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"Google's "Smartphone Launch Predictor" study found that 52 percent of purchase-related searches occur before a smartphone is launched. According to Google, the key to a successful smartphone launch is getting ahead of the release and marketing early. "One of the biggest factors is getting early buzz. Getting early buzz is key [for a successful smartphone launch]," Google Industry Director for Tech Kyle Keogh told ClickZ. The study found that the earlier a firm markets a smartphone the more likely they are to succeed in sales. According to Google, an extra 1,000 news stories put in place weeks before a launch can lead to a 9 percent spike in smartphone sales. Google's research discovered that users tend to do general product searches in the week during launch. After launch, it was discovered that consumers dig deep and search for key specifications on a device. Video is also becoming a key research tool for consumers shopping for a smartphone. According to the study, video views for smartphones increased 60 percent this year. Google says that if a smartphone gets over 1 million video views during launch week it will likely sell over 1.3 million units."

""With YouTube external annotations, we're trying to make it a very seamless process," said Lisa Green, industry director at Google. "If while you're watching it, you see something you really want, you can click... We've allowed the user to make the decision to make the purchase" in the video. The beta feature is available to all existing clients, although Google won't disclose how many advertisers have shown interest or signed up thus far. Juicy Couture, one of the first brands to adopt the shoppable feature, released a new video directed by Terry Richardson featuring Candice Swanepoel at the famed Chateau Marmont hotel. The fashion label features nineteen different products in the second video. YouTube's shoppable video ads will display a shaded rectangle in the middle of the screen whenever a product appears. When a user rolls over that embedded video link, the product name is displayed with a link to the purchase page. Google's product and sales teams are working with advertisers to bring these new ads into their videos on YouTube, Green said."

"Ingress, the Alternate/Augmented Reality (AR) game from Google's Niantic Labs, is a major evolution of mobile gaming. Apparently, it's also a good way to get arrested. According to a post on Reddit (I know, I know - but stay with me on this), an Ingress player in Ohio was detained by police for his in-game actions. Specifically, he was "hacking a portal" near a police station. His phone had technical difficulties, which led him to linger by the portal/police station for a bit, catching the eye of local law enforcement and leading to the detention. After the original post, other Ingress players responded with similar stories. One aroused suspicions by wandering around an empty parking lot at night. Another, trying to hack a portal next to an air traffic control station, had to run from the local sheriff. A third was called in for questioning after hacking a portal outside of a "high-traffic drug area.""

"But advertisers have loads of their own offline data from existing customers that they have not been able to use to target search ads. Conversions API allows those advertisers to upload phone numbers and in-store purchase data and use that information to target search ads through DoubleClick, Google's search ad system. Google's announcement was thin on details. It says advertisers can now "upload new conversions to account for in-store transactions, call-tracking, or other offline activities, or edit existing conversions to account for discounts, returns, credit, or fraud.""

But you might be surprised by the second-leading source of the expected surge in traffic. It won't come from people, but from machine-to-machine communications, or "M2M." Think of sensors in cars and in appliances, surveillance cameras, smart electric meters, and devices still to come, monitoring the world and reporting to each other and to centralized computers what they're detecting. The chart below, reprinted from the Cisco report, shows just how extreme the jump in machine-to-machine communications could be. It is expected to grow, on average, 86 percent a year, and by 2016 it is expected to reach 508 petabytes a month, or half a billion gigabytes.

Hallmark Cards Inc. is getting into the text-messaging world - but not the one that usually springs to mind. Text Bands, a new product from the Kansas City-based greeting card giant, aim to give kids a way to exchange positive messages when they meet in person. Kids wearing the colorful bands bump fists or shake hands, causing the the bands to light up and the message - up to 10 characters - to transfer. Each band can hold as many as 24 messages; they include filters to help prevent negative messages.

Attempting to conquer the same social/hyperlocal space as Patch and more niche apps like Yardsale, Nextdoor, which launched to the public last October, lets people create Facebook group-like communities for their neighborhoods, free of charge. From the Village Voice to Foursquare to Everyblock, everyone has tried, but the problem of how to effectively create location-based social networking is a conundrum for many reasons. In order to mitigate the largest barrier to entry, trust, Nextdoor has you verify your neighborhood address either via snail mail or via credit card - purposefully introducing friction.

Activated by gestures, touches and movements, visitors can be trigger different sounds such as "athletes' heartbeats, shoes squeaking, arrows hitting a target, etc" which will then be synced up to remix Mark Ronson's "Anywhere in the World." But for what purpose is Coca-Cola doing this? The company's official statement: The visionary pavilion has been inspired by Coca-Cola's global campaign for London 2012 - Move to the BeatTM - that aims to connect young people to the Games by bringing together their passions for music and sport. The pavilion forms part of Coca-Cola's Future Flames campaign for London 2012, which aims to recognise and reward the best of the nation's youth and shine a spotlight on emerging talent to inspire other young people to pursue their passions.

"Booking a dinner date through Facebook is getting a bit easier for iOS users today. The company has just updated its iOS app with full OpenTable integration, meaning you won't need to leave Facebook to make restaurant reservations. Simply visiting a restaurant's Page within the app, choosing a date and time, and specifying your party size will present a list of available reservations. Restaurants will need to be participating with OpenTable for the option to be visible, but Facebook's users don't need existing OpenTable accounts to use the feature. Once you're set up, it's just as easy to cancel a booked meal - all it takes is a tap to alert a restaurant that you won't be making it out."

"Thanks to Groupon, merchants may face a similar, but perhaps even more damaging, fate. Prices are likely to erode as consumers come to expect deals. They will wait for sales to buy, and merchants will find themselves competing ever more fiercely. Meanwhile, merchants' brand power will be eroded as consumers look to Groupon (as they do to Orbitz), rather than to the merchants themselves, for the best deals."

Best Buy is on a mission to change its image and reclaim sales lost to rivals including Wal-Mart and Amazon. Under CEO Brian Dunn, the consumer-electronics chain is testing less-cluttered layouts similar to those of Apple stores, training employees to demonstrate to customers how gadgets work together and moving away from promotions to everyday low pricing. 

The app, built by Radical Media (the folks behind Arcade Fire's "The Wilderness Downtown" project), allows users to watch videos and read articles from ONE's website, and then take actions based on those articles. Is ONE having a campaign to get the U.S. government to forgive developing world debt? You'll be able to pull up all the relevant facts to convince people how important the issue is, sign a petition at the click of a button (and get your friends to sign, too), or be directed to who to call to formally lodge your opinion. The app even gives you a script, and a place to record how the call went. Now ONE will know more precisely how much its users are pushing policy-makers. And when it's time to protest, a ONE organizer can send you a push notification telling you to get out on the street and make your voice heard.

"The big highlight is that Google will be building a version of Chrome especially for use inside virtual reality. The browser will be coming later this year. Oculus launched a browser for the Gear VR in its most recent big software update, though Daydream's option seems to take advantage of some of the strengths of Chrome, like bookmarks and history. The company has already brought WebVR to mobile and desktop Chrome. They showed off WebVR Experiments last month to bring bite-size experiences to VR on Daydream and Cardboard. Google gave some light details on bringing Chrome to augmented reality situations, as well, so that users can bring their outside world into the browser. This will allow people shopping for a coffee table on Amazon's mobile app to scan their room and see what the right size would be. The update will be launching today on an experimental build of Chromium."

Zeebox still hasn't launched in the US, but shortly after the London-based social TV company scored a large round of funding they're launching clickable TV ads across their platform. Their press release reads, "in a world first, UK users will be able to purchase products advertised on TV through their tablet or smartphone in real time." Zeebox seems to be one of the only major players in the UK giving them the opportunity to really build a great product in their market and then come to the US with a fine-tuned model and case studies. On the other hand, Shazam, Viggle and the other US social TV startups are working with brands to finally figure out how to make ads useful.

Endorse for a Cause gives charities a percentage of sales from any online retailer users can nominate charities widget for certain sites that allows you to share on facebook and if friends purchase the item EFAC will donate affiliate fees to a charity earn points, win badges, prizes for raising money

More Londoners than ever are using contactless payments to get around the capital, and now, a new initiative called "Penny for London" is asking commuters to add charitable donations to their daily routine, too. The idea is that every time you use a contactless card to pay for travel, you also put aside a nominal amount -- between 1p and 10p -- for charity. Then, at the end of the each month, Penny for London charges the accumulated total to the same card, and forwards the money on to the Mayor's Fund for London, Cash for Kids, The Prince's Trust and other charitable organisations.

"Facebook has been showing a survey to users within the social network. Users can take this survey if they want to - it's entirely voluntary. They'll answer questions about whether they're experiencing symptoms associated with COVID-19, such as cough or fever.  That data then gets sent to the research team at Carnegie Mellon (not Facebook), which uses it to create population models of people experiencing symptoms. The idea is that symptoms are the "precursor" to hospital visits, so an uptick in symptoms in a particular area could help officials decide where to send health resources. "The survey responses combined with other data such"

""We're a direct response shop and we are held to a strict ROI metric," said Will Ferguson, senior director of online marketing, display advertising & social media at 1-800 Flowers. The company uses AddThis--which offers a toolbar that enables users to share content over Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere-to help it collect data from billions of search queries, domains and URLs. "We are able to leverage this data to introduce new audiences to our product," said Ferguson."

"While at least Life-magazine-killer TV has served as a platform for the creation of some great artworks (HBO's "The Wire," created by newspaperman-turned-TV-auteur David Simon, comes to mind) and inspired the creation of new art forms (see the upcoming Smithsonian retrospective of the work of "father of video art" Nam June Paik), it's hard to imagine what of lasting value hot web-native media brands like Gawker and BuzzFeed are contributing to visual culture and art history. Which brings me to an email I got last Wednesday from Gawker promoting its "top story" of Dec. 5., titled "The 13 Most Powerful Images of Naked Celebrities of 2012," which quickly racked up more than a million page views. It was a sequel to a Gawker post from the previous day titled "The 19 Most Powerful Images of 2012," which was mostly a shameless, edited-down rip-off of a BuzzFeed post titled "The 45 Most Powerful Images Of 2012," consisting of intense wire-service photojournalism from Reuters, the AP, Getty and others, which derive most of their support from old-school print-centric publications around the world. Gawker's excuse for its act of, uh, curation: "Who has time to scroll through 45 pictures?""

"Walmart began recruiting top Silicon Valley talent and acquiring start-ups last year. For instance, Walmart acquired Kosmix, a company that specializes in making web design more seamless, for $300 million. That team has been working for over a year to fix Walmart's systems and improve its website.  Walmart is investing in the "social gifting" market. A year ago, Walmart launched "Shopycat," which makes gift recommendations based on friends' Facebook profiles. The site is now called "Walmart Gifts" and allows customers to log in and get personalized recommendations based on Facebook and Twitter profiles.  The retailer got a better search engine. A dozen top engineers took 10 months to build it, and while the company won't discuss sales figures, they said the new system is more user-friendly. "If you search for cotton socks now, you'll actually find them," Manjoo writes.  Walmart is trying to lead the charge in same-day shipping. Its at an advantage considering that 96 percent of Americans live within 20 miles of a Walmart.  Walmart is investing like crazy in its mobile app. "Walmart imagines that as you go through an average day, you'll remember things you need--milk, bread, a new tennis racquet, a toy truck for your nephew's birthday--and tell the voice-enabled Walmart app. The app will list each item's location inside your local Walmart and include product info; eventually, it will also learn your preferences and offer recommendations. And once you're actually in the store, you'll be able to summon an associate to help you," Manjoo says. "