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Survey Says: Smartphones are Being Used for Travel

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Today’s smartphone will not be called as such if  it isn’t smart enough to perform day-to-day functions that affects our lives. One proof? – the plethora of mobile applications available on various platforms. These mobile apps vary from the most useful to the most absurd ones. One  app which smartphones are supposed to come in handy is for travel purposes.

There are various travel-related apps available on various smartphone platforms. But are these applications being maximized by users? Compete’s analysis of available data shows that indeed, smartphones are being used for travel purposes. The bad news is, the usage is not significant enough, leaving more room for, growth perhaps?

Compete’s study utilized behavioraly targeted surveys that asked smartphone users whether they use their smartphones for travel research and booking.  Surprisingly, 69% of the respondents to Compete’s survey said that they do not use their smartphone’s for travel purposes and 78% said they don’t use smartphones for travel booking as well.

Quite interestingly, the survey also revealed that respondents see their smartphone’s usage more for post-travel bookings. These pertain to following up room availability, check-in time and other travel-related activities that you need to do.

The survey thus revealed that smartphones are not replacement tool but rather additional tools that aid users in their travel-related needs. And smartphone’s usage to follow-up bookings and other travel-related purposes are still growing despite the relatively low usage.

The fact is smartphones can be used in various ways that we can possibly imagine. And one of these is for travel bookings and other related information.

via Compete

3 Reasons Why Foursquare Should Not Sell Out

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With its userbase already reaching 1 million this week, coming from a 170,000 membership during the last quarter of 2009, there’s no doubt Foursquare is the hottest and fastest growing location-based social networking service right now. With 20 employees running it, it is not so surprising that talks are already popping out regarding possible sell-out.

And if you’re still doubting whether Foursquare is hot right now, what if we tell you who the rumored buyers are. Well, some of the major players who are reportedly eyeing Foursquare include Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook. Yahoo was rumored to be willing to buy Foursquare for $100 million. Now, the question is not whether Foursquare will sell out, but rather should Foursquare sell out?

I don’t think so. And here are 3 reasons why Foursquare should not sell out.

1. Location-based social networking is hot and still growing

Both three major social media players namely, Google, Twitter and Facebook are gradually exploring the location-based social media sphere. Google is slowly evolving its Buzz service to have the same cool features as Foursquare. Twitter has activated geolocation of tweets and Facebook has been trying out these feature as well. As for Foursquare, it’s the very essence of its existence – location aware social sharing and networking. Foursquare just need to ponder on why the three major players are wanting to have Foursquare feature’s to understand that it’s going to be the next big thing in the social media ecosystem.

2. Along with growth is the commercial revenue potential

Foursquare currently offers free advertising to small shops and restaurants as it generates revenue from selling ads business chains. It recently launched Foursquare for Business where it gives simple self-service tools that would allow business manager to cook up various kinds of special gigs that would attract customers to business establishments. This is a good start at trying to tap on a business model. Once this service goes viral and businesses spread the word out how Foursquare is helping out drive in customers, you can just imagine how big it will be for Foursquare. Location-based social networking and recommendation site has all the potentials to bring in revenue whether be it for ads or other means. And Foursquare is already ahead of the game. [Read more…] about 3 Reasons Why Foursquare Should Not Sell Out

7 Reasons to Work in the Cloud

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The following is a guest post by Selena Narayanasamy. An avid lover of all things caffeine, Selena  currently does SEO and is a social media marketer/analyst as well as a writer. She has multiple degrees in business, marketing and finance. Along with all this, she also writes for Searchenginejournal.com and is growing Esvienne.com, her own personal social media and tech blog.  Twitter- @esvienne

The cloud is something that has been all around us for quite some time now, but we may not have noticed. Many of us didn’t think we needed to utilize the cloud; and we’re right. We have our own ways of managing tasks and information, from planners to our cell phones. There are certain markets that should be using the cloud, specifically small and large businesses. Since the cloud is ever-changing and nothing solid, it’s often confusing to a company who may be considering a work-flow overhaul and is looking at different options. There are 7 reasons in specific to use the cloud:

1. Employees are utilizing the same resources:

This can bog down your network and kill all chances of getting a good system flowing. Frustration with editing and slow resources can add stress to employees and hinder their abilities to work effectively and efficiently. Having many tools available in the cloud will allow there to be a place where everyone can work and collaborate freely. You won’t have to keep asking and waiting for someone to email you a document or a zip file. [Read more…] about 7 Reasons to Work in the Cloud

Google Buzz Posts Are All Auto-Feeds

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Here’s an interesting look into the current buzz being posted on Google Buzz. The study was conducted by Post Rank which tracks engagement activities on over two dozen social networks and recently added buzz posted on Google Buzz.

During their analysis of  Google Buzz feeds, Post Rank found some interesting points regarding all the noise that have been building up on Google Buzz.

Turns out, approximately 60% of the content on Buzz is from Twitter! Many users have hooked up their accounts to automatically repost their content from Twitter either directly, through FriendFeed, or via another service.

The runner up to Twitter? Another set of bots! This time, it’s automated alerts from feeds, e.g. CNN publishes a new story and a bot pushes it out to the Buzz stream. All in all, those two sources account for almost 90% of the Buzz stream, and even in the remainder there is a long tail of Google Latitude updates, ping.fm, and others. Unfortunately, there just doesn’t seem to be much original and/or human-generated content in Buzz. Perhaps you shouldn’t hurry to install that Buzz button on your site just yet…

What does this all mean. If you’re a social media marketeer eyeing to implement some marketing campaign on Google Buzz, well you might want to hold back for awhile as there is no clear chance that your campaign would reap higher engagement.

It seems that the activities on Google Buzz right now are all automated. Well, of course you might be engaging with “real people” in your own Buzz streams and that’s pretty understandable since you’ve selected people to follow on Google Buzz yourself.

But then as what Post Rank’s study yielded, majority of Google Buzz posters are actually non-human.

Google Buzz Gets An Official Share Button

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If you  liked Buzz since day one chances are you’ve probably clicked on those Google Buzz share buttons developed and implemented by top blogs such as Mashable and TechCrunch. You may have also used some “unofficial” follow me on Google Buzz buttons in your blogs or websites. The thing is implementing those unofficial Google Buzz buttons maybe a tedius process and may require some codings and all.

But that was the case before, not until now. Google has just launch the official Google Buzz sharing buttons. Starting today, you’d be seeing more of those official Google Buzz share buttons on top sites which have partnered with Google. These include The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, Glamour, YouTube and others. These buttons will make it easier for you to share interesting news items you find on the Internet and post it as updates to your Google Buzz accounts.

Likewise, those third-party share widgets/buttons such as Share This, Shareholic and other have also started implementing the Google Buzz button in their widgets.

Now, to post the Google Buzz button in your own blog/site, you can grab the Javascript code from this site and paste it to your site’s code.  You can also add the official follow me on Google Buzz button to your blogs/sites by also grabbing the code for it from the said site.

There you go, some new ways to spread the buzz and if you don’t like Google Buzz – add some more noise to the Buzz sphere.

TweetDeck App Fully Optimized for the iPad

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With the large screen real-estate that the iPad offers, I wasn’t really quite surprised that the first adopters among application developers would be those with mobile Twitter client apps. If you checked the iTunes iPad App Store right now, you’d find several Twitter apps for the iPad – both new and old ones ported to the new platform. One of these Twitter apps which happens to be also my favorite on mobile phones is TweetDeck.

Thankfully, the TweetDeck folks didn’t just ported their mobile TweetDeck app to the iPad platform but build a new application instead. In fact they’ve build two new interfaces – for portrait and landscape modes. TweetDeck for iPad also takes full use of the device’s multi-gesture features.

Feature-wise, TweetDeck for iPad lets you do practically everything that you can with its mobile phone versions. The app lets you fully manage all your Twitter accounts, check web pages from within TweetDeck, use columns to manage your real-time feed, sync your data with the desktop and iphone client, iPad gesture based navigation, geolocation data and map interface, and of course all the basic Twitter functions such as composing tweets, retweeting and sending DMs.

And guess what? TweetDeck for iPad is a free download. Get it from the iTunes iPad App Store once you received your iPad.

Or watch this video showing the TweetDeck for iPad in action.