Digital White - super shiny web apps

At Digital White we have been watching with interest the continued roll out of tablets across the hospitality and airline industries. Recently American Airlines have announced they will be giving First Class Passengers use of tablets. They are not the first airline to show interest in integrating tablets into their services with JetStar, Air NewZealand and Air Baltic all trialing iPads.

In the hospitality industry numerous hotel groups have been looking into rolling out iPads for customer use or to increase staff productivity. The Intercontinental Hotel Group has researched whether the gadgets would make hotel staff more versatile to the needs of customers.

This is an important development for a number of reasons. Firstly it cements that tablet computers’ uses are continually expanding, as airlines and hotels alike ‘go digital’… It will be interesting to see which sectors of the industry are next. Secondly it is another step in the shifting emphasis towards mobile technology, which shows no sign of dampening. Finally it is an opportunity for innovation and creativity within the application industry. It’s a good thing that it’s what Digital White does best!

F-commerce (Facebook commerce) is a type of e-commerce where brands use Facebook to sell products. With 25% of the 700 million users on Facebook connecting with brands on the social network site, f-commerce is becoming an increasingly popular form of e-commerce. The top three brands on Facebook (Coca-Cola, Starbucks and Disney) all sell products directly via their page.

Why Use It?

- There are millions of people using Facebook and an increasing amount of time is being spent on the social network, so it’s a great way for brands to engage with customers and increase sales opportunities by selling products on their page.

- The ability to offer unique discounts and offers to Facebook fans.

- 50% of consumers use social networks for product referrals, learning about offers and to seek advice from existing customers. Consumer recommendations are the most trusted advertising medium for Internet users so it’s a good space to dominate!

- The use of smartphones. Time spent on social networks via mobile browsers has significantly increased from 6.5% in 2009 to over 11% in 2011, which is fuelling the growth of f-commerce.

- Brands can use f-commerce in different ways. They can use it for fan stores (offering fan merchandise - Disney), full stores (sell all products to drive sales-ASOS) and as a CRM platform (drive customer experience - O2 and Starbucks).

EXAMPLES:

- ASOS - Launched a fully transactional Facebook store which allows people to buy its entire range from within Facebook itself. With 1,300 products added each week they “have millions of visits and millions of pounds coming from Facebook to ASOS”.

- Odeon Cinema - Odeon is looking to sell tickets through a transactional Facebook store as an additional way to drive people to its cinemas. It will allow people to purchase tickets without having to leave the social networking site.

With brands realising the potential of selling products via the largest social networking site, f-commerce is beginning to gain popularity in the UK. With ASOS leading the way in the UK, French Connection, Heinz, P&G, O2 and others are following the trend. It’s easy to see why!

Facebook quitely launched the new “Tag Suggestions” system globally last week. This new service uses facial recognition software to identify individuals as photos are uploaded. It automatically picks out existing friends and then encourages their friends to tag them so that others can easily access the images. It sounds like a very cool idea and Facebook said that the system was intended to speed up the process of assigning a name to a picture, known as tagging. So what’s wrong with it?

Over 100 million people are tagged in Facebook photos each day and the first obvious problem with this new function is the fact that more people are being identified without their permission and thus it’s an invasion of their privacy.

The bigger problem is that even though users have the choice to switch the feature off, they are opted to it by default and Facebook did not do enough to notify users about this. Therefore, users complained that they were not explicitly asked if they wanted it activated. Many people feel uncomfortable about the information these social networks share without their permission and it seems that Facebook’s Face Tagging functionality has deepened these concerns.

Facebook have explained the misconceptions about the service and say that the tagging is still done by your friends and not Facebook and they have apologised for the way it rolled out its new face tagging service, admitting that they should have notified users more.

Wednesday 8th June was the World IP version 6 "IPv6" Day, which was held by the Internet Society (ISOC). Yesterday many major organisations, such as Facebook and Google, rolled out either commercial or trial IPv6 services, as well as increasing awareness of the new Internet protocol.

With the increasing connectivity of mobile devices, you may or may not be aware, that Internet ‘space’ is greatly diminishing. With each machine needing a unique address, IPv4 addresses are getting close to none. IPv6 will be able to give unique Internet addresses to all devices and thus, create enough space on the Internet. The days goal was to motivate organizations across the industry - Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies - to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition as IPv4 address space runs out.

World IPv6 Day acts as a focal point to bring existing efforts together. For the first time, players from all parts of the industry were able to work towards the common goal of enabling IPv6 at a large scale with minimal disruption. IPv6 will implement a massive change on the web as it will provide over 4 billion times more space.

This week, Apple unveiled its iCloud service in San Fransisco at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). This exciting, free service syncs users’ content - including emails, apps, documents and music - on an online server to let consumers access all their digital content anytime, anywhere.

The iCloud is designed so that when an item is bought, i.e. a song or video, on one device it will automatically be available on all other devices. It also lets users sync their documents and photos between multiple devices. And the great part about it is that it will work automatically, meaning that there is nothing new for users to learn.

When it comes to the music storage part of the iCloud, the free service syncs music bought from iTunes. But for an annual subscription Apple will also scan the music that you haven't bought from iTunes and add it to your iCloud service if it is in their library.

Yesterday, Steve Jobs outlined a world where computers are just access points to digital storage...the iCloud is definitely something that will shake up the digital world and bring with it new opportunities!