The market was not ready for wireless even five years ago, but that has definitely changed. When Levi's launched its latest 501s marketing campaign earlier this year, a wireless site was a central part of its digital strategy. Now there are nearly 30,000 public wireless "hot spots" in the United States. Advertisers believe that now that wireless has finally become a medium with which consumers are comfortable, the next stage is its exploitation by brands. Many feel that the wireless sites will increasingly become a part of marketing campaigns.
The semi-technical arena is seeing the rise of numerous new search engines, especially since ones such as Google have become so successful. Increasing numbers of Web surfers are going to alternative search engines that specialize in finding certain kinds of information or offering additional capabilities to well-known search sites (Kharif). AOL launched a test version of its new travel search site, PinpointTravel.com. Nextaris.com allows customers to search for and share online files. Yang and Yun introduced their new shopping search site, Become.com, this April. Dallas Mavericks' owner Mark Cuban invested in search engine IceRocket.com last year. FactBites.com, an Australian company still in testing mode, helps students and researchers find articles from scholarly sources. Another new search engine, BlogStreet.com, looks for blogs. Many of these search startups discover that they can make ends meet by simply relying on advertisements from ad networks like Google's AdSense and Yahoo.
Are highly specialized search engines the trend for the future, such as searching the whole Internet for just one news clip from the day before? Michael Yang and Yeogirl Yun, who founded Become.com, created a specialty worm or crawler mechanism that is tuned to the element of product shopping (Clandenning). Using both page-ranking concepts and proprietary methodologies, the site attempts to isolate product news, reviews and sales elements. The developers say that the crawler could be adjusted for other forms of specialty searches. It can be tailored for results that are more targeted than what is obtained from a general purpose search engine such as Google, which does not work in that manner unless the person does a highly complex search query.
Become.com is only a beginning for what is needed, which are specialty search engines based on categories of knowledge as might be categorized by a librarian. Over the past decade the librarians of the world have been trained in modern information retrieval theory and should be leading the next generations of search technologies.
Specialization is not lost on Google, either. In fact Google has a number of specialty engines including its news.google.com engine that reads all the newspapers of the world and creates a machine-generated front page. It also has specialized searches for the U.S. Government, Microsoft, Apple, and Linux (Clandenning).
Search engines are also impacting the way consumers use the traditional media, according to recent studies. Fully 70% of American households now rely on the Web to find local merchants and services, which is equal to the percentage that go to newspapers, according to a survey conducted by market research firms Constat Inc. And the Kelsey Group. A similar poll conducted in October 2003 found that 60% of U.S. households used the Internet for local shopping information, while 73% used newspapers. Assuming the current trend continues as expected, the Internet will surpass newspapers by 2006.
What are the trends coming for Web design, considering all this new technology is either here or soon arriving? It is understood that Websites need to be continually updated, but not just for the sake of it. The site should be providing something extra to the users. There are new technologies that many sites will not feel are worth pursuing. However, the Website a company launched a few years ago is probably nothing like the site managed today. In just a few years, Web technology has changed significantly time and time again. What is possible now is far beyond what was possible just a several brief years ago. Redesigns help incorporate new technologies that consumers expect to see. While much of the design changes occur behind the scenes, it is often coupled with a redesign as more organizational sites attempt to separate content, design, usability to gain better site management capabilities
Lastly, what are the trends for e-commerce? A recent issue of E-Commerce News lists the following;
1) Multichannel Retailing Arrives. Shoppers are switching back and forth among catalogs, retail stores and Internet sites. Many brick-and-mortar chains have not taken the Web by storm expected....
Chinese Internet Culture Decades after the reforms of Deng Xiaoping known as the "Four Modernizations," "a focus on development of agriculture, industry, science and technology and the military" (The University of Michigan. N.D.); China in 2011, grapples with the multiple dilemmas of internet information access, personal freedom, and government control over content. The rise of digital media, web access, and information availability over the past two decades has spread around the
How often do you lose sleep due to late-night log-ins? 15. How often do you feel preoccupied with the Internet when off-line, or fantasize about being online? 16. How often do you find yourself saying "just a few more minutes" when on- line? 17. How often do you try to cut down the amount of time you spend online and fail? 18. How often do you try to hide how long you've been online? 19.
At the bottom line, the issue at hand is with the sanctity and safety of the students and the responsibility of the university to preserve and develop that. Moreover, many of these students are dallying into multi-dimensional virtual worlds that are beginning to closely resemble the physical world and that are having their own ethical issues arise (Wankel & Malleck, 2010). Universities need to educate themselves as to what those
Whereas adult obesity rates have always been present, they have never been so high. What is more worrisome is that youth is becoming increasingly obese. The American Heart & Stroke Association conducted a study, for instance, in which it found the following data to be true: "Among children ages 2 -- 19, about 1 in 3 are overweight and obese (BMI-for-age at or above the 85th percentile of the 2000
Trust alleviates the apprehensions of insecurity that crop up when the retailer is not known, or the way the company will deliver the goods or services purchased. Building trust in e-commerce necessitates a clear indication of rigorous standards of security, data safeguard, transparency of data use, etc. (The effect of IT-based security on feedback mechanisms and trust building in online auction settings) Morgan and Hunt during 1994 indicate that trust
INTERNET'S IMPACT ON HEALTH CARE INFORMATION Internet The Internet's Impact on Health Care Information The Internet's Impact on Health Care Information This paper explores some of the best and well-known cites and sites around the world for information and health care. Early in the 21st century, the World Health Organization made its first attempt to rank the quality of health care in approximately 200 countries. (NYT, 2007) The WHO ranked the countries' health care
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