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Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba plans a mobile version of its annual shopping festival

Feb26

by Sindy Cator on February 26, 2014 at 11:22 am

Posted In: Apps, Around the Web, Asia, M-commerce, Mobile, taobao

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is known for holding an annual 11.11 Shopping Festival – China’s answer to America’s Cyber Monday shopping bonanza. Last year, Chinese shoppers splurged a jaw-dropping record CNY35.01 billion ($5.7 billion) during the festival in just 24 hours, and about 21 percent of orders were placed via mobile devices.

Now, Alibaba is planning another 24-hour sale, touted as a mobile version of the 11.11 Shopping Festival, in a bid to boost transactions made via mobile devices.

Set for March 8, the “Mobile Taobao 3.8 Life Festival” will feature discounts for merchandise, meals, movies and other products when users shop via Alibaba’s Mobile Taobao app. To snag these discounts, consumers need to pre-order goods and services in the days leading up to March 8, when they can then redeem their purchases.

The company says its Mobile Taobao app currently has over 400 million users — and it is “trying to ride the wave of Chinese smartphone users who are increasingly using their mobile devices instead of PCs to shop online.” Throughout 2013, Alibaba already took steps to woo consumers to shop on their mobile devices.

In October last year, Alibaba announced that it would give certain mobile users free access of up to 2 gigabytes of data in November and December, when they shop with Alibaba’s apps for the company’s Taobao Marketplace, Tmall.com, Juhuasuan, Laiwang and Alipay.

Subsequently in November, the e-commerce giant launched a scheme to give away free smartphones as part of its efforts to encourage merchants to shift from PC-based online shopping to shopping via mobile phones — by helping them work better on this new platform.

Headline image via Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images

└ Tags: china, news, syndicated

EE and Wembley want to create ‘the most connected stadium in the world’

Feb26

by Sindy Cator on February 26, 2014 at 11:01 am

Posted In: Around the Web, Insider, UK

Wembley National Stadium Ltd. (WNSL), or ‘Wembley’ to you and me, is teaming up with UK mobile network operator EE in a six-year deal that they hope will make the stadium ‘the most connected in the world’.

The multi-million pound deal comes into play with immediate effect, with the first event taking place on March 2 – the Capital One Cup Final. Though the real fruits of this tie-up won’t be seen for a while yet, EE customers will start benefiting from “exclusive ticketing and marketing initiatives” from late March.

Although EE will be a lead brand and sponsor, the Wembley Stadium name shall remain. This is certainly a good move, given that corporations putting their own name into traditional, long-established sporting brands typically doesn’t go down well with fans. But there is a new composite logo, and EE will become a supplier to the England Men’s Senior Team (football) and The FA Cup competition.

Technology roadmap

The deal will see some interesting initiates comes to fruition over the next six years. The so-called ‘technology roadmap’ will herald ‘enhanced’ 4G coverage, superfast WiFi and mobile payments integrated across the stadium.

As anyone who has tried using their mobile phones within busy sporting arenas will attest to, perennial 3G issues in and around the stadium due to the mass concentration of mobile phones often restricts what fans can actually do with their devices. So this move will be good news for fans.

The deal also includes the launch of a new co-branded mobile app for Android and iOS, which displays the latest events, the view from your (potential) seat, a travel planner and even a ticket-buying feature.

Launched in 1923, Wembley Stadium is probably best known as the home of England’s national football team, but it’s also used for cup competitions (including the FA Cup Final) and concerts. The original stadium was demolished in 2000, and was replaced by a 90,000-seater behemoth which opened in 2007.

While we’re starting to see more stadiums go ‘connected’, we’re still in the early stages of a widespread transition. League Two’s Wycombe Wanderers has been offering WiFi for a while already, while Liverpool FC announced its own intentions last April. Elsewhere in Europe, Real Madrid has been making in-roads on the hi-tech stadia front, as is Barcelona, but WiFi is still a relatively rare beast in the European soccer scene.

The US is making small strides on this front too – The New England Patriots (American Football) has previously gone WiFi, deploying the NFL’s first stadium-wide, free WiFi network. And to counteract lagging attendances, the NFL is dangling a giant WiFI carrot in front of fans across the country, as it looks to have full connected stadiums in place by 2015.

└ Tags: news, syndicated

Google partners with ‘Russia’s Google’ Yandex in a reciprocal advertising deal

Feb26

by Sindy Cator on February 26, 2014 at 9:01 am

Posted In: advertising, Around the Web, Google, Insider

Yandex is typically known as ‘Russia’s Google’ but it has now teamed up with Google itself so their respective advertising clients will be able to access each other’s networks. The agreement is expected to “dramatically increase” advertising inventory available to the customers of both companies, Yandex says in a blog post.

Through its DoubleClick subsidiary, Google’s clients will have access to the advertising inventory offered by publishers in Yandex’s Advertising Network, while Yandex’s clients will be able to bid for ad displays in the global inventory of DoubleClick AdExchange partners. Both systems are powered by a real-time bidding technology, which helps to mediate ad marketing between buyers and sellers.

Yandex notes that the deal is aimed at giving their advertising clients more value when they carry out real-time bidding, which benefits from a larger number of bidders and sellers. This is because the more conditions taken into account by a system when matching ads to publishers, the more fine-tuned the ad targeting is and the better optimized the bids are.

Accessibility of Yandex’s inventories for Google’s advertising clients, and Google’s inventories for Yandex’s advertisers, supports the idea of and the principle behind real-time bidding – each auction participant has an equal chance to reach their goal.

The company also says that the deal is expected to give a “new kick” to competition and boost the quality of advertising space in the digital marketing world.

The current arrangement, however, only relates to display advertising and does not cover text-based contextual advertising. Yandex and Google are now at the technical stage of implementing this project, and it is expected to roll out to their clients soon.

Yandex has been inking partnerships with major tech firms including Facebook and Twitter — as it seeks to boost its search results with popular topics that are circulating on the social networks.

└ Tags: europe, news, Russia, syndicated

Mobile push messaging expert Urban Airship unveils new marketing solution with iBeacon targeting

Feb26

by Sindy Cator on February 26, 2014 at 8:00 am

Posted In: Around the Web, Insider, Mobile, mobile marketing, MWC, Product Launches

Mobile push messaging specialist Urban Airship took the wraps off a new product today at the Mobile World Congress, which is squarely targeted at marketers.

Urban Airship has made a name for itself by providing push-messaging features for other companies’ apps. Its new solution, which is available this quarter, combines push messaging with real-time mobile marketing automation and iBeacon targeting. Urban Airship says:

For the first time in the industry, every swipe on a push message, tap on a landing page, or proximity to an iBeacon can build richer mobile audience segments for better targeting and deeper personalization over time. For example, a shopper might walk into a children’s clothing department triggering an iBeacon message with seasonal specials, and also become part of a children’s clothing audience segment for a back-to-school campaign later that year.

With this new solution, marketers and product teams can set up their own automated programs for real-time messaging, design and deep-link to landing pages anywhere in their apps or on the mobile Web, manage and analyze these campaigns through message response reports, and have the data connected into existing analytics systems including Google Analytics.

Urban Airship’s new solution intends to help marketers be less reliant on developers to deliver responsive experiences at scale. It means marketers can react more easily to campaign responses and other customer behavior with real-time triggers for push messages, in-app messages and deep-linked landing pages.

In a bid to avoid bombarding customers, Urban Airship’s new solution also features timing delays and frequency limits for subsequent messages beyond customers’ responses or non-responses. For example, a business may trigger a free shipping offer two days after a customer abandons his/her shopping cart, but avoid sending it more than once per month to each customer.

Urban Airship’s new focus on marketing comes after it eyed up Apple Passbook and Google Wallet as the next big growth market, launching a cross-platform digital wallet solution called Wallet Studio, which enables businesses to easily create, launch and manage campaigns that integrate with Passbook and Google Wallet.

By going into marketing, the company is no doubt hoping for a stickier ecosystem that gets customers spending their money at these businesses as well.

Headline image via Shutterstock