Changes to business digitisation brings
Taking time off from stuffing their faces with turkey and mince pies, nearly 4m Britons waddled away from the dinner table to go online and spend more than £100m on Christmas Day.
According to figures issued by the IMRG, around 3.8m consumers turned their backs on Wallace & Gromit and the Dr Who special to log on and splash out a record breaking £102m online – an average of £26.80 per shopper.
Burger King has releases a rather strange Facebook App – Whopper Sacrifice.
In exchange for you un-friending (burning) your Facebook ‘friends,’ it gives you credit towards a Whopper. Burn ten and they’ll give you a burger in the US.
UK sales of video game hardware and software in 2008 have lept to £4.034 billion, so say industry body ELSPA.
Looks like fans of video games are refusing to listen to the doom-sayers and have been buying video games in ever larger numbers taking software sales to £1.905 billion.
Now the detail …
If you haven’t heard, mxiwit, the great Web service that lets people create their own online mixtape, complete with a player that looks like a real old compact cassette tape with rotating reels, is closing, describing their situation as being “between a rock and a hard place.”
There’s two pieces of good news to add to this sad news.
AMEE, a company that provides Internet-based calculation and storage of the carbon footprints, has received ‘substantial’ Series A funding from O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures (OATV), Union Square Ventures (USV) and The Accelerator Group (TAG).
In a further step to make Gmail as invaluable as possible to peoples lives, Google has released an add-on for gmail to help you handle your tasks.
Released via Google Mail Labs, the app is fairly simple, letting you plug in the tasks you have to complete and when they have to be done by – but of course!
As was pointed out on Twitter by Psychemedia, Google knowing what you need to get done is fantastic for their adsense advertising opportunities.
It’s highly arguable that no piece of information could be more valuable to Google that what your plans / tasks / desire are.
One of the great things about being computer-based is that you can move fast and change information quickly … right?
We know these things, don’t we.
This was the basis for us being really confused as to why some eBay sellers are still charging VAT at 17.5%, instead of the new 15% rate.
As those in the UK will be well aware, in an attempt to stimulate the economy and get people spending their money, the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer allowed the VAT rate (sales tax) to be trimmed down on 1 December 2008.
It’s interesting how a couple of months can change the view you hold of a collection of companies.
These in particular center around Kevin Rose and the companies that he has an involvement in – Digg, Revision3 and Pownce.
It’s not long ago – back in March 08 – that there were rumours that Digg was subject to a bidding war between Microsoft and Google. The tech giants were – rumours told us – battling to outbid each other for the blessed Digg. Figures of $200 million were floated, although the accuracy of the rumours was questioned by Digg’s CEO Jay Adelson.
It’s possible that some people reading this won’t have heard of Sun. They’re a big computer company that has gone through many iterations (during the dotcom boon their moto was “The computer is the network”).
We’ve covered a background below to get you up to speed on Sun, but before that, we’ve got an overview on the Sun Startup Essentials, which is aimed at start-ups.
Pownce, a competitor to Twitter, has announced that it is shutting the service on 15 December – Just two weeks notice.
The two main people behind the service, Leah Culver and Mike Malone, will be going to work with blog company, Six Apart.
Two more of the Pownce team, Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka will be all ‘la de da’ and become advisers to Six Apart.