Facebook Offers Mix Gains New Entrant: eGain

Consumer offers are a widely used marketing tactic on Facebook, and eGain becomes the latest entrant into that arena.

The company provides customer-interaction software onsite and via cloud, is hoping to occupy some of the estimated 700 billion minutes per month users spend on Facebook with targeted offers, coupons, promotions, and surveys aimed at promoting interaction between brand pages on the social network and their fans and prospective customers.

In addition to offers, consumers can access personalized content and contextual help including frequently asked questions, chatbots, chats, click to call, and co-browse options.

On the brand side of things, eGain Offers can be implemented simply by adding a tag to the website code, and eGain provides testing tools and analytics.

And eGain Offers is  integrated with other applications from the service provider.

The company’s Chief Executive Officer Ashu Roy said:

Consumers increasingly live in the world of Facebook, so businesses must serve them there. With eGain Offers, they can do this in minutes, using the same solution that they use to deliver proactive experiences on their website.

Readers: Do offers entice you to interact further with the Facebook pages of brands or products?

Google adds voice search on PCs to mapping

Pushing natural user interfaces one step farther, Google today added voice search to its mapping service.

Google Voice Search for maps lets users speak city names and route requests.

(Credit: Google)

It's an incremental addition to Google Voice Search that the Web search giant announced in June. But the newly announced feature allows users to speak their destinations into a computer's microphone.

The idea is to make it easy to, for example, find a street map for a city that's hard to spell, such as Poughkeepsie, N.Y. And voice search also lets users find routes by saying, for example, "directions from Seattle to Portland."

Google's voice search technology is already an expected feature on mobile phones, available on handsets running Google's Android operating system as well as in an application for iPhones. But the company is pushing to bring so-called natural user interfaces--ones that don't involve a mouse and keyboard--to personal computing.

Google Voice Search for maps and for all the other personal computer functions launched in June only work inside a Chrome browser. And, for now, it only works in the United States.

Ad-Aware 9.5 upshifts for better performance

The latest version of popular anti-spyware and antivirus program Ad-Aware comes with bold performance claims. Released today exclusively with CNET Download.com, Lavasoft Ad-Aware 9.5 Free Internet Security and Ad-Aware 9.5 Pro Internet Security says that both programs have seen heavy construction under the hood and ought to be four to eight times faster than they were in the last release, version 9.0.5.

In addition, the suites now come with a faster installation process, bolstered by a dramatically smaller download that shrunk from 130 MB to 12 MB. This "stub" installer then grabs only about 80 MB of data online to complete the program, which is still significantly smaller.

While using the program, I noticed that Ad-Aware felt smoother when transitioning between screens, supporting that some parts of the program are faster. However, the program's "quick" scan, called the Smart Scan, which checks only mission-critical areas of your computer for infection, was actually slower on a real-world, daily-use computer than it was when tested in version 9.0. Whereas the scan averaged around four minutes to complete, over three cold-boot runs, version 9.5 notched 5 minutes, 37 seconds over three cold-boot runs.

Full CNET Labs benchmarks weren't available at the time of writing, but I'll update those here as soon as they're completed. The slow scan speeds don't bode well for Lavasoft's claims.

Souce : cnet

Apple shares drop after Jobs resignation

Apple's share price has dropped over 5 per cent in after hours trading, following the news that Steve Jobs has resigned as CEO.

The company released a statement announcing Jobs's resignation at about 3:30pm Pacific, after the markets had closed in New York, and as of 5pm Pacific, Apple's share price had fallen from 376.18 to 356.61, a drop of 5.20 per cent.

Prior to the announcement, Apple's stock was suspended from trading.

Apple is the world's second most valuable company, after Exxon, and the world's most valuable technology company. But its fortunes have been closely tied to Jobs, who founded Apple and – after a spell outside the company in the late 80s and early 90s – guided the company to heights few thought were possible.

In 2008, Apple shares fell as much as 5.4 per cent after an online rumor said Jobs had suffered a major heart attack. The rumor was not true, but prior to Apple denying the report, the company's share price hit a 17 month low.

Over the previous year, the company's stock price had already dropped 49 per cent, due – at least in part – to questions over the health of Apple's leader. In 2004, Jobs had surgery to treat a rare form of pancreatic cancer, and when he appeared in public in July of 2008, he was significantly thinner than before.

In January 2009, Jobs took a leave of absence from the company, saying he was suffering from a "hormone imbalance". He returned to the job six months later, but then in January of this year, he announced another medical leave.

Despite Jobs's continued health problems over the past three years, Apple's share price has more than tripled. Former Apple COO Tim Cook has taken over the CEO post. He also served as acting CEO while Jobs was on medical leave

Source : theregister

Microsoft buries two surprises in Windows 8 hype

Oy! Microsoft's trying to save a company whose stock has gone exactly nowhere for the past decade, revolutionize an aging product, halt Windows' slipping market share, spur corporate clients to immediate worldwide adoption, and bring an exciting new vision of Windows to the desktop, to the tablet, and to the phone -- and we're talking about dialog boxes? Clearly, Sinofsky's biding time, waiting to drop the big bombs at the Build conference on Sept. 12. In the interim, we're getting pablum.

However, a few details struck me as odd while viewing the Building Windows 8 video connected to the latest blog post. If you run the video and pause it in two places, roughly at 25 seconds and again at 35 seconds, you'll notice a couple of very different Windows desktops.

The first desktop, which shows a folder inside of the Pictures folder, looks like the kind of desktop we're expecting from the Windows 8 tiled interface. The icons at the bottom, from left to right, are the Windows Flag, Internet Explorer, Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel, Word and Windows Explorer. As Long Zheng explains in his iStartedSomething blog, the Windows Flag icon looks a lot like the tile-based "touch" Start button we saw in the D9 Conference video. There's no taskbar, just icons sitting on the desktop.

The screen at 35 seconds is another story -- very much like a traditional Windows 7 screen, showing the Pictures library. There's a good, old-fashioned Windows toolbar; in the lower left sits the Win7 orb, followed by icons for Outlook, Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer, and the Command Prompt. The Windows Flag is nowhere to be seen. The toolbar icons are nothing like the icons on the first desktop.

As Zheng notes, the first screen includes a "Sync status" notification, leading him to conclude that syncing will be a much more prominent concept in Windows 8. But this second screen doesn't mention syncing at all.

The demo shows these new copy dialogs, but only on the Windows 7-like desktop. There's no discussion at all about the new desktop.

Is it possible that Windows 8 will contain a Windows 7 desktop emulator? Tantalizing thought.

A couple of miscellaneous observations: Both desktops seem to include an "Up one level" icon next to the Windows Explorer navigation buttons -- a major development, far more important than collision dialog boxes, in my opinion. And there's no ribbon, anywhere, on either desktop, in spite of repeated promises (threats?) to the contrary.

We should know a lot more in three weeks. In the meantime, it looks like we'll be treated to a lot of grandstanding about nearly inconsequential details. But if we're lucky, we'll get more sneak peeks of the man behind the curtain

Nokia unveils two cheap cellphone models

Nokia shares have roughly halved this year as the firm struggled to keep up with the pace of smartphone development while also losing ground at the cheaper end of the market to Asian brands like ZTE and G'Five.

The Nokia 101, which comes with slots for two different SIM cards, will be available this quarter for about 25 euros ($35.22), excluding taxes and subsidies, while the Nokia 100 will be available next quarter for about 20 euros.

Nokia's first dual-SIM model reached the market only last quarter, enabling smaller rivals to benefit from growing demand for such models which are increasingly popular in countries such as India.

The latest models mark the fifth duo-Sim models for Nokia in the last three months.

Executives at the firm told a media launch in the Kenyan capital that Africa, with its 1 billion people who are mostly young, is a key strategic area.

($1=.7099 Euro)

Thank you, Steve: 20 key products introduced by Jobs

As the world digests the shock of Steve Jobs departing as Apple's iconic CEO and pontificates over stock prices and future leadership, we decided to take a look back at the innovations he oversaw -- both the flops and those that changed the world.

No matter how you feel about the company or Jobs himself, it's impossible not to recognize the incredible turnaround Apple has seen in the past 10 years -- and the industry it has transformed in the process. Apple has consistently been at the forefront of innovation, design and culture, inspiring a generation to look at technology not as tool, but as a way of life.

While the era of "One more thing..." may be over, Steve Jobs' legacy will endure through the most important thing he created: Apple itself. And for that, we are thankful. Click through below for a brief history of the key product milestones throughout Jobs' career. And let us know in the comments if we forgot anything.

Time Warner Cable starts to cave with subsidized Slingboxes

It’s no secret that cable companies are suffering financially across the country. That’s mainly thanks to the rise of easier and improved HD video streaming from services like Netflix, Hulu Plus and others that offer plenty of content at a far cheaper price. And it’s not like cable companies are known for their charming customer service agents.

Well, these companies have to do something to stay afloat. Time Warner Cable tried to go a different route with a home entertainment service, SignatureHome, that tries to make its customers (who are willing to pay more) to feel like they’re having special and better treatment.

Now, it’s pulling a more drastic move: it’s going to subsidize Slingbox purchases. Yes, that box that technically enables buyers to be able to sling their cable accounts to multiple screens worldwide from just one paid account.

However, only select customers are going to be eligible — those who pay for the $99-a-month Wideband Internet service. Starting this September, they will receive a rebate worth $300 to purchase the device. (Presumably, that allotment is intended for the Slingbox Pro HD, which retails for $299.99. There are a few other solutions from Sling that are a bit cheaper.)

The move comes across as a bit peculiar at first, but Time Warner has definitive motives. The New York Times reports:

As a sales promotion, the rebate offer reflects the fact that Internet connectivity, not television, is becoming the core part of the business for companies like Time Warner Cable. But it doubles as something else: as a shot across the bow to cable programmers who say that distributors should pay them more for the right to such place-shifting.

The NYT adds that this promotion is also intended to remind “programmers that there are other ways to port channels to different screens and places, though it wouldn’t admit to such a tactic on the record.

At the end of the day, this deal is to get customers onboard with Wideband, and nothing else really. This promotion is probably not going to do much for Time Warner as a cable company, but it could entice subscribers into paying for faster (and therefore, more expensive) Internet packages to be able to keep up with the Slingbox and similar Internet-connected devices.