In dark days, is e-commerce the answer?

We are in the middle of the most extensive crisis of the lasst decades! Most US economic indicators have suffered severely in Q1 2009. With one exception!

According to a survey by Forrester Research and Shop.org, US online retail sales rose an average of 11% in the first three months of 2009.

Of the 80 companies studied, 58% saw online sales increases compared with the same quarter last year.

Looking further into the findings, 44% of the e-tailers reported increases of over 10%, 14% showed increases up to 10% and 13% reported flat sales.

In the survey, about 70% of both consumer brand manufacturers and multichannel retailers reported online sales increases. However, Web-only merchants had a different situation. About six in 10 reported Web sales declines.

“It seems that consumer confidence is getting better,” Sucharita Mulpuru, a Forrester analyst, told Bloomberg News. “Hopefully the worst is behind us.”

Looking ahead, Citi Investment Research projects that US retail e-commerce sales will grow 4.4% in 2009 to $141 billion—and jump to 16.5% growth in 2010.

source: emarketer.com

Design matters

Latest research in the UK showed that 93 % of iPhone owners accessed mobile media in January 2009. What does this show? That if you give users a beautiful phone and a handy interface design they will access media and they will be more willing to learn how to use technology!

According to the first data to describe iPhone usage in the UK, from comScore, 93% of iPhone owners in the UK accessed mobile media in January 2009.

Comparing iPhone users to smartphone users to mobile phone users, comScore found that the iPhone users did almost everything more on their phones than their counterparts.

Nearly 80% of iPhone users accessed news on their phones, compared with 48% and 20% of smartphone and mobile phone users, respectively. And so on down the line.

www.outalot.gr

Like everybody else, we wanted to create a social network that everybody would love and would spread viraly . We decided to take a different approach. We decided to create a tool, an engine rather than a social network. On the way things got different. Everybody wanted to be able to add new events and meet new people and make friends. So we changed the concept and came up with a mixture of things. The concept is "Socialize more in the real world" rather than spending your whole day over your keyboard. It's a way of making real friends, people that you will actually meet. People that share one thing. They love to go out, have a drink or a bite and love to meet new people.

Take a look and try it out: outalot.gr! For the moment it's only in greek but you will get the idea.