E-Commerce and Subscriptions

E-Commerce is big business on the web with more and more software as a service options cropping up daily in a multitude of offerings and points of integration. It seems flexibility to integrate is core to business functionality and speed to delivery. Restful services are making strides towards building a more resourceful and accessible web. However, the web is still a very disenchanted place with a lot to be done in terms of linking and connecting concepts and things in a meaningful way. GoodRelations is a vocabulary that takes ontologies for E-Commerce a step further towards knowledge discovery and metarepresentation. 

Online subscription services are starting to make inroads towards a more barrier free integration for E-Commerce businesses with more flexible options for billing and transaction processing. One key aspect to note towards deciding on a integration provider is to always try to check their security policies and how PCI compliant are their services. A few key players that have sprung up with interesting options are below:

Stripe - very simple pricing model with no added fees making it cost-effective and easy to use
Zuora - providing added support for taxation, metrics, currencies and salesforce integration
Chargify - added benefits for coupons, free-trial periods, recurring/one-time transactions and refunds
Spreedly - payments platform with comprehensive services also provided with heroku add-on
Recurly - providing a full subscription commerce with analytics and a fast integration process
Braintree - easy to manage API with reasonable pricing with international payments support

The Web of Sentiments

Increasingly, the web is opening up new avenues for customers and consumers to voice their service and product issues and share it on the Internet. In process, with the viral growth of sentiments, it is bound to make a company or an individual notice and respond. There are a multitude of avenues opening up for customers: blogging, review sites, Google ads, Facebook, Twitter, and even Twitter Promoted Tweets. The sensational way of viral marketing can be utilized for voicing opinions all from the Internet. This will no doubt make many companies rethink their approach to public relations, after sales services, customer satisfaction, and in quality assuring their products.

Subjectivity

Apple Products Are Not Upgradeable

What you are paying a premium on with Apple is the aesthetic design. The build quality is cheap. The functionality not fully tested. Support services are over priced. The OS configuration security services are a right pain for application installation. And, one of the biggest flaws of Apple products are that they are non-upgradeable and nor future proof once bought. One has to pay premium and almost double to get an upgrade of any sort and the products do not even fully support upgrade options as they are so limited in hardware capacity to allow for that. In the general PC market, an upgrade is understandably a major requirement for customers to be supported by any vendor. However, on most Apple macs just to do a memory upgrade one has to buy an entire amount rather than the amount you want to actually upgrade to with the existing memory. On most machines these combinations are fully supported. It is always advisable on an Apple to buy memory option all inclusive within one card slot rather than split into two in case one decides to upgrade. That is the only way it is possible to avoid paying double on upgrades with Apple. The model of most Apple products seem to work on the notion of point of sale only, customers often need to be aware that that is all they will get for their money and nothing more later on in terms of support or upgrades.

Atariya

Sushi, in particular, Japanese places in London are quite a few. However, finding quality places is fairly limited. YoSushi! is one of the cheapest places around lacking in much freshness of the fish and cannot in all honesty be classed as a Japanese takeaway. One of the best places I find in London is Atariya where the fish is just deliciously fresh and tender on rice. The sushi quality is splendid. They can be found mostly in north side of London and provide for both takeaway and eating in options. They have one main branch situated in central London. Atariya also provides a wide selection of fish and other options.

Atariya

The Degenerative Memory

Everyone grows old as we are all mortals of time. And, as the ageing process continues so does the memory decline as well as other body/mind related effects. Eating well and keeping healthy early on is the best course of action to avoid many ailments later in life. However, finding out early rather than later allows for a more effective course of remedial action.

The following article shows some of the progress being made towards understanding memory decline and forgetfulness.

scientific america

LinkedUp Projects

LinkedUp is a community providing linked data challenges in a hackathon friendly environment to muster solutions to real-world internet problems of big data and knowledge discovery. In process, taking the necessary steps for the knowledge evolution on the web in form of open data and allowing for open education and learning. Semantic Web and Linked Data is the next big process towards a more connected web landscape. 

LinkedUp
Datahub

Google Glass Creatives

Google Glass is an interesting piece of wearable device with an infusive opportunities for mashup applications. Although, in some circles Google Glass is still viewed with reluctance and skepticism similar to the dwindling future of the 3D glasses of the time when the Avatar movie had come out in cinema. However, there is an immense amount of untapped uses that could be added on to Google Glass with the sheer creative delights of mashups reloaded. One of the best places to harness the abilities of such a device is to head over to a hackathon near you and try it out for yourself. There is always a hackathon going on some where or another. Best place to check is on Google or at a meetup.

Google Glass meetups
Google Glass

Google Outage

Perhaps, they even own the domain name: Google Outage. Whatever happened to "prrfft Google down?" - not likely. Well, it was so true on Friday. When everything on Google services pretty much felt drained out of life. It was like someone had pulled the plug. I was at work and I felt everything was a drag and then near enough in afternoon everything went kaput, lingering and lingering in almost like snail pace. It almost felt like Google had become inflicted with a Microsoft bug defined by the word "slow" and "down". Even five minutes of downtime is just so unacceptable especially for businesses. More than likely, the outage will reek havoc and the traffic flow will dissipate to other search engines. Maybe, this was a political maneuver by a competitor or maybe Google was hacked? Or, it could just have been simply a case of Google maintenance/upgrade mistake? Why don't Google feel need to give an explanation? They owe it to their customers after all when their services are down businesses are effected, which means downtime. Businesses were not even informed with courtesy for contingency planning meaning their services could suffer in future.