Hanoi Morillo

Finally!!! The new Nexus is here and I’m soo excited about it.
Could you imagine a hybrid between a phone and a tablet? That’s the new Galaxy Nexus. Amazing device, slim and curved with a heart made of an Ice Cream Sandwich, the latest Android version.

If you could really fall in love with a decive, you would definitely fall in love with this one.

Some of the amazing features:

- The home screen includes re-sizable widgets for apps and a simple swipe action to clear notifications
- To let users monitor data usage, ICS includes a reporting feature with data breakdowns and controls.
- Touch to beam: there’s a new feature called “beam” that lets you share things with friends using NFC technology. You just need to put 2 Galaxy nexus together in order to share whatever it is on your phone. From a YouTube video to a contact.
- Speech-to-text functionality to dictate. Words will magically appear on the device’s screen. I love this feature because I hate the keyboard on the screen. I’m much slower so this will solve that issue!
- In the security realm, there is a device unlock feature via facial recognition.
- Lots of new improvements have also been made on the camera app.
- One of my favs: when you receive a call you can pick it up, hang up or… you can inmediately text that person with a message like: I’ll call you later. I’ve named this feature the apologetic hang up.

If the words are not enough and you want to see it…

As a daily deal addicted, I think it was about time to write about it.

Lately, I’ve been reading many articles about companies that offer daily discounts like Groupon or Living Social. I have to say that I have purchased a few coupons myself and I love my discounts!

However, a great opportunity for a small business to leverage the online world can become a nightmare.
Recently, I purchased a coupon to get a massage (I need to relax from time to time) and when I call to booked my appointment, I got an anxious assistant on the phone confirming that they were fully booked until January!
When I check the deal page I realized that they had sold more than 300 coupons. 300 for an hour massage. That means 300 hours of work plus the appointments they already had in their agenda.
Let’s do the maths: they open 8 hours a day, 6 days a week = 48 hours a week = 192 hours a month + extra appointments – holidays = I’m fully booked for almost 3 months!

What are the consequences? A frustrated potential customer that will probably forget about the coupon after a couple of months. If you lose that customer once, you may lose him/her forever plus the retail selling opportunity (all the extra things you can sell to the customers when they visit).
And I haven’t finished… what about those 3 months of intense, unexpected and unorganized activity?
And what about your social reputation?? What’s is going to happen when all these discount seekers visit you, obtain a bad service and they post a terrible review in Yelp, Urbanspoon or any other site?

I could read this words in The Globe & Mail a few days ago:
“Researchers found offering a Groupon correlated with a bump in business for most companies and also an increase in Yelp reviews. But they also found a company’s star rating declined after it offered a Groupon. In general, those companies with reviews that mentioned the words “Groupon” or “coupon” had star ratings 10 per cent lower, on average, than those that did not.”

So what’s the conclusion?

If you’re a business owner, go ahead and use the discount sites to promote your business. But please, be reasonable. You can participate almost as often as you want so the first time you try don’t go crazy and offer only what you can really handle! Remember that you need to continue to offer an amazing customer service. Don’t ever forget about that.

If you’re a discount seeker, enjoy the discount!

Not a surprise at all but it’s always good to confirm your suspicions with Comscore numbers!
Nearly 7 Percent of U.S. Digital Traffic is Consumed Away from Computers.
U.S. consumers are increasingly connecting to digital content via a variety of devices such as smartphones, tablets and other connected devices.
In August 2011, the share of non-computer traffic for the U.S. increased to 6.8% from just 6.2% at the end of the previous quarter. The largest percentage from this share came from mobile devices, which drove 4.4% of total digital traffic in the U.S. The second largest driver of non-computer traffic was the tablet category, contributing nearly 2% of total traffic.
I wonder what’s the % in Canada, the most connected country in the world!

I can’t wait to see the numbers after Christmas. Many people will get a new device(specially tablets) and due to the holiday season most people will connect from their portable devices instead of connecting from their computers.

These findings are part of recent comScore report, Digital Omnivores: How Tablets, Smartphones and Connected Devices are Changing U.S. Digital Media Consumption Habits. If you are interested, send me an email and I’ll be happy to send you the pdf.

Source: Very interesting article published by Comscore