Author Archives: Sara

Online Christmas Shopping in the UK

Christmas in 2010 saw 44% of us increase our online shopping budgets according to a survey by market research company Tealeaf.

Reasons for this were said to be Convenience, Less Stress, Cheaper Prices (even after postage costs are added on) and Faster Shopping Times (the average time it takes to complete a simple transaction is about 21seconds).

According to a study by eDigitalResearch on Christmas and Boxing Day almost two thirds of Britons went online to get in on the Post-Christmas sales and beat the VAT rise.

It seems that now more than ever companies are realising the impact online shopping has on their business.

The Tealeaf survey also showed that over 5.3 Million British users abandoned their shopping carts due to errors on sites. This figure alone may seem high, but in a Social Media savvy society the knock on effect could be tremendous.

If your friend posted a status or tweet stating a site was full of errors or timing out would you shop there, especially when there are hundreds (if not thousands) of alternatives at your fingertips?

With smartphones and other smart devices becoming more and more prevalent our demand for 24 hour access to online stores and services increases. Even a down time of 2 minutes could lose you 50 customers even if only one person tries to access your site in that time.

Great Year for Google

The past year has seen a great success for Google. With Chrome’s market share reaching 9.98%, over 100% increase since January 2010 when they had only 4.63% market share.

However this was not good news for IE, losing over 5% of their market share over the course of the year.

Google Android OS has also see a significant Rise in new users of the Smart phone OS. In the US over the past 6 months, over 40% of new smart phone users choosing Android OS over iOS or Blackberry OS phones. However iOS is still the most popular phone OS with 28% overall market share Android OS is close behind with 25% overall market share.

With the release of Chrome OS and their Netbook the Cr-48, Google is looking to have another very prosperous year in 2011.

Police Restricted To 140 Characters

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If you were to log onto twitter on Thursday 14th of October you might be surprised to find that one of the trending topics is #gmp24, you might be wondering just what this means.

In an attempt to show the greater public just how tough it is to be a cop Greater Manchester Police have been Tweeting every 999 call they receive in the space of 24 hours.

So far they have made over 1200 tweets since 5:30AM and had three of their accounts temporarily suspended due to ‘spamming’ the micro-blogging site.

However this has not been without any controversy. Fake accounts were made by pranksters which featured tweets such as;

Call 025 – Reported burglary by man with lettuce on his head.#gmp24

Call 36 Police officer down. Police officer down. Ambulance with box of donuts required stat #gmp24

GMP responded quickly threatening the pranksters to remove the official GMP logo.

Although some of the official tweets were just as humorous;

Call 384 report of man holding baby over bridge – police immediately attended and it was man carrying dog that doesn’t like bridges #gmp24

While the whole thing may seem trivial to some Chief constable Peter Fahy claims the point is to let the general public as well as the politicians see what police have to deal with every day, and possibly re-consider budget cuts that have been proposed in the Government’s upcoming spending review.