I came across this interesting news which states a survey that firms in the UK continue to take punches from employee’s online activity. These punches have cost these firms an estimated $2.25 Billion a year, thanks to every employee spending an average 40 minutes a week on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Now to be honest this is just another reason to justify the losses and these social networks have actually given the employees a way to break away from work and actually help them being more productive. I mean employees weren’t much productive either when they spent time smoking away a few minutes every now and then or having lengthened conversations while they just munched some food. At least with this employees can actually enjoy their time at work place by communicating with an old friend somewhere far and actually have a better focus at work, spending a few minutes online.
Topics: Reports
Salesforce is making quite some moves presently, ever expanding with its integration with the Box.net, Twitter, etc. Presently the SaaS provider has partnered with Adobe. The integration will have Force.com, its platform for creating apps to offer Adobe Flash Builder. This would enable developers as well as IT professionals to create applications using Force.com’s platform which will be much improved with the Adobe Flash Builder. This would add a lot of value to their businesses with the ease of creating custom applications that suit their needs.
Yammer that has got all the attention being the Twitter for businesses appears to be going through some issues at the moment as it suffers some serious outage. The problem arises from some DNS issues and has left the services down for quite some hours now. Although it’s quite uncommon to have been happening with Yammer but then it can happen with the best, Gmail has a very good history and so does Twitter. We just hope it is up and running sooner now.
Online shopping assistance and community platform for retailers, IMshopping gets some boost from Rainbow Appliance as it introduced a 17% conversion rate for its Merchant Answers Service. Rainbow Appliance previously focused on phone support for customers but as it happens, the support teams end up answering the same questions time and again. This is exactly why they extended hands to IMshopping’s Merchant Answers which lets customers to ask any and every shopping related questions using the widget. The idea was to provide customers an answer from a proper shopping guide, giving each a personal reply. This proved more than just fruitful as the service had more than 17% customers into sales. This makes Rainbow Appliances the 26th retailer to be using IMshopping’s Merchant Answers. The recommendation can be directly added to the retailer sites enabling customers to directly ask questions using the sites or Twitter and giving them a personalized shopping experience.
After launching earlier last year, Blogged.com is making a move to integrate real time functions to its site. The site provides users a platform to find the ratings and feedback on blogs in numerous categories and the entire work is done by humans instead of some algorithm. The introduction of real time function to the site is to enhance user experience with comments made real time plus the inclusion of live chat. The live chat feature lets users create chat rooms of multiple users to engage in discussions and these can be put up on sites via the embeddable widgets.
Alert, Alert it’s not just Facebook that has a vulnerability, the latest to be affected is Adobe Acrobat and Reader. This is found in the latest release of the software and leaves your system prone to execution of codes via PDF file. The primary target is version 9.1.3 for Windows but that doesn’t count out Mac, UNIX, etc. Adobe however will be releasing an update by Tuesday, 13th October. In the meantime users are advised to keep their anti virus software updated to avoid any issues.
In a bid to improve how data is shared in the New York City publicly. The city’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg is taking the NYC Big Apps Ideas a step further with the launch of NYC BigApps Competition. This would encourage application developers to turn their ideas to reality and bring innovative applications for online and mobile experience. The winners will get to have dinner with the Mayor and have cash prizes worth $1,500 to $5,000. I guess there should be more of such competitions, not just in the USA but else where too.
After partnering with Mindspark Interactive Network about a week back, Offerpal has released its new platform; Offerpal SURVEYS. It provides game developers and publishers tap in more revenue by simply having their users earn virtual cash in return of filling out surveys. This isn’t something new which the company is doing, but it has sort of compiled all those surveys it did in the past into one module. This would greatly benefit those developers whose primary focus are surveys. Plus it gives them a potential market given that they have partnerships with Comscore, Nielsen NetRatings to name a few and more than 5 million surveys to date. There is quite a potential in that alone and the numbers don’t leave me surprised why Offerpal decided to introduce an entire platform for this.
Google’s simplicity is what I have always loved and how quickly it provides results for the search queries. However WebMynd is holding a competition to have people give Google a different look. The competition is called RedesignGoogle and will be accepting submissions till November 1st, once the competition closes, the judges will decide the winner and will reward a MacBook Air to the lucky winner. The participants will be able to check the design out using WebMynd’s browser plugin to have a fully customized search experience.
