But in a general user’s perspective, what social commerce actually is?

• Is it a sales channel?
• Is it any type of customer service?
• Can we refer it as a new form of advertisement?
• Or can we mention it as an innovation in e-commerce?

Well, the answer for all the above questions is a “BIG YES“. Social commerce is everything mentioned above. All the above features or perspectives are embedded onto a single social media platform, to facilitate both users and businesses to involve in monetary exchange.

Every person possesses an intense desire to live in a social network; it may be a real world network or a virtual network like a social media platforms. Most of the time, this network determines, how people influence each other in terms of their choices. It’s a well-known fact that a friend’s recommendation is the most persuasive advertisement. So, to utilize the popularity of these pre-existing networks of people, for business development, while maintaining the trustworthiness, helps building the reputation for a company.

Different social media have defined their own social commerce strategies, like:

• F-Commerce, or facebook commerce, is the practice of sale and purchase using the most popular social media platform, either using facebook directly or using the facebook open graph.
• T-commerce, similar to f-commerce, t-commerce is the practice of commerce using twitter. All the sale and purchase, payment option and product advertisements are done through twitter. Twitter has a system to inform about the real-time transaction status via direct message.

Social commerce not only brings revenue in terms of transactions, but through advertising and click-through as well. Recommendations by individual users also work for the companies for developing their business online. Also, it’s not only the company being benefited, but the users are also potential beneficiaries, as even their participation in such commerce counts. Sites offer special rewards or reputations points against the user’s recommendation and information sharing from the user’s account.

Individual level reviews are presented on web-pages which discuss the quality and drawbacks of a product in its category. Some web-sites offer features for product comparison, so that a user can first compare the product in terms of price, specifications and features and after that decide according to their requirements.

Author’s Bio:

Christa Joe is the author of this article. She has been writing articles for Cloud Computing Company like Q3 Technologies. Moreover, she has been providing useful content writing material related to iPad Apps & Mobile App Development.

By: christa joe

The first mobile advertisement displayed the news headline of a Finnish newspaper through SMS.

Mobile advertising continued the importance of SMS and made it one of the most important technique involved in promotion through mobile. The primary reasons for SMS being popular are:

• SMS delivery barely fails, as messages are always kept in a queue before successful delivery.
• Messages can be delivered while the user is on an active call. So chances that user will not look into the message are very low.
• Even the basic phone with no multi-media feature, supports message service. So the target population automatically increases.

When multi-media features are introduced in mobile advertisements, it takes the promotion and marketing to a whole new level. Marketing with iAd and AdMob by apple and Google respectively, provides rich media advertising using their technologically sophisticated, creative and attractive media banners over iPad apps and android applications.

The huge scope for mobile advertisements is due to following reasons:

• Fast growing audience: As the numbers of mobile users are growing in the world every single day the target population is increasing. People tend to choose mobile devices for going on-line, browsing the internet, checking e-mails, etc. This improves the chances of being noticed by a user while performing such activities.
• Convenience in terms of advertisement, relevancy and updates in promotional activity is the major aspect of this strategy. With this strategy, the content will always be current about the ad and it provides the convenience to the company to update their content according to the relevancy of ad.
• Maximum exposure: Each and every individual owns a mobile phone nowadays and casting the product over mobile devices catches the maximum number of eyes, providing the maximum exposure about the product, to the target audience.
• Eco friendly advertising: Mobile adverts which are eco-friendly, so doing its bit towards a healthy environment and saving the natural resources for the future generations.

While advertisement over mobile devices is catching a number of eyes of companies to look into their products and services, it is also helping mother earth to breathe easily.

Author’s Bio:

Christa Joe is the author of this article. She has been writing articles for Cloud Computing Companies like Q3 Technologies. Moreover, she has been providing useful content writing material related to Mobile App Development.

By: christa joe

Companies started following the cloud trend as it was:

• highly flexible,
• based on pay-per-usage
• scalable

The selection of the cloud is purely based on the decision made by the authority of the organization, which is further based on certain parameters like

• Product of the company
• Sensitivity of the data
• Location of resources, etc.

Cloud computing companies like Amazon, Google and Apple have to use public cloud due to the reason that their products are more general user-oriented. A user would not want to use Google docs, inside a particular region only. Rather user demands to have the access to cloud, anytime, anywhere.

On the contrary, an organization cannot put its official data onto a public cloud, as it will disclose the private data of organization and will hamper the privacy of company.

In situations where external access to internal data is required, like a scene where client’s requirement is to analyze the progress of the project or e-mail access to the internal web-server by the employees, Hybrid cloud is deployed. In such scenarios, an authorization key is provided, to authenticate the access and maintain the privacy of the data.

Advancement in the virtualization and distributive methods, allow organization to maintain separate data centers under the jurisdiction of another organization, which effectively meets the customer’s requirements over cloud and gives the data centralization to have anytime, anywhere access in a more secure manner.

Services offered in both the cloud types are of three types:

• Software as A Service or SaAS, where end user access remote product like e-commerce web-site over internet, which uses a public cloud. Outsourced data centers or e-mail services are availed in the private cloud, so as to maintain the privacy and data integrity.
• Platform as A Service, PaAS, developers in the private cloud are given the legacy to attach themselves with the sophisticated hardware over network to find out the functionality of newly developed program, while public cloud allows free-lancers to use any programming language, any database or any operating system according to their requirement from any location.
• Infrastructure as a Service, IaAS, used mostly in public cloud for data storage need of the users, provided through an application like iCloud, an online data back-up service, for remote storage purposes while companies use IaAS for internal working of different module of corporate system.

Cloud, as a facility, is not only for the big giants of the industry, but for the general purpose users. An effective Cloud strategy provides better and economical services for their digital requirements and necessities.

Author’s Bio:

Christa Joe is the author of this article. She has been writing articles for Mobile App development Companies like Q3 Technologies. Moreover, she has been providing useful content writing material related to iPad Apps development.

By: christa joe

There are different types of online retailing sectors depending upon the bodies involved in electronic commercial activity :

• B2B, business-to-business, takes place between two companies over the internet. For example, sale and purchase of raw material through internet between company A and company B, where company A is the retail supplier of raw material and company B is Buyer Company.
• B2C, business-to-consumer, takes place between a company and the individual consumers. The products of the company are mostly individual oriented. Amazon.com, ebay.com are the real life example of such retailing type.
• C2C, consumer-to-consumer, this is new type of e-commerce recently introduced, where a company provides a web-based platform to different individuals to sell or purchase the products online. Here the involvement of the company is just to provide the platform to interact. All the supply & demand activities are handled by these individual users.

During the year 1994, the online banking and other online commerce activities were opened and in the same year, Netscape introduced the SSL, Secure Socket Layer, for the encrypted and more secure online transfer of data which made the online transactions more secure, thus facilitating the e-shopping web-sites. A German company, Intershop, was the first company to introduce first Online Shopping System.

Online shopping provides both ease and convenience of shopping to the customers and allows retailers to maintain the balance between demand and supply. Some other advantages of online retailing can be summarized as:

• Requires low level of investment, retailer need not to build a huge complex for storage and display purposes. Only a web-site works and storage is the matter of concern.
• Builds the customer base, as it reaches to a huge number of users through ads campaigns, adverts, search engine results etc.
• Eliminates the geographical barrier for the business as online stores can be visited from any part of the country at anytime.
• Improved customer interaction through feedback and reviews from customers; customer interaction can virtually be served at one-to-one basis.
• Improves the brand value while customers in real-world scenario aren’t much aware about the technical know-how’s of a product. Online stores provide that information to a customer without facing the hassle of answering multiple customers simultaneously. This gives a reputed face and sense of trust in user’s perception and improves the brand value of online retailer.
• Automates working of various entities involved in retailing and helps in maintaining the inventory, finance and other aspects by integrating various modules of retailing with the online store. For example, whenever any product is ordered, inventory can be automatically updated.

During these past 15 years stretch, online retail has been through various trends in market. Companies’ like Walmart has introduced the “in-store pick-up” for the orders placed online for more sophisticated customers who are keen to bring their newly ordered commodity by themselves.

Mobile apps for smart-phone are the new trends in new mobile-world. Smart-phones are now in the reach of every person and so the online stores are keeping their reach with their customers on their smart phones. This modern era of Mobile Application Development has allowed online stores to launch their own mobile apps for stores and provides laxative shopping experience to users.

Author’s Bio:

Christa Joe is the author of this article. She has been writing articles for Mobile App development Companies like Q3 Technologies. Moreover, she has been providing useful content writing material related to iPad Apps development.

By: christa joe

Facebook has come up with this single networking platform on a broad scale which provides more technologically sound methods to integrate with the prevailing marketing strategies and output more result than achieved before. Facebook provides a number of marketing tools. Some of them can be listed as:

• Integration with the website: Using this facebook developer tool, an organization can easily place a Facebook “LIKE” button onto their web-page which provides them a user interface that directs them to place a like button on their web page. So, whenever any individual visits the web page and press the like button, the company’s facebook page is automatically added in the users’ liked pages and all the updates are posted on the wall of the users, to make them visible to its connections.
• FB Ads or Adverts: While using the personal space of FB account, each user gets an option to view the advertisements present on the extreme right corner of their screen. FB provides companies to place their website or product as an Ad in that space, so a user can view that ad and can contact the organization in the “hour of need“. 
• Creating Pages: We all join different pages those match our interests to get the information out of these pages. These pages are basically meant to market the presence of the concerned company and promoting itself by providing useful information in more fun-oriented manner. It can be referred as the mouth-publicity in digital world where people promote the page by sharing or liking the page and even sharing the link with friends in chats or wall posts.
• Using small FB apps: FB apps are generally presented to increase the user interaction with the FB page. When a user spends more time on the page and enjoys being on the page, he definitely refer it to other user so that the user also experience visiting the page and have a nice time, which directly promotes the FB page and indirectly publicizes the presence of the company.

And, like any other marketing strategy, Facebook marketing is no different and need relationships to sustain its reputation in social network. User interaction sessions should be included to maintain this reputation and conversation like:

• What users want to have in their liked page?
• What users like in the current page’s status?
• What is that users don’t like about?

If a user comments on any post or places a query on the wall, it should be answered in a professional manner, keeping the essence of a personal relationship. No one would like to have an interaction session that sounds lame and is monotonous like a robot answering.

Social media market is not oriented only for a particular domain of industry rather many software development companies with their technically sophisticated and complex products, are taking advantage from this platform. Every Software Development Company should step-up on social network to find out their potential clients.

It should be noted that the goal of promoting the brand should be kept as prior concern but along with that the content presented should be kept with the intention of covering a wider spectrum of users such that even the most general user can understand the basic concept of the content or the discussion going on.

Author’s Bio:

Christa Joe is the author of this article. She has been writing articles for Cloud Computing Companies like Q3 Technologies. Moreover, she has been providing useful content writing material related to iPad Apps Development.

By: christa joe

Though cloud services are very much in these days, yet number of security measures are associated with deployment of cloud services as many cloud computing companies are not yet capable enough to provide a secure medium of data storage and data transfer to its clients which results in the intrusion in their data center and ultimately client’s data is compromised. Failing in deploying secure features in cloud strategies can arise due to any reason like unqualified policy makers or architect or coders, improper technical mechanisms and risk-control processes.

The Client should always check for few cloud security measures so as to avoid data hampering situations that may have a negative impact on their organization. Here, in this article, we have listed few points below which needs to be taken care of and well analyzed before taking up the cloud services from a vendor:

• Location of data: The physical location of the data should be known to the client while using cloud services. In fact, most of the time, client don’t even know where their data is physically located in. Due to this reason, sometimes local jurisdiction policies create a chaos for the customers for storing or accessing data.
• Non-personnel user access: As cloud service outsource the data storage necessities of an organization, which takes away the authorized user control over data, so all the time customers should know which personnel of vendor is managing the data and also the level of access on data.
• Segregation of data: Data centers are shared in cloud environment which means number of users’ data is residing on the same data storage device. So, data segregation schemes should be checked so as to ensure the proper security of data.
• Data Back-up: The roll-back criterion should be properly explained by the vendor to ensure the recovery of data in disaster situations like database crash. Information regarding the restoring policy of data and the time that will be required to restore the data should be verified.
• Privacy and security: A proper encryption method has to be there to protect data from unwanted entities over web. And a user management system should be provided so that user with intended amount of information access should be provided.
• Transparency: A cloud vendor should be transparent in providing all his internal policies regarding the cloud services and also the clients should ask for it before signing any legal document of agreement over the policies.

Each and every parameter should be analyzed before deploying the cloud services because this virtualization of IT infrastructure Services and de-localization of data brings up the security concerns for the clients to take control of the data, logically, even if it is physically located outside its locations area.

Author’s Bio:

Christa Joe is the author of this article. She has been writing articles for Warehousing management companies like Q3 Technologies. Moreover, she has been providing useful content writing material related to machine to machine communication.

By: christa joe

Social media integration is also an interesting feature in Mango, where updates from the phone can be directly sent to the social networking platforms like facebook; twitter etc. for instance user can upload a recently taken photograph to twitter from the phone library directly.

Multi-taking capability is also integrated so users don’t have to go back to the home screen or end an application in order to switch to any other application. You can listen to music while browsing on the internet or even while playing a game.

A few of many new features introduced in Windows Mobile Mango are:

• Windows live messenger and Facebook chat integration: which allows managing the chat from different contacts those available on both FB chat and live messenger and helps user in maintaining records.
• Facebook events are integrated into the in-built calendar. So whenever any new even is added into your facebook account, it is automatically synchronized into the calendar as well to help you remember the event, like a friend’s b’day.
• Threading: This maintains a single thread or link to the list of events happened with the contacts. Like for each contact, there is a single thread that contains all the SMS’s, MMS’s, call history etc.
• Groups can be formed among the contacts list, which can be later pinned to the home screen.
• Mango has come up with Voice-to-text and text-to-voice functionality that provides the ease of hands free chatting.
• Improved photo management is provided with photo tagging with facebook sync.
• Automatically fixing of photographs for sharpness, brightness.
• Video aspect ratio could be control during the playback, which means videos could be stretched or compressed without pausing them.
• Voice controlled media content provides stopping and playing of media with voice commands.
• Xbox provided to give 3D avatar and avatar customization for different games.

A battery saver mode is also introduced in Mango, which presents the advanced mobile app development methodologies. This mode is activated with user’s permission and closes the background application and email applications to save the battery of phone in case of low battery and will automatically turn on, when charger is connected.

Though the earlier versions of Windows phone may not have brought a great success to Microsoft through smart phone technology, but this new version is quite promising in terms of services provided and user satisfactions.

Author’s Bio:

Christa Joe is the author of this article. She has been writing articles for iPad Apps Development companies like Q3 Technologies. Moreover, she has been providing useful content writing material related to Cloud Computing Companies.

By: christa joe

But according to Google, only the management methods have changed and in all this “mixing and merging”, users’ privacy has not been compromised.

The Adwords criterion, which was more user oriented, was based on the deductions made form the history and other saved searches present in the browser’s cache, shows only the related Ads. But with updated policies in Ads, they would be more keyword oriented and will also match the context of the query searched for.

A new update, known as Search Plus Your World, was also introduced by Google in their search algorithm. With this modification, when a user is logged in his Gmail account and makes a search in Google, the top results were piped from the database of Google+ and then added to the other organic results. The problem with this was that it didn’t provide a comprehensive personal search as it didn’t show results form other popular social media platforms but Google+. So, to provide the links from other social media, extensions from these social sites were added onto a single web page. So whenever user makes any search, say for iPhone Apps Development, wherever user is logged in, results for the keyword from that social media would also shown in the search result.

Another policy change that may interest SEOs or webmasters is change in the reporting policy of the referral traffic in web analytics tool. Webmasters use web analytic tools to analyze certain parameters like the flow of traffic onto their web page, the keywords that redirected the user to their page, the page from which user came from etc. and make decisions to carefully optimize the ranking of their web pages.

With the new policy, while user is logged in the secure mode and makes a search, in chrome browser, with a keyword, web analytic tool would record only the event of search that has happened from the page Google.com and whichever the website, user has been redirected to, Google would be kept as a referrer in the report. In contrast with this, earlier whenever a user entered a keyword in Google, despite of redirecting the user directly to the web-page, the user was redirected via Google and a keyword was tracked particularly for that search, making it available in the report. But with the updated policy, the concept of so called “Search Traffic” has been completely wiped off and Google would be the sole referrer against any search made on Google. All the traffic onto a web-page would totally be either direct traffic or referral traffic.

The introduction of these policies have provided more negative than positive reviews to Google, while Google keeps on justifying its users about these changes and keeps on mentioning that user’s privacy is still their primary concern.

Author’s Bio:

Christa Joe is the author of this article. She has been writing articles for Cloud Computing Companies like Q3 Technologies. Moreover, she has been providing useful content writing material related to Windows Mobile Development.

By: christa joe

SIRI, expanded as Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface, is an iPhone application that takes in the input in form of voice rather than text and responds according to the query entered. Interfacing with SIRI is just like having a conversation with a person. SIRI asks for the input in its application as voice, understands what could be the appropriate response to it and give answers on the basis of those computations.

The processing of the voice query executes in series of steps, before the response is presented to the user:

• The spoken words are encoded in the digital format at the local station i.e. the iPhone.
• After the voice is digitized, this data is sent to the Apple’s server via the local mobile tower and through a series of stations. There it is broken down into vowels and consonants.
• Simultaneously, the voice is evaluated locally in case it’s a command to execute a local instruction like typing text, playing music etc.
• A recognizer installed in iPhone simultaneously communicates with the server to estimate if query can be handled locally.
• At Apple’s server, using a statistical model, the spoken words are estimated.
• After this, a language model is used to understand the meaning of the sentence.
• Finally, server executes the action that can be taken to respond against the query.

Due to all these steps SIRI understands the meaning of the sentence delivered and user can have the expected response. Like if a user tells SIRI, “I’m in a mood to have Italian food”. SIRI will respond as “here are few good Italian restaurants nearby”. And again if user asks a suggestion like, “Who makes good Tortellini in here”. SIRI will list the Italian restaurants from the previous list those who makes Tortellini.

Just like in a normal human conversation, SIRI here remembers the previous query and compares the context of the dialogue going on and when it matches, SIRI provides the result in proper dialogue-like format, having proper vocabulary, verbs, punctuations, pronunciation etc.

SIRI is the result of the evolving mobile app development processes deployed using artificial intelligence and hence, SIRI is an intelligent agent that is self evolving and learns and understands about it’s user with time.

Also, like the finger touch technology of iPhone, it provides enough intelligence to application to distinguish between the user’s voice and music and other sounds and so user can interact with his iPhone even in noisy environment. Thing to keep in mind is SIRI works only with the 3G network or Wi-Fi network availability. And Apple first verifies about the device identity using a unique identifier, before beginning any processing at server. Authentication relies on four parameters provided by iPhone 4S only, during establishing a connection. Validation identifiers, UDID is the one provided by iPhone 4S makes this authentication successful and even if someone succeeds to breakthrough in server, Apple servers are smart enough to detect the fake connection within 24 hours. As a fake identifier would be ported to Apple server from multiple devices, Apple would simply ban that identifier from porting.

However, a few short comings are also associated with this fantastic application like

• Understanding the local accent or dialect, every region has it’s own accent over English, this creates a problem while recording the speech in SIRI
• Inability to provide service in low coverage area, due to insufficient signal strength to transfer the digitized speech, SIRI is not able to respond in such situations.

After January 2012, SIRI services were limited in few countries for the map and local searches. With advancements in iPhone Application Development, Apple is working to provide SIRI in other languages including Spanish, Chinese, Italian and Korean.

Author’s Bio:

Christa Joe is the author of this article. She has been writing articles for Android application Development companies like Q3 Technologies. Moreover, she has been providing useful content writing material related to Windows Mobile Development.

By: christa joe

Amazon web service basically comprises of two segments:

• Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2): This is used to provide infrastructure services like Desktop Virtualization to a company.
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), to provide data storage facility to an organization.

The deployment of this cloud technology reduced the cost of installation for new infrastructure and was easy to deploy. Amazon also provided ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ and ‘Software as a Service’ and soon emerged as the leader among the various cloud computing companies offering cloud services.

The basic requirement of providing computing services over a network was fulfilled by Amazon’s Cloud Compute (EC2). EC2 allows the organizations to hire a virtual machine, which runs the computer applications desired by the organization and operate over a network. EC2 provide scalable amount of virtual machines called as “Instances”. The user pays according to the amount of services used for its working rather than renting the instances for a fixed duration of course.

EC2 is based on Xen virtual machine (VM) monitor which allows multiple operating systems to execute over the same hardware platform concurrently. Every instance or the virtual machine in EC2 works as a private virtual server giving a sense of dedicated system to the user. The size of each instance is drafted in accordance with the Elastic Compute Unit i.e. ECU. Amazon defines ECU as several benchmarks or tests to manage the consistency and predictability of the cloud computing unit.

There are different types of ECU packages which contain a number of VM’s and the amount of data storage. These are:

• Micro ECU: provides 1-2 instances and 633 MB of memory
• Small ECU: comes with only 1 instance but increased memory of 1.7 GB.
• Larges ECU: provides 4 instances and 7.5 GB memory.
• XL ECU: comes with 8 instances and 15 GB memory, etc.

Each VM has a processing capacity equivalent to 1.0-1.2 GHz, 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xenon processor.

In August 2006, Amazon launched EC2 with Linux, Open Solaris of Sun Microsystems and Solaris express community edition. But in October 2008, Amazon added Windows server 2003 and Windows server 2008, in list of available OS’s for cloud computing.

EC2 instances are available with two types of storage options; one is using the local instance store disk which is temporary storage and all the data gets lost as soon as the instance lasts. Another method to launch EC2 instance is using EBS, Elastic Block Store, which is more like a data storage disk at the server and stores the data independent of the lifetime of the instance.

With Amazon EC2 service, Elastic IP addressing is done between instance and the user’s system. With this users are free to map their system to any desired VM without taking into account the network administrator and without waiting for DNS to propagate the new binding. This allocates the IP address to the account being used and not the VM being used. In a sense, Elastic IP addressing is more like Static IP addressing.

Another important feature of EC2 is the automated scaling of the servers which means in high traffic situation, the number of servers would increase and if the traffic reduces, the server number would also be reduced. This gives the flexibility of pricing to the customer as the cost will be in accordance with the usage of service.

Since 2006, Amazon is providing useful and reliable IT infrastructure services over the web to its clients and charging on the usage basis for services and infrastructure, thus giving the scalable services according to need of a software development company which eventually cuts away the cost and time of installation and maintenance of such infrastructure.

Author’s Bio:

Christa Joe is the author of this article. She has been writing articles for Custom application Development companies like Q3 Technologies. Moreover, she has been providing useful content writing material related to Software development services.

By: christa joe