This week’s movers and shakers in the digital industry: Sportingbet | Random House | Plusnet | Coca-Cola | Face & Nokia | Strongmail | Bongiono | Invisiblehand | Blue Barracuda | Contiki | Just search | Moneybookers | Tomorrow People | Marie Claire | Stream: 20 | Rank Interactive | RSPCA & I Spy Marketing | bigmouthmedia | hereforaday | linkshare | Web TV Enterprise | Infogain | IE | eModeration | Crocodile Keyboard | Smirnoff | Guava | Webgains | Goss | eKnife | Exalead & Capgemini | Samsung
Sportingbet expands into Russia
Sportingbet announces a joint venture with First International Bookmakers Company (“FIBC”), Russia’s second largest licensed bookmaker, trading under the well known Liga Stavok brand. Under the five year deal, Sportingbet and FIBC agree to partner exclusively to establish a Russian online sports betting offering under the “Liga Stavok powered by Sportingbet” brand.
Sportingbet are the sole provider of online services to the joint venture, which will be a unique offering in the market. FIBC operates 256 Liga Stavok licensed betting outlets in 67 cities across Russia, and is expanding at a rate of 25 new openings per month. Liga Stavok has unparalleled access to the Russian sports betting market as a result of its exclusive betting partnership with the Russian Football Premier League. As one of only 18 licence holders, Liga Stavok is one of the country’s most recognised betting brands.The fast growing Russian sports betting industry has an estimated turnover of $1.8bn a year.
www.sportingbet.com
Random House to publish user generated story Mortal Kiss
Random House Childrens Books is to publish Mortal Kiss, the interactive virtual story it created with Stardoll, the worlds largest virtual entertainment and social gaming site for teenagers. The move to create a physical book was prompted by the phenomenally positive response to the story from Stardoll users.
The Mortal Kiss pages on Stardoll have received over 13.9 million page views, with the campaign page receiving over 3.8 million. The Mortal Kiss Stardoll fan club has 51,788 members, against 33,347 for the Harry Potter club. Each of the main characters in the story has character Stardolls; the most popular of these, Faye, received over 600,000 views. Mortal Kiss is the first interactive story Random House has published on a social networking platform. A paranormal mystery, created in collaboration between writers and editors at RHCB and artists and programmers at Stardoll, Mortal Kiss was serialised globally via the Stardoll website over the 8-week period leading up to Halloween. The book will be published on 6th January 2011 by Bantam Books, price 6.99.
www.Stardoll.com
Plusnet creates 250 jobs in Sheffield
Yorkshire-based broadband and phone provider Plusnet is creating an extra 250 jobs in its customer service centre in Sheffield. The regional development agency for the Yorkshire and Humber region, Yorkshire Forward, is partly funding the new jobs to secure them for the city.
Business growth at Plusnet is creating 150 jobs and another 100 jobs are moving from an outsourced customer contact centre in Durban, South Africa, to Plusnet’s UK headquarters. During the last couple of months Plusnet has interviewed more than 400 people in Sheffield to recruit the 250 to fill the new posts. The newly appointed advisers will help customers with all aspects of customer service in billing, provision of service and customer support. Calls up until now handled in South Africa switched to Sheffield.
www.plus.net
Coca-Cola unveils Xmas digital campaign in Ireland
Coca-Cola Ireland has launched its Christmas digital activity drawing on the heritage of Coca-Cola’s association with Christmas. The campaign consists of a website, iPhone Application, Facebook application and online advertising including a high profile Homepage Take Over on MSN.ie today. Online advertising specials will also be present on Entertainment.ie, eBay and Independent.ie during November and December. The campaign creative features the iconic Coke Santa and Coke Trucks set inside a snowglobe scene.
Coca-Cola are taking the snowglobe on the road with a human snowglobe touring around the country for children to experience the magic of the Christmas in a snowglobe. The Coca-Cola snowglobes application on each of the three platforms allows users to choose from a variety of Christmas scenes, personalise the snowglobe with a number of accessories and then upload their photo. Users are then able to invite their friends to join their snowglobes and share their wish on Facebook. The completed snowglobes from the iPhone App, Facebook and the website are placed on Santa’s table on CokeSnowglobes.com where they join Christmas wishes from all over the world. The online advertising has been produced locally by Coca-Cola’s Irish digital marketing agency Cybercom and includes a CGI version of the original Coca-Cola Christmas truck, made famous in the “Holidays are coming” TV commercial, bursting through a snowy scene from a magical snowglobe. The website, Facebook application and iPhone application have been developed by Scholz & Volkmer of Wiesbaden, Germany.
www.CokeSnowglobes.com
Face works with Nokia for tech-lovers social network
Face, a co-creation planning agency, is launching The X-Crowd, a co-creation community connecting tech lovers with global technology brands, following successful work with Nokia to develop a new research programme. Face has been working with Nokia since 2009, designing and running a new research programme aimed at securing growth for the brand within the upper end of the smartphone marketplace.
The programme has demonstrated how collaborative methodologies can lead product innovation, test products still on the drawing board or not even conceived, as well as anticipate future trends and consumer behaviours. It has also showed how well mobile approaches and online research complements and enhances traditional research, translating quickly into solutions that can be actioned into brand and commercial strategies. The final output has seen a range of User Experience visions being taken into Nokia’s concepting and design agenda for 2012. The programme used Face’s social media analysis platform Pulsar, tracking over 100,000 ‘sources’, and involved building a community of ‘fresh tech leader consumers’. This community, named The X-Crowd, is now being launched on a global scale in order to allow exploration with a larger number of consumers across a wider geographical base, and to better mirror the hybrid ecosystem consumers actually live in.
www.facegroup.co.uk
Hotel giant picks StongMail for Real-Time Email Marketing
StrongMail, a provider of online marketing solutions for email and social media, today announced that IHG (InterContinental Hotels Group) has begun transitioning from near-time to real-time email marketing by integrating StrongMail with Unica and Teradata. IHG replaced two existing email service providers with StrongMail to enable seamless integration with its customer data, which is necessary to achieve its goal of delivering true one-to-one messages in real time. IHG is the world’s largest hotel group by number of rooms. Each year, more than 130 million guests visit one of the more than 4,500 hotels and 650,000 guest rooms that IHG franchises, leases, manages or owns in 100 countries around the world. In order to better serve its 52 million Priority Club rewards members and grow its business, IHG launched a strategic initiative to transition into a real-time marketing organisation.
By integrating StrongMail with Unica Interact, Unica Campaign and its Teradata data warehouse, IHG can now generate and deliver highly customised, one-to-one messages to their customer base in less than two seconds. IHG also switched to StrongMail for its unique hybrid deployment model. By taking advantage of StrongMail’s Managed Hosting Services, IHG receives the cost and integration benefits of owning an in-house email system without having to worry about the hassle and process inefficiencies of running everything through their IT department. IHG is also leveraging StrongMail’s Strategic Services team to optimise their marketing and transactional email programs to maximize revenue. StrongMail’s experts created a singular look for all of IHG’s email communications, which paired with its new one-to-one messaging capabilities has significantly increased the performance of their campaigns.
www.strongmail.com/IHG
Buongiorno Launches SMS App For Android
Mobile entertainment firm Buongiorno has launched mysms, a new SMS application for Android. The international application can be used instead of the preinstalled SMS software, allow the sending of SMS messages at a cheaper rate for the user. The application gives the user the option to use mysms or the preinstalled SMS software on the Android smartphone, enabling them to select their own tariff and choose how SMS messages are sent.
The user can choose to send messages via mysms, at a cost of £0.07 for national and £0.09 for international SMS’, or via the network operator, where the fee is determined by the network operator itself. Thanks to mysms, users can save up to 50 percent of their SMS expense. Additional features on offer with the application include group send, personalisation and SMS pop-up. The group send feature enables multiple sending to different groups of people, and allows contacts to be synchronised with either those in the phonebook or those being managed directly in the application itself. In
terms of personalisation, the signature feature, for example, will enable smartphone users to automatically sign off their messages. And finally, when receiving an SMS message, a pop-up window automatically appears, enabling the user to immediately read and reply to the message directly via pop-up – without having to close the current application in use.
www.mysms.com
www.buongiorno.com
InvisibleHand adds ‘share this deal’ feature
InvisibleHand, the free price-finder tool that automatically alerts shoppers to the best prices available on the web, has added a new ‘Share This Deal’ function, allowing online shoppers to tell friends and peers where to bag the best bargains.
The ‘Share this Deal’ button is designed to tap into the growing trend of ‘social shopping’, appealing to a community of online shoppers who like to use social media to tell others about their own bargains and to hear about recommendations on the latest ‘must have’ deals found across the net. InvisibleHand is a free-to-download price-finding tool which works by using real-time technology to discreetly and automatically alert shoppers if a product they are looking at is available at a lower price elsewhere. The tool is available on all four major web browsers – Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari 5.
www.getinvisiblehand.com.
Blue Barracuda wins Fat Face online advertising account
Fat Face, the active lifestyle brand, has selected independent digital agency Blue Barracuda, to handle its digital advertising activity. The agency will produce and execute a strategy to plan, buy and optimise online media and affiliate marketing for Fat Face in order to drive online brand awareness and recruit new customers. The activity will be integrated with search engine marketing on Google, Bing and Yahoo!, which has been managed by Blue Barracuda for four years.
Blue Barracuda will use creative designed in-house by Fat Face, which clicks through to the relevant area of the site. A highly targeted media campaign will use targeting and retargeting initiatives across advertising exchanges and networks such as ExchangeLabs and Struq – using dynamic creative – as well as social graph targeting. The agency’s affiliate marketing team will manage relationships with key networks and super affiliates, such as voucher code sites, as well as seeking partnerships with relevant brands. The search team will add tools such as Google Places and Google Products to its existing activity as well as running remarketing campaigns to drive reach and to inform the display advertising.
www.bluebarracuda.com
Contiki Holidays picks Unboxed Consulting for web and social media push
Unboxed Consulting, a web development consultancy, has today announced that Contiki Holidays, the worldwide leader in holidays for 18-35 year olds, has launched new geo-location features, social networking applications and an online tour comparison tool developed by Unboxed Consulting, which will allow friends to vote on their favourite tour before booking.
Contiki Holidays has been offering young people a huge range of tours around the world for nearly 50 years, each created to offer a mix of sightseeing, free time, culture, socialising and adventure. Contiki wanted to create a new way for groups organising a holiday to easily view a number options and drive traffic to its website.
http://www.unboxedconsulting.comwww.contiki.com
Just Search Italy secures its first client
Less than a month after its inception, Just Search Italy has secured its first client. The Rome office was opened in November this year to serve the Italian market with a localized version of the complete Just Search service offering. The office now proudly announces Gianluca Tilesi Studio Chururgia Plastica Estetica as its first client. The contract, signed in the official opening week of the Italian office, is for SEO services with a value of Euro 8k.
Getupdated’s expansion into the Italian market has been launched as Just Search Italy. The company is proud to announce that a client contract has been signed with Gianluca Tilesi Studio Chururgia Plastica Estetica. Just Search Italy is to supply strategic SEO-services. The contract means that Gianluca Tilesi Studio Chururgia Plastica Estetica is allocating a substantial portion of its marketing budget to internet marketing. As late as at the end of September, Just Search announced the launch of Just Search Italy, by the opening of a new sales office in Rome. The service offering has now been adapted to the Italian language, and is now available to customers in Italy.
www.justsearch.it.
Moneybookers rebrands mobile payments system as Skrill
Moneybookers, one of Europe’s largest online payments systems and among the world’s leading eWallet providers, today announces that it is rebranding to Skrill. The new name is set to become shorthand for a safe and innovative way for customers to shop online with greater choice, flexibility, reliability and peace of mind. Skrill better captures the ease and functionality of the company’s online payment suite and reflects its recent success as it extends its international payment network even further for consumers and retailers alike.
Since Moneybookers Limited became the first e-money issuer to obtain an electronic money licence from the FSA, it’s taken the company less than a decade to become one of the biggest players in online payments in Europe: it now has over 15 million account holders and 70,000 merchants globally. This year, Moneybookers was voted the UK’s fastest growing private-equity funded company, by Deloitte and The Sunday Times. This speed of change in the market and the business, combined with rapid growth, has led Moneybookers to change its name to one it believes better characterises its business and makes it stand out in a crowded market.
www.Moneybookers.com
New beauty website has online customer experience nailed
A new beauty ecommerce site is bringing a whole new dimension to ‘try before you buy’, with product demonstrations personalised to its customers. Visitors to the new beauty ‘online store and more’, can try out their choice of nail products – without leaving home. The site, created by design and marketing consultancy, Tomorrow People, has been designed to provide a more personal experience for online shoppers. Despite being launched just four months ago, the new website is already catching the eye of customers and industry experts.
With the beauty industry growing fast, the website designers wanted to create a unique ecommerce site to actively engage the company’s potential customers. On the website’s home page, customers can use a ‘tsunami’ style colour picker to select their favourite colour nail varnish. This intuitive navigation feature allows them to move on to more detailed information about their product choices. They can then visit the unique online ‘Nail Studio’, select from a range of five different skin tones, demonstrated as real life videos, and view each nail polish colour being applied in an ‘as life’ environment. Each visitor with a registered profile sees fresh content relevant to them every time they return to the site, thanks to a dynamic graphics display featuring high end cosmetic products. Attractive Flash animations on each section landing page also help to keep prospective customers engaged.
www.candynails.co.ukwww.tomorrow-people.com/candy-nails-case-study.php
New digital editor at Marie Claire
Marie Claire, IPC Southbank’s flagship women’s glossy, announces the appointment of Helen Russell as digital and online editor. Helen Russell is an experienced journalist and editor who has worked on national consumer titles both in print and online. Most recently channel editor at BSkyB, Helen’s previous positions include deputy editor at AllAboutYou, features editor on the launch of Grazia India, editor at Tatler Asia, and associate editor on Top Sante.
In her new role Helen will be responsible for the day-to-day running of www.marieclaire.co.uk as well as overseeing the new Beauty Genius app and other digital developments. She will report to Marie Claire editor-in-chief Trish Halpin. Helen joins as the site is attracting record numbers, pulling in 1.1million unique users and 17 million page impressions*. The unique user figure represents an annual increase of 91%. In addition, Marie Claire has launched its first app, Marie Claire Beauty Genius, featuring more than 60 minutes of exclusive bite-sized how-to videos, presented by top make-up artists and stylists, including renowned celebrity make-up artist Jackie Tyson. The app is currently Apple’s App of the Week.
www.marieclaire.co.uk
Stream:20 bolsters UK team with three new consultants
Stream:20, a leading digital marketing consultancy, is expanding its UK team and hiring three new senior consultants. Following a number of new business wins, Stream:20 welcome Gronya O’Reilly, James Fernie and Vicky Ryan to their growing team of consultants.
Gronya has over 10 years experience in digital communications covering account management, planning and buying with leading agencies and blue chip client organisations. Most recently, she was working as a senior client manager at Vizeum. At Stream:20 Gronya will be working across all digital channels, providing strategic insight to create best-practice and integrated digital solutions. James will focus on project management and CRM rollouts for key clients. He began his digital career in 1997 helping companies get started online and to maximise their web presence. Most recently he was Managing Director of Dial Media Group. And finally, Vicky has over six years experience in the affiliate and digital marketing arena, during which time she has built up strong relationships within the industry, both here in the UK and abroad. She joins the team from Acxiom Ltd.
www.stream20.com
Rank Interactive adopts Speed-Trap customer insight software
Rank Interactive, part of Rank Group plc, one of the UK’s leading interactive betting providers, has selected online customer insight software from Speed-Trap, and CRM technology from its partner Indicia, previously known as Marketing Databasics, to build an eCRM program.
Speed-Trap will feed the individual historical and real-time customer profiles and data that it gathers from site activity into an automated campaign selection process, created by Indicia which integrates the online data with other customer data held in their BI data warehouse. The Rank Group is a leading European gaming and betting company, headquartered in Great Britain. Rank’s businesses include a number of established leisure and gaming brands including Mecca Bingo, Blue Square, Grosvenor Casinos and Top Rank España.
www.Speed-Trap.com
Kuoni boosts Scandinavian customer experience with Tealeaf
Kuoni Travel, one of the world’s leading global leisure travel organisations, is deploying Tealeaf® Customer Experience Management (CEM) software across its three Apollo-branded Scandinavian websites after successful deployments on the company’s Swiss and UK sites. Tealeaf will help the company in its efforts to improve conversion rates and increase revenues by delivering improved online customer experience for the sites in Sweden, Denmark and Norway.
Since deploying Tealeaf on its UK and Swiss sites in June 2009, Kuoni has been able to improve customer experiences and understand why a given customer did or did not complete a process successfully. By minimising the time wasted recreating errors, and having pre-configured triggers for certain thresholds of customer struggle, the company can react instantly when issues arise. Expanding this common view of a customer across the company’s Scandinavian sites will help Kuoni move to a position where it can better understand and maximise the value of every visitor, in every region.
www.tealeaf.com.
RSPCA first to use Facebook ad technology from I Spy
The RSPCA plans to debut Upcast (I Spy Labs’ new Facebook advertising tool) on two awareness and fund raising campaigns: ‘Voices’ (www.rspca.org.uk/voices) and ‘Biggest Animal Rescue’ (www.biggestanimalrescue.org.uk). The campaigns comprise display, paid search, Spotify, email, TV and social media. Upcast is being engaged specifically to manage the campaigns’ Facebook elements.
Upcast has been developed by I Spy Labs to replace Facebook’s basic native ad management system. Upcast is a web-based campaign management tool that improves overall ROI by simplifying key areas of paid Facebook advertising (eg – demographic targeting, ad variations, tracking, optimisation and campaign timings) with a quick and coherent ‘one click’ approach. The RSPCA’s campaigns are using Upcast to create thousands of ads, combining different image and text variations to target a broad range of Facebook users. Upcast removes the time-consuming process of manually choosing locations, interests, relationship statuses and age. The tool will create as many profiles as possible and will use the thousands of ad variations to obtain a wider reach whilst developing a greater insight of who is most affected by the campaigns. I Spy Labs developed Upcast because clients are significantly increasing investment in paid Facebook advertising, with eMarketer predicting social networking ad sales will rise by 29% in 2011.
http://www.rspca.org.uk http://ispylabs.co.uk
Park Plaza Hotels partners bigmouthmedia for SEO drive
Park Plaza Hotels and Digital Marketing Agency bigmouthmedia have reached an agreement for the agency to manage strategic search engine optimization campaigns for the company’s brand websites – parkplaza.com and artotels.com as of 01 October 2010. Park Plaza Hotels has been trialing the efforts of digital marketing giant bigmouthmedia’s search campaigns for three months across a selection of its Park Plaza hotels and art’otels across Europe, and is now delighted to have reached an agreement that extends the search marketing agency’s efforts across the entire portfolio.
www.bigmouthmedia.com
New website sells bargains… for one day only
A new website, called www.hereforaday.com has launched, offering UK shoppers the chance to buy household essentials at knock-down prices.. but only for 24 hours at a time.The site touts itself as ‘bringing the benefits of bulk buying, without having to buy in bulk’, making purchases in quantity and then passes on the savings.Customers can sign up at www.hereforaday.com to receive e-alerts of what’s on offer. The site was set up by husband and wife team Donna and Mark Baker. For Mark the venture is a complete change of direction, following a successful career in the funeral service business.
www.hereforaday.com
LinkShare unveils Free Delivery Day for UK merchants
Affiliate marketing network LinkShare, today announces the launch of its inaugural Free Delivery Day, which is taking place on Friday 10th December. The event is designed to allow consumers to benefit from free delivery on all items purchased from 12am GMT on 10th December up until 12am GMT on 11th December. Over 80 merchants are already participating including Warehouse, Uniqlo, Lipsy and The White Company.
The announcement follows from recent reports that Christmas sales in the UK this year[1] are predicted to be one of the highest in Europe and with findings from the IMRG estimating that online retailers will draw in £6.4bn in online sales, LinkShare’s Free Delivery Day will help drive consumer spend online. The launch of LinkShare’s Free Delivery Day follows from the success of similar schemes in the US which see a wide range of brands such as Walmart, Target, Sears, Amazon.com and Old Navy, annually join forces on 17th December to offer free shipping with a guaranteed delivery day.
http://www.linkshare.co.uk/publishers/xmas-10/freedelivery
Web TV Enterprise appoints LiveRail as ad serving partner
Web TV Enterprise, the UK’s largest premium advertising video network, has appointed LiveRail as its new ad serving partner. This will enable Web TV Enterprise to offer its advertisers advanced targeting across its network and a range of new video ad formats. VAST (Video Ad Serving Template) and VPAID (Video Player-Ad Interface Definition) are a set of technical standards governed by the IAB to allow a cohesive online advertising industry.
www.webtventerprise.com
Infogain debuts iPhone App for Kiddicare customers
Infogain, a global retail and mobile solutions provider, today announces the launch of the definitive iPhone app for Kiddicare.com, the UK’s number-one online nursery retailer, combining secure transactional capability with bar code scanning to deliver the ultimate in best-buy shopping experience for customers.
Developed to support Kiddicare.com’s drive for multi-channel excellence, Infogain has created a truly compelling iPhone app which, for the first time, integrates secure payment, bar code scanning, video, price comparison and power search, alongside core ecommerce features, to deliver the ultimate shopping application for time and price-conscious consumers anywhere in the UK.
http://www.kiddicare.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/categorylandingpage_10751_-1_iphone%20app_10001
IE launches mobile banking platform, mobinetic
IE, part of the Parseq group providing digital banking software for financial services, today announced the launch of mobinetic, a mobile banking platform that gives financial providers the ability to deliver fully branded mobile banking services and value-add initiatives to their customer base.
mobinetic enables banks to overcome their lack of specialised internal resource and offers a production-ready solution to easily and rapidly launch mobile banking to market. It integrates seamlessly with back office systems so that banks can quickly benefit from the reduced operational costs and improved customer relationships that mobile banking enables. The IE platform will support smart phone apps for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7, as well as mobile web and text banking experiences for virtually every other handset available.
www.ie.com
www.mobinetic.com
eModeration launches Facebook management service for brands
eModeration, the social media management and moderation company, has launched a Facebook management service for brands using the social network as part of their marketing campaigns.
A presence on Facebook is becoming a must-have for any consumer-facing brand, and can result in excellent user engagement, providing a direct medium for marketing messages and customer service and an opportunity for viral growth of brand loyalty. But as Facebook campaigns become more commonplace and sophisticated, brands are increasingly aware of the need to manage the community within Facebook so that users are engaged, and of moderating content in order to keep users safe from spam or inappropriate content.
www.emoderation.com/services/facebook.
Crocodile Keyboard Tries To Snap Up Sales On Android Market
David Baker is an inventor from the UK who has just launched a triangle based qwerty keyboard that helps to hit the right keys on small touch screen devices running on Android. Many people still complain that smartphones now rely too much on predictive text to make up for the small, fiddly and cramped standard keyboard. A simple to use replacement keyboard that helps the user to hit the correct key seems to have eluded manufacturers until now.
Mr Baker’s pat pending solution is to change the tightly packed square keys to a triangular key layout. The keys sit on staggered rows and leave triangular shaped spaces around each key, making it difficult to hit two keys at the same time. The use of colour is also incorporated into the design to maximise the separation effect between key and background.
www.crocodilekeyboards.com
Smirnoff launches global nightlife project with MTV
MTV Networks International and The SMIRNOFF Co. today reveal the culmination of a global collaboration to showcase ‘The Smirnoff Nightlife Exchange Project’ – an ambitious attempt to break new ground in nightlife experiences and an integrated marketing partnership in the truest sense. Curated by respected nightlife figures, The Smirnoff Nightlife Exchange Project sees 14 countries work with the public to discover and celebrate the best elements of their country’s nightlife. These ideas were captured online and packed up in a crate to be transformed into unique event experiences culminating in an epic finale on 27th November – the day the world swaps nights.
MTV audiences in the following countries – Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, India, Ireland, Poland, South Africa, Thailand and Venezuela– will be able to follow the nightlife exchange and observe the many vibrant sights, sounds and tastes of global nightlife culture today. The content will run on MTV channels in 12 countries around the world and on MTV websites globally. Content will also be available to view on www.facebook.com/smirnoff
Guava launches ‘Web Couture’ development and design service
Guava, the digital marketing and web development specialist, today announced the launch of ‘Web Couture’, its redefined web development and design offering, combining extensive digital marketing expertise with deep online analysis to deliver high-end, customer made web experiences and solutions. Today’s market is proliferated with off the shelf web design and ecommerce solutions which whilst providing a fast and cost effective solution, deliver none of the extensive analysis required to ensure that a website or solution delivers maximum success.
With this in mind Guava, which has developed web solutions for brands including Telstra, Shurgard, SMA Nutrition and Ramada Jarvis, has redefined its web development approach around a tried and tested structured process called ‘Guava DNA’. The Guava DNA process takes a ground-up approach, converting comprehensive analysis of all aspects of your online business into the blueprint for online success, focusing on four key areas; market analysis, visitor analysis, persona analysis and user journey, plus usability and compliance analysis. In addition, Guava offers a broad range of digital marketing services including SEO, PPC, Analytics and Social Media for SME’s and established brands such as RBS Insurance, Argos, Homebase and The Royal Mail.
www.guava.com
Webgains debuts Multiple Datafeeds tool
International affiliate network Webgains, is to offer a unique new product datafeed tool allowing merchants to provide additional feeds to affiliated websites. The functionality will be available to merchants across Webgains’ eight platforms– UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Spain and the USA.
A product datafeed is a file containing information about products a merchant sells. Many affiliates download and reconfigure product datafeeds to display product information on the affiliated sites, driving traffic in exchange for a commission on each sale. Existing product feed systems, though extremely detailed and comprehensive, can be unwieldy, as they include information on all products. The new Webgains tool will allow Merchants to upload specialised datafeeds, for example around seasonal or best-selling products, thus taking much of the hard work away from the affiliates, leaving them free to concentrate on what they do best: driving ready-to-purchase consumers to the merchant site. Merchants will be able to create specific feeds, not only around seasonal events such as Easter or Christmas, or seasonal fashion launches such as the new Winter range, but also use product datafeeds as a trade marketing tool to drive volume increases via discounting. For example, a retailer will be able to supply affiliates with a feed of products where he/she wants to build a market share, as well as the traditional price reductions for out-of-date products on sale. Moreover, the retailer can create bespoke feeds for chosen affiliates, thus strengthening their commercial relationship.
www.webgains.com
GOSS utilising open source technology to deliver semantically enhanced content
GOSS Interactive is the first UK based commercial Web Content Management vendor to sign a contract with the Interactive Knowledge Stack (IKS) project based in Austria. The Project, part-funded by the European Commission, seeks to provide an open source technology platform for semantically enhanced content for the global market. GOSS will be working to integrate the IKS software into their Web Content Management system, GOSS iCM (intelligent Content Management).
The 4 year project has funding of €8.5m to get semantic web technology into the main stream and provide a defacto standard for semantic mark-up. GOSS are natural partners for such a project, having developed a leading information retrieval (IR) technology in 2005, called iSuggest. The solution utilises complex natural language algorithms to read web content and suggest related content including media, documents, other web pages and metadata. Later versions of iSuggest also learns from user interaction generating more focused results, saving time and money.The experts at GOSS will integrate the IKS framework into GOSS iCM. This will enable other entities to be identified within article text such as people, places and organisations, and these will then be automatically marked-up with RDF tags to allow further semantic interaction.
www.gossinteractive.com
Online Swiss Army Knife Launches: eKnife.ch
Doodle, Memonic and Wuala, three of the biggest names in the Swiss start-up sector, have launched eKnife, an exclusive premium bundle of Swiss online services. For a limited time, users can get three premium accounts for the price of two: schedule meetings with Doodle, capture, organise and save important web content with Memonic, and store and access files on the go with Wuala.
The eKnife stands for Swiss efficiency and shows the leading roll of Switzerland as a rising tech hub in Europe. The bundle includes a Doodle and Memonic Premium account as well as 10 GB of online storage on Wuala for one year. The prestigious Premium Doodle is ad-free and includes premium features such as tracking polls, while a Premium Memonic account offers the ability to clip unlimited items. With 10 GB of storage on Wuala users are able to store more than 5000 documents, photos and media files.
www.eknife.ch
Exalead and Capgemini team up for search tool development
Exalead, a provider of search platforms and search-based business application (SBA) technology for consumer and business users, and Capgemini, a provider of consulting, technology and outsourcing services, today announced the expansion of their partnership to a global level. This alliance means that Capgemini has expanded its offering of Exalead innovative search-based applications to help more customers manage, aggregate and interpret data from high volume and disparate sources to benefit multiple industries including the global financial, manufacturing and public sectors.
Exalead previously collaborated with Capgemini at a regional level in France, delivering business oriented SBA solutions, since 2008, to joint clients across the telecommunications, transportation, logistics, and financial sectors. Specific SBA projects have included delivering 360° Multi-Channel Customer Information (sales, marketing and support), Operational Reporting & Business Intelligence, Database Offloading, Master Data Management, Logistics and eBusiness solutions. Through this local partnership Capgemini France has been able to help businesses integrate services and also offer the benefits of ‘early release’ Exalead solutions, training and product demonstrations.
www.exalead.com
New Digital Campaign Manager at Samsung
Samsung Electronics UK has appointed Laura Dance as Digital Campaign Manager. Laura’s appointment highlights Samsung’s ongoing commitment to the development of a clear digital strategy as the company looks to build on existing online consumer engagement to help develop its market-leading position in the UK.
In this role, Laura will be working across the entire Samsung business, and will be responsible for the planning and development of digital campaigns in addition to the digital activation of key brand partnerships. Reporting into Head of Digital Gabby Hegerty, Laura’s appointment recognises the increased investment Samsung is making in digital. Laura joins the business from the Central Office of Information (COI) – the UK government’s expert agency for marketing communications and, until recently, the biggest digital advertiser in the UK. In her role as Senior Digital Manager at the COI, Laura managed the digital communications strategy, planning and execution across a portfolio of brands including the Army and the Home Office and gained significant experience across a number of elements of digital marketing.
www.samsung.com.