Holiday shoppers are expected to buy more online, and be more mobile, this year

Holiday shoppers are expected to buy more online, and be more mobile, this year
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Computerworld – Holiday e-commerce is expected to jump 14% to 17% this year compared to 2012, despite shoppers’ financial worries and a shorter
holiday shopping season.

Specific shopping days, like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, are expected to show strong sales, according to Kate Dreyer, a
spokeswoman for ComScore Inc.

“Over the past several years, each holiday season has seen the continuation of many online shopping trends that are not necessarily
new but nevertheless shape the dynamics of the season,” Dreyer wrote in a blog post. “The holiday shopping period continues to kick off earlier and earlier — with an increasing number of retailers offering
deals on and even before Thanksgiving Day — and Cyber Monday rises in prominence and promotional activity.”

Online shopping should be strong enough this year to actually blur the lines between Black Friday, which is the day after
Thanksgiving when people tend to flock to retail stores, and Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving when people tend
to make a lot of online purchases from their office computers.

“Many U.S. consumers are going online for holiday deals on the biggest shopping day of the year for brick-and-mortar retailers,”
a Nielsen report released Monday said.

The Nielsen study showed that 51% of those surveyed plan to shop online on Black Friday instead of dealing with packed parking
lots and throngs of grumpy shoppers at the mall. And 46% said they would be doing online shopping on Cyber Monday.

According to comScore, though, people aren’t just sitting in front of their laptops or desktops to do their buying. A third
of the average leading retailers’ monthly traffic now comes exclusively from mobile devices.

Shoppers also are increasingly using their smartphones and tablets to “showroom,” which means they check out an item, like
a bicycle or a sweater, in the store and then actually purchase it online. ComScore reported that 76% of the people it surveyed
say they showroom “sometimes.”

Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld. Follow Sharon on
Twitter at @sgaudin, on Google+ or subscribe to Sharon’s RSS feed. Her email address is sgaudin@computerworld.com.

See more by Sharon Gaudin on Computerworld.com.

Read more about e-business in Computerworld’s E-business Topic Center.

Netflash

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(Video)10 year old British girl explains to her Teddy where money really comes from, & it ain"t the Bank of England

(Video)10 year old British girl explains to her Teddy where money really comes from, & it ain"t the Bank of England
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Positive Money is a movement to democratise money and banking so that it works for society and not against it.

Our current financial system has left us with the highest personal debt in history, unaffordable housing, worsening inequality, high unemployment and banks that are subsidised and underwritten with taxpayers’ money. We believe that these problems have a common root: money.

Many of the big social and economic problems that we’re facing today are connected to money. If we want to solve these problems, we have to change the way that money is created. Most of us learn that only the government can create money, but in reality more than 97% of money is created by private banks – the same banks you see on the high-street every day.

The money banks create isn’t the paper money you keep in your wallet. It’s the electronic money that flashes up when you check your balance at an ATM. Find out How Banks Create Money…

Banks create this electronic money whenever they make a loan. That means for every pound in your bank account, someone else must have a pound of debt. The authorities find it very difficult to limit how much money – and debt – that banks can create. As a result personal debt is now higher than ever before.

MORE: Why is there so much debt?

Since almost all of our money is ‘on loan’ from banks, someone must pay interest on nearly every pound in the UK. This interest redistributes money from the bottom 90% of the population to the top 10%. The money banks create also pushes up house prices, and blows up bubbles in financial markets – making the very rich even richer.

MORE: Why are the rich getting richer?

House prices have been pushed up and out of reach by the hundreds of billions of pounds of new money that banks created in the years before the financial crisis. It’s not just that there’s too many people and not enough houses..

MORE: Why are house prices so high?

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED

Read more about (Video)10 year old British girl explains to her Teddy where money really comes from, & it ain"t the Bank of England and other interesting subjects concerning Police State at TheDailyNewsReport.com

ZTE will bring second wave of Firefox OS phones to US next year

IDG News Service – ZTE plans on launching another phone running Mozilla’s Firefox OS, this time with a dual-core processor, a bigger screen,
and a revamped user experience, a company executive said on Tuesday.

The Chinese handset maker has so far sold about 100,000 of its first Firefox OS phone, the ZTE Open, said He Shiyou, the company’s
executive vice president. The low-end phone was built for developing markets such as Latin America, but later made available
in the U.S. and U.K., where it quickly sold out at prices of $ 79.99 and APS59.99, respectively.

The phone’s sales volume is small compared to the millions of Android handsets and iPhones that fly off store shelves weekly,
but ZTE has been pleased with the initial demand, and hopes sales will eventually reach 200,000 units, He said in an interview
with journalists.

“On the whole, the sales have been pretty good, especially on eBay and with third-party retailers,” he said. “The demand has
exceeded supply, but we also purposely did not want this first generation product to have a large scale.”

ZTE’s next Firefox phone will arrive in the first half of 2014, and remain priced at the lower end. The Chinese company largely
sells Android handsets, but has high hopes the Web-based Firefox operating system will eventually go mainstream.

“These Web-based OSes will develop fast, particularly because of 4G LTE technology,” he said. Higher-speed networks means
that HTML5-based apps can load quickly on phones, removing the need to download and install native apps, He added.

“In the future, the app store business model will be no more,” he said. “The Firefox OS is still new, and it will bring an
entirely different user experience.”

ZTE was ranked as the world’s fifth-largest smartphone vendor in the second quarter, according to research firm Gartner. But
the company is not widely known in the U.S., where it generally sells unbranded versions of its phones with local carriers
including AT&T and Sprint.

ZTE will begin selling its Grand S and Nubia smartphones in the U.S. in Oct.

But starting in October, ZTE will begin selling its Grand S and Nubia phones in the U.S. through retailers.

The Grand S, launched in China earlier this year, is an Android phone with a 5-inch full-HD screen. It has a quad-core processor, 13-megapixel
camera, and its U.S. edition will probably come with a 2300 mAh battery. The price will range between US$ 400 and $ 500 when
bought without carrier subsidies.

ZTE’s Nubia Z5, another Android phone, features similar specs with a 5-inch full-HD screen and a quad-core processor. Its
price will range around $ 450.

For this year, the company is aiming to grow its U.S. handset revenue by 60 percent year on year to around $ 1.6 billion.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.

Netflash

ZTE will bring second wave of Firefox OS phones to US next year