Samsung Announces Galaxy Note 10.1

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Monday Samsung announced the awaited arrival of the Galaxy Note 10.1, stating that the tablet will be available around the world by the end of this month .

Dual cameras, a forward facing 1.9 megapixel and a 5 megapixel rear-facing are features, as well as the the 1.4Ghz quad-core Exynos processor that powers the 10.1-inch Android tablet.

Originally announced at Mobile World Congress in February, the Galaxy Note 10.1 has upgraded to a faster processor as well as other updated specs hoping to make it more competitive with other tablets on the market. It will launch with the Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" OS.

For those of you in New York City, Samsung is holding an event  on August 15, which will probably introduce the launch of the tablet. 

The tablet  has a multitasking feature, allowing you to run two apps simultaneously on the screen, which could be used to surf the web or take notes during the presentation. Or various other uses creative minds will find useful!

Why Ecommerce Businesses Should be Using Facebook for Market Research

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Why E-commerce Businesses Should be Using Facebook for Market Research

Using Facebook’s marketing data may prove to be essential to e-commerce sites. Any e-commerce site that is currently not using Facebook for market research is potentially missing out on significant information that could be beneficial to their bottom line. Sociable Labs explores how technology can be used in innovative ways and recently conducted a survey of over 12 e-commerce sites in different markets. They discovered half of visitors to e-commerce websites are logged on to Facebook. Businesses need to know more about their customers’ interactions with Facebook because of its significance in the day-to-day lives of current and future customers. 

Facebook allows e-commerce businesses to conduct market research in a way that is highly targeted. Businesses can use the data they collect on Facebook to create more effective ad campaigns. These campaigns can be spread across multiple platforms including social media sites and also help businesses create more effective copy for their websites. If businesses are able to determine exactly what their customers need and want they will be in a better position to increase sells and brand loyalty. The days of untargeted ads are coming to an end. People want products that cater to their specific needs and any e-commerce business that can figure how to do this is bound to have lasting success online.

Using social media in particular to market means being relevant. E-commerce companies need to be able to cut through all the noise that individual consumers are bombarded by during their online experience. The average Facebook user spends an average of 15 minutes on Facebook each day. Highly targeted ads to these customers on Facebook alone could be a very effective and economical way for businesses to spread the word about the brand and products. Sociable Labs creates different services to help businesses better understand the response they are receiving from customers on their social media marketing campaigns.

Having relevant and highly targeted information about target audiences and demographics can help businesses create more effective ads for their general audiences and sub-niches within their core audience. Products that are better positioned to sell can also be created based on market research and information received from Facebook’s platform. Companies should be using the Facebook Business Pages to conduct research. The built-in metrics on Facebook’s platform can help businesses make better decisions for the future and understand want their customers are looking for. Companies can also conduct polls as a way to interact with their fans and gather information as well. Including services that help monitor customer response like the ones developed by Sociable Labs can also be a very important component of an e-commerce businesses marketing plan.

How Can a Company Move "Followers" and "Fans" into Sales Prospects Using Social Media?

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How Can a Company Move "Followers" and "Fans" into Sales Prospects Using Social Media?

Written by Bill Pojunis on 28 July 2012. Posted in Social Media Marketing & Strategy

Social media is a great tool to market various products and services. Companies that utilize a Facebook page or manage a Twitter account have a wide audience for potential customers. However, any business that is using a social media site needs to provide content valuable to their target audience. Once this has been done, an online strategy for the generation of revenue is needed. 

Updating fans of a Facebook page or followers on Twitter allows a business to reach prospects early on in the sales process. Getting a potential customer's attention early is the key to successful conversion to a paying customer. To do this a company will need to post a description with a preview of their product or service being offered. 

Potential customers for your business need an easy way to find your product. To do this an example for the type of product or a link to a web page needs to be included with any posted message. Make sure to keep extra clicks to get to the link for your product to a minimum. The link on a Facebook page or your Twitter account needs to go directly to the product. If a link simply goes to a main page for a website, a business may miss out on converting fans and followers into a sales prospect. 

Utilize a Facebook or Twitter page to create soft leads. Potential customers that follow your pages enter the sales process at an early stage and may not be at a buying stage at this point. However, a business is able to create a new lead or sales prospect by using an email list. This allows a business to use an email marketing campaign to promote their product and other offerings. 

The sales prospects being nurtured on fans on Facebook or followers on Twitter are different than those of a traditional sales lead. This means that a traditional email campaign for this type of prospect is not a good choice to drive a purchase decision. These emails should include basic information of a product to keep up interest. 

Measure the effort to convert a fan or follower into sales prospects. This can be done by tracking how many visitors click on a link the is posted to Facebook or Twitter. Compare the number of clicks on your links to the number total number of potential leads following on Facebook or Twitter.

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Google debuts "Vault" Archiving and Records Management System

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Google debuts "Vault" Archiving and Records Management System

It seems like everything is moving to the cloud and with the advent of the Google Vault, business communications are headed there as well. The company recently announced its archiving service for users of its chat and email services. This service costs $5 per month and is geared toward any organization that might benefit from an archiving system during times of litigation, investigation, and compliance audits. We think it's a strong addition to the company's other business services, which you may already be using, including Cloud Connect, Groups, Sites and Docs.

Water cooler talk has been positive. If you already rely on Gchat or Gmail don't need to make any changes. This records management system simply archives the data that is already being communicated in those channels. It offers an easy solution during a difficult time. Legal processes that require a retention period, or hold, on such data go that much more smoothly when it's easy to locate and save that data.

Google explains that its Vault service allows businesses to comply with those legal holds and the system will hold the chat and email data until the retention expires. Although you can manually save some of this data, the automated records management system ensures that it is preserved for longer than Gmail or Chat may usually allow.

Even when litigation and compliance aren't an issue, this new service allows small company owners to quickly search through archived data to find specific information. The search tool is handy because it allows you to locate data based on message content and meta-data such as labels. It also promotes collaboration between users for message management purposes. Plus, there's no need to move your sensitive files between hard-drives, a practice that can sometimes result in corrupted files. This new service is just one more way to ensure that important information never becomes lost, even in the event of a hard-drive or network failure.

Google wants business owners and IT managers to sign up with this service right away. What is its reasoning? Vault provides an easy-to-access method for quickly finding data. The archiving service is a small fee, the company says, especially when compared to costly data retrieval and wasted man-hours when the auditor makes an appearance. Operations quickly return to normal, and audits become less painful. It's certainly a convincing argument and we think it's always better to be safe than sorry.

New Media Plus Relaunches Blog

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Written by Bill Pojunis on 27 July 2012. Posted in Blogs

 

New Media Plus is now re-launching our blog onwww.newmediaplus.net.

 

During the next few weeks, you will notice our re-energized commitment to providing valuable information on all things relating to social media, website development and online advertising.  We now will be providing information and an enhanced emphasis upon how public companies can more effectively manage their investor-related materials through social media and new media. We will be bringing our readers trends and new developments, industry news and best practices from sources to complement our own staff of contributors and experts.

We are back, better than ever, and raring to go!  The new content is on schedule to begin release in the next few days.

We hope you like what you see, and that you will give us some feedback so that we can continue to improve things going forward.  In addition, we would greatly appreciate it if you could help us by sharing articles and posts you like or find helpful to your business!

As the saying goes, we are ramping up for success! Glad to have you join us!

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PayPal Wallet's Take on Payments- Click here http://bit.ly/rXt6xm for full article

PayPal Wallet's Take on Payments- Click here http://bit.ly/rXt6xm for full article

The idea of a world where consumers are free from carrying multiple debit and credit cards with them has picked up a head of steam over the last year. The biggest push for this concept may have come from Google Wallet, the company’s NFC-based payment solution. Google’s dream of a future where everyone uses Google Wallet won’t come to fruition if PayPal has any say, though.

PayPal recently unveiled its new PayPal Wallet interface. Like Google Wallet, the service lets consumers spend anywhere that PayPal Wallet is accepted using a unified account. All a person needs to do is select what account they want to spend from, and either key in a PIN or use a PayPal credit card. The rest is handled by PayPal, without the buyer needing to carry around a card for each of their spending accounts.

The biggest differentiator for PayPal Wallet from Google Wallet is that PayPal’s new service isn’t based on NFC. While Google Wallet requires its users to have an NFC-enabled phone – something that is still a rarity in the world of smartphones – PayPal doesn’t require NFC. It will have support for NFC in the future, it won’t be required. Instead, users can use the aforementioned PayPal credit card or PIN method to verify purchases.

It’s a great idea, and one that PayPal is hoping will allow it to be a leader not just in online payments, but also in offline. When compared to Google Wallet, its largest competitor, the only major advantage that Google Wallet has is that it lets the user choose what payment method they want to use prior to the purchase. PayPal Wallet, meanwhile, uses a default payment method that can’t be conveniently changed prior to each purchase.

To make up for this shortcoming, PayPal Wallet lets its users change their payment method after the purchase has been made. For example, if a person sets their debit card to be their default payment method, then that’s what will be used in all PayPal Wallet purchases. Once that person gets home, though, they can log on to their PayPal account, single out the transaction and switch the funding source for it.

PayPal Wallet promises to be an innovative new service that will allow consumers to spend more while fumbling through different cards less. Because of this, business owners can benefit from implementing PayPal Wallet functionality. It takes away the roadblocks associated with traditional spending, and that means more sales for businesses. And, of course, more business for PayPal.

The Release of Siri: What You Need To Know-Click here http://bit.ly/nF4i6q for full article

The Release of Siri: What You Need To Know-Click here http://bit.ly/nF4i6q for full article

Of all the many upgrades and new features included in the latest iPhone 4S, the most highly anticipated has got to be Siri. In a nutshell, Siri is a digital personal assistant program that's included in iOS 5, the latest and greatest version of Apple's much-lauded mobile operating system. Relying on natural language recognition and artificial intelligence to respond to queries from the user, Siri can do everything you would do yourself automatically without having to push a single button. While there are many similar programs on the market, few attain the level of polish and sophistication that Siri achieves.

Main Features and Benefits
Siri is like having a digital personal assistant within your phone. Using natural language recognition melded with cloud database storage, Siri responds to a user's commands and questions and learns as it goes. In order to launch Siri on a new iPhone 4S, simply hold down the home button. Once activated, you can ask Siri nearly anything you can think of and it'll answer you to the best of your ability. Simply ask Siri “What can you do?" if you're unsure where to start. It'll give you a rundown of the available options and capabilities built in to the service.

Siri's voice-activated web search is impressive enough by itself. But the truly astounding thing is the way in which it organizes and streamlines communication online or on the phone. Due to its tight integration with your contacts, E-mail, and messaging accounts, you can easily fire off calls and SMS messages by voice command alone. If you want to update your Twitter stream or see what other people are saying, Siri's got you covered. It can tell you if you need to grab an umbrella before you leave the office, and even book a hotel room for you if you so desire.

How Siri Will Change The Digital Landscape
It's not an understatement to say that Siri will be a major boon to small and medium-sized businesses that rely heavily on the iPhone to make their work force more productive. Siri's personal assistant technology makes having a secretary for lower-level executives almost redundant. For the rank and file, Siri makes keeping track of appointments and staying on top of deadlines less of a headache. Overall, Siri makes everyone a more effective worker. As Apple's flagship voice recognition software catches on with more and more users, expect to see competition in this sector heat up as Android jumps on the bandwagon and releases a digital assistant application of its own.

Wall Street Protests- Click here http://bit.ly/ptkPFs for full article

Wall Street Protests- Click here http://bit.ly/ptkPFs for full article

Back in August, the self-proclaimed ‘culture jamming’ Canadian magazine Adbusters launched a call to action to all disenfranchised Americans. It was time for the USA to have its ‘Tahrir moment’ they said, and they began a movement to ‘Occupy Wall Street’ with at least 20,000 people.

On September 17, the date finally arrived, and fewer than 1,000 people showed. Only a small shadow of what the original call was. Come next morning hundreds had left, and by Monday the 19th, only two days into the Wall Street protest, a mere 150 committed people remained.

Those who followed the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement expected it to fade out into the background and disappear, obscured by a mainstream media blackout. Now, 20 days in and contrary to early forecasts, the movement has not only grown, but snowballed nationwide beyond the already high expectations of the original organizers.

‘Occupation’ actions are being held and organized in over 200 US cities, including Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco and the District of Columbia. It has also grown internationally, with ‘Occupations’ taking place in Spain, Canada, France, Brazil and Greece to name a few.

The occupation movement was originally met with derision and condescension by the media, due in great part by the lack of a cohesive and unifying message. But it may perhaps be this lack of a clear demand what is the most telling about the Wall Street Protests.

On Thursday, President Barack Obama addressed the protests, stating he believes “it expresses the frustrations that the American people feel” and that “the protestors are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.” It may very well be this generalized message of frustration towards inequality that has made the movement resonate with so many Americans – and draw support from so many varied and eclectic sources.

Increasingly, these grassroots demonstrations against perceived injustice and corporate greed are drawing the attention and support of heavy hitters across the sociopolitical spectrum, like labor unions, Nobel laureates, anarchistic organizations like Anonymous, celebrities, active-duty and veteran US military, politicians and even groups of Tea Party members.

Ironically enough, the NYPD presence which was deployed to contain and disperse the Wall Street protests has only succeeded in helping galvanize public support for ‘Occupy Wall Street’. In fact, on September 23rd the occupation movement was still only a couple hundred strong, but the now infamous video of Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna pepper-spraying female protestors on September 24th played a key role in creating public support for the Occupation movement; catapulting it to the nation-wide pressure group it has become.

With such a broad range of issues ‘Occupy Wall Street’ wants to tackle, as well as the growing number of groups, parties and unions attempting to co-opt the movement into their own agenda, it is extremely hard to tell what the future of this grassroots campaign holds. However, one thing is certain: It has been 20 days and everything indicates it will only get bigger.

The Loss of a Visionary, the Death of Steve Jobs- Click here http://bit.ly/r3QA8F for full article

The Loss of a Visionary, the Death of Steve Jobs- Click here http://bit.ly/r3QA8F for full article

Hailed as both a visionary and creative genius, Steve Jobs passed away Wednesday night after a long and mostly secret battle with cancer. In addition to his friends and family, Steve Jobs leaves one the most successful technology companies and a host of innovations that will forever change the world. His family issued a short statement Wednesday, informing the public that he had left peacefully. Although many knew him as a creative genius, the release noted that he cherished his family. They requested privacy as they mourn his loss and committed to setting up a website dedicated to honoring his memory.

In response to the tragedy, many have begun to take a second look at Jobs fantastic life. Some have begun to assemble at Apple retail stores as they remember Jobs and his profound effect on the world. This effect was most recently realizied in the development of some of the most celebrated technological devices, the iPod, iPad and iPhone. The personal device revolution they have inspired is not dissimilar from the success Apple first experienced in the realm of personal computers.

Without Steve Jobs, in cooperation with Steve Wozniak, the computer revolution may have never happened, or at least been significantly delayed. Apple led the industry in personal computing until the 1990’s when the company lost a great deal of its popularity and market share. This coincided with Job’s absence from the company, beginning in 1986 when the creative genius and ended after Jobs returned in 1996 and led the company to release the first iPod in 2001.

Jobs brought more than just technology to the world. The visionary was responsible for number of contributions to society and worked with other corporate leaders like Bill Gates to encourage positive growth in society. He also gave joy and laughter to millions through a number of films produced by his animation company, Pixar. Steve Jobs bought the company in 1986 and after leading it for a number of years, accepted a buy-out agreement in 2006 and became the largest share holder in Disney. He continued to serve as a director until his death.

Apple issued a statement declaring the visionary a mentor to those he knew and an amazing human being to all. Until a website is released, they officially designated rememberingsteve@apple.com as the place to send condolences and appreciate for the man who changed so many lives.

Take Your Best Shot!- Click here http://bit.ly/nEgedy for full article

Take Your Best Shot!- Click here http://bit.ly/nEgedy for full article

It used to be that anyone who wanted to take good display-quality photos would need to invest a lot of money in serious photo equipment. Most people who took photos did so with instamatic-type cameras and were happy to just have personal records to keep for memories’ sake and not to necessarily display.

With the advancement in today’s technology, though, it is now easy and relatively inexpensive for anyone to explore their creative talents with photography. Today, a digital camera comes with almost every cellphone made. For example, the latest iPhone comes with a 5 megapixel camera and an L.E.D. flash. You will find cellphone cameras in use by many teenagers today. They love to send pictures to each other via the Internet and to post them to social networking sites. You will even find many of them sporting iPhones. Whether it be an iPhone or another type of cellphone camera, no child today feels complete without their digital camera.

For a minor investment, a budding photographer can more deeply enter into the world of photography by buying what used to be thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment in one affordable digital camera (typically known as a prosumer camera); a camera that allows the user to go from total novice settings to fully manual. Prosumer cameras typically come with zoom lenses of various focal lengths, some have a very impressive range of zoom—from wide-angle to super-telephoto.

For those who want even more, a modern DSLR (digital single-lens reflex) camera is the way to go. The DSLR is the camera of choice for those serious about photography, especially for those who make their living taking photographs, such as photojournalists. The DSLR allows the photographer to add myriad accessories such as different lenses to multiple flash units in order to get the shot

In a fast-paced working environment such as photojournalism, DSLRs are the cameras of choice. Photojournalism has become simpler with their use. The photographer no longer needs to wait to get back to the lab to get the film developed. She can now transfer the images directly from the location over the Internet to her editor for review. In some ways, digital cameras could be said to have revolutionized the world of photojournalism.

Digital cameras truly have opened up a new world for many today. There’s never been a better time to enjoy the fun of picture taking.