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Has Christmas come early for Amazon?

With the festive season fast approaching and 50,000 daily pre-orders of the Kindle Fire, it looks like Christmas has already come early for Amazon.  In light of this, Techspot published this lovely infographic showing us just how big Amazon is:

Generation M – mobile shopaholics

By Nicole Melzer

I confess: I am a shopaholic and find it impossible to resist a bargain!

Helping feed my habit are vouchers.  The latest trick is the mobile coupon, offered via an app, Bluetooth, SMS, MMS or email, and promising 20, 30 or even 50 percent discounts.

These offers now form a part of many retailers’ advertising, payments and loyalty mcommerce initiatives. Mobile coupons are particularly popular among young consumers, as they are more willing to ‘friend’ or ‘follow’ a brand when offered a discount.Gone are the days of reading newspapers and trawling for vouchers to cut out.

Smartphones have changed, and are continuing to change, the world of shopping and mcommerce is certainly on the rise in Europe. The challenge is for retailers to meet the demands of shoppers on the move.

With Christmas coming up, there is of course a good chance that we’ll all be using our smartphones to buy presents.  Indeed, UTalkMarketing surveyed 1,300 UK consumers and found that almost 32 percent of 18 to 34-year-olds plan to shop for Christmas presents via mobile in 2011.

With Juniper Research predicting that the total redemption value of mobile coupons worldwide will exceed $43 billion by 2016, it looks like these vouchers are here to stay. With a shopping problem habit to feed, I’m certainly not complaining!

No space for reporters at Cyberspace conference

By Jonathan Mathias 

This week saw the start of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s two day ‘London conference on Cyberspace’.  The event has a large focus on cybercrime, online safety and security, and aims to ‘launch a focused and inclusive dialogue to help guide the behaviour of all in cyberspace’. 

Yet, on Tuesday morning, some reporters were feeling left out, with tweets [1] [2] [3] [4] on the event stating that media attendance has been heavily restricted.     

Being very interested in security, I try to attend as many of these kinds of events as I can, and have been in sessions before where media have been asked to leave.  I never really understood this as, if you’re promoting the event, why have sessions on the agenda that should be restricted?  If something really needs to be top secret, why not make it so?  What about the risk of someone blagging their way in anyway? 

This goes to show how important it is to fully anticipate the variety of possible responses to events.  There has been a huge amount of media interest in the conference for some time now – and I must say the organisers have done well in using social media and promoting the #LondonCyber hashtag – they just won’t have wanted some of the tweets or articles they’ll have seen in response. 

Did you get the chance to attend the conference?  Tell Jonathan your highlights on Twitter @JonathanMathias.