Nokia May Be Down, But ...

As bad as Nokia’s financials look right now – a $4 billion drop in sales won’t make anyone’s day – don’t consider the Windows Phone move a failure just yet. They’ve done what many phone companies have thus far failed to do – namely change swiftly with the times – and, more important, they’ve done it quite admirably. If you’ll recall, the first real Android phone was HTC’s G1. Considered a clunker by all but the most die-hard of users, the device sold fairly well (1 million in 2008). But it did something more important than make T-Mobile the first Android carrier – it grabbed a certain contingent of user who understood Android, understood the framework, and would follow Android to the grave. The popularity of the G1 was a direct reaction to the burgeoning iOS platform. The same thing happened in the WebOS space, but WebOS was exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time and is a disaster distinct from the Android launch. Over time, the maker of the G1, HTC, got better and better at making Android phones. The experience gained from the G1 allowed manufacturers to rejigger their sales strategy, leading to the famous Droid marketing campaign and the hysteria for Google’s Nexus line. Nokia is in a similar space. An outside software product is trying to take market share and will probably flounder for the first few months. Nokia has pivoted completely. Their popular Symbian smartphones are essentially dead and their Windows Phone line is curtailed until popular adoption grows. Most important, they’re taking a bath on the Lumia line by pricing it at or below the comfort level of most casual smartphone buyers They’re essentially selling loss leaders in order to gain market share. Microsoft knows it and Nokia knows it and I assure you HTC, Samsung, and LG know it. They only folks who shouldn’t be worried – yet – are Apple yet I suspect Microsoft is definitely on their radar. I can say one thing without equivocation: Windows Phone is than Android. WinPho is monolithic, there are no issues of branching or hardware compatibility, and UI familiarity will soon be bolstered by millions of Windows 8 installs around the world. Android is great if you’re a small manufacturer and you just want to dump a stack onto what would have once been called a feature phone. Windows Phone is great if you want the largesse, the popularity, and the trustworthiness of Microsoft behind your product. So ignore Nokia at your peril. Their strategy is just right at just the right time. Remember: nobody ever got fired for installing Microsoft. Not even Stephen Elop.

BiteHunter 2.0 Makes Fi...

We’ve written quite a bit about BiteHunter , a mobile app for iPhone that aggregates dining deals in the U.S., since it launched about in 2010. Now, the New York-based company has released version 2.0 of its app and this update makes a good app even better. BiteHunter 2.0 doesn’t just introduce a new, highly visual interface for discovering restaurants with available deals around you, but it also allows you to buy the deal and make a reservation without ever leaving the app. In total, the app currently gives its users access to about 50,000 deals nationwide. It aggregates these offers from a variety of sources, including Groupon, Restaurant.com, LivingSocial, Yelp Deals and Gilt City. Its focus on deals, of course, means BiteHunter doesn’t directly compete with Yelp and similar services. Instead, the basic use case for the app is that moment where you quickly want to find a good restaurant without paying too much. The highlight of this update, beside the new one-click purchase mechanism, is the new interface. It’s highly graphical, makes searching very easy, and let’s you quickly see the Yelp rating of every place and the kind of deal you are getting. You can switch back and forth between a photo grid, a list view and a map. BiteHunter also tuned the app’s recommendation algorithm for this release. Restaurants are now organized according to factors like your distance to the restaurant, the popularity of a given deal and the potential savings.

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Retailers Aren’t Ready ...

New data from Compuware finds conclusive proof of the popularity of iPads as a shopping device. The firm took a look at the website traffic for 70 U.S. retailers’ delivered to an iPhone or iPad over the start of the holiday shopping season (November 14th through Cyber Monday). On Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, specifically, there were peaks in traffic with a high of 6,475,354 iPad pageviews on Black Friday alone, based on a statistical sample of more than 140 million pageviews. To be clear, because this data was pulled from a sampling of tests, it does not indicate the total number of pageviews delivered to these 70 retailers’ sites. But because the sample is large enough to be statistically significant (140 million pageviews), it does show the impact of iPad traffic on e-commerce websites. In addition, the second chart (below) shows how the sites’ response times are impacted when the influx of iPad users hit. Now for the bad news. Despite the increases in tablet traffic, many retailers are not prepared to accommodate these new mobile shoppers. Compuware also prepared a chart showing the top retailers’ sites, and whether or not they offered an iPad-optimized website. Surprisingly, none of them do, not even Apple.com. What’s worse, Apple is also among the retailers who don’t offer a native iPad application. (The iPhone Apple Store app runs on the iPad, of course, but it’s not a universal app). For shame! Apple is not alone though. Around half of the 30 top retailers Compuware looked didn’t have an iPad application, either. Want to see what a missed opportunity looks like? Check out the chart below:

It only shows her popul...

It only shows her popularity across the web. She probably focuses on getting fans online, which is a good idea. long island seo