We invite you to read our post on the new blog which is online since

February 2012.

http://blog.anbotogroup.com/

How the future will be?

We can’t know how the future it’s going to be, but we can try to predict how it will be. In the video that you can see below this is what guys from Corning Incoporated try to do, the try to predict how the future will be.

In the video they imagine the possibilities of glass partnered with innovative technologies that can help us in our everyday lives. The video name is “A Day Made of Glass 2: Same Day. Expanded Corning Vision” and its an improved version of “A Day Made of Glass” the first attempt of Corning Vision of showing us a part of the future.

Real time communications through flexible touchable screens will be soon available, a lot of companies are developing incredible technology to make possible for us to have new flexible devices that we can take with us everywhere. The society of the future is an hyper-connected society where we can start anywhere at anytime a real time communication or do our job wherever we are.

What do you think about the innovative technology that Corning Vision shows us in this video?

Do you think that this technology will be available soon?

2011 Ecommerce review

E-commerce continues growing, 2011 has been a good year for e-commerce despite being a bad year for global economy. It seems that e-commerce is not affected by the bad news of the offline world, and it continues growing like years before, and it looks like that in 2012 it will continue to grow.

Let’s analyze what happened in 2011 to see if we can guess what is going to happen in 2012 or what are the keys to success for e-commerce projects starting in 2012. It’s important to analyze what others and us have done in the past to be successful in the future.

Mobile:

Smartphone and tablet usage continued growing in 2011, these devices are really important and every e-commerce project must be prepared for mobile commerce. Android, Google’s operating system for mobile devices, surpassed Apple’s iOS in popularity. Marketing campaigns can also be adapted to this new way of e-commerce.

Social Media:

The importance of Facebook and Twitter and a lot of social media platforms around the world is getting bigger and bigger. Facebook is really important for online display advertising in the U.S. and in the next years F-commerce will be as important as traditional e-commerce.

Security:

Security issues are really important, e-commerce projects have to ensure the safety of their users so they can buy what they want with high security levels. New security threats are going to appear in 2012 and e-commerce business have to be prepared for this.

Customer care:

A lot of new users are going to arrive at your e-commerce platform in 2012, this new customers will have a lot of questions for you and you have to give them a quick answer if you want them to buy. Solutions like a virtual assistant or an Intelligent Chat will be more important than ever if you want to offer a great web experience to your users.

We don’t know what’s next, but everything points to even better years for e-commerce.

How is the online customer?

In this nice infographic you will find a few interesting facts about the online customer. If you have an e-commerce project or if you are thinking on starting a new one, in this infographic you will find a few facts that you have to keep in mind.

You can see how important is the growth of the online sales, or the satisfaction of the Internet retail customer. You also can check what your customers are looking for and how important is to provide them a method to establish communications with you like a chat.

Enjoy and click to enlarge the image!

SOPA Day

Today is the big day for the Anti-Sopa activists, Wikipedia’s English version is down, Wordpress.com is dark, and Google.com has censored their homepage logo. A lot of famous big companies and Internet sites like Facebook, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo, Foursquare, Amazon or eBay are supporting this fight too. The black out will last all day.

We have talked about SOPA in this blog, but today is a special day because a lot of websites decided to black out. An example is Reddit.com, they announced that they would be blacking out their site today. Reddit.com four 12 hours goes dark to raise awareness of SOPA and PROTECT IP bills in US congress. They argue that these two bills could change the landscape of the Internet.

You can check sopablackout.org if you want to blackout your web. In this web you can obtain the code to put in your web page a banner supporting the SOPA Blackout or the code to blackout your web page. With this code your web will temporarily turn down and it will show a text with information about the controversial bills SOPA and PROTECT IP(PIPA).

*About SOPA

It would particularly affect sites with heavy user generated content. Sites like Twitter, Reddit, Youtube and others may cease to exist in their current for if this bill is passed.

*About PIPA

PIPA is SOPA’s twin in the Senate. Under current DMCA law, if a user uploads a copyrighted movie to sites like Youtube, the site isn't held accountable so long as they provide a way to report user infringement. The user who uploaded the movie is held accountable for their actions, not the site. PIPA would change that - it would place the blame on the site itself, and would also provide a way for copyright holders to seize the site's domain in extreme circumstances.

*Information from sopablockauto.org/learnmore

Big companies like Google are fighting really hard against these two bills. You can check this post in Google’s official blog, it’s called “Don’t censor the web” and they talk about the blackout and they explain why they are against SOPA and PIPA bills. A huge campaign asking people to send petitions to the US Congress has started, Google has enabled a landing page where every US citizen can send and sign their petition to the US Congress.

Here is a video from EngineAdvocacy where you can see a few Internet entrepreneurs talking about SOPA and PIPA and it’s possible effects on the Internet

CES 2012

The 2012 International CES has started in Las Vegas, Nevada. Since January 10 to January 13 2012 International CES will be offering the most exciting technological news. This year’s edition has more than 3.100 companies, and we will see more than 20.000 new products being launch in the 2012 International CES, the world’s largest hub for consumer technology innovation.

Innovative products as ultrabooks, voice and gesture-based technologies, smartphones and OLED TVs are going to be launched during the event. The 2012 CES show floor covers 1.851 million net square feet of exhibit space, a huge space bigger than 37 footaball fields, this big space is filled with consumer technology innovation.

What can we see at CES?

Microsoft President and CEO Steve Ballmer delivered a pre-CES keynote address. During the address, Ballmer announced that Microsoft Kinect will be available on Windows on February 1, 2012. Other innovations from Microsoft such as Windows phone can be enjoyed at CES.

Other big companies like LG Electronics, Panasonic, Nokia, Samsung, Pioneer, Sharp, Sony, Intel and more are going to launch interesting and innovative products at CES too.

Here are a few conferences you can see at CES the next days

Conferences January 12:

• At LVCC, Nort Hall: “Simplifying the Architecture for Connectivity”, “Kids Go Mobile”, “The Future of Tablets: Segmentation”, “Show Me the Money: Mobile Payments and the Consumer”
• At The Venetian: “Being Creative in Producing a Live-Streaming Show”, “HD Video Everywhere”

Conferences at CES are amazing and there is a wide variety of them to choose the best for you.

The Consumer Electronics Association announced that the 2012 International CES will be the association’s second largest show in history. Every major technology company across the globe is participating in force at this year’s CES. Companies like Apple, Facebook, Twitter, HP and Dell are sending significant delegations to CES to show and talk about their new products.

The opening day CES started with a record number of exhibitors, we have 2 more days to see what CES can show to us.

Web browsers usage in 2011

2011 has been a year of changes in the world of the web browsers, for the first time Google Chrome has overtaken Firefox and Internet Explorer is losing its big market share. If you thought that things could not change in this area of the Internet you were wrong. We might see in 2012 how Chrome beats Internet Explorer supremacy.

The web browsers market has been historically dominated by five web browsers:

• Internet Explorer
• Mozilla Firefox
• Google Chrome
• Safari
• Opera

The big market share has been owned by Internet Explorer since a lot of years ago, Microsoft has an advantage with Windows. But it seems that this will change. Google is making great efforts in promoting Chrome, and it seems that they are getting great results. They have overtaken Firefox and the next target is Internet Explorer. Experts predict that by 2012 Chrome will be overtaking Internet Explorer but it is soon to give an opinion.

All we can do for the moment is check the data and wait for the new statistics the next months. Thanks to StatCounter we can check the Worlwide statistics for web browsers usage from December 2010 to December 2011. In the graph we can see the evolution of usage of the five most important web browsers in the world.

As you can see in the graph the trend for Internet Explorer is going down but not for Chrome that beats Firefox. Firefox’s trend is not as bad as Internet Explorer but it’s going down too. Meanwhile Opera and Safari keep negligible market shares.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Market Share

IBM Next 5 in 5

IBM Next 5 in 5 is the title of a fantastic video that IBM guys have developed to show us what technologies will have more success in the next five years. The future of innovation can not be predicted but it’s possible to analyze the most interesting technologies in an effort to know what will be the way of the technology in the next years.

The innovations that IBM analyze are those that have the potential to change the way people work, live and play. This technologies are:

• Energy
• Security
• Mind Reading
• Mobile
• Analytics

Energy: IBM believes that in the future everybody will be able to create their own energy. How? Well, anything that moves can generate energy, if advances in renewable technology and energy go on this way, it’s possible that we can empower our houses with our self-created energy.

Security: Passwords won’t be needed, or at least, not as we know them nowadays. IBM believes that the passwords of the future will be composed by different data of our biological composition. Different information such as retinal data, can be used to build a unique password that you don’t need to remember.

Mind Reading: IBM believes that in the next 5 years we are going to see how mind reading is used in PC games and helping to cure diseases. Just think.

Mobile: In 5 years 80% of current global population will have a mobile device, this can help to break the gap between the information haves and have-nots. Mobile technology is cheaper so a lot of people with economic problems around the world will be able to access information like other people with better economic status.

Analytics: SPAM will not exist in the future thanks to technological innovations. This innovations will be able to filter and find the data that is important and relevant to you, bringing you information without you having to ask for it.

What do you think about these predictions from IBM? Will they change our lives?

Do you know what SOPA is?

SOPA is the Stop Online Piracy Act, it proposes to expand the ability of US law enforcement and copyright holders to protect copyrighted intellectual property and fight online trafficking of that property. The complement of SOPA is the PROTECT IP (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act), that proposes to give the US government and copyright holders tools to stop access to “rogue website dedicated to the sale of infringement and counterfeit goods”.

This two acts are one of the hottest trending topics on the Internet, a lot of people inside and outside the US are fighting against this Acts that have not been well received by the Internet community.

The big ones on the Internet industry, as Google, Twitter and Yahoo, have already said they don’t like this SOPA and PROTECT IP comparing them with Iran or China laws.

If you have never download anything illegally you are not safe from this acts. In the video below you can see why you are not safe from SOPA and PROTECT IP Acts.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet

from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

E-commerce & Christmas

Christmas is one of the best seasons of the year for e-commerce. Everybody is in hurry, a lot of things to do, and not much time to prepare everything that has to be done. This is perfect for online retailers that have a perfect opportunity to encourage people to buy their products quickly and with no worries through the Internet.

Every year more and more shoppers plan to do their gift buying online instead of in stores. The reason is because shoppers have really interesting advantages from traditional shopping, they can save money, the can avoid crowds, they have a better product selection and variety, and they can save time.

Internet is growing very fast and e-commerce projects are evolving really fast too, a few years ago you could only buy clothes, books or technology, nowadays you can buy a wide variety of food and everything you have in mind from anywhere in the world.

Online retailers know that this is a very important season, everything is prepared to offer the best user experience to the customers. Here are a few tips about how to prepare your online shop to the Christmas sales.

• Analyze the past: If your e-commerce project is online since a few years ago, analyze how the last Christmas campaign was, you could know what where the best products and the better days to prepare promotional actions.

• Christimas marketing: Make your customers feel the Christmas spirit.

• Socialize: A strong Social Media strategy will help you to detect new opportunities and quickly respond to your customers.

• Don’t get out of stock: Check your capability and don’t sell more of what you have.

• Deliver on time: Everybody wants what they buy online on time but especially at Christmas. People usually buy gifts on Christmas and if they don’t get on time their gift someone is going to have a bad Christmas and you don’t want to be the responsible of that.

If you prepare a good e-commerce experience for your customers at Christmas you’ll probably be rewarded with more sales the rest of the year.

E-commerce and M-commerce

E-commerce is evolving really fast, a few years ago companies like Amazon were just starting their business, nowadays Amazon is one of the biggest retail companies in the world. This fast evolution don’t stop, and new technology developments helps the e-commerce industry to be better and bigger.

The next step on the e-commerce revolution is the m-commerce, the way how we buy things is going to change forever. No problem where we are, we will have what we want, exactly in the moment that we want it. This new reality is based on new technologies that make this possible. We have to think in new business models to bring support to the new way of shopping.

This video made a few years ago shows us the importance of m-commerce. An important fact that is shown on the video is that the mobile device will be the world’s primary connection tool to the Internet in 2020. Ready for the future?

Don’t stop innovating

Nowadays is really important for every size companies to keep constant innovation, it’s important to know the latest technologies and research on their business area to be competitive and to stay alive. The economic situation it’s not as good as we want it to be, and we have to stay alert if we want to continue with our business.

¿How to innovate?

Ok, so you want to innovate on your company but you don’t know how to start. Let’s analyze how other companies are innovating on their business areas. For example let’s see what is Google doing:

Launch new products, test the market:

Google is constantly launching new products, they are not afraid, they make good products and they test it on the market, after launching the product Google evaluates the reaction of the market and if it’s not good the product is closed, you can check on The Official Google Blog and see how many products they closed last spring.

Improve your successful products:

You can think that your successful products are already finished but for sure that you can think on new improvements to make this successful products even better than they are. For example Google has announced these days a new feature on Google Maps for Android, now it’s possible for you to figure out where you are and see where you might want to go when you’re indoors.

Make your best product even better

Google is constantly improving it’s search engine, if Google is the most used search engine in the world it’s because they are always adding new and interesting features. Google is always updated with a fresh and stylish design. They’re going to launch the next stage of their redesign, a new Google bar that will enable us to navigate quickly between their services.

It’s really difficult to be as innovative as Google, they have a really big structure. But you can begin to innovate with little improvements that will make your company more competitive.

The most social companies

Social Media have become a really important part of our lives, we use different social networks all along the day and we use it also while we are in our jobs. NetProspex Social 50 is a ranking of top corporations in America and it’s employees usage of the social networks. NetProspex Social 50 rates the activity of usage of social networks of 100.000 business contact records from their database plus information provided to them by Rapleaf a social data provider.

The top ten of the ranking:

The first company of the ranking is Microsoft with the better score in the list, followed by eBay for a long distance (306 points of Microsoft vs 208 points of eBay). The activity of the employees of this companies was analyzed in the following social networks:

- Facebook

- Linkedin

- Twitter

- MySpace

- Friendster

- Flickr

- LiveJournal

- Hi5

- Flixter

NetProspex has also prepared a Twitter ranking too, and the winner is Microsoft again, this Twitter ranking analyzes the number of followers, the number following, as well as the number of tweets. The social network most used by employees of companies according to NetProspex data is Linkedin it’s used by more than the 30% of the employees of these companies, followed by Facebook used by more than the 10% of the employees of these companies.

Social networks are important tools that can help employees of any company to do their jobs in a better way, this new reality of instant connections can make us more productive and agile, the Social Media revolution is going to change the way we work and we communicate with each other and it is important that all employees of all companies know how to correctly use these powerful tools.

What we want from technology?

We create technology to fit our needs, wants and desires. We have been developing technology since we appeared on earth, our first big technology discovery was the wheel and since then we haven’t stopped creating and developing new technologies to meet our needs.

Technology of our days has nothing in common with that primitive technology that was developed to help us with primary tasks, in the past we need to resolve problems like hunting faster or making fire. Nowadays our needs are more sophisticated, Siri’s recent release is a perfect example of how our wants, desires and needs are becoming very complex. Siri was born to change the way we interact with mobile devices, it’s a technology that makes the mobile experience better, and helps humans to make a better use of the mobile devices. Siri is also helping blind people to improve their use of mobile technology.

Technology is the engine of big and powerful industries, but it’s also the heart of amazing projects that help people with their lives. We develop new technologies to help ourselves and to have a better life. GPS, Smartphones, and Social Networks, makes us a kind of super-humans, with skills such as communicating with others in seconds, finding everything we want wherever it is or being available to everyone everywhere we go.

This interesting features are making our world a better place, we have to use this technological knowledge to make things that could help other humans to improve their quality of life and to make our wold a fairer place to live. Technology of our days is designed around how people naturally do things, so it’s really easy to know how something works. This interesting fact make us think that the future will be a really amazing place where technology will serve us.

Oink: Rate it all!

Kevin Rose is a really active Internet entrepreneur, he is the co-founder of Revision3, Pownce, Digg and Milk. Milk, his latest creation is a company focused on creating mobile applications. The first application designed by Milk is Oink a really intereseting application where you don’t rate places, you rate the things inside.

The community around Oink is growing very fast and a lot of investors are interested on Milk’s projects. Recently Google Ventures has invested $1.5 million in a seed round.

In the next video you can see Erick Schonfeld from Techcrunch interviewing Kevin Rose and testing Oink with Kevin in Milk’s headquarters in San Francisco.

OpenSource E-commerce Solutions

There are on the Internet a lot of e-commerce solutions from different providers, nowadays a lot of people want to start it’s own e-commerce project, OpenSource solutions are a great opportunity to start and learn the rules of e-commerce. In this post we want to show you a few OpenSource e-commerce platforms for your online store.

Magento

Recently acquired by eBay, Magento is the world’s fastest growing e-commerce platform. Magento has really cool features and it’s used by important online retailers to empower their stores. It has two editions, Enterprise Edition which you have to pay for and Community Edition that is free and a really interesting option for your own online store. Magento is probably the most robust opensource e-commerce platform available on the Internet.

Prestashop

“The french Magento”. This e-commerce platform is really well known in Europe, a project made in France that is helping a lot of merchants to have their e-commerce project online. It’s easy to install and to configure, in a few steps you can start selling your products on the Internet. It’s recommended for beginners but it has professional features too.

osCommerce

The most popular e-commerce platform. osCommerce is absolutely free under the GNU General Public License. The platform has a big community of developers behind who have created a lot of add-ons to personalize the platform. With osCommerce is really easy to have your online store working.

VirtueMart

VirtueMart is a really interesting platform for those who have worked with Joomla. This platform needs Joomla to work and has nice features for customers and for merchants. An easy way to start your e-commerce site.

This OpenSource solutions can help you to start an online business, when your store grow up you can order a customized platform to meet your needs.

Nice animated infographic

The guys from CNET UK have prepared a nice beautiful animated infographic where we can watch the iPhone’s history. What innovations have been developed to create the iPhone? A lot of people and a lot of technology developement was necessary to create the iPhone and this video is a trip to discover the elements that contributed to the iPhone becoming what it is today.

Really nice tribute to Steve Jobs

Social Commerce

The new step on the e-commerce stage is the Social Commerce, as eBay CEO John Donahoe said: “We’ll see more change in how consumers shop and pay in the next three years than we’ve seen in the last 15 years”. The revolution is arriving to our lives, eBay and Facebook have established a new partnership to empower Social Commerce.

We're starting to see a few integration projects of e-commerce in social networks as Facebook, this integrations are not the future of social commerce but are the beginning of it, social commerce will be a new reality in which our electronic life will be enhanced by the shopping experience, everything we want at the moment we want, fast and easy for everybody. Buying the same clothes that your friend is wearing in the latest photo that he uploaded to Facebook, or buying the book your friend read, will be a reality in a few months or years.

The partnership between Facebook and eBay includes the integration of Facebook’s Open Graph into eBay Magento and GSI global commerce platforms. This partnership gives third party developers a bigger voice in the development of social commerce. The social commerce experience will not be owned alone by Facebook, this are great news for the e-commerce developers community, the opportunities are just beginning for everybody, nothing is done and everyone can contribute to this new reality.

Social Commerce is considered by a few as the next bubble on the Internet, but others consider it the next revolution, is time to contribute, to develop new applications, to offer to the people new buying experiences. E-commerce was considered a few years ago as something that was just for geeks, today everybody is buying food, clothes or technology on the Internet and e-commerce stores like Amazon are bigger than telecommunication companies, and this e-commerce projects continues growing year by year with a growth rate that is impossible to reach for other business

New risks for companies

Thanks to a recent survey, PricewaterhouseCoopers has detected that social networks and mobile devices are the most important new risks for the company’s information security. Companies have to adapt their security strategies to a new reality that comes in a difficult economic time, this complicates the possibility to develope quick and effective strategies to improve security

To conduct the survey PWC have interviewed more than 9600 executives responsible for security and technology, someof the most interesting is that for example 57% of respondents did not have a security strategy on Social Media or mobile gadgets, in Spain this percentage rises to 62.5% quite remarkable percentage considering the penetration in Spain of social networks and mobile gadgets.

On the other hand 54% of respondents believe that cloud computing is improving security systems, this is an interesting fact that reflects the favorable reception that is taking the cloud in the business.

Organized attacks known as Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) are one of the most important emerging risks, these attacks target international organizations systems, they attack systems vulnerabilities and seriously damage the computer systems of large and important organizations. Overall (72%) respondents trust in their security systems, and a half of the respondents estimate that the budget on security will be increased on their companies in the next twelve months.

Companies are facing hard times, the information leakage risk is increasing due to staff cutbacks and low cost strategies, this facts makes it difficult to achieve desired security objectives for companies.

Security systems have to be adapted to this new reality, a lot of people in the staff of different companies are using social networks, the messages sent by them contain professional and personal information and this messages can cause an impact on the company reputation or can damage the security of the company, a new reality has born and companies must be prepared for it.

Las novedades de Facebook

El pasado 22 de septiembre Facebook organizó en San Francisco su conferencia para desarrolladores, el F8, Mark Zuckerberg capitaneó las presentaciones que comenzaron con una divertida suplantación de identidad de la mano de Andy Samberg, su gran parecido con Zuckerberg logró levantar las risas de los asistentes. Pero Zuckerberg tenía cosas más interesantes que mostrar y no dejó indiferente a nadie, las innovaciones que el equipo de Facebook y otras empresas tan conocidas como Spotify enseñaron en el F8 pretenden revolucionar la manera en la que empleamos las redes sociales.

Las últimas novedades que Facebook ha planteado pretenden convertir a esta red social en una herramienta que envuelva nuestra vida y nos permita compartir con extrema facilidad (quizás demasiada) todo lo que hacemos. La barra de información instantánea que podemos ver actualmente en Facebook es una muestra de estos avances que van encaminados hacia conocer en todo momento que es lo que están haciendo nuestros contactos, se trata de eliminar barreas y de compartir la información sin tapujos, para Zuckerberg esto es un avance en la interacción social, para otros muchos esto es una clara intrusión en la privacidad de los individuos, el debate está servido.

Las novedades no acaban ahí, el nuevo perfil de usuario de Facebook, que actualmente se puede disfrutar en modo desarrollador, es una versión muy diferente de la que veníamos empleando hasta ahora, el perfil se convierte en un timeline que desglosa nuestra actividad en diversos períodos de tiempo, Facebook pretende convertirse en la herramienta que recoja nuestra actividad vital, qué hacemos, qué comemos, qué película vemos, dónde estamos, todo esto lo podremos compartir en nuestro perfil-timeline y será visto instantáneamente vía la barra de información instantánea de nuestros amigos, lo que les permitirá interactuar en tiempo real con lo que nosotros estemos haciendo, por ejemplo si estamos corriendo en el parque escuchando una canción, los demás lo verán en su barra de información instantánea y podrán comenzar a escuchar la misma canción.

Este tipo de servicios los facilita Facebook gracias a un buen número de alianzas con diversas empresas, desde repositorios de recetas como Foodily que nos permiten compartir que plato vamos a comer, hasta empresas como Spotify que se han cogido fuerte de la mano de Facebook y están cambiando diversas opciones en sus servicios para estrechar los lazos de colaboración con la empresa de Palo Alto, parece que otras como Netflix serán las siguientes en establecer fuertes alianzas con la compañía de Mark Zuckerberg para poder ofrecer sus servicios en Facebook con una integración total.