Italian Newscast............
- Khantelle on “My Godfather”
- CORY on “My Godfather”
- eec111 on Throngs Line Up to Buy Sarah Palin’s New Book
- eec111 on LeMond and Trek Move On
- eec111 on Oprah Leaving Talk Show
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Avatar -
The Blind Side -
District 9 -
An Education -
The Hurt Locker -
Inglourious Basterds -
Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire -
A Serious Man -
Up -
Up in the Air
Archive for October, 2009
Headlines 10/29:
Amazon hopes to simplify Web shopping with words - Amazon will begin allowing customers to make purchases with something they call “Amazon PayPhrase”. The service lets users buy a product with a short phase (shopking) and an ID no.
Google to allow searchers to find songs – Google will start a new service whereby a user can search for a specific song. The search will bring up the song and the user will be able to listen to the song via a pop-up player from Myspace or Lala.
Netflix movies to come to your Playstation – Netflix and Sony have agreed to let Netflix and TV episodes to broadcast through Sony’s entertainment system.
Fastest Retail Sites: Apparel and Accessories
Apparel and Accessory sites recorded the highest (fastest) response time of all merchants during the month of September at 7.56 secs. Mass Merchants came in at 8.08, Computer retailers 8.24 and all Others averaged 9.42 secs.
What’s the Deal With Social Networking
Facebook: The original social platform for keeping tabs on friends, associates, acquaintances, etc. Share photos and all manner of other goodies. Some annoying applications, but overall its still useful.
LinkedIn: A great source for business people. Keep up with contacts. Network with others. Look for jobs. Post a resume.
Twitter: Track whoever you want with this cool site. Every one is allowed 142 characters to communicate with the world. People follow your posts and you follow their posts. It’s fun and informative.
Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, reddit, etc: Bookmark your favorite articles or look for bookmarked articles from others on any subject.
FriendFeed: This great site allows you to put all your networks together into one stream of information. Very handy for seeing everything in one place.
RueLala.com and GSI Together
RueLala.com was just purchased by GSI for $350. RueLala is a private members-only site that offers upscale fashions through limited sales events. The idea was first offered in 2008 based upon other such sites in Europe.
With its $350 million acquisition of Retail Convergence Inc., GSI Commerce Inc. sees a lucrative opportunity to provide additional third-party services to other retailers that want to target the fast-growing private sales business, executive vice president of partner strategy and marketing Fiona Dias tells Internet Retailer.
GSI already provides a number of big chain retailers and consumer brand manufacturers such as Toys “R” Us Inc. and adidas AG with e-commerce platform, marketing and other services. But with its acquisition of Retail Convergence, which owns and operates SmartBargains.com, No. 101 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, and especially RueLala.com, a fast-growing private sale e-commerce site, GSI can provide retailers with a new outlet to sell in-season and excess inventory to RueLaLa’s 1.2 million members.
GSI also has a prime opportunity to cross-sell other services to the 300 upscale brand manufacturers that already have a relationship with RueLaLa.com, such as watch maker Movado Group Inc., cookware manufacturer Calphalon Corp. and sportswear manufacturer and retailer Tommy Bahama Group Inc. “This is our largest acquisition ever and we see great synergy with Retail Convergence and a huge upside in the private sale e-commerce market,” says Dias. “We’ve been looking at this market and decided to buy a company rather than build one because there is a great advantage to being an early mover.”
Zappos Getting Personal
Intro: Zappos, now owned by Amazon has added ChoiceStream to provide more personalized recommendations to shoppers. Its all based on what a shopper has looked at previously on the site. According to ClickStream, sites that use more personalization can see increases in sales by as much as 20% to 30%.
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As e-commerce companies eye another dreary holiday season, they are experimenting with different ways to urge the customers that visit their sites to make a purchase.
At Zappos.com, the online shoe retailer that is about to become part of Amazon.com, that means treading the line between giving shoppers personal advice and scaring them off with too much one-on-one attention.
Zappos has hired ChoiceStream, a Cambridge company that helps e-commerce sites give shoppers personalized recommendations. So far, Zappos is using ChoiceStream for product recommendations, based on which products shoppers have browsed or purchased in the past and those that other people with similar taste have bought. On its new homepage, which the company is currently testing, product recommendations show up in a big box when a shopper first visits the site.