, customer satisfaction scores plummeted compared with last years' for retail chain and ecommerce Web sites, per a study released Monday. Amazon now shares the top spot with QVC for Web site customer satisfaction. It became more difficult to increase scores for some sites like Williams-Sonoma, which limited discounts to one code per transaction on its ecommerce site. The retail store, known for its housewares and home furnishings, fell to 78 in 2014, from 81 last year.
by Laurie Sullivan on Dec 26, 9:13 AM
In an unprecedented show of support for democracy, Sony Pictures agreed to release "The Interview" in theaters and online Christmas Day, making history along with Google, Microsoft and the thousands who streamed the controversial movie. The movie studio formed an alliance with Google and Microsoft to rent and sell the over-the-top comedy online amid the North Korea-linked cyberterrorism attack to rent or buy from their online video stores. I was among the moviegoers eager to understand the reasoning behind the controversy and show support for free speech. Now it's time for U.S. officials to take cyberattacks more seriously.
by Laurie Sullivan on Dec 24, 10:03 AM
Brands should have a way to detect if their company's app lives on the consumer's device. Knowing this would allow brands to link directly from the campaign in a search, display or email promotion to the product page in the app -- not just link from the campaign to the app, but a specific product within the app. JavaScript provides that link, but few have followed through. The trend will accelerate in 2015.
by Laurie Sullivan on Dec 23, 12:44 PM
The file-sharing network BitTorrent wants Sony to release "The Interview," the movie about two producers who the CIA recruits to assassinate North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un on their trip to Pyongyang, on its platform. The Twitter tweet sent late last week read: "Releasing #TheInterview via torrent is a safe way to bring the film to audiences."
by Laurie Sullivan on Dec 22, 10:22 AM
Common misspellings, nuances in Web copy and content, and incorrectly optimizing videos can drag down rankings on retail sites, contributing to underperforming pages. Here are five essential tips that help brand marketers increase visibility and rank products higher in search queries on major e-commerce sites such as Amazon, eBay, and Walmart.com.
by Laurie Sullivan on Dec 19, 11:36 AM
None of the most visited print news and media sites evaluated for their mobile experience passed Google's recommended five-second Web site load time, and only 56% of the sites provide social media buttons on their home page to share the news. While the sites are not prepared to serve content to readers on mobile devices, about 30% were built with responsive Web design in mind.
by Laurie Sullivan on Dec 18, 1:56 PM
Baidu has revealed the first results of a test to improve speech recognition. In a paper published today on Cornell University Library's site, arXiv.org, members of the search engine's research team, which includes one former Google exec, said they have created a new method of more accurately recognizing speech. Baidu's Deep Speech beat other methods such as those offered by Apple, Google and Microsoft on standard benchmarks that measure the error rate of speech recognition systems.
by Laurie Sullivan on Dec 17, 11:40 AM
Mobile app "Install Addicts" -- consumers who download more than 17 apps monthly -- have emerged as a dominant force in the market, according to research released Wednesday. Getting consumers to download a mobile app is one thing, but it's quite another to convince those consumers to use them. Who are these consumers -- and what do they need?