Google has been developing its Voice application, which used to be called Grand Central, since 2005. Now almost ready to roll out on general release (free, of course!), Voice has the potential to replace all internet voice applications with a single call manager. It can collate all your phone and messaging contacts, handle all voice calls and has many sophisticated add-ons such as call monitoring and automatic transcriptions. 

Google has been in talks with the major terrestrial phone service providers. I, for one, am really looking forward to the day (coming soon) when I need only one phone and only one address book.

New York Times [link]

UK online sales will actually increase during the recession at a rate of 6% a year, according to research by e-commerce consultancy firm Forrester.

Despite the current economic downturn, the research predicts that online sales will continue to rise as an increasing number of customers move away from the high street.

"The recession will hit online sales less hard than other channels as people shop online to find better prices," said a spokesperson from Forrester.

Online is one of the few sectors in the UK that is still experiencing a growth in sales, and all small business owners are advised to make sure that they have a fully functioning website where customers can purchase their products and services online.

The survey predicts UK online sales for retail and travel will total over £37bn in 2009 and will rise to £56bn by 2014. 

Forrester Research [link]

Now I've seen plenty of the new ad formats, I have to say I prefer them. They seem like a more 'natural' addition to editorial content. But I wonder why ads have to be in fixed format? Isn't this just a lazy hangover from press - where subeditors worked to a fixed layout? 

It seems that, just as the press liberates itself from fixed layouts (thanks to computer technology), new (entirely computer-generated) media choose to adopt the old Press constraints! Easier for buyers, certainly - and necessitated by templated CMS. 

If online media are more restrictive than print ... has something gone wrong?

Business Insider says:

27 publishers with a reach of about 109 million unique visitors per month -- that's 66% of the total U.S. Internet audience -- have agreed to try one of three new online ad formats sometime before July. The publishers are all members of the online publishers association (OPA).

Here's how an OPA rep described the units:

• The Fixed Panel (recommended dimension is 336 wide x 860 tall), which looks naturally embedded into the page layout and scrolls to the top and bottom of the page as a user scrolls.
  
• The XXL Box (recommended dimension is 468 wide x 648 tall), which has page-turn functionality with video capability.
  
• The Pushdown (recommended dimension is 970 wide x 418 tall), which opens to display the advertisement and then rolls up to the top of the page.

The formats they've agreed on all have one trait in common: they are much bigger and more attention-grabbing than the banner, which is despised by publishers, advertisers and readers alike as an ad unit.

Business Insider [link]

Whitehall's information-sharng programme lumbers on. I'll welcome it when it actually works ...

Jill Sherman reports:

Parents will be able to compare the cost and quality of nurseries and childminders under plans to publish much more data on government interactive websites.

By early next year they will also be able to post comments and challenge data on a childcare site. Poor providers will be highlighted through a mixture of Ofsted scores, council information and parental grumblings.

On a linked website, cyclists will be able to look up the worst blackspots in England and Wales by the end of this year, says yesterday's White Paper on public services. The Transport Department plans to extend the information to all traffic accidents once the cycling data has been tested.

Crime rates are already provided locally by individual police forces throughout England and Wales but by the end of this year recorded levels of burglaries, robberies, and violent attacks will be standardised to provide, in effect, a nationwide “crime map”.

These sites would link to a range of maps and interactive charts about recycling rates, parking charges, council tax increases and service performance tables, provided by town halls. At the press of a button residents should in theory be able to find out almost everything about the area in which they live.

Times Online [link]

YouTube has begun blocking UK users' access to music videos and is blaming the move on a hike in fees sought by the British body that collects royalties for composers and publishers.

Brand Republic [link]

Two young French entrepreneurs are celebrating their triumph in exporting a very Gallic and un-American product to the United States: an internet forum for wallowing in self-pity.

They have been surprised by the way that Americans are flocking to an English-language version of VieDeMerde.fr (which translates as s***ty life), a popular website on which the French tell hard-luck stories and lament their misfortunes with black humour.

The US version of VDM, called F***MyLife (fmylife.com), opened in January. A million people a day are now visiting to read about other people's disasters or recount their own, Guillaume Passaglia, the co-founder, told The Times. "This sort of humour is quite specifically French but nevertheless it has worked in the US straight away," he said.

VDM has become one of France's top ten sites since its launch in January 2008 by Mr Passaglia and Maxime Valette. It has spawned half a dozen others. The latest of the haunts for "des serial losers", as they are known, opened to instant success on Monday under the name RaterSaVie.com (FailYourLife). The spur was a remark last month by Jacques Seguela, a veteran advertising man and friend of President Sarkozy, that anyone who did not have a Rolex watch by the age of 50 had "failed his life". Mr Sarkozy is often criticised for his Rolex taste.

With their sardonic despair, the hard-luck sites reflect the pessimistic streak in the French character, as well as illustrating Voltaire's remark that "the misfortunes of some make for the happiness of others". Some have described the sites as Twitter for losers.

The idea of VDM and FML, the American offshoot, is simple: losers tell their sob story in a few words, the darker and bleaker the better. It must start "Aujourd'hui/Today" and end with the curse VDM - or FML in English.

For example: "Today my boss fired me via text message. I don't have a text messaging plan. I paid $0.25 to get fired. FML." Or, from VDM: "Today, I received two text messages from my girlfriend. The first to tell me that it was all over. The second to tell me that she had sent it to the wrong person. VDM."

Mr Passaglia, whose site produced the material for a book last December, said that his team rejected the great majority of the 20,000 stories they received every day and published only the best. They had been helped by the economic crisis. "That favours this type of mentality. You have even more need to distance yourself from the difficulties of the world by laughing at your daily problems."

Times Online [link]

Netflix Inc. is expected to announce a deal with Korea's LG Electronics Inc. that will make a Netflix online-video service available on a new line of high-definition TV sets from LG due out this spring. The online service offers 12,000 movie and television titles.

Amid other developments pegged to this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Yahoo Inc. and Intel Corp. plan to announce support from several major consumer-electronics companies to sell TV sets that come with software, dubbed widgets, that make it easier to call up Web content on TV sets using ordinary remote controls rather than computer keyboards.

Efforts to combine Internet technology with TV sets first emerged in the mid-90s. The current economic climate could be a stumbling block, deterring consumers from upgrading their existing TV sets. Observers have remarked that TV and Web are already interchangeable to some degree, and consumers may not wish to pay the estimated $300 more for a Web-ready TV.

Still, the topic remains a hot one in high-tech circles because of the potential impact on existing business models in the entertainment industry. Instead of the often expensive packages of video content from cable and satellite providers, the Internet could theoretically deliver a much wider array of entertainment and information choices -- many of them free.

Wall St Journal [link]

Sara Murray's daughter, Rowenna, got lost on a ski-ing trip. Shocked by the realisation that - in this mobile age - there was no fast way to find out where Rowenna was, she used her contacts & business know-how to develop the Buddi, a square box, not much bigger than a watch, which can hang around the neck.

To find someone's whereabouts, you log on to the buddi website and are directed to the relevant page of Google Maps. Movements can be tracked in real time. The device also contains a panic button, which alerts one of two constantly monitored call centres and allows them to locate it. They call the named guardians, listed in order of preference. The panic button also sends an audio feed to the call centre.

The guardian has the option, based on what appears to be happening at the scene based on the sounds on the audio feed, of going there directly or calling the emergency services. 

The buddi also has uses in the care of elderly or disabled people.

Times Online [link]

A virtual shopping centre based on London's famous Oxford Street and West End consumer hotspots is currently in development, set to open its (virtual) doors in time for Christmas shopping in 2009.

The aim of the virtual Oxford Street venture is to bring over 600 West End traders from Bond Street, Oxford Street and Regent Street online.

The £8m scheme has been masterminded by Alex Wrottesley from Near software who has teamed up with Be Broadband to bring a 'Second Life' style Oxford Street to (virtual) life.

"This is the first time that someone has tried to recreate a city just as you'd find it in real life," said Wrottesley.

The virtual weather in Wrottesley's "Near London" is set to change according to live Met Office data and shoppers can ping their mates on Facebook or MySpace to go off on joint virtual shopping jaunts together.

Tech Radar [link]

Computing giant IBM has completed a giant think-tank project, designed to forecast how technology will change the ways we live and work. 

These include remote healthcare, 3-D shopping & education, voice-activated browsing, instant language translation and 'mind-reading' phones. As futuristic as these sound, they are merely developments on technologies that already exist.

"Imagine being able to virtually walk round stores and try on clothes ... recreate a room in your home & test out different appliances, colors and more ... Kids will be able to walk through rainforests or visit ancient Rome" says IBM.

IBM [link]

Social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo, are seeing huge boosts in UK traffic thanks to mobile phones, with average users checking their profiles more than eight times a day, says new research.

Mobile phone network Orange said 640,000 of its customers are accessing social networking sites through their mobile phones, accounting for 166m page impressions every month.

Individual users will check or update social networking sites a total of 260 times per month, an average of eight times per day.

Brand Republic [link]

Having worked with many of the world's biggest ecommerce names senior technical director at WebTrends, Conrad Bennett has a wealth of experience and expertise in web site design, and has come up with a few basic rules for online shops that although simple, can have a huge effect if followed over the Christmas period:

• I Want it Now: "Allow users to find what they want - and quickly. Competition online is intense and if you don't get it right then unless you have the monopoly on what you sell then I'll be off to Google to find someone else. There's nothing worse than sending online customers on a complicated paper chase - and there's no quicker way to lose them. So if you offer a search function on your web site - which is highly advisable - good indexing is crucial and don't make it necessary to have a log-in to use the search function."

• Transparency: "Always let users know where they are in the buying process. With an online shop in particular, it is vital for customers to be able to see the step they're at, and, just as importantly, how many steps remain. The buying process should be kept brief and to the point, and there should be complete clarity about the final cost from the outset. Customers hate nasty surprises at the end of the purchasing process and will often simply break off the procedure, never to return."

• Dropouts: "Understand why visitors interrupt the process and abandon your web site. Why do visitors drop off a web site at a particular point - and how can you optimise the process and remedy this point of abandonment? They are often more valuable customers than those that have actually bought something."

• Beware the Back Button: "Keep it simple - buying online is not, for most people, a recreational pastime. The technology should be basic and adapted to suit visitor behaviour and support normal browser navigation functionality. So make sure that using the 'Back Button' doesn't ruin the process - it's the most oft-used button on any website so why disallow its use?"

• Don't Get Flash: "Static web sites are a thing of the past - but beware of excessively data-rich applications. Customers will not wait an age for pages to load. The key is to find a balanced mixture and, above all, to find a page design that matches the product. While online videos, animations, blogs, etc. are right for some online retailers, they're completely wrong for others. In fact, when in doubt don't even think about Flash - it slows the process and unless it really does add value, you will be losing users every second it takes to load."

"Every Christmas online gains ground on its High Street counterparts - whatever the economic weather. If anything in the current financial climate, people increasingly see the Internet as an affordable and hassle-free way to do their Christmas shop", explains Bennett. 

"Even on Christmas Day there are huge opportunities - while the shops were closed on the 25th December 2007, four million Britons went online and spent £84 million. However without a firm grasp on how customers are actually interacting with your site, you could end up with a disappointing slice of the Christmas retail pie."

Web Trends [link]

Millions of shoppers yesterday made Monday, 8th December 2008 the biggest online shopping day in history.

At the 1.30pm peak of the buying frenzy, Britain was spending £16,000 every second, with the day's takings estimated at £320million.

David Smith, of e-retail experts IMRG, said: "It seems the mixture of a cut in VAT and the credit crunch created an internet sensation this year.

"Shoppers are more keen than ever to shop around for the lowest price possible.

"Sixty per cent of them have realised that instead of traipsing up and down a high street to compare prices they can look at an item in the shops once, go home and compare prices online."

The resulting spree offered a rare boost to businesses facing the first "recession Christmas" for more than 15 years.

The Mirror [link]

Deloitte's latest forecast estimates online Christmas sales will increase by 10 percent this year – a figure in line with predicted growth across the past 12 months. 

The consultancy puts total online spend this year at £4.7bn, also a 10 percent rise year on year.

Although it is still growing, commentators have predicted online shopping is beginning to slow — a recent Capgemini IMRG e-Retail Sales Index report noted web sales grew by 54 percent in the last quarter of 2007 and just 15 percent in the corresponding quarter this year.

Deloitte also estimated the average basket size for online shoppers is 15 percent larger than those of high-street shoppers.

Deloitte Retail Review [link]

Online retail website Amazon has launched a UK music download service, selling tracks from 59p and albums from £3. The new music store, called Amazon MP3, will offer more than 3 million songs that will work on any digital music player, including Apple's iPod.

The move puts Amazon in direct competition with Apple for a stake in the growing market of online music sales, which in Britain alone was worth an estimated £163m in 2007.

Unlike many files from Apple's iTunes store, which can only be played through its iTunes interface or on an iPod, the music available from Amazon will be free from the constraints of digital rights management (DRM).

BBC News [link]