With the start of the new year we all get several emails and messages on thousand different sales that is happening around. 80%, 90%, what?! There are two set of beliefs about online shopping, one is I am sitting here on my couch and buying things that I need.. (Are you really sure, you NEED them!) But anyways do mock people who go out and buy stuff from stores. I ain't complaining but. In this busy world of today, you want everything in a jiffy. (Isn't it like a oxymoron?! you buy things online to get things in a click and you wait 3 days for it to ship?!) One other thing I have noticed with online shopping, be it clothes, electronics, bags, or even groceries (They do that now! Amazon, grofers, big basket! the list goes long). You don't notice how much you spend when you physically don't pay it in cash. Now, don't get me started on how we use debit cards when we shop at the market stores. At least you physically get the bill in your hand and pay for it. You are super aware of the moment. When it comes to shopping online hitting the deal becomes much more important than shopping for the product. This happens when you are in a different state of mind.

App only offers?!

So, I was thinking on why these big online marketers target the app promotion so much rather than the website itself. I then managed to come up with two basic and major purposes of promoting the app much more than the website. One is you are in constant contact with your customer. They do not need your mobile number to send you messages on your phone regarding the offers right. In this tech savvy world of today wherever we go we have WiFi network or even we go to an extent of buying the best data plan out there (Rs. 195 for 21 days! YES.. ) When you have network there is no need of your  number, sending notifications all the way. This has to deal with the timeliness factor of marketing. The other one is flashy deals. I wanted to check for the market trends of particular products and analyse how all these price reductions and offers happen (Yes! That's what you do when you are bored of holidays at home..) So, yeah what I found was that a day or a week before the products prices are altered. For instance, if there is a bag for about 500Rs. the week before you alter it to 1500Rs. and then what comes after is the discount. A flashy 60% discount. I am not saying all the discounts that are offered are fake. It's just how the market works. There are even some genuine products out there, which I personally have bought because of a good deal. 

Marketing interest?

I am and always have been an advocate for the technical developments, but I think we can appreciate it only to a certain extent. It is always better to think twice before buying something be it online or store bought on whether you actually need the product or you are buying it because of the deal (and just because it is a good deal, apparently not everything that glitters is gold.. Right!). I have always been interested in analyzing the market trends and how promotions work being a media and communications student.These were a few thoughts and discussions that I had in my mind!  

~Wishing you a  very happy New Year~

~ Stay awesome ~

Skype who roll on with the tagline 'We keep people together, wherever they are' are now in the process of creating real time translated conversations to break the language barrier across different countries and various conversations. This idea was initiated over an year ago with many attempts by the Microsoft research team to make this a success story.Chris Wendt, program manager of the Machine Translation team says “We felt speech translation was a very natural evolution of the text-translation work we’ve been doing,” .This technology would help people from various parts of the world to successfully communicate with others thus breaking the language barrier that might hold them back.

The problems that are faced in creating a technology that translates real time conversations as noted is the 'disfluecy', where there are a lot of pauses and unusual utterances while talking and also use of the social media way of talking or the internet slang. We can understand how extremely difficult it will be  to recognize and translate all possible accents and languages, this initiative by Skype is highly appreciable and would find high level of usage in both professional and personal life.

Once these are fixed, the skype translator is scheduled to be made available for windows 8 beta app by the end of this year (2014). 

Source: The official Microsoft Blog

For more information about this, follow this link.

"This could change the way we view and interact with art"