U.S. shoppers less than merry after online glitches

NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Tom Nenon, a philosophy professor at the University of Memphis, is vexed with his online shopping experience at Best Buy, a sentiment shared by other U.S. Internet shoppers this holiday season.

Just days before Christmas, he received an email from the top U.S. consumer electronics chain informing him that his online order for a 42" Samsung TV will not be fulfilled.

"You can count on me not being a Best Buy customer anymore," Nenon told Reuters on Friday, adding that he was disappointed that the chain tried to make him buy an older model at the same price as a replacement, rather than trying to make amends for its shortcoming.

Best Buy is not the only retailer causing problems online this Christmas. Other brick-and-mortar chains including Target Corp, Wal-Mart Stores and Barneys are struggling to keep up with online demand, an indication of poor execution by retailers during the biggest selling season of the year.

"Since Best Buy's website has always been a stepchild to the stores, it's gotten short shrift, and when they boosted Web demand by essentially matching others' Web prices, they got a bit overwhelmed," said Craig Johnson, president of retail consulting firm Customer Growth Partners.

In an email, Best Buy spokeswoman Lisa Hawks said less than 1 percent of Best Buy customers' online orders during the Thanksgiving weekend and the following week were affected.

"The challenges related to this situation are being addressed. We are very sorry for the inconvenience this has caused, and are providing e-Gift Cards to the affected customers," Hawks said.

Other chains apologized for online ordering and fulfillment issues as well.

"We, at Barneys New York, are sincerely apologetic for any inconvenience that occurred while holiday shopping on barneys.com this past week. We are personally reaching out as quickly as possible to every customer who has been affected by this limited, but unfortunate, IT glitch," Barneys posted on Facebook. A spokeswoman for the company did not return phone messages seeking comment on the nature of the problems.

BITING OFF TOO MUCH

In a bid to win shoppers from the likes of Amazon.com, many brick-and-mortar chains including Best Buy decided to offer free shipping this holiday season.

The decision certainly helped sales.

U.S. shoppers spent $30.9 billion toward online purchases during the current holiday season, a 15 percent increase from the year-ago period, according to comScore.

Still, experts think retailers bit off more than they could chew.

Target's website crashed twice in recent months, while some Wal-Mart Stores shoppers had trouble checking out online when its site went down briefly after midnight on Black Friday, the day after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday.

"Retailers have been surprised by how successful the holiday season has been online. Negative economic sentiment may have driven more people to the Web in search of better deals," said Jordy Leiser, chief executive of STELLAService, which rates online retailer customer service.

"For some retailers, this was a good thing that turned into a very bad thing once it started affecting the experience of customers online," Leiser said.

Only six of the 25 largest U.S. retailers received top marks for online customer service, including website performance, between this year's November 25 Black Friday and the following Cyber Monday, according to STELLAService.

The result is a large number of disappointed online shoppers like Nenon.

"They don't understand the basics of customer service," Nenon said of Best Buy. "I understand that things can happen. What bothered me is when they made a mistake, then they made no concessions to their customers to try and make up for it."

Nenon's sentiment was echoed by a director of communications at a San Francisco tech company who decided to order his Christmas tree online from Target.com this year.

The shopper, who did not want to be named, received an email from Target saying the tree would not be delivered until very close to Dec 25. To top it off, Target did not let him cancel the order, but advised him to mail the tree back once it arrived.

The tree finally arrived via FedEx on December 21, but that was not the end of his worries.

"As predicted, FedEx dropped it off without knocking. So I had the added joy of getting the FedEx guy to come back and get it. And let me tell you, nothing screams holiday cheer like watching a grumbling FedEx employee schlepping a Christmas tree back into his truck," he told Reuters.

The stories are bad news for retailers, industry-watchers said.

"The three pillars of retail are prices, product and experience. Best Buy sells a commodity product and has to price competitively, so the thing most in their control was experience. And now they've blown that.

"It's another blemish for a management team that is starting to look like they've gone five rounds with Rocky Balboa ... and lost," Trutina Financial Chief Investment Officer Patty Edwards said.

"People have a long memory. And when a retailer ruins Christmas by not delivering little Jimmy's present on time, they've placed themselves on the permanent 'naughty' list."

(Reporting By Dhanya Skariachan and Alistair Barr, editing by Matthew Lewis)

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Twitter index: Spanish-speaking Twitterers get cheeky on Día de los Santos Inocentes

As scientists at the CERN?Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland?continue their search for the elusive Higgs boson "God particle," one physicist has built a tribute to their work entirely out of?Lego bricks. Sascha Mehlhase, a researcher at the Niels Bohr … Continue reading →

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App aims to make a social network more personal

TORONTO (Reuters) - Interested in sharing more personal moments of life to a small group of friends rather than a large network? An app called Path could help.

Originally conceived as a way to post photos and videos for close family and friends to see, the app was re-released this month as a "smart journal" to enable users to share more about their lives.

"Because Path is a smaller network that's built for the people you love -- the closest friends and family in your life -- people are willing to share more intimate content as a result of that," said Matt Van Horn, a vice president at Path.

He added that although some of details of life might seem mundane when broadcast to the masses, they can take on a newlight when shared with closer connections.

"Taking a photo on the porch with your sister if you were to post to a larger network might not be that interesting. But if your mom, who is on the other side of the country, sees it then it's magical," he said.

The app also learns a user's habits, such as favorite places, and can recognize deviations in patterns and broadcast them to their 'path', the social stream visible to a user's connections.

Inspired by British anthropologist and Oxford professor Robin Dunbar, Path limits the number of social connections a user can have to 150 people. It is considered the upper limit of the number of trusted relationships a person can have, and is a direct function of our biology.

The average user on Path has five to ten connections.

Since its re-launch, Path has experienced a 30-fold increase in the number of daily users, according to its creators.

Although the app is free, users must pay for some features. But the company said it will not include ads on the site.

"We believe in creating quality products that our users will want to pay for," Van Horn said.

Path, available for iOS and Android devices, also integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Tumblr to allow cross-posting to the social networks.

Similar apps for creating digital journals include Momento and Day One.

"Facebook changed the world. People were themselves for the first time, putting their real name on the Internet, and then connecting with every person they had ever met," said Horn.

"But we really believe the next generation of social is going to be personal."

(Reporting by Natasha Baker; Editing by Patricia Reaney)

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New "Hobbit" production video shows captures cast and crew

As scientists at the CERN?Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland?continue their search for the elusive Higgs boson "God particle," one physicist has built a tribute to their work entirely out of?Lego bricks. Sascha Mehlhase, a researcher at the Niels Bohr … Continue reading →

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27% of Photos and Videos Now Captured on Smartphones [STUDY]

More than a quarter of photos and videos shot by individuals in the U.S. are now being captured by smartphones, according to an online survey of 3,300 Internet users ages 13 and up. Sales data suggest smartphones are replacing consumers' need for low-end point-and-shoot cameras and camcorders.

The percentage of photos taken with a smartphone went from 17% to 27%, a 44% increase from the year previous, according to a survey conducted by NPD Group. Meanwhile, sales of point-and-shoot cameras dropped 17% in volume and 18% in revenue in the first 11 months of 2011. Individual sales of pocket camcorders dropped 13%, with a 10% decrease in revenue.

[More from Mashable: Amazon, Apple and Google Offer Discounted Albums as Low as $4.99]

Higher-end items performed better: Sales of cameras with detachable lenses (average price: $863) increased by 12%, and sales of point-and-shoot cameras with optical zooms of 10x or greater (average price: $247) grew by 16%.

Liz Cutting, executive director and senior imaging analyst at NPD, acknowledged that smartphones are taking the place of point-and-shoot cameras and camcorders in many instances -- particularly "spontaneous moments" -- but for important events, single-purpose cameras and camcorders remain the device of choice.

[More from Mashable: 75% of Worldwide Cellphone Users Send Text Messages [STUDY]]

We asked Flickr reps if they were seeing a similar in increase in mobile uploads. The company said traffic to its mobile site doubled this year, and uploads from mobile sources has increased eightfold in the last two years.

Image courtesy of Photojojo

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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Twitter index: Tweeps show their love for All Time Low and Super Junior, discuss racism

As scientists at the CERN?Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland?continue their search for the elusive Higgs boson "God particle," one physicist has built a tribute to their work entirely out of?Lego bricks. Sascha Mehlhase, a researcher at the Niels Bohr … Continue reading →

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Comscore: Bing almost even with Yahoo in search rankings

Microsoft launched its Bing search engine back in mid-2009 with a goal of taking on Google in the lucrative Internet search market—or, at least, the lucrative search advertising market. Although Google has yet to see much of a threat from Bing, Microsoft’s search engine is on the verge of marking a major milestone: according to Comscore, Bing is just about even with Yahoo in terms of its share of the U.S. search market. During November 2011, Comscore has Yahoo down 0.1 percent to a 15.1 percent share of U.S. searches, while Bing is up 0.2 percent to 15 percent. That essentially puts the two companies neck-and-neck.

So, while Bing may soon be able to sing “we’re number two!”—at least in the United States—it’s still far behind Google, which Comscore says accounted for 65.4 percent of the U.S. search market during the same period. However, it’s important to remember that for the last year and a half, Microsoft’s Bing has been performing the backend duties behind Yahoo search in the United States—so that means Microsoft is capturing and analyzing about 30 percent of U.S. search traffic, and using that information to profile and track users and deliver advertising.

Comscore’s figures cover some 17.8 billion “explicit core searches” during November 2011, which omits things like local directories, maps, and user-generated video sites like YouTube, as well as contextually-driven searches that don’t reflect “specific user intent” to use the search results.

On a side note, rival media metrics firms Comscore and Nielsen have announced a settlement of patent litigation between them: under the deal, Comscore will wind up owning four families of Nielsen patents asserted in the case, and grants Nielsen a worldwide license to four Comscore patents. Nielsen also walks away with about $19 million in restricted Comscore common stock—meaning the companies are a bit joined at the hip for a at least a year—and the companies agree not to sue each other over patents for three years.

Nielsen got its start providing ratings and audience measurement for television, and added online media ratings in recent years. The company sued Comscore, claiming it was violating five Nielsen patents related to measuring online content; Comscore countersued, claiming Nielsen violated some of its patents for measuring online content. The cross-licensing deal puts both companies in the clear, but while Nielsen walks away with cash (assuming Comscore stock holds value over the next year), Comscore seems to be walking away with most of the intellectual property—which, given the state of the U.S. patent system, may be more valuable to the company down the road.

This article was originally posted on Digital Trends

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Reports: Yahoo exploring sale of Asian holdings

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Yahoo appears to be getting closer to giving its frustrated shareholders something they've long wanted: a sale of the Internet company's holdings in China and Japan.

The prospect of Yahoo Inc. finally consummating a deal with China's Alibaba Group and Softbank Corp., the controlling owner of Yahoo Japan, emerged in online reports published Wednesday by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Citing unnamed people familiar with the matter, both newspapers reported Yahoo is exploring a proposal valued at about $17 billion, or $14 per share. The price reflects Wall Street's belief that Yahoo's investments in Alibaba Group and Yahoo Japan have become the company's most valuable pieces. Yahoo's U.S. business has lost its luster as the company's website loses traffic and advertising revenue to Internet search leader Google Inc. and Facebook's social network.

Yahoo ended Wednesday with a market value of about $20 billion, based on its stock closing price of $15.99. The shares gained 88 cents, with most of the surge occurring after the reports of Yahoo's talks with its Asian partners.

If the deal comes together, Alibaba and Softbank would contribute cash and certain assets to newly formed entities. Yahoo would then surrender its 35 percent stake in Yahoo Japan and most of its holdings in Alibaba to gain control of new entities, according to the Times.

Yahoo would retain a 15 percent stake in privately held Alibaba, down from 42 percent as of Sept. 30, according to the company's most recent quarterly report.

The transaction would be designed to avoid a big tax bill — a stumbling block in Yahoo's previous discussions to sell its Asian holdings.

Yahoo declined to comment Wednesday. Alibaba didn't respond to requests for comments.

The renewed talks among Yahoo, Alibaba and Softbank are the latest bit of boardroom intrigue that that has been unfolding since Yahoo abruptly fired Carol Bartz as CEO in early September after losing patience with her attempts to turn around the company during her 2? years on the job.

Since then, Yahoo's board has been mulling a variety of options that have included selling the Asian holdings, selling a 20 percent stake to buyout firms or even auctioning off the whole company.

The nine-director board has been leaning in different directions as it ruminates. Just a few weeks ago, it appeared the board was leaning toward selling a large stake to a group led by Silver Lake Partners for $16.60 per share or TPG Capital for $17.60 per share.

That idea didn't go over well with some of Yahoo's major shareholders, including hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, who has been threatening to overthrow the company's board.

Yahoo's board is scheduled to discuss the proposed divestiture of the company's Asian holdings in a Thursday meeting, according to the Times. The newspaper said the directors intend to decide whether to intensify negotiations that could last for a few more weeks.

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Italy anti-trust fines Apple for misleading customers

In 2012, Yahoo! News will tell the nation’s story through the experiences and views of real Americans like you. Watch the first Remake America video ?

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Video Chatting is the New Way to Get Out of Family Events

As technology and Internet bandwidth has made video-chatting a regular part of communication, it has proven a great way to get out of otherwise painful obligations. Since 2007, there has been a 900 percent increase in Skype video calls alone, The New York Times's Julie Scelfo notes in her feature on the spread of video chatting in domestic life. That doesn't even include other services like Apple's Face Time and Google Video Chat. With its proliferation, video chatting has evolved from a novel tech toy, into a real way to communicate. But in the examples Scelfo cites, unlike talking or Gchatting, Skyping can act as a virtual stand-in for spending time with people in our lives. And since spending time with people is often an unpleasant endeavor, video chats are a great way to feign quality time. ?

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No More Stressful Family Holidays?"We call it Skypanukkah," Elliot Darvik told Scelfo. Rather than gather for 24-hour-a-day family time, the Darviks celebrate the holiday over video chat. It might feel like the family is all together. They lit candles, did the whole menorah-prayer song and dance.?But after that chat box closed, family time was over. It's a win-win: Family time without family times. Sounds beautiful "I didn’t have to travel or worry about packing up the kids," explains Jessica Hunt, who like the Darviks, Skyped Christmas. ?"It relieved a lot of stress."

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Babysitting Without Changing Diapers?Parents have taken to using Skype as a babysitting machine. Parents can read bed-time stories from afar, or even use it to distract kids. "It was so much better than plopping her in front of the TV," an absent father told Scelfo. But, let's be real. It's the fun part of childcare. "[Video chatting] has given him an excuse to be an absent father," one annoyed mother told Scelfo. "He can say, ‘Oh yeah, I saw her, she’s doing this and that,’ " the anonymous mother explained. "He hasn’t seen her in person since she was 3 weeks old."

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Awkward Group Gatherings Made Easy?People are even resorting to video chatting as a party replacement. Take Jamie Van Houton, who had her baby shower over Skype. "I had thought, ‘Oh, this will be fun, but it’s not the same as being there,’" ?she said. "But it turned out to be even better." Of course it was: video chatting provides an escape from the cooing. Not to mention, there's no clean-up, set-up or moderating guests who don't get along.?

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Dealing with Death the Virtual Way?Skype makes confronting the death of a loved one an Internet activity. As Selia Mae Jackson died, her sister, unable to physically come visit, said goodbye to her over video chat. "We set it all up, and they were ready on their end, and voila, we had picture and we had sound," Jerome Jackson, who set up Skype between his mom and her sister explains. “And I never will forget the moment because there were about 11 or 12 people gathered in my mother’s living room and kitchen, all kind of waiting for the moment. And I heard my mother say, ‘I see you Mae Mae!’ And tears just came to my eyes.”

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