With holiday season upon us, online retailers are preparing for the busiest online shopping days of the year, The first Monday after Thanksgiving, has been christened with the name Cyber-Monday. Seattle man-about-the-Web Chirs Pirillo has posted Amazon’s Cyber Monday coupons on his site for bargain shoppers.
Acording to BusinessWeek, the bigger spending day of last season to date was on Nov. 22, three days before Black Friday. What’s more, many e-tailers say the season’s top spending day comes much later, between around Dec. 5 and Dec. 15.
Due to the roller-coaster economic environment, a lengthening of the online holiday promotion period is also likely in order for retailers to try and win every last dollar they can from consumers. Macy’s began aggressive advertising this year in mid-November.
Google research informs that some 69% of shoppers plan to purchase gift cards this year and E-tailers are reminded to promote gift cards in their search marketing campaigns. Examples of some keyword ideas include: “electronics gift card,” “best gift for dog lovers,” and “great gifts for under $25.”
Consumers also realize they can find great deals starting December 26th. So search advertisers should make sure to create sale-specific campaigns, keywords and creative ahead of time and schedule the campaigns to launch automatically on December 25th at midnight. [24×7]
Microsoft Launches Pivot, A Radically New Visualization of Online Objects.
Microsoft’s Live Labs has been the source of many interesting projects: a 3D photo-stitcher called PhotoSynth, and bookmarking service called Thumbtack (which was shuttered just this month) are two.
Today, the Live Labs’ latest creation has launched. Pivot is a fun, powerful discovery tool, built on Seadragon and powered by Silverlight, that explores user created data sets along multiple criteria in a rich, visual way.
Pivot (not to be confused with Microsoft’s recently renamed PowerPivot) is meant to combine search, browsing and recommendations to create a more unified Web experience, according to a description on the Live Labs Web site.
Another way the team is describing the goal of the Pivot project is to enable users to view the Web as a “web” rather than a series of isolated pages. Pivot is to allow users to visualize hidden patterns so they can “discover new insights while interacting with thousands of things at once,” according to the Web site.
The team is counting on developers to extend the “Collections” that are central to the Pivot technology. Collections, as the Pivot team explains on the Web site, are combinations of large groups of similar items on the Web that allow users to “begin viewing the relationships between individual pieces of information in a new way.”
Collection files are CXML and Deep Zoom-formatted (DZC) images. According to the site, “depending on whether the user browses web pages or collections, the Pivot client will either use the embedded IE rendering engine (Trident) or the collection browser to display the files.”
You can learn more about Pivot and watch a video with Gary Flake describing the latest Live Labs project at www.getpivot.com
Get more info in the Seattle24x7 blog
