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Just Like the Share Price, Facebook Goes Down After Being Hacked (Daily Mail)
Facebook experienced service outages for portions of its 900 million users Thursday after the social networking site was apparently targeted by a hacking group. The mass outages for the famously reliable social networking site capped off a topsy-turvy two weeks for co-founder Mark Zuckerberg after Facebook’s stock closed at $29.60 per share on Thursday, down 22 percent from its offering price of $38. The New York Times On Valentine’s Day, Nick Bergus came across a link to an odd product on Amazon.com: a 55-gallon barrel of … personal lubricant. He posted the link on Facebook, adding a comment: “For Valentine’s Day. And every day. For the rest of your life.” Facebook — or rather, one of its algorithms — had seen his post as an endorsement and transformed it into an advertisement, paid for by Amazon. VentureBeat If you have a great idea or application that uses the Facebook platform for human rights, the company just might give you a sweet $20,000 prize for your efforts. The cash is part of the Access Innovation Prize and is offered in partnership with Access, the tech human rights organization. Mashable A recent Facebook update lets page administrators schedule posts in advance, similar to the scheduling functions of HootSuite and other third-party apps. However, users quickly noticed flaws in the user interface — that is, if they could even find the feature at all. CNET Facebook has apparently booted Google’s Chrome browser off of its supported browser list, instead highlighting Opera, according to Favbrowser, which managed to cache a page with the note (the page no longer appears). The switch is particularly poignant with speculation flaring up that Facebook is interested in acquiring Opera. AllFacebook The question of whether registered sex offenders should be allowed to use Facebook and other social networks found its way into a courtroom again Thursday, this time in U.S. District Court in Indianapolis, Ind., where Judge Tanya Walton Pratt said she would rule within one month on whether a state law banning the practice is constitutional. continued…

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What do Cupid, Abraham Lincoln, and Saint Nick have in common? Other than the fact that they each are icons associated with a major holiday, finding a common thread might be tough — until now.

The answer is that their holidays have provided a stage to show that a smarter form of commerce is not just taking shape, but is also here to stay: mobile commerce.

I have spent a great deal of time over the last three months dissecting the influence of the empowered consumer. Throughout that time, the conversation has focused primarily on the emergence of the mobile shopper.

Now, as we begin April, I am excited to report that mobile shopping hasn’t receded. In fact, it remains a staple of the retail landscape, whether initiated with an iPhone, iPad, or Android device.

Recently, our team did some analyses of online shopping the week leading up to Valentine’s Day as well as the days before President’s Day.

Here’s what we found:

Valentine’s Day

In the week leading up to this holiday, IBM’s online benchmark study found that 14.5 percent of all online sessions on a retailer’s site were initiated from a mobile device. As for sales, 10.1 percent of all online sales for the week before Valentine’s Day came through a mobile device.

If this sounds familiar, it should. These figures, for both traffic and sales, are almost identical to what we saw over the recent Christmas holiday, where traffic and sales were 14.6 percent and 11 percent, respectively. What this tells us is that the mobile shopping habits witnessed over the November and December holidays are not fleeting. They’re actually quite the opposite. A permanent change is in effect, with the empowered consumer turning to mobile devices not just for blockbuster shopping days, but also for all holidays and shopping occasions in between.

For Valentine’s Day, the influence of mobile commerce was perhaps most prevalent in several key verticals where sales were up dramatically from last year:

Jewelry and intimate apparel
A record number of consumers made impulse buys via their mobile devices, with mobile sales of jewelry and intimate apparel growing to 28.8 percent and 17.7 percent, respectively.

Health and beauty
Shoppers continued to demonstrate a desire to pamper their loved ones, with mobile sales of health and beauty items (lotions, fragrances, and more) growing to 15.1 percent, an increase from 2011′s less than 4 percent.

Valentine’s shoppers also showed a similar pattern when it came to device preferences. Apple’s iPhone and iPad ranked one and two for mobile device retail traffic (5.5 percent and 4.9 percent, respectively). Android was third at 4.4 percent. Collectively, iPhone and iPad accounted for 10.4 percent of mobile device retail traffic.

President’s Day

To make sure Valentine’s momentum wasn’t just the work of Cupid and his love of mobile devices, we decided to take yet another look. This time we focused on President’s Day weekend, and what we found further demonstrates “m-commerce’s” coming of age. On President’s Day weekend, mobile traffic and sales reached 17.3 percent and 11.9 percent on Saturday, 16.9 percent and 11.6 percent on Sunday, and 14.2 percent and 9.9 percent on the Monday holiday. These figures far exceed what we witnessed in 2011.

As was the case with Valentine’s Day, there were also some tremendous industry performers. Here are some that stood out on President’s Day Monday:

Apparel
Mobile sales of apparel grew from 3.5 percent in 2011 to 11.3 percent in 2012.

Health and beauty
Mobile sales of health and beauty items surpassed what we saw over Valentine’s Day, reaching 18.1 percent.

Home goods
Mobile sales grew by more than 116 percent, reaching 12.2 percent in 2012.

It’s exciting to see that the promise of mobile remains strong, and I cannot wait to see how it continues to influence both shoppers and retailers as we move forward. As for now, it’s safe to say that holiday shopping, whether you are buying jewelry or items for the home, has changed for good.

John Squire is the director of digital marketing and analytics for IBM.

 On Twitter? Follow John Squire at @IBMsmrtcommerce. Follow iMedia Connection at @iMediaTweet.

“Smart phone with credit card” image via Shutterstock.

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This weekend is Mother’s Day and as the nation prepares to say a collective thank you to our Mums I thought this would be a good time to share our top 10 Mother’s Day facts for 2012:

1. 10% of all Mother’s Day UK searches include the word ‘when’. It’s Sunday 18 March so get cracking!

2. Since Monday (12 March) over a million UK Internet visits have been made to the Flowers & Gifts shopping category every day as sons and daughters seek to buy Mother’s Day gifts before Sunday.

3. Visits to the Flowers & Gifts category accounted for almost 2% of total Internet shopping in the UK this week.

4. The average online shopper spent 8 minutes and 18 seconds on a Flowers & Gift website this week in preparation for Mother’s Day. In the week before Valentine’s Day the average visit time was 7 minutes 25 seconds.

5. The UK will spend 927,000 hours this week shopping for Mother’s Day gifts.

6. Last year flowers were more popular than Mother’s Day gifts and cards. In the week leading up to Mother’s Day there were 5% more searches for flowers than gifts, and 68% more searches for flowers than cards.

7. This year searches for gifts are three times more popular than flowers, although there is always a late surge in searches for flowers for last minute online shoppers.

8. There is an emphasis this year on getting Mother’s Day gifts which are different from the standard fare. 1.7% of all searches for Mother’s Day gifts included the word ‘unusual’ whereas 1% contained the word ‘unique’. On the other hand 1.4% of gift searches included the word ‘homemade’.

9. Mother’s Day Hampers are the fast moving gift this year with searches for hampers twice as popular this year than last Mother’s Day. Hamper.com and Hampergifts.co.uk were among the biggest recipients of traffic for these searches.

10. Internet users in Stevenage are the most prolific visitors to the Flowers & Gift category in the run up to Mother’s Day. The people of Stevenage are 21% more likely than the average user to visit this category in March.

Follow Hitwise UK on Twitter for the latest data updates.

Happiness Machine for couples from c-section on Vimeo.

For Valentine’s Day, digital agency, C-Section, placed a Coca Cola vending machine in the busiest mall in Istanbul that dispensed a free can of coke to couples, but only if they proved they loved each other first. Awww isn’t that sweet.

Imagine searching on your own company’s name and finding a competitor’s ad that said you were “Sold Out” right on your business’ most important holiday. That’s what florists like the owner of Chez Bloom in Minnesota had happen, as originally reported by Brand…



Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Not surprisingly, Valentine’s Day spurred lots of last-minute Web searches and phone calls — and the Google mobile ads team just published a blog post highlighting how much of that activity happened on smartphones and tablets.

For one thing, last-minute searches for national restaurant chains grew across-the-board, but they grew the most on smartphones — between February 7 and February 14, these searches increased 359 percent on mobile, compared to 142 percent from desktop computers and 135 percent on tablets. (These statistics are all for the United States.) In total, mobile made up 62 percent of those searches on Valentine’s Day.

People were also more likely to search for flowers from their phones, and to select the “click to call” or “get directions” options in florists’ ads — mobile searches for flower-related terms increased by 227 percent, direction requests increased 514 percent, and people became 560 percent more likely to “click to call.”

While those numbers are impressive, they make intuitive sense. Here’s something that’s a little more surprising: Searches for dating sites Match.com and eHarmony increased more for tablets than for desktops and smartphones. I guess lonely folks preferred to curl up on their couch or bed with their iPads as they looked for love.

Not that I’d know anything about that.

Google is releasing some data on mobile search and Valentine’s Day. The company said, “A whopping 62 percent of total searches for popular national chain restaurants [in the US] on Valentine’s Day occurred on high end mobile devices or tablets.” One more time: 62 percent of all…



Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.