Smelly Cavemen

Short post: New user-interactive site from Lynx, which supports their new TV campaign.

How loud can you shout at your computer?! Great stuff from the deodorant giants.

Pizza Topping…

Ok, so last year saw the domain name “Pizza.com” sell for $2.6m – and it seems that the cheesy-topped meal is worth even more dough online…

Dominos Pizza is literally raking it in, as the recession continues and UK consumers stay at home. According to the pizza chain’s latest full year results, while in-shop sales have grown 10% year-on-year, its web sales have jumped by 74%.

During the whole of 2008, Domino’s generated £58m in online sales – a massive increase on 2007’s figure of £32.2m.

The year was also a record breaking one for the takeaway kings – they reported a number of weekends breaking the £1m barrier for web sales. Seems that they really are topping the online takeaway stakes.

Back to the Future

I stumbled across a cool site today: This Moment.

It’s a website for saving and sharing the moments of your life – It’s pretty cool, sort of like a personal 2.0 timeline.

Because it’s quite new – some of it still in development - they’re offering beta keys to anyone who mails them. Get going!

Offline Bites Online

Offline, Woolworths and Entertainment UK have gone into administration. Online, Zavvi’s website has ceased trading as a knock-on effect of this.

It couldn’t have really come a worse time for Zavvi, as the traditional double-bonus of an increase in entertainment and online sales has now been kicked out from underneath them. But I guess it’s the price you pay when you have an “exclusive agreeement”….

I’m not talking in code here. Basically, Zavvi has stopped online in the key pre-Christmas trading period, because its supplier, Woolworths’ entertainment wholesaler EUK has recently died a very public death.

Still, at least they’re thoughtfully warning customers and trying to plug their high-street shops.

“Come down to the library, we’ll have a wild time!” (Eddie Izzard)

Well, we would do if we could get in.

The EU’s new Europeana digital library has closed, just hours after it’s launch, due to the huge traffic volumes. Who could have ever predicted that a library would be such a cool place to go? Well, it is online, and online is undoubtably the coolest place to be.

Immediately after it got up and running, the library of Europe was experiencing an average of 10 million unique user hits per hour, swiftly crashing the system. This was on Thursaday, and still, nothing’s improved… a message on the site currently reads:  “The Europeana site is temporarily not accessible due to overwhelming interest after its launch.”

Although this digital library’s been inspired by ancient Alexandria’s attempt to collect the world’s knowledge, they really should have had the intelligence to implement a better system.

Stuck like Glue

Right, well, Yahoo users in the US might have glimpsed the new offering, Glue.

At the moment, it’s only running as a trial and has a small amount of content available, but looks pretty cool. Think Google’s Universal Search, but displayed a bit more aesthetically… It pulls together search content content from all over the internet onto one single page, including image results, Youtube videos, news and blogs.

As I said, it’s fairly limited at the moment, with only a handful of topics available to users – ranging from Kylie Minogue, through to Cupcake Recipies. Suprisingly, it’s been previously tested in India, so go figure. Perhaps the orders for this came from Mr Yang – people in power always go a little nuts – which is why he finally quit?

Who knows, but I do sincerely hope we’ll soon be seeing Glue up and running in full – despite the fact that Yahoo really shouldn’t be playing too much with search and needs to focus on a different business model.

Shopping, anyone?

It seems that the next level of interactive shopping has arrived.

As if Amazon’s window-shop wasn’t enough, we now have the arrival of Mallplace.

It’s truly great; a virtual, interactive shopping mall – and just in time for Christmas! So instead of fighting over carparking spaces, wrestling in the shops and stressing over time, you can now just sit at home, chill-out and shop online.

Mallplace also has integrated other important online elements for users: you can access the latest news or browse the video offerings of Youtube, for example. A great concept and one that works extremely well – although it can’t ever replace that magical christmas feeling of late-night shopping – it will still fair extremely well in the long term, I imagine.

Where on earth are you?

Everyone knows that Twitter is an amazing social tool.

So, get this: You can now follow LIVE reatime tweets from across the world using Twittervision. It’s in realtime and is a pretty cool application, but even better is TwittEarth, where you can download the application as a screen saver. Brilliant – I recommend you give it a go.

Window Shopping

… Am loving the design thats gone into Amazons new platform, windowshop.

Not entirely convinced it’ll boost sales, but it’s an awesome example of 2.0 at it’s finest.

If you haven’t already seen it, go there NOW!

Told You so

Quick post, as I’m at work.

Referring to my musing on Yahoo UK, the new site has just gone live.

It looks so much better.